Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Some readers will be aware that I am sympathetic to the view that the books of the Old Testament were products of the Hellenistic era. I believe that sound historical methods involving critical analysis of assertions against evidence make such a late dating highly plausible. But it is also vital to be as fully informed … Continue reading “The Age of Inventions of Mythical Histories — Greek and Biblical”
Russell Gmirkin concludes his second last chapter with a look beyond Genesis to highlight the plausibility of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias influencing some of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua. In Critias Plato was composing an account of Athenian origins and its political organization, a politogony. Gmirkin cites Naddaf’s The Greek Concept of Nature which I turned … Continue reading “Two Covenants: Israel and Atlantis — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7f]”
The survival of humans and animals in an ark owes more to Mesopotamian than Greek antecedents, but the division of the known world into 70 nations in Genesis 10 follows Greek patterns of the genealogical organization of nations descending from eponymous founders . . . (Gmirkin, 230) The Table of Nations Once again Gmirkin detects … Continue reading “Table of Nations and other Post Flood events — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7d]”
Excerpts from Philippe Wajdenbaum’s Argonauts of the Desert (related to an earlier post, Biblical Scholars, Symbolic Violence, and the Modern Version of an Ancient Myth) where he draws upon the study of structures of myths by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: . . . to give an interpretation of a myth is to create a new variant … Continue reading “Historical Jesus Scholarship and Mythmaking”
We declared a while ago on Vridar that we would never sell anything so I am at this moment trapped between gratitude and principle. Yale University Press kindly agreed to send me a review copy of M. David Litwa’s How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths but, as it turned out, they requested their … Continue reading “Review, pt 1a: How the Gospels Became History / Litwa”
After reviewing the efforts of Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey to present their respective cases for the historicity of Jesus we now come to chapter 4, Inadequate Methods. By way of summing up the previous discussion Raphael Lataster writes The recent defences of Jesus’ historicity by Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey lack lucid and competent … Continue reading “Review part 4: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus / Lataster (Case for Agnosticism – I, Methods)”
In the right hand column I have added links to three new blog pages. They are under the Archives by Topic (Annotated) heading. Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (Levenson)| From Adapa to Enoch (Sanders) Plato and the Hebrew Bible (Gmirkin)
We have two models for the origin of the biblical and its ancillary literature. According to Seth Sanders in From Adapa to Enoch we have a progression from the late Iron Age to the Seleucid era. The early period (during the time of the kingdom of Judah before its exile) we have “public genres of … Continue reading “More Thoughts on Origins of Biblical and Pseudepigraphical Literature”
Chaim Milikowsky gives his answer to the question in the title, or at least he answers the question with respect to rabbinical literature. I have added the connection to our canonical four gospels, and I could with equal justice add Acts of the Apostles. I read CM’s answer in Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early … Continue reading “Why the Rabbis (and Gospel Authors, too) Wrote Fiction as “True History””
A first century Greek named Strabo documented an account he heard or read on the founding of a colony at present day Marseilles, southern France. The founders were from the Greek city-state of Phocaea, present day Foça on the Turkish coast. The date of the founding was around 600 BCE. In 2005 Vetus Testamentum published … Continue reading “Two Foundation Stories: Dan by the Danites, Massilia by the Greeks”
. Russell Gmikin’s Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible led me to another work, one cited by Gmirkin, Weinfeld, Moshe. 1993. The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites. Berkeley: University of California Press. The opening pages describe a typological comparison of the roles of the … Continue reading “Rome’s and Israel’s Ancestor Traditions: How Do We Explain the Similarities?”
We think of Hellenism as the enemy against which the Maccabees fought to the death. But consider the following . . . . To celebrate the recapturing and re-dedication of the Jerusalem Temple in 164 BCE the Maccabees instituted the festival of Hannukah [=Dedication]: Judah and his brethren and the whole congregation of Israel ordained, … Continue reading “Those Hellenistic and Hellenizing Maccabees and Pharisees”
I should follow up my previous post with a clarification of Weinfeld’s argument as he presented it in his 1993 book, The Promise of the Land. The bolding is mine for the benefit of those who don’t want to read lots of text but just hit the highlights. As is well known, most of the … Continue reading “Postscript on Rome’s and Israel’s foundation stories”
Continuing from Plato and the Hebrew Bible: Law-Giving Narratives as Greek-Inspired Literature . . . . The historical narratives of both Herodotus and Thucydides contain narratives explaining the origins of Athenian laws of three notable lawgivers in both myth and history: Theseus, Solon and Cleisthenes. (Russell Gmirkin appears to say that both historians address the latter … Continue reading “Plato and the Hebrew Bible: Legal Narratives (esp. Panegyrics), continued”