Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
[After the 1967 June War] [t]his was what the Arab had become. From a faintly outlined stereotype as a camel-riding nomad to an accepted caricature as the embodiment of incompetence and easy defeat: that was all the scope given the Arab. Yet after the 1973 war the Arab appeared everywhere as some-thing more menacing. Cartoons … Continue reading “The Bifurcation of the Semitic Myth and Post-WW2 Antisemitism”
A few weeks ago in the course of explaining why I called this blog “Vridar” I posted a few remarks about American author Vardis Fisher. The name “Vridar” was Vardis Fisher’s fictionalized autobiographical name in the last novel of his Testament of Man series, Orphans of Gethsemane. I was pleased to read last evening that I am … Continue reading “Religion and Understanding the Zealots, Theirs and Ours”
My response to Cornelis Hoogerwerf’s post on Γεγραμμένα, Misquoting Albert Schweitzer, has raised the question of the intended meaning of Schweitzer’s words in relation to historical probability, common sense, and more. Cornelis has said my own explanation of S’s words is wrong; I attempted to explain why I disagreed. But rather than leave the discussion … Continue reading “Schweitzer in context”
Back in 2010 the University of Copenhagen published news of a project to “map the development of the four gospels in order to establish that the Gospel of Luke is not, as believed so far, a contemporary of the Gospel of Matthew, and that the shared content of the two is not to be explained … Continue reading “The Gospels as Creative Rewriting (like rewritten biblical books)”
Russell Gmirkin in his new book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible draws attention to striking similarities between the Pentateuch (the first five books of the “Old Testament”) on the one hand and Plato’s last work, Laws, and features of the Athenian constitution on the other. Further, even the broader collection of writings that … Continue reading “Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible”
The survey of Muslim religiosity was carried out in Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Turkey. It included statements on the respondents’ image of Islam. The survey listed forty-four items that examined religious beliefs, ideas and convictions. These statements were generated by consulting some key sociological texts on Muslim societies by authors such as … Continue reading “Something Rotten in the Lands of Islam”
Continuing from Muslim Nations and the Rise of Modern Barbarism . . . . According to Abou El Fadl, characteristic features of salafabism (combination of salafism and wahhabism) include the following: a profound alienation from institutions of power in the modern world and from Islamic heritage and tradition a supremacist puritanism that compensates for feelings … Continue reading “The Poisonous Cocktail of Salafism and Wahhabism”
This post is the third in my notes from Inside Muslim Minds by Riaz Hassan. The second response among Muslims to their experience of colonialism and its aftermath is salafism. Response 2: Salafism Whereas apologetics was a direct response to colonial rule, salafism emerged out of apologetics but in the post-colonial era. When independent nations … Continue reading “Muslim Nations and the Rise of Modern Barbarism”
Such violent, repulsive and publicly visible acts could be interpreted as the by-product of social malignancies that have festered for a long time. Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl—an eminent Islamic jurist . . . . —provides a succinct description of how historical and social conditions interact to form a particular mentality . . . . … Continue reading “Islam and the Rise of Barbarism”
My first post covering a little of what I learned about the Muslim religion (Sharia) and its global applications did not get off to a good start. I have already posted three times on Rahim’s Muslim Secular Democracy: Voices from Within so this post is based on a key theme in the third of the … Continue reading “Understanding Muslims and Barbarism”
For all posts in this series: Roger Parvus: A Simonian Origin for Christianity One problem with accepting Mark as a Simonian/Pauline allegory (see the previous post) is the role it gives to John the Baptist. As it stands canonical Mark seems intent on presenting John as the foreshadower of Jesus. His preaching of repentance foreshadows the … Continue reading “A Simonian Origin for Christianity, Part 17: Mark and Proto-Mark”
I put Richard Carrier’s arguments on hold in this post in order to point out what another scholar I have not yet cited has had to say about what J. H. Charlesworth calls “the myth that Jews expected a Messiah and knew what functions he would perform.” I would even say William Scott Green‘s opening … Continue reading “Origin of the Myth that the Jews Expected a Messiah”
This is part 3 of my series arguing against the popular notion that the time of Jesus as narrated in the gospels was ablaze with various cults and movements eagerly expecting a messiah to appear as per prophecies or even time-tables found in the Jewish scriptures. My depiction of this supposition as a myth in … Continue reading “Questioning Carrier and the “Myth that the Jews Expected a Messiah” (#3)”
How do classicists determine if a figure appearing in ancient records actually existed? Do they use the same methods as biblical scholars who tell us certain persons in the Bible are historical and others not? In this post and another I will look at questions classicists ask about two ancient philosophers, Demonax and Apollonius of Tyana, … Continue reading “If Biblical Scholars Were Classicists”