angelo

May I suggest a very good source of babble study. A scholarly study by Burton L Mack titled Who Wrote The New Testament? (or via: amazon.co.uk) [ The Making of the Christian Myth ]
Published by Harper.
Further reading; The Bible Unearthed (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. published by Simon and Schuster.

Karen Armstrong also has a fairly readable study of the bible in her book. On The Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk)

So when I call the bible the babble I'm perfectly within my rights, because that's all it is, a babble of word salads that for the 21st century have no longer any meaning, if it ever did.

About the only truth you will find in there are the names of some towns or villages and the various people who lived around the Middle East in those days.

bacht

Wisdom cries aloud in the street;
in the markets she raises her voice;
on the top of the walls she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
"How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?" Prov 1


yep, just babble

spin

Hey, shit, you've read a few titles that deal with the bible! What have those books got to do with the naivety of your comments?

The word "so" is supposed to connect logically to something that preceded it as a consequence or conclusion. You simply mention some book titles without showing how these titles are relevant to your harangue against the bible.

"[T]ruth" is a strange word to use here. You require truth from this text. What truth value would you apply to Cicero's "The Nature of the Gods"? or the religious position of Celsus (for whose treatise Origen wrote a response to)? A better comparison of course would be to religious writings of other cultures, the Zend-Avesta, the Rig-Veda. You may as well say that "[a]bout the only truth you will find in there are the names of some towns or villages and the various people".

If by "truth" you want historical accuracy, try reading the works of ancient historians. The bible is not a text that fits into a recognizably historical category. It is a collection of traditions of two cultures. What truth value do you put into the traditions of the early Finns, or the Vikings, or the native American traditions, or your own native Australian traditions? Would you have the temerity to say such vacuous things against them as you do the bible?

I think anybody who reads your comments about the bible already knows that you are against christians and their book. That in itself is of little consequence to the analysis of the bible -- and after all this forum is Biblical Criticism and History, not Bible Slagging. What people do here is to understand what the bible actually says, how it relates to its times, how it reflects or doesn't reflect what happened in the past and what its purposes were. You may be "perfectly within [your] rights" to say trivial things about the bible, but that is of little use to us here.

If you want to talk about the bible here, I think you need to dig a little deeper than the prejudices you espouse and attempt critical analysis of the book. People discuss what is in the text, not just make negative comments about it. The latter are irrelevant to BC&H. Infidels fathoming the biblical text are in the trenches. Why stand by heckling? Why not join in or at least reduce the background noise?


spin

angelo

I'm not really interested in studying about a small tribe who were responsible for authoring the bible.
My interest was and is on the origins and history of the bible that has three quarters of the world living in fear of a non existend deity.
My amazement is that this book is still today taken seriously as the word of god.
If heckling is what I'm called to be doing, then I agree with you.
Once I learned the origins and history of this waste of perfectly good paper, I simply ignore it. Why argue of why the fludd was not possible because!
The whole book is not credible because it was written by bronze age goat herders.
There is not one iota of history in the whole bible.

Roger Pearse

Three quarters of the world are living in fear?

Alas for Homer, alas for the Iliad, all rendered worthless after 3,000 years of being considered a high point of human culture because he used bronze tools and ate goat!

I would not tend to judge people by the material out of which their razors are made, or by the herd animal of their culture; others, of course, may choose to do so.

Which naturally leads to the question; what is the herd animal of the modern Americans?

You don't believe the Roman Empire existed? OK...

All the best,

Roger Pearse

bacht

I think you're overestimating the rationality of human nature. If there had been no bible, do you think those millions today would be reading philosophy? The need to believe came before the invention of religion. Nowadays we have UFOlogy, New Ageism etc for those who seek irrational explanations. If the bible hadn't existed, something else would have filled the void.

As far as history, yes there is very little straight data in these books. As Roger says, the bible is more like Homer than Herodotus or Thucydides. You're creating a false dichotomy: if the bible is not historically true, then it has no value and should be discarded. There are middle positions as well.

You do understand that Bronze Age goat herders were illiterate? (actually most people were in those days)

gregor

Sheep? Sorry, I thought you meant what herd animal most resembles the modern Americans.

jbarntt

Then why are you commenting on the question at hand ?

If that is the case then why are you not intererested in the "small tribe who were responsible for authoring the bible" ?

You seriously wonder why the Bible is considered the word of God by Christians, and that the OT is so considered by Jews ?


Curiously, you seem to contradict yourself. You are not ignoring it, you are arguing it, hmm ?

What "whole book" ? You do understand that the OT is comprised of many books written over many centuries. There is no "whole book".

Pontius Pilate was not a real person I guess.

Jerusalem was not a real city I suppose.

There was no city of Babylon.

The Kingdom of Judah never existed.

Egypt did not exist.

There were no Hebrews.

I would say more, but the moderators have warned me not to be insulting. Still you deny the facts I have given you when you said this:

I will be polite and only say that perhaps you are mistaken, heaven forbid that I say what every historian will acknowledge and you deny.

angelo

So the bible fills a role as a tool for mankind's belief system.
Yes I'll grant you that's exactly what it is.
Children have their fairy tales, adults have a bible that some insist is written by their deity.
What history has been discorvered to be hidden in it's thousands of pages?
Because Rome is mentioned, or many other facts that we now know to have existed does not give it any credibility at all.
How many movies have been shown based on present day cities and existing people? Does that make all the movies true because the cities are a fact.
The bible is in the same category. All the stories contained in the various books that make up the whole were written in real places about the tribe of Israelites. Which was on the main fiction.
Reading the O/T a person who knows no better would think that the Kingdom of Judah, Solomon, David ect ect. was as great as the kingdoms around them.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Modern archeology has found no sign of any of these so-called great kingdoms. Even the story Moses is now regarded as a possible myth.

bacht

The Old Testament is not completely devoid of historically reliable information. I think the problem is that you're comparing the Bible with modern books and writers. Try matching it up with contemporary literature for a fairer judgment.

And keep in mind that the Jews were never a great power; their literature was the place where they could aggrandize themselves in compensation for relative insignificance on the world stage. Sort of like the Wizard of Oz: he put on a show of fierceness and majesty to mask his actual powerlessness.