Apikorus

Those interested in giving Dr. Comfort a test drive can look here. Comfort waxes credulous on the Bible's "divine origins." And, like many Christian "scholars," he subscribes to the preposterous notion that Jesus of Nazareth is prefigured in the Hebrew Bible. Anyone so slaved to a confessional stance is hardly an objective source. That is not to say that he can't also put on a scholar's hat too and recount valid historical data every now and then. But inasmuch as his entire worldview is wrapped up in this divine origins and everything-points-to-Jesus nonsense, it is abundantly reasonable to expect from him a tendentious analysis.

Doctor X

Indeed.

I have a good Fortress Press Guide to Scholarship on the formation of the NT canon. The author clearly thinks the texts are "divinely inspired" and all of that, but he does provide a credible summary of the formation of canon. It is a matter of knowing when to "don the Wellies" when the excrement rises.

To keep things "fair" I wish I had bought a "guide to the Bible" I found in a "pagan store" a long time ago. This guy argued that YHWH was the "666" of Revelation--you see . . . religion is this "big conspiracy" to serve dark powers. I hope most people could "smell" that one, but if you do not know a subject, you can certainly become "dazzled with bullshit."

I, for example, can wack on about how a particular phrase in the OT predicts Junior--writing pages of linguistic analysis--and it will probably convince people . . . unless they actually know Hebrew and realize I am writing from the wrong orifice!

That having been written, the basic texts in the Recommended Reading are fairly "neutral" with regards to a theological axe.

--J.D.

Katarzyna

Starting from where? Are you looking for a timeline like:

Composition of E text: ~ 922 - 722 B.C
Composition of J text: ~ 848 - 722 B.C.
J and E text combined: ?
Composition of P text: ~ 722 - 609 B.C
Jeremiah and/or Baruch compose D text: ~ 622 B.C
Redactor combines JE, P, D texts:
....
all the way to the writing of the KJV?

Kat

spin

Ah, pure Wellhausen. Sight for sore eyes. Loved the assumptions. Wonderful sequels.


spin

Katarzyna

Er, sorry. Wasn't trying to push one theory or another, just trying to understand what the OP wanted. But if you care to, I'd love to see a rebuttal, your theory, or something other than sarcasm.

Kat

Apikorus

Preexilic P ain't pure Wellhausen. This has a neo-Kaufmannian tilt to it. It is...Friedman.

spin

And, sorry, I was not attempting any criticism of the poster.

I really don't have any solid alternatives. All I know is what was preserved at Qumran. Nearly all the theories that deal with the texts in some historical context, are based on hot air. I can say when Daniel was written and I have hypotheses for when Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles were compiled, but for the rest I can only supply wide ranges of dates. I see no court situation big enough to support a scribal school in Judah, so beyond the few private inscriptions, I see no sign of a writing tradition which would maintain literature such as indicated by any supposed big traditions such as J and E. I would therefore put the writing of the core materials very late indeed. The texts were built up through accretion and sewing together, even interweaving, so, while there is probably some logic behind the source theory initiated by Wellhausen, I think the process far more complex and ongoing. -- oh, and to a large part, irrecoverable.


spin

spin

Don't be so literal!

(You have the books, I don't, and at the moment can't get access. If I could I would be dealing with other things!?)


spin

Apikorus

Aw, I didn't need any books for that and neither did you. You just let your nostalgia get away for a moment. Powerful stuff.

spin

One of the good things about the scrolls is that no-one can dribble on about the alphabet soup or the primary history. Now it's not such a bad thing that one can work out the compositional layers for texts, but that can only really go far with an eye on the historical context.

Can one really be sure for example when Kings was written, when most of the kings are treated so negatively? This naturally suggests that the "lives" weren't written until after their deaths and obviously the last few lives were written after Nebuchadnezzar, which could suggest that all of them were written after that time. Now what would priests be doing writing royal histories which features David, Solomon, Hezekiah and Josiah, who were such good kings and more important than priests? Would priests be interested in keeping a royal history?

I find myself thinking that Kings was compiled very late in a kingdom (otherwise, why write a royal history?), so I'm left to wonder about Kings being written during the Hasmonean period from an earlier work (well actually at least two with the kingdom of Israel material, but...), for Chronicles was based on that same earlier work. This seems in keeping with the fact that most of the kings are just stereotype entries with parentage, length of reign and whether he was a good boy or not. Obviously some traditions from the times of Hezekiah and Josiah made it through, but then some of Josiah's deeds seem to match those of John Hyrcanus.

Ben Sira knows only David, Solomon, Hezekiah and Josiah as good guys, yet if you read kings you'll find a few more as well (Jehoshaphat, Asa, etc), so was there a text which dealt with these that was available to Ben Sira?

There are great difficulties dating the histories. Not much of Kings was found at Qumran and only one fragment attributable to Chronicles -- which wasn't Chronicles either because of the differences it presents to both Kings and Chronicles, though it leans more to the Chronicles tradition.

The more tradition based texts such as the pentateuch, Joshua and Judges... how on earth can one date the layers in them when there is just so little to pick out to hang them on? Teensy example: Deut 28:68 talking of bringing the people back to Egypt in ships and sold as slaves is clearly dealing with a post-exilic context, which I think is Ptolemaic, but too complex literary analysis to argue here.

Until texts were basically frozen by the Pharisees, I can see no reason to think that the texts were not in continuous evolution, though I think the pentateuch was fairly standard by scrolls times. I can say this because there were various text traditions of pentateuchal books, LXX type (in Hebrew), Samaritan type (pre-Samaritan) and MT, plus variations beside these. This implies a necessary standardisation before the scrolls deposit. Fragments of other biblical texts show more variety.

Dating this stuff is a key problem for analysis of the texts. That's why I chafe on the glib standard datings. They are totally meaningless.


spin