JERDOG

And what years were the first canons of it circulating? I'm asking because I need to know if the OT predates ancient greek gods and myths.

Chris Weimer

canonized wise, no it is about the same for the earliest Greek myths, if you take the earliest canon, though.

offa

I have seen the date 280 b.c.e. as the date our current Old Testament was written. A coincidence is this date falls within the years of Ptolemy Philadelphus and the library at Alexandria. The only possible source, as I can rationalize, about this dating is Josephus.
When Josephus talks about characters and locations he has a tendency to misplace names. On the other hand, Josephus is refuted (not taken as gospel) by theologians unless what he writes is to their convenience.

Chris Weimer

um, Daniel was written, or so I believed, later. Wasn't it?

offa

Yes. I mistakingly was using Genesis as my source material. There is a lot more to the Old Testament than the first five books. I was writing from memory, being too lazy to look for sources. Also, I am a bit hooked on Jubilees.

My 280 bc dating was not about all the books in the Old Testament and I appreciate your critique cweb255.

offa

Chris Weimer

well, I'm glad that we've clearified things up a bit. Next topic?

spin

Two points:

The pseudepigraphic work known as the Letter of Aristeas, which is used to derive the 280 BCE dating is not correct when he talks of Demetrius of Falerum as librarian at the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. There was conflict between the two and there is no chance of Demetrius holding this prized position. Scholars tend to date Aristeas to 100 BCE or there abouts.

One simply doesn't know what the writer of Aristeas meant by the books of the law. If one thinks of the books of Moses, they weren't considered a single entity even in Qumran times, for they circulated basically as separate works.

This means that there is very little that is tangible to be derived from the Letter of Aristeas.


spin

JERDOG

The reason I am asking is because someone on another board is saying that the pagans copied from the supposed old testament prophecies and developed their pagan gods from this.

Chuck Rightmire

As I understand it, many of the books of the bible were circulated in oral form for quite a while before being written down. Many of them appear to have been written sometime after the return from Babylon and then first codified to some extent, according to my memories of sister school, after the Maccabees reestablished a Jewish state about 200 BCE. The Jewish bible was probably codified in about 70 CE just before the disapora.

The book of Job seems to have been written the other way around than is being suggested in your other thread. It appears to have been a Greek-style drama turned into an Old Testament morality play by the introduction of the byplay between Yahweh and the devil.

Many of the books of the Old Testament, in particular Genesis and the remaining books of the first five can be traced to origins in Mesopotamian clay tablets. Abraham is said in the Bible to have come out of Ur which gives possible sources for both the story of Cain and Abel (although the farmer was the victim there—obvious cultural bias), the resurrected God, original sin, the flood, and others. Sargon was an earlier version of Moses, the baby found by the royal female floating in a sealed basket near the banks of a river. Sargon and Hammurabi both promulgated laws similar to those of Moses. The great whale mentioned by at least one of the prophets that swam in the primordial seas seems to reflect the origin tale of Ur and Akkad, as does the separating of the earth from the waters above and the waters below.

In a sense, the traditions of the Greeks may have been a parallel branch out of Mesopotamia with cultural additions of the sky gods of the Aryans. But Christianity owes much of its classical influence to the additions of the Greeks and Romans through Paul. Some may argue, indeed, that it should be called Paulism rather than Christianity.

Clivedurdle

Are you daring to say that Moses did not write the pentateuch and that all the other stuff is quite late!!??

Watch out for those lightning bolts - oops that was Zeus did that!