Magdlyn

Take your time. It'll all still be there in the morning.

apologist55

In an earlier reply you said,"You may willingly believe that Paul wrote 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Colossians or Ephesians, but most contemporary scholars -- you know, from recognized universities -- don't. This is because the content of the letters don't add up to what is accepted as Pauline letters, such as Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. You should check out scholarly commentaries on these works -- not devotional commentaries (usually not written by scholars) -- to understand the issues. Belief in itself is insufficient to deal with the problem. You need logic and knowledge as well."

Thus far you have offered no credible defense of your position and no reason for me to doubt the veracity of the salutations wherein certain men represented themselves as the author of the books in dispute. Your only defense has been,"most contemporary scholars," which means what?? The majority opinion is correct?? "From recognized universities", meaning what? "The Ancient Eight", "The Big Ten" or local universities that are familiar to you??

Thus far you have stood on nothing but simple disbelief which has no basis in fact.Perhaps you could be a bit more explicit and not so vague in your responses??

spin

It was not my intention to hold your hand on this issue, but to point you towards reputable sources on the subject, so you could DIY.


spin

Huon

The Dutch Radicals :
http://www.atheistalliance.org/jhc/a...s/EysingSp.htm

The Spuriousness of So-called Pauline Epistles
Exemplified by the Epistle to the Galatians
G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga

Toto

apologist55: the easy place to start is at www.earlychristianwritings.com That will lead you to more resources.

apologist55

Thank you Toto!

very good site, imo.

apologist55

Thanks Huon! Lots of good information!

Sarai

Hi again. I've been doing some reading these past couple of days on the Divided Kingdom and Galilee, and--you're right, the situation just gets more and more interesting. It seems Galilee was part of the Northern Kingdom for only a very short time, like between approximately 23 and 45 years, before Galilee fell to King Rezon, the Aramaic King of Damascus sometime between 911 and 888 BCE. There doesn't seem to be a lot known about the religion of the Arameans of Damascus, but they certainly weren't worshippers of the Israelite god.

Aramaic Damascus, and so probably also Galilee, fell to Assyria in 732 BCE. Assyria's policy was to take at least a good chunk of the population of conquered areas and resettle them elsewhere, while importing new inhabitants for the just conquered territory. So there's a population change at this point, but I don't know who they brought into Galilee, except I'm pretty sure it wasn't Israelites or Judeans.

Then sometime around 612-610 BCE, Galilee is taken by Nabopolasser of Chaldea (Neo-Babylonia). I can't find any indication that they shuffled the population like the Assyrians did, but we know they did just that when Nabopolasser's son, Nebuchadnezzar, took Judah 25 or so years later. There may have been no need to resettle the Galileeans. They may not have been troublesome. I'm not sure...

The Chaldean Empire, and so likely Galilee since it was part of the Chaldean Empire, fell to Cyrus of Persia, the ruler of Media, in 539 BCE. So we have yet another infusion of a different belief system into Galilee.

It looks to me like the Galilee probably didn't have a large population of Jews for a very long time, until Hyrcanus conquered the area in 105 BCE, and apparently, according to Josephus, forced conversion and circumcision on the population, just as he did in Edom (Idumaea). That makes me wonder how authentically "Jewish" these people felt themselves to be, and how authentic the Jews of Judea felt them to be? We know that they were rebelling and causing all sorts of problems to the "establishment" from the beginning of the Common Era consistently through to the Bar Kochba Rebellion. Interesting questions!!!

Sarai

Magdlyn

Nice recap.

It's important to remember that back then, there was no such word as Jew. You had Israel, the northern kingdom, and Judah, the southern. The whole idea of a united kingdom stemming from the 12 tribes of Jacob's sons' descendants, as they returned from the enslavement in Egypt, is highly exaggerated, if not invented. There is no archeological evidence of a huge group of ex-slaves wandering and then conquering Canaan in that time period.

Worship was not centralized and YHWH-centric until Josiah attempted to impose it just before Babylonia attacked. So, if by "Jews" in the north, you mean monotheistic YHWH worshipers, you might be snipe hunting.

Those "foreign gods that you have not known" so direly warned against were actually local gods everyone knew and loved. My theory is that the priests and Levites of Jerusalem really wanted those sacrifices and tithes and so attempted to scare people into thinking YHWH demanded their best livestock and produce. The scribes consolidated and aggrandized the stories of the patriarchs, the united kingdom of the virile David and the wise and wealthy Solomon, and their god and his covenant, to impress the people of the region, and later, after Babylon had gone ahead and overcome Judah and exiled the nobles anyway, to hold on to a national identity.

The people of Samaria, depicted as such depraved villians in Tanakh, their crime was worshipping YHWH, but wanting to hold on to their local Beyt-els (houses of god, ie: YHWH, perhaps with his consort Asherah, or alongside Baal and Tammuz), and this could not be tolerated. It seems the Galileans were of like mind.

The horror of the end of the book of Ezra really brings home the ethnic and religious cleansing the nobility carried out when they returned from exile.

spin

I think 1 Macc 5:14 should shed a little light. It's about "Israelites" complaining about bad treatment from the gentiles who also lived in Galilee.

Josephus is not a transparent source for the matter. He wasn't around at the time and depends on his sources. What is being reported is propaganda. Look at 2 Macc 6:2 for the fact that Gerizzim (Samaria) was accepted as of the religion of the Hebrews in the time of Judas. The conversion story is partly to over up the fact that there were two centres of the religion until John Hyrcanus's time, which of course wasn't politically acceptable. The "need" for conversion made them second class and oppressable. (And of course all the negativity towards the Samaritans must be seen in this light, despite the fact that there were good enough relations between the Jerusalemite priesthood and that of Gerizzim to have had intermarriage!)

If you were Samarian and Hyrcanus's Jews destroyed your Yahwistic temple, would you consider yourself a Jew??


spin