Agenda07

I've got a copy of the 1954 revised version in front of me and it doesn't support 'tablet theory'; in fact it supports a form of the Documentary Hypothesis. To give you the context which McDowell convenients excludes from his quite mining:

Notice that when Albright defends the "substantially Mosaic character of the Pentateuchal tradition", he is not defending the view that Moses wrote the Torah, but rather that the books were based on traditions handed down about him. Dave, not only does this book not support your tablet theory, it actively refutes three of the 'assumptions' which you claim are key to the DH, namely:

"2) Natural view of Israel's religion and history
3) No writing in Israel at Moses' time
4) Legendary view of the patriarchal narratives"

Here is an author who broadly accepts the documentary hypothesis but also believes in the patriarchal narratives and in the Exodus (he disagrees with claim two in another chapter and I don't have the patience to type any more out).

You've shot yourself in the foot with this quote-mine old boy...

Steviepinhead

With regard to the discussion between ninjaj and afdave re Bilbo.

The science fiction author/"alternate" historian S.M. Stirling has written a series of books in which he postulates a traumatic "fork" in earth's history in which people who have cultivated various back-to-the-earth, medievalist skills--smithing, swordmaking, bowmanship, wheelwrightry, and the various aspects of small-farm, pre-industrial agriculture--preferentially survive the disaster.

Among these "survivalists" are Re-enactors, and they find themselves "in tune with" Tolkien, to the extent that Sindarin becomes the "code" language of a group of "Rangers" who are the scouts and wardens for a coalition of surviving communities. Tolkieniana gets blended into a mix of druidic/celtic paganism, and so forth, but Stirling "plausibly" convinces the reader that--in the right circumstances--Tolkien's mythworld could wind itself around the cultural core of an (alternate version of) our real world.

And, of course, we've watched this happen much more recently than nascent Christianity or Mosaicism--Joseph Smith inventing the LDS (or having it "revealed" to him on, ahem, here-and-gone-again tablets), L. Ron Hubbard inventing Scientology, etc.

These more recent examples--and Stirling's fictional demonstration of fiction-becoming-cultural-"fact"--don't necessarily disprove the earlier examples.

But they prompt questions...

-Jay-

Actually, Dean's the Hobbit fancier. I'm just dragging the example along.

You bring an interesting twist to the discussion, though. I've wondered how some hypothetical extraterrestrial anthropologists might look at a phenomenon like Star Wars. Think about it. There are films, complete with these yellow-lettered crawls that give the context of the story that is about to unwind. There are books about these characters. Action figures. There are even plastic Stormtrooper costumes out there that could be unearthed.

It really doesn't seem much of a stretch to suppose that someone could think that all of these artifacts represented historical people and events.

regards,

NinJay

gregor

Have I missed somewhere mixed amongst the blathering derails the post where AFD has apologized/owed up to the quote attributed to Friedman, but mined from Meyers?

AFD - please explain the Friedman quote, please

Keith&Co.

You need to go to more conventions.

More than a few people have confided in me that they felt such a strong spiritual awakening at Star Wars, that they just KNOW that Lucas was....onto something.

Then again, it was the 70's. They were probably ON something.

Still, whether or not a nerd or a future hypothetical xenothologist feels that Jedi is a real job description, the fact is, there is no evidence to support Skywalker as a historical figure.

Or evidence for George Washington's Cherry Tree episode, despite the numbers of school children who are sure it was real, because it was presented to them as real.

So, the fact that it's presented as real is not a good reason to accept the historicity of an event.
Or a figure. Santa is presented as real. The Astarte Bunny. Leprechauns. I spent a summer looking to catch a Jackalope because it was presented to me as a real animal. I even convinced myself i saw one.
I was more skeptical about the furred trout in the glacier-cooled streams up in the mountains, but that was because i'd learned the truth about the jackalope by then...and about grandpa's sense of humor.

Dean Anderson

The central claim of the DH is that the best way to explain the text (i.e. the way that most explains the consilience) that we see is to conclude that what we now see as a single Torah is a combination of different sources - commonly labeled J, E, P and D.

Various scholars may have their own additional hypotheses about whether these sources were oral or whether they were written, and who or what group produced them; but these are additional hypotheses which stand or fall on their own merits. Whether the sources were oral or written does not affect the DH itself since it is equally compatible with both situations.

As I have said repeatedly, the claim it makes is that there the Torah consists of four main (and a few minor) sources that were edited together - probably in two stages (J and E put together first, then P and D added). These sources may have been written or may have been oral. The DH is compatible with either scenario.

No, You did not. As has been explained to you repeatedly, the quote simply does not say what you claim it says.

Let's have a look at it, shall we:

"Ancient Israel was certainly not without God-given bases for the ordering of human life; only they were not fixed in writing." (Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Translated by Black and Menzies. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1885, p.393)

Does that say anything about the history of Israel? No. It makes a claim about "God-given bases for the ordering of human life". It is saying that in an unspecified "ancient" time (the quote is taken out of its context so we can not tell exactly what period Wellhausen is referring to) there were no written commandments from God to guide behaviour. Your claim that it "specifically" says that the Israelites history was not fixed in writing is simply false - and you keep repeating this false statement even though I have explained this to you more than once.

They are indeed. You claim to have "shown" that the DH "presupposes" a lack of writing in Canaan in the 15th century BCE and that this "presupposition" has been proven false.

I do not consider:

1) A quote from one advocate and populiser of the DH - taken out of context and misrepresented (dare I say "Quote Mined").

2) An assertion that there was writing in Egypt before the 15th century BCE.

To have "shown" either:

a) That the DH does indeed "presuppose" a lack of writing in Canaan in the 15th century BCE (it is actually 100% compatible with the presence of writing there at that time).

b) That there was indeed writing in Canaan in the 15th century BCE. (There may or may not have been - but you certainly haven't shown that there was.)

So, yes. When you claim to have "shown" these things then we obviously have different understandings of what the word "show" means (as well as, apparently, what the words "evidence", "prove", "reasonable" and "consilient" mean...)

Unfortunately, from reading the comments of others on these threads, I rather get the impression that most people here seem to agree with my understanding of these words - and that with your understanding of them you are in a minority of one.

You are contradicting yourself there. You agree that the larger chiasm is contained in the two sources, then claim that it is "chopped up and pureed" and only smaller ones exist.

Pray tell, what are these smaller ones? Because given the individual separated texts (which I provided links to earlier - I can repeat those links if you like), it is plain for all to see that they both contain the larger chiastic structure regardless of whatever "chopped and pureed" rhetoric you may use.

This is not true, Dave.

I have been through this entire thread, and you have mentioned "details about Egypt" a couple of times in lists of "evidence for Mosaic authorship", but you have most definitely not given any specific details.

Once again, you have gone straight from asserting something to claiming to have shown it, whilst missing out the actual showing part in the middle.

Ridiculous

Firstly, it has already been pointed out that scribes do not write about their clients in the third person - they write the client's own words. That is the point of being a scribe, rather than simply a biographer.

Secondly, you are missing the point utterly.

From a logical standpoint, your argument here is:

1) A is evidence for B.

Then, when I point out that A is compatible with both B and ~B, and indeed ~B is more compatible with A than B is - and therefore A is not in fact evidence for B at all, you reply with:

2) Ah - but you forget that it is possible for A and B to be compatible.

This is another example of your understanding of the meaning of "evidence" being apparently different to that which the rest of us have.

A being compatible with B does not mean that A is evidence for B. For A to be evidence for B it must be be more compatible with B than with ~B

Dean Anderson

Yes, I did - because it was irrelevant and merely an indication that you did not recognise that I was using a reductio ad absurdum.

The whole point of a reductio ad absurdum is that (as the name implies) it is shows that a logical argument generates a preposterous and/or paradoxical (i.e. "absurd") scenario and therefore is not sound.

So your bluster about how "preposterous" the Bilbo example is supports my case that the argument used to generate both it and your Moses example is unsound (to be specific, it uses circular logic).

angelo

Fundamentalists will argue otherwise. I read a letter to the editor of a magazine title ''Creation''. Some group of people are pushing for a replica of the ship Darwin used, the Beagle to be rebuilt to celebrate the 200 hundredth year anniversary. This idiot wrote a replica of Noah's ark should be built alongside the Beagle replica. Reasoning? to show the scale of size.


www.creationontheweb.com

Dean Anderson

Erm... I think he was talking about the Ark of the Covenant, not Noah's Ark...

mung bean

Did Noah have a covenant with Yahweh? Did not Yahweh make a covenant with mankind after the Fludde and buggerise around with the laws of optics to create rainbows? So it was an Ark of a covenant. So there.