Magdlyn

Would anyone care to comment on this dialog I had with a poster on another board? She has given me persmission to post it here:

Z:

Personally, i have only recently completely rejected the New Testament after a long journey of study and reflection, because i can no longer ignore the massive mistakes, contradictions and other theological errors contained in it when compared with the original Hebrew Scriptures (so-called "Old Testament"). I think if J.C. did in fact exist, then he was a minor messianic figure among many others claiming the same thing - and even then, his original message was perverted beyond all recognition by Paul of Tarsus. I rejected Paul's letters a long time ago, but now i have to reject the NT in its entirety.

Magdlyn:

You think the gospel narratives are fiction, yet you believe the Hebrew Scriptures are factually correct? Please read this book:

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

Actually, if you understand Paul wrote his letters long before the gospel narratives were even thought of, you may come to a different conclusion.
Paul was sincere if a bit crazy. Half the letters attributed to him are forgeries. Acts, the Peters, the Johns and Jude were written to pervert Paul's original and neo-Platonic ideas into a form more useful for the Roman gov't.

Z:

I have read many books in the same vein and i do not find the evidence compelling. In fact i believe the entire archeological view of ancient Hebrew history is skewed because it has been placed in the wrong era entirely. I am an adherent of the view that the exodus from Egypt actually occurred in about the year 2150 B.C.E., precipitating the collapse of the Old Kingdom. This is about a thousand years earlier than the commonly accepted chronology, but it fits the historical and archeological record much better.

I believe Paul wrote his letters before Matthew, Luke and John were written, but i believe Mark was written first from Peter's account of events.
I do not believe Paul was "sincere if a bit crazy". I believe he was engaged in a concerted effort to sabotage the growing Jewish Messianic movement from within by altering the original teachings and preaching his own message to an audience who wouldn't know any different: pagan gentiles. I do not believe his "conversion experience" was genuine whatsoever -- he just came up with a better plan for destroying his enemies than open persecution and murder. As for Acts, the Peters, the Johns and "Jude", they were a not-very-subtle attempt to marginalize James the Just and rewrite history in Paul's favor.


Paul was a Roman citizen born in Tarsus who travelled to Jerusalem to study at the Temple under Gamaliel, according to some sources in order to "woo" the daughter of the high priest. He didn't get very far (as evinced by his complete mauling of Jewish theology in his writings) and, frustrated in his hopes of advancement, he soon became disillusioned. He had attached himself to the high priest as a henchman, and it was in this capacity that he originally persecuted and murdered members of the Nazarene movement, carrying out his duties with fanatical zeal. He was supposedly on his way to further this persecution in Damascus when he had his so-called conversion experience.
Now, at this point, Paul has a grudge against Judaism in general. He does not understand it, and he finds it too difficult and demanding (see his famous passage in the NT about how hard he finds it to control himself and obey the Torah). He decides to take advantage of the situation and insinuate himself into this new movement, declaring himself not only an apostle of Jesus but in fact a superior apostle who has been given a "new" message that he must take to the gentiles. The original apostles had been instructed to preach only to "the lost sheep of Israel". But Paul, by supposedly joining himself to the apostles, was able to preach his own message of "freedom from the Law" to an audience who didn't know any better and wouldn't question him.
He was challenged, of course, by the other apostles and many of the Jews he encountered on his travels (of whom he writes with thinly veiled hatred), but eventually it was just a matter of numbers. Paul's message, not requiring circumcision or adherence to Torah, was easier and therefore much more popular with the pagans. Eventually his gentile "Christians" outnumbered the Jewish Nazarenes led by James the Just, who slowly faded into obscurity; and thus he accomplished his goal of destroying the original message and movement and replacing them with his own. And not only that, the real irony and genius of it is that by claiming to be working for the Jewish messiah, he uses his own twisted version of Jewish theology to discredit Torah-keeping and push traditional Judaism into the realm of history, so to speak (i.e. the "Old Testament"). Of course, traditional Judaism does survive to this day, but that is certainly in spite of Paul's efforts to bury it.
Like i said, this is what i believe to be the truth based on years of personal struggle and study. If others believe otherwise, that is their own business.

Here are a few links (i don't necessarily agree with other things on these sites, take it with a grain of salt):
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org.../wrongdates.php
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org...xodus_egypt.php
http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/exodus.html

Magdlyn:

Z, I see from your first link that you are not relying on archeology for your Exodus theory, but are choosing your favorite chronology from the conflicting ones in the scriptures, even for example, taking such time periods as the 40 years of wandering as a literal timespan.

The link seems to imply a belief in the Exodus narratives as accurate objective history. I find Finklestein's theory of a rewrite of Jewish heroic myth at the time of Josiah's Judean Yahwist "revival" (more correctly revolution, when the "torah" was "found" in the Temple), after the conquering of the northern state of Israel, much more convincing.

Why for example, was "Pharaoh" not named, but the midwives whom he ordered to kill Jewish babies were? That just doesn't make sense if the author was attempting to write accurate history.

Z:


First of all, i do think the story of the exodus is generally reliable. Is it "accurate, objective history"? No, there is no such thing. All historical records are colored by some kind of cultural/ideological bias -- that does not mean they are unreliable, only that we must "eat the fish and spit out the bones", so to speak. Should we reject an account of the Civil War in its entirety simply b/c the author asserts that God had a hand in helping the Union to victory? What if future archaeologists dismiss the Constitution as a valid historical document because it claims that our rights are bestowed upon us by our Creator? Neither should we assume a priori that just b/c the historical narrative of Exodus is contained within a theological framework it is somehow invalidated as a source of information.

The ancient Hebrews did not clearly differentiate secular history from sacred history, and these stories are how they preserved their national heritage. It does not stand up to reason that they would deliberately falsify or drastically alter the secular portions of their records in any way. Embellish the religious aspects, perhaps, but why completely rewrite history? It would be akin to deliberately inducing amnesia. I feel that to reject Exodus out of hand simply on the basis of its inclusion in the biblical canon is itself a form of cultural bias.

Secondly, the version of the exodus story used in the "official" canon is not the only one in existence. There is an extrabiblical book called Sefer haYasher or the Book of the Upright, which is mentioned by name in other books of the Tanakh and has been quoted by the Rabbis for centuries, but for arbitrary reasons was not included in the canon. It covers the period from Creation to the death of Moses and is complementary to the canonical books. The aim of the canonical books Genesis through Deuteronomy was to outline the origins and history of the Hebrews in a brief, succinct way, but to relate the Torah given by YHWH in exhaustive detail. The Book of the Upright, on the other hand, goes into the details of many stories "glossed over" in the canonical texts, fleshing them out and making more sense of them, but it is not concerned with Torah and omits it from the narrative completely. The canonical stories are the abridged version written for an audience who already knew the details.

The Upright version of the exodus story tells us many interesting details not deemed necessary to include in the abridged canonical version. It tells us the names of the Pharaohs, Melol and Adikam (although each Pharaoh actually had numerous names and titles), and that Melol ruled from the age of 6 to the age of 100 -- an unprecedented 94-year reign. When one examines the Egyptian king-lists, one sees that there is only one Pharaoh who ruled for 94 years -- Pepi II. He was the penultimate Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, and his successor only ruled for about a year before the nation collapsed into anarchy and chaos around 2150 B.C.E. Of course, the dates are approximate and vary depending on which Egyptian source you use.

The reason no corroborating evidence has been found for this and other biblical stories is that the archaeologists have been looking at the wrong time period. When one adjusts it by a thousand years or so, suddenly everything makes sense. But it does drastically change the accepted, traditional view of Middle Eastern history and chronology. Peoples and invasions that were postulated to fill in unexplained gaps turn out to be unnecessary after all, some of them bastions of modern archaeological thought - they were actually Hebrews all along. Of course, this does leave a lapse in the biblical narrative of a few hundred years somewhere in the period of the Judges, but this is really not surprising for such a venerable culture which experienced numerous upheavals.

I'm not sure if this clarifies anything for you, b/c i'm not sure what you meant about my selecting a biblical chronology instead of using the archaeological record. I am talking about both -- matching one to the other, which is easily done when you're looking at the right timeframe.

Magdlyn:

Who has done the archeology you postulate for the third millenium BCE which evidences the movement of 100s of thousands of people and animals on the Exodus route?

Names, books, publishers, dates? I only looked at your first link which did not mention archeology at all.

If the Biblical account of the exodus was abridged, why did the author(s) at least not name the pharaoh?


How could a powerful army drown in a Sea of Reeds?


BTW, Z, do I have your permission to cut and paste your interesting opinions to another board more concerned with Biblical history?

Z:


I will need to look around a bit for this info, i do not have it immediately on hand and it is a while since i referenced it.

M:

If the Biblical account of the exodus was abridged, why did the author(s) at least not name the pharaoh?

Z:

May i ask why this particular point is so significant to you? To answer your question, i really don't like to speculate on the inner psychological workings of the author(s) of Exodus -- but if i have to, i suppose i would say that they refrained from using Pharaoh's proper name as a means of highlighting his inhumanity and making him a more archetypal figure. It is a method commonly employed throughout the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps to demonstrate the ultimate insignificance and interchangeability of rulers and tyrants on earth. In fact, even in the "New Testament", Caesar also remains unnamed. It suffices to use the title because it conveys all that's necessary to know.


M:

How could a powerful army drown in a Sea of Reeds?

Apparently, if one refers to the text in question, they attempted to follow the Hebrews and were swept away by a mighty wave. What is so hard to believe about that? It happens all the time, as adequately illustrated by the recent devastation. As an interesting aside, the Book of the Upright tells us that Pharaoh was not drowned along with his army but was cast up by the wave and ended up living in a foreign land for several more years, because he finally believed in YHWH. Have you seen the animated film "Prince of Egypt"? A lot of the details in this movie were taken from Sefer haYasher.


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That is the dialog. Any comments? What is this Book of the Upright? Who proposes this 1000 yr earlier exodus theory?

Anat

The book of the Upright = 'sefer HaYashar' was discussed in this thread.

As for chronology, as described in Finkelstein's book, the population of Canaan's central hill country underwent several cycles of settlement-nomadism. The first settled stage, when the city-states first appeared, as far as I understand, was in the Early Bronze Age. Many cities were destroyed or abandoned at the end of this stage, leading to the Intermediate Bronze Age, when very few cities remained settled and the rest of the population turned to nomadism (thus little but cemetaries remains from them). The hill country was resettled in the Middle Bronze Age, and most of those settlements were abandoned again in the Late Bronze, and then settled again in the Iron Age. See also Introduction to Biblical Archaeology 2: From Stone to Bronze.

The latter part of the Iron Age, Iron Age II is the time of the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, as evidenced by seals, ostraca and inscriptions in neighboring kingdoms, as well as finds particularly from Samaria and Jezreel, the cities associated with the Omride kings. So the question is whether earlier events in biblical chronology correlate with anything in archaeology and if yes, with what?

The traditional chronology of the Exodus is based on place names such as the city of Rameses as well as interpretation of times as mentioned in the Bible, using events from Iron Age II as anchors. It is also based on the idea that once the Israelites (wherever they came from) settled the hill country they remained settled in its northern part until the fall of Samaria to Assyria in 722 BCE and in the south until the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE. but if we follow this chronology, we run into trouble with Joshua's conquest - see Introduction to Biblical Archaeology 3: The Rise of Some People or Other - especially Appendix A. Biblical literalists who insist that Joshua's armies conquered a walled city in Jericho have no choice but to redate the conquest to the end of the Early Bronze Age. This introduces a long time between the supposed conquest and the Iron Age - which would mean a very long time of the Judges, I suppose. (The conflict with the Philistines is very dominant in Samuel, and we know they arrived in the 12th century.) Not only that, but an early conquest chronology fails to explain the following: a delay of about 2 centuries in settling the land following the supposed conquest (the Intermediate Bronze Age), no biblical explanation of the 3-4 centuries of sparse settlement in the Late Bronze Age. Also, there are the El-Amarna tablets of correspondences between Egypt and local rulers in Canaan, including requests for military support against other local rulers. I wonder how that fits in with an early conquest chronology.

Magdlyn

TYVM, Anat. I see I have 59 views and only one reply. I humbly hope more will have something to add.

I will look at all your links.

I read the Finklestein book but as it was all new info to me, have not fully absorbed or intergrated it inot my view of the eras involved.

I do not know what archeology my correspondant Z has for the early conquest idea. What kind of stuff has been found in Canaan for the 3rd century BCE, that could possibly convince her of a massive influx of nomads in that period?

Anat

Well, the end of the Early Bronze Age was a time when many cities were destroyed, including Jericho (which had a wall then, but not in its later incarnations) and Ai. But it is not at all clear who or what destroyed the cities - external invaders, ecological collapse or something else? Following the collapse the population is more nomadic and less settled for some 2 centuries, but the nomads weren't necessarily outsiders replacing theprevious population but could easily have been descendants of the city dwellers.