Sheshbazzar

Those poor starving Theraputae living on a bread and water diet, and impelled to even further starve themselves on that, would have been in no condition to attend to the medical or spiritual needs of anyone, trapped in their cells six days a week by their fellow religious fanatics, they would have quickly became 'venerable' appearing emaciated cadaverous sickly skeletons, to be propped up at Feasts.

spin

The tenor of your posts? Let's look at the tenor of your posts:

1.
Or one can be a carrier infected with the Zombie Jeebus shit-for-brains disease. (here)

2.
Is there anything of christianity that does not reek of fraud. (here)

3. (This one's gone, but made Feb 7)
What a wanker.

Typical christian. Zombie Jeebus didn't say enough So make up some more religious horse shit and pass it on.

The tenor is loud and clear. It is extremely anti-christian and rather disgraceful. There is a tendency for extremities to be quite close to each other in appearance, such that extreme anti-christian can look a lot like extreme christian (with just a few negatives).

That's tenor. Now the act. The typical zealous christian who comes here attempts to apply biblical verses as though they had some sort of authority with which they can prove some rhetorical point, which is what you were doing by citing Deut (in Hebrew, mind you) to attack the therapeutae because they don't adhere to your standards of bible literalism.

Nobody said you were. You won't win the pathos vote on that note.

For some reason, when someone calls you on your general bilious harangue, you get all uppity.

Looking past your attempted insult of old women, it's plain that you can't see past the mirror there, Sheshbazzar. The few examples I have cited above show you to have been spewing bile all over this forum for a long time and there doesn't seem to have been a single thought about the reading population here amid your need to vilify christianity. Talk about "nasty, bitter, and sad shriveled up", to most people such hypocrisy as that would not go so unnoticed.

You have ceased to be talking on the subject of your view of the therapeutae being "hinky" in the light of your understanding of what Judaism had to be, so I guess you've decided that you have no more to say on the issue.

Sheshbazzar

I'm very confident that The Torah as was used in the Temple, and in the synagogues was very stable by the 1st century,
-other than certain small nut-job desert cults that attempted to produce their own self-promoting revisions.

The Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy had been around for hundreds of years both in the Hebrew and in the Greek by the the 1st century.
Their contents were well known, and they were often cited in the many Jewish literary works that had been built on that known content of these texts.
Huge sections of The Torah were often committed to memory,

There would have been little acceptance of such well known texts being significantly altered. The differences that have been found in ancient Torah texts when recovered, are are usually confined to little more than a missing letter or a slightly different spelled word here or there, not the elimination or addition of entire verses that change the entire sense of a passage.

As Exodus 12:42 and Deuteronomy 4:2 also exist within the LXX, I have little reason to doubt that these two verses are as authentic as any Torah verse can be.

spin

Can you not put a sentence together without loading it with unnecessary aggravation?

As I have made it plain the pentacontad reckoning of the therapeutae from our one source on them goes back to Palestinian notions also found in the Temple Scroll. This means your comments about the 1st century are of no value.

Setting aside the off mark stuff about the 1st c., you assume that all Judaism reacted the way you do.

:deadhorse:

You are still trying to assert the way you think Jews had to behave, when there is sufficient evidence from the DSS to show that your opinions don't represent the world of the time.

Sheshbazzar

Gee I'll have too repeat it, 'Philo's' description of the Theraputae of Alexandria is hinky, what he describes in glowing prose is the discription of a sick and insane cult.

It is so hinky its stupid. And looking at his ignorance of conjoined-twins, I seriously doubt that this text was composed by the real Philo.
The real Philo was well educated and experienced and certainly wouldn't have been that ignorant. (Which is a compliment to Philo)

Sheshbazzar

No I do not assume any such thing. I realize there were many splinter groups with their own sectarian axes to grind, but that hardly entails that the Torah and LXX TEXT of the Torah varied all over the place.
Jewish groups may have disagreed over the interpretation of various verses and Laws, but the TEXT of the Hebrew TORAH and of the LXX translation of it had long been established. These weren't the kind of texts that could be shoved around and altered on a whim.

mountainman

That's not quite the case. Some of them take the time to document their reservations and "presuppose without discussion Philonic authorship of the treatise".

That's called an hypothesis.




See post #900.

It's Greek term meaning those who serve the [presumably Greek] gods.





Whoever wrote "VC" applied the term "therapeutae" to this group.

It was a pre-existing and prestigious pagan term related to what is now perceived to be the pagan church. The author of "VC" borrowed it.



Eusebius also found the "TF".



Or that Josephus described Jesus F. Christ.




Of course.


I have cited at post #900 a mass of literary evidence for pagan therapeutae.

This mass of literary evidence is corroborated by the archaeological evidence.

The world's best educated biblical historians have been running a circus tent for the last 100 years in which they exhibit one item of literary evidence "Vita De Contemplativa" to establish a Utopian sect of Jewish therapeutae. This single item of literary evidence remains uncorroborated by the archaeological evidence.

Don't you see the paradox?

Sheshbazzar

There are none so blind, as those who will not see.

Philo describes an 'idealized' (read that as totally F'd up) religious cult.

"Vita De Contemplativa" has to be unquestionable, the unchallengeable sacred text, its every word inscribed in letters of gold.

Forget anything The Torah might say, it doesn't count. "Vita De Contemplativa" is now their God's infallible word. And Philo is his messenger!

mountainman

Heal

Below are the results of the LexiConc search using your criteria.

There are 6 LexiConc entries that match ................ "heal."

Toto

Also used by Philo to refer to Jewish worshipers.

In other words, you've got nothing.


Philo used it for his purposes, giving it the normal Greek meaning, which did not require that the worshiper be pagan or gentile.


I still don't see that you have answered the question of why Philo's therapeutae should be confused with the therapeutae of other gods.

I don't know what sort of evidence you would expect to find of a sect that lived in modest houses, not large temples.

I don't see an absolute insistence by modern scholars (most of whom are not Biblical scholars) on the existence of this sect.

I don't see the point of continuing this.