Robert Tulip wrote:This claim that higher criticism is divorced from archaeology is so divorced from all truth and scholarship as to be deeply unethical, illustrating why conventional religion is such an object of scorn and disdain. For Flann to make such a claim is a perfect illustration of how evangelicalists have no concern for evidence, and why atheists find the silverback idea more plausible. The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein shows that there is extremely high probability that the Exodus story is pure fiction. There is no archaeological evidence for early dating for the Pentateuch.

Prof of Egyptology Kenneth Kitchen would not agree with you here, Robert. In the article I linked he also took issue with Finkelstein's view on the united monarchy era stating that it was not the accepted view among archaeologists generally either.

I don't claim to be an expert here but there are clearly two conflicting views among archaeologists on biblical archaeology dubbed minimalism and maximalism. The more accessible later periods tend to corroborate the biblical accounts and we're obviously not dealing with myth but history. No real reason to suppose that because earlier periods are not so easily determined the pattern of results should be different.

I've referenced articles on the Pentateuch showing how the internal evidence points to a people in Egypt and not the much later dating the higher critics of the Wellhausen school propose, on zero evidence.

http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/20 ... alism.aspx

Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Paul Griffiths looks at the sons of Noah and their sons in the context of historical, geographical and linguistic evidences.


You mean how Genesis is plagiarized from the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Griffith's in his talk looked at the sons of Noah and their sons, tying these with real people,places and tribes with historical references from ancient historians secular and religious.

There is nothing like this in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is a typically pagan work with feuding gods and suchlike stuff. In the flood part, one god sends the deluge because there are so many people they are making too much noise and are keeping the gods awake!
It also says; " Even the gods were terrified at the flood,they fled to the highest heaven,the firmament of Ann,they crouched against the walls cowering like curs."
In the Gilgamesh epic the building of the ark took just seven days and the flood lasted just seven days. The point is there are similarities but the Genesis account is far more sober and reasonable.
The biblical view of God could hardly be more different than the world of pagan deities.
http://biblehub.com/nasb/isaiah/40.htm

The question is whether Genesis copied Gilgamesh or whether there was a common source in the known past history of a global deluge.

Nozomi Osania for her thesis did a study comparing these accounts and looking for the answer to this question. This link is to her conclusions but there are seven chapters linked there for anyone who wants to look in more detail.

Geo complained about assuming the biblical account is correct. In chapter 7 she references scholarly works supporting the biblical view of original monotheism.
http://www.creation.com/conclusion-of-n ... -v-genesis

Flann, thanks for drawing attention to Professor Kitchen. I had not heard of him. I looked at some commentary on his work, and it seems clear that he starts from a point of view of defending Biblical orthodoxy, and therefore stands at one extreme of the academic spectrum within archaeology. I do not accept that defending Biblical orthodoxy presents a sound academic method, since that will strongly skew assessments on a political basis.

The defenders of Professor Kitchen include young earth creationists, whom I consider totally unethical in their approach to facts, even though they may be warm and caring within their communities. Kitchen is an outlier regarding the order of writing of the Old Testament, rejecting the broad academic consensus which sees the Pentateuch as late fiction.

Robert Tulip wrote:Flann, thanks for drawing attention to Professor Kitchen. I had not heard of him. I looked at some commentary on his work, and it seems clear that he starts from a point of view of defending Biblical orthodoxy, and therefore stands at one extreme of the academic spectrum within archaeology. I do not accept that defending Biblical orthodoxy presents a sound academic method, since that will strongly skew assessments on a political basis.

The defenders of Professor Kitchen include young earth creationists, whom I consider totally unethical in their approach to facts, even though they may be warm and caring within their communities. Kitchen is an outlier regarding the order of writing of the Old Testament, rejecting the broad academic consensus which sees the Pentateuch as late fiction.

We are obviously not going to agree here Robert. Kitchen is appealing to archaeological evidence such as for king David which the minimalists denied but were proved wrong by the evidence.

You really don't take my point about the bad foundations of these documentary source type theories on the Pentateuch. It doesn't matter if the higher critical school assert these things. What matters is the internal and external evidence.
You don't accept the virtually unanimous scholarly view on the historicity of Christ, but you are appealing to current majority views on the Pentateuch.

The reality is that the higher critical scholars are imposing their naturalistic philosophical assumptions on these texts. That is for example that from their philosophical perspective, there could not really be such a thing as divinely inspired historically fulfilled prophecies.
They are kidding themselves about their 'objectivity'.

I exampled Isaiah but there are many other books they do similar violence to because of their allergy to divine prophecy such as Daniel.
Anyone who truly was unbiased could easily see that there was an historic Isaiah and that the internal an external evidence supports the entirety of the book being by this prophet.

We can't have real divinely inspired prophecy fulfilled in history though, therefore..........

http://www.academia.edu/7928184/The_Uni ... _of_Isaiah.

I'll leave it at that Robert, since we are never going to agree on these things.

Flann 5 wrote:higher critical scholars are imposing their naturalistic philosophical assumptions on these texts.

Yes, true. Critical scholarship generally assumes that the universe obeys consistent intrinsic physical laws. I think that is a more reasonable assumption than the evangelical belief in an external personal intentional wise loving almighty being who provides the order of the cosmos through deliberate choice. Assuming such attributes of divinity is a fraught endeavour, since religious scholarship tends to produce incoherent results compared to the modern secular assumption that the laws and methods of science are our best guide to truth.

Flann 5 wrote:]That is for example that from their philosophical perspective, there could not really be such a thing as divinely inspired historically fulfilled prophecies.

That is more complex. My personal belief is that ancient astronomy was entirely sufficient to predict the incarnation of Jesus Christ based on precession of the equinox, but the nature of this prophecy is quite different from the traditional supernatural story, since Jesus was imaginary not real.

Flann 5 wrote: The reality is that the higher critical scholars are imposing their naturalistic philosophical assumptions on these texts. That is for example that from their philosophical perspective, there could not really be such a thing as divinely inspired historically fulfilled prophecies.
They are kidding themselves about their 'objectivity'.

When the field of biblical archeology began, the intent was to prove that events of the Bible truly occurred, as William Dever says in this recent interview (link below). Your “higher critical scholars” are merely trying to incorporate modern archaeological methodologies into this once sacred terrain. It may seem natural to you to assume supernatural origins, but this is not how real scholars work. In no other field—scientific, archaeologic, historic, geologic, etc.—would you make any assumptions at all. You follow the lines of evidence and then form conclusions. Can you imagine a modern scholar studying legends of King Arthur assuming that the magic and monsters in the old stories were literally real? And, yet, according to Christian apologists, whether they are posing as Bible scholars or not, anything to do with the Bible is supposed to be hands off to modern archaeological methods and assumptions.

Before we started this conversation, I had no idea that fundamentalists were ideologically entrenched in the idea of monotheism before polytheism, which is contrary to archaeological evidence for many cultures,including the early Israelites, who clearly worshipped many gods. Why else does the Bible admonish the worship of other gods? Indeed, the evolving nature of religion seems to challenge religious dogma, and so we see this attempt to cast all evidence that runs contrary to dogma aside as "liberal" or biased or whatever.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/ar ... bible.html

Mono- predating polytheism was a surprise to me, too, but then I reflected that the Fall is central to this type of theology. Since Adam and Eve were monotheists, it follows that drifting away from worship of the one God had to be a result of their disobedience, as was every other current ill of humankind.

geo wrote:When the field of biblical archeology began, the intent was to prove that events of the Bible truly occurred, as William Dever says in this recent interview (link below). Your “higher critical scholars” are merely trying to incorporate modern archaeological methodologies into this once sacred terrain. It may seem natural to you to assume supernatural origins, but this is not how real scholars work. In no other field—scientific, archaeologic, historic, geologic, etc.—would you make any assumptions at all. You follow the lines of evidence and then form conclusions. Can you imagine a modern scholar studying legends of King Arthur assuming that the magic and monsters in the old stories were literally real? And, yet, according to Christian apologists, whether they are posing as Bible scholars or not, anything to do with the Bible is supposed to be hands off to modern archaeological methods and assumptions.

I'm not using assumptions Geo, on the case for original monotheism but rather the findings of ethnologists. http://www.custance.org/Library/Volume4 ... pter1.html Bad link here. Google, "Primitive Monotheism A Cunstance."

It was the higher critics who assumed an evolutionary model from animism to monotheism in ancient cultures.

Dever is not on the extreme end of archaeological biblical minimalism but he is still interpreting the data.He has to explain the obviously very different findings for the Israelites from the native Canaanites and proposes a theory of tribal rebellion. However the clear distinctions in diet (no pork) fit with the laws in Leviticus which the higher critics would say were not written down til centuries later.
How does he explain the origin of such different dietary factors among the Israelites in Canaan? The practice of pagan polytheism by Israelites admonished by the prophets, does not presuppose it's originality but is the very thing Moses warns against and the prophets decry as a departure from their covenant of allegiance to the one true God.

He acknowledges the consistently corroborating archaeological support for the later history but in the nature of things earlier evidences will be harder to find.
What amounts to arguments from silence must recognize that nothing like a complete excavation of either Israel or Egypt have occurred but are ongoing.
Many such arguments were made in the past as in the case of the Hittites but evidence for these people was subsequently found and vindicated the biblical account.

As Kitchen and many others argue the cultural background to the patriarchs is consistent with that period and not with the centuries later period the higher critics place it in.
Dever in fact acknowledges Egyptian connections in the Pentateuch yet is unwilling to draw the logical conclusion that it's evidence for their time in Egypt.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/apconte ... ticle=2753

Dever makes much of his finding of asherah as proof of early practice of paganism and Yahweh being thought to have a pagan goddess wife. No one claims that pagan religion was not a snare many of the Israelites fell into but this too is a matter of interpreting the evidence.

It's not automatically proof of the original religion of Israel but rather of departure from it.

http://www.michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabb ... he-masses/

This article includes a link to another by Heiser looking at the biblical data on monotheism and other gods. In short, pagan gods are said to exist but they are defined as demons or the fallen angels. Yahweh is the one true God to which they can not be compared in power,eternal self existence etc.

The higher critical approach is un-scholarly and in any other field would be viewed as dishonest treatment of these texts. At one time there were more than a dozen alleged authors of various parts of the book of Isaiah based on their subjective bases for determining sources in style,theme etc.

These have been whittled down to three by the current consensus among liberal scholars. Nevertheless they still have a big problem. So called Proto- Isaiah in chapters 13 and 14 prophesies the downfall of Babylon and mentions the Medes in connection with this.

So what do they do? They posit these chapters to be a later insertion by some unknown scribe into Proto-Isaiah. Thus whenever they are confronted with internal textual evidence of fulfilled predictive prophecy they just assert without evidence that some such later activity must have occurred.

But this is no way to do serious scholarship and just highlights their obvious bias against the supernatural. They can't gainsay the messianic passages of the messiah's suffering and atoning death of course, though they could always join the mythicist denial of Christ's historicity. But in fact they can't do this, so let's have their explanation for these prophecies.

For a satirical parody of the higher critics methods, google" New directions in Pooh studies, Academia eu." This applies their absurd methods and thinking to the Winnie the Pooh 'corpus'. I can't give the direct link as it includes a germanic U with two dots over it which I can't manage. It's amusing and telling though.

I will have to look closely at Cunstance's book. For now, I have to say that his negative value judgments on "primitive" or polytheistic religions don't bode well for me. One would think that morality was impossible before monotheism--or, as Cunstance would have it, after sinning humans abandoned the monotheism they were born into. Taking the Fall as a literal, historical event seems to produce this kind of thinking.

How embarrassing this thesis is..
even more embarrassing that an atheist can be so obsessed with God and Religion.
The psychopathy is apparent.

DWill wrote:I will have to look closely at Cunstance's book. For now, I have to say that his negative value judgments on "primitive" or polytheistic religions don't bode well for me. One would think that morality was impossible before monotheism--or, as Cunstance would have it, after sinning humans abandoned the monotheism they were born into. Taking the Fall as a literal, historical event seems to produce this kind of thinking.

He maintains that the earliest most primitive cultures are more enlightened than later ones so it's not a negative judgement from that point of view,Dwill.
Dr Winfried Corduan's book is more up to date but the findings are the same. How does the naturalist explain bad human behaviour?
Tribalism? Isn't that over simplistic accounting for only certain behaviours. Our inner chimp or fish perhaps?

I take issue with the so called higher critical scholars of the bible as a clear pattern emerges in relation to prophecy.

I've looked at quite a few of these issues in my debates with mythicists. Actually an impartial examination of the external and internal evidence for dating Luke and Acts supports a pre-destruction of the temple date, but the prophecy is clearly what prevents them accepting this.

It's the same with the book of Daniel. They resort to all sorts of implausible ad hoc 'explanations' such as it being some other Daniel when the evidence points to a genuine future prophecy by Daniel.

These recurring cop out 'explanations' give the game away.
http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/relig ... /1131.aspx