You understand my entire world view and are able to critique it by our interactions here? And you judge it all wrong.
Adam, the pride of your statement is beyond all.
The very earliest yes, and then not.
And there was a great deal of variety among those earliest lists that is not covered in the article.
14 centuries after Jesus Trent does not count as “closer to the source.”
Why?
That wasn’t the point.
And obviously the canon HAS been rewritten numerous times to align with various beliefs.
For you
Of all your cross-referencing
Um. Ok. You sure?
Including ALL the books included from Trent? I see.
And all those other Christians over time and place who used different canons weren’t? I see.
Thank you for clarifying. The kingdom gets smaller and smaller all the time.
How can I be angry with a man in the Antipodes on a computer who has no authority over me carrying himself as an OT prophet, condemning the majority of all Christians trusting in Jesus for their salvation, because they don’t/didn’t use the right Bible books the way he thinks they should?
Demand whatever you want. You have no authority.
Your tantrum is my fault? Hardly.
For you.
The Authority.
YOU know because YOU
On your authority
I am brutally honest with myself. And with what I read.
No single book or author or school of thought is going to answer all questions or provide the “right” lens.
Jesus only used the Tanakh. And further and further from the unhistorical accounts, we have ever more archaeology. And ever deeper linguistics. I’m sure AI will unearth much more of both and their interconnectedness from what we already have.
The actual answer was very definitely ‘no’, not least because of geology evidence that the Earth was older than a few thousand years that was available before Darwin was even born.
This isn’t the first time this has been pointed out to you.
Right back at you.
You want me to provide a reference for the existence of the Apocrypha???
How have you managed to spend so long in apologetics without learning about deuterocanonical works?
Since the Council of Trent decreed that Tobit, Baruch etc are canonical books of the Bible, while you think they aren’t, you just declared yourself to not be Christian.
I did not reveal annything specific about Don Quixote other than he tilted at windmills. His mental state is the whole point of the story and not something to be dismissed or even summarised.
I sugggest you stop your little superiority game now.You are way out of line.
Nothing in the Tanakh or the Septuagint is the anachronism or other miracle needed to verify Jesus other than a man of his culture. Which leaves the New Testament to do so. Which it does not.
So why does anyone need myths to validate a myth? Jesus stands alone. Nothing that even stands against him in the OT can stop that. If the NT contains a culturally impossible anachronism at the time of writing, a fossil rabbit in the Cambrian, he stands regardless. As God incarnate. It still wouldn’t solve the problem of how much of what he fully humanly believed was relevant. His moral compass was divine. All would be well.
Kind of like reading a long letter from 1917 from a British lad: unless you read it in his context of sitting in a trench somewhere in France, with a no-man’s land that looked like Hell and a dead companion next to him because the survivors of the last attack left too few alive to deal with corpses, along with the attitudes and customs of an early twentieth century middle-class young Brit, you won’t get what he is really talking about.
How that is not self-evident about literature baffles me.
Applying the above to this, we see that it is saying that Christ’s Coming will be a total surprise even though people were warned.
There has never been a theology “regarding the age of the earth” – that is not a theological matter.
Things are only theological if they somehow bear on Christ and Who He is. The age of the earth could be a trillion years or ten years, and it would have no theological meaning . . . except that if it was a trillion it would indicate the greatness of its Maker, while if it was ten it would show the maker to be a liar.
But it wasn’t – this has been pointed out to you repeatedly, but apparently hasn’t sunk in. There was never a consensus about the earth’s age and still wasn’t even after Archbishop Ussher published his silly timeline.
BTW, there were biblical scholars who argued theologically that the earth was infinitely old. I’ll let you think about that, just noting that it was actual theology rather than arithmetic games.
You need to get Darwin out of your brain and recognize that there have always been Bible scholars who understood the genealogies as allegory, as only the significant generations, and other views – which happen to be based on the Bible and not an outside philosophy such as YEC.
I’m trying to get to the basics. There’s no point in quoting the Bible when you don’t know how to read it! And if you don’t grasp the basics of how literature works – and it’s plain that you don’t – then quoting the Bible is like throwing Belgian waffles to pigs: they’ll eat them, but not appreciate their worth.
Good. Now take the next step and admit that ancient literature is exactly that – ancient literature. And the ancients had types of literature we don’t have, and the fact that they seem to look like a type we have does not make it that type.
This is why I say YEC forces a modern worldview onto the scriptures: they aren’t asking what Moses actually wrote, they’re deciding ahead of time what he had to have written, and reading it as though he did. If you told Moses that the first Creation account was historical narrative, he’d laugh and say, “Wot now mate?! It’s bloody temple inauguration! It’s royal chronicle! Are ye daft, to not see what I did?”
We can’t – all that we can prove is that the name is a real one and that it was used among the Hebrews after the Exodus.
Except it isn’t. This is like saying that because we know that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote some history (he did), then the accounts of Frodo and Gandalf are things that really happened, or that because Tom Clancy wrote some history (he did) then all of his books are things that really happened.
That’s going beyond the data. All the data shows is that someone was attacking those areas, and they seem to have been Hapiru, but that doesn’t make them Israelites.
You should take an archaeology course. Something that is taught in the basics is to never claim more than your evidence actually shows.
There are some interesting correlations, yes. So what?
Those are late-comers. By the time of the 382 council, the canon’s contents had already been decided. And just BTW, I doubt you accept the positions of those councils on the canon!
Huh? You just cited it as a “key moment” in the formation of the canon!
False. There are at least three other major versions of the canon.
The interesting thing is that while we parrot their decisions, we have lost their understanding of what a canon was. In the ancient understanding, some books within a canon could (and did) stand higher than others, and some books outside the canon could nevertheless have some degree of authority. We moderns have gone binary on a matter that was what we would call ‘fuzzy’.
Adam, I’ve corresponded with Wallace, not just read his stuff.
Yes, there is – it was something that surprised many scholars when the letters were first uncovered, since many denied any reality to the Exodus at all, yet the letters talk about the “Hapiru” conquering territory in Canaan.
“Devastation”? You’re right. But fading of power, loss of control of swaths of territory, and lost influence? Yes.
It is strong inferential evidence, yes – denying that is silly. Is it proof? No, but as has been said, if it wasn’t the Israelites we would have to invent someone just like them to explain what happened.
There is no evidence for Eber: not a trace in archaeology, not a trace in relevant literature (i.e. close enough to be considered historically relevant).
To those who know what they’re reading, Abu al-Fida’s account is related folklore, an account taken from folklore and passed on.
Granted, it’s a fun story, but as historical evidence it tells us no more than that someone passed on stories about Eber.
But don’t go claiming more for the evidence than it actually provides! Yes, the Tel-el Amarna letters show that things happened that fit with the Hebrew accounts, but they don’t provide enough to provide certainty.
BTW, there is a hypothesis that Semites/Hapiru already living in Canaan joined Israel in its conquests, thus turning what would have been an annoying nomadic problem into actual conquest. It’s one of the explanations for the probable actual size of the Exodus contrasted with how Israel managed to take the land they did: distant cousins were allowed to claim the Abrahamic heritage.
Good way to put it.
Which fits the above-related thesis.
LOL No one made such historical records back then, so there’s that.
The biblical narrative shows signs of editing along with the typical hyperbolic claims of numbers found in other ANE records. It’s closer to being history than Genesis 1-11, but is still mytho-history, real events case in mythic style/framework to teach something, in this case serving as a foundational myth – which doesn’t say anything about how much of it really happened other than the core proposition that a departure from Egypt by a group that became Israel happened. Its signs of editing point to a later version of mytho-history where a larger amount of content is events that actually happened, which is exactly what one might expect from a document written to tell a people who they really were.
Those who arguably did have authority to condemn other Christians didn’t do so except on one topic: Christology. If you had the person of Christ right, they didn’t much care about other things.
Given Adam’s thesis that we should lean to what is closer to the source, we should follow that example: since they never judged someone based on what they held to be canon, neither should we (and therein lies one aspect of the ancient view of canon).
I see what he’s saying, but it’s meaningless unless you know what kind of literature you’re reading. Translation is just the beginning of hermeneutics.
And what do we do with those who think that both sides of that issue are wrong, that Tobit, Baruch, etc. are deuterocanon, canon but of a second rank? That’s how the early church tended to treat the matter, so Adam should hold that position, yes?
I read that about one-fifth of the Quran is essentially plagiarized from heretical writings and another fifth is (corrupted) Christian (orthodox and heretical) poetry/hymnology. That’s some pretty heavy repeating!
Exactly so. The Bible doesn’t tell us how YHWH-ELohim’s commands got carried out once there was existing material. Evolution can’t contradict the Bible because their overlap turns out to be the empty set.
Amen!
A gal at a seminar at Oregon State University used that position to argue that God could “not” have made us as robots.
From the early church, there were various views on the age of the earth. Some held that the earth was eternal, so that the Creator always had a creation. Others thought that creation was quite ancient, but of finite age. Some thought that the earth was created about 5000 or 4000 BC. Yet others though that the days of Genesis 1 were about 4000 or 5000 BC, but who knows how long the “formless and void” was before that. The claim that the church uniformly held to 4000 BC ish creation before secular scientists proved them wrong is an “Enlightenment” lie, intended to make Christians looks stupid. Besides the fact that various views on the date of creation were common, the early geologists who discovered evidence for long geologic time were mostly Christians.
Claims that geological evidence points to a young earth are a modern invention, after geological study had proved otherwise. In the 1500’s, a few thousand years seemed so vast a time that many doubted that fossils could be as old as the flood. Many workers tried to synthesize all available historical information to produce an overall history of the earth in the 1500’s and 1600’s. Ussher’s work was one of the most respected efforts there, and he di a reasonable job with the data that he had. But in the 1660’s, Steno published on recognizing the sequence of geological layers. Much of that was probably common knowledge among miners, well-diggers, etc. but not formally written down and considered academically. This led to the general recognition that, just as finding an old coin or other artifact provided historical information that might not be preserved in written records, geological data could build our understanding of earth history, expanding on the work of Ussher, Isaac Newton, and others who had assembled historical data. By the late 1600’s, it was clear that there were a lot of geological layers, recognizable widely across Europe. Many began to suspect that the earth was rather old, but it was not until the 1770’s that the geological evidence for an ancient earth proved overwhelming. By the latest 1700’s, there was an incident where the Roman Catholic authorities suppressed young-earth claims because they weren’t good. Darwin wasn’t born until 1809. Anyone in touch with academic science would have been aware that the earth was old well before he was born. But this was not seen as opposing the Bible; it was seen as indicating that the Bible had passed over theologically irrelevant pre-human time. In fact, as geologic data increased, it became clear that the idea, popular with the “Enlightenment” deistic to atheist crowd, of an eternal earth going through repeated cycles, complete with humans, was incorrect. The actual age of the earth was finite, with directional change, matching the biblical teaching of a beginning, so Christians used old-earth geology to argue against atheism. The first book published to have pictorial representations of various times through geological history concludes with a scene of Eden.
And from Ussher’s methods, he would have taken that into account. He only used the Old Testament because it was the only source available tht purported to relate events from that far back.
Which anyone up-to-date now in ancient Hebrew in its context would know from the text itself – not specifically regarding “pre-human time”, but that the Bible skips irrelevant material.
Primarily, the Bible was never “advertised” as a “factual” or “historical” book. Until somebody decided to press the issue thousands of years after it was written and compiled.
It is also not “univocal”; the text was written over thousands of years by an unknown number of writers. None of them, writing things down with the eventual purpose of them being collected into an unabridged text.
Lastly, a certain percentage (unknown but more than zero) claiming that the Bible is “literal”, do not in their written statements and spoken word refer to things that are “literally” present in any known biblical translation. Or perhaps even more grievous, proponents of a “literal” Bible move text within a particular book of the Bible so that it does agree with their statements, both spoken and written.
I agree with much of what has been said in these latest comments. Ultimately, while scripture was written for us (or at least God’s people at any given moment), it was not written TO us. In as such, an honest and truly “literal” translation takes into account the POV of the original audience. This does not cheapen our faith nor our claims of truth, but rather enriches and deepens our theology. Christ cannot be understood without the law and the prophets, lest we stray into heresy. And the law and the prophets cannot be understood fully without ANE lens.
Any communication by God is by its very nature an accommodation to us as humans in our understandings. We could not understand him or His working as He literally is, it would be incomprehensible. The ultimate accommodation was Jesus himself - God now has a face we can recognize.
