Not credited by me marvin. That’s wiki.
And my question is what it is: can you only have a Jesus if you have a Joseph 1900 years before? And a Moses 430 years after that?
Hammer: the Bible is as literal as possible when it comes to personalities, at least; its historiography is inerrant, supernaturally recorded and preserved to timeless standards, Joseph is therefore an historical person, he dreamt the famine; where is he and that in history? Ah ha! Look! He’s even in the Antarctic ice. Nail.
Still do not understand why he “dreamt the famine” as the famine was real. Did someone see the famine coming and fathom the consequences of it, thus initiated the building of grain stores?
Clearly the famine is not legend, as in a made up story, but reality. It should allow is to adjust historic timelines a bit like the bomb as it clearly changed the world at the time and is a good lesson about the impact of climate change, only that the next transition might not be as “peaceful”
If you look for what the bible describes as a poetic description of reality to make it accessible to the illiterate does not mean that you are a biblical fundamentalist, and to imply that of other is not helpful apart from brushing up ones ego.
Too many nails: ‘…investigations have shown that a seven-year famine was a motif common to nearly all cultures of the Near East: a Mesopotamian legend also speaks of a seven-year-famine and in the well known Gilgamesh-Epos [late second millennium BC, set over a thousand years before] the god Anu gives a prophecy about a famine for seven years. Another Egyptian tale about a long-lasting drought appears in the so-called “Book of the Temple”, translated by German Demotist Joachim Friedrich Quack. The ancient text reports about king Neferkasokar (late 2nd dynasty [2740 BCE, the time of Imhotep. Not Joseph or even Abraham.]), who faces a seven-year-famine during his reign.’.
Clearly famine is normal. Climate change is normal on a larger scale. Myths and legends about them abound.
Only a projecting egotist could be threatened by this.
I wonder about Joseph’s true legacy. We tend to look at him as a hero but given his role in enslaving Egypt I wonder if that plus the failure of his brothers and him to return to Canaan led to 400 years of slavery for Israel, as foretold by God.
Genesis 47
14 Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and Canaan in payment for the grain they were buying, and he brought it to Pharaoh’s palace…
… “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land… The land became Pharaoh’s, 21 and Joseph reduced the people to servitude,[c] from one end of Egypt to the other.
On the other hand, God can use our failures and sin to demonstrate his sovereignty, mercy, grace and love.
There could well be historic truth behind the story of Joseph and the discourse was relevant to the question on why one would want to reject the truth claim of a story opposed to the necessity of the truth claim of the story.
to feel threatened by Joseph to be or not to be goes either way. you seem to be in the to be camp.
I found it intriguing that the sea level rise submerging the Australian reefs was still in the oral hi-story telling of the aborigines.
So to help @Altair along with the interpretation of Joseph, to a materialist the importance of the story lies in the ancestory value, to a philosopher it lies in the philosophical content of the story. So it depends how one defines oneself.
Regarding the influence of a person across time boundaries you only need to read a book of someone long dead and see what happens to see how you can interact across time boundaries.
If there could well be historical truth behind the Joseph story, how could that possibly threaten me?
Of course it would have to be the kind of truth that doesn’t break the historical surface, leave any kind of a wake, so what kind of historical truth could that be? As for Abraham, Jacob (Isaac doesn’t really count does he?) and Moses. The truth would be many orders of magnitude less than the fantastical claims. None of which could possibly be historically true. p=0
so what makes you so certain that there is no historical truth in the stories of Abraham, Jacob and Moses
Once the fantastical is removed from the oral thousand year tradition, concretized, gelled by 500 BCE, including literally absurd, poetic lifespans, what’s left? A possible c2000 BCE Sumerian migration to Canaan with forays in to Egypt going hand in hand with the evolution to monotheism by 1500 BCE. I’m happy to give tradition credence in the names that survived. But none of the self-serving fantasy which has nothing to do with God in Christ.
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