Again, even with 10,000 people out there for half a century we would have seen some evidence. There would have been pottery. Something. The absent of evidence does mean something. It means, no evidence for that claim. Especially when you are referring to 10-20k people over 40 years. Additionally, there is no record in any Egyptian worrying anywhere about all of their first born dying. In the story, Egyptians also felt there were so many Hebrew slaves they were a dangerous number.
Again, no evidence of giant men and giant fruits either. No evidence of any of the plagues all happening. It’s clearly extremely hyperbolic.
It may help to look at some books by scholars on these subjects. I don’t see a need to regurgitate what I have already said. As far as the Torah is concerned, I’ve read it beginning to end, using different translations over 50 times in just the last decade and the overwhelming majority of commenters and works I read are on the Torah as well. It’s by far my favorite part of the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew Bible is my favorite part out of the entire Bible and Bible is my favorite book out of the handful of late Bronze Age and early Iron Age ANE books I’ve read.
Also Royboy. I feel that it’s a waste of my time
To continually have interactions with you. So like I’ve done to several others, I’m going to block you, and never read anything you write for the next few years or until I am no longer part of these forums. Feel free to get the last word or respond to anything I write in the future, just know I won’t be reading it.
As you note, the radical reformation / Anabaptist tradition is quite a wide category, with much variation in theology. Some branches within the Mennonite tradition, while emphasizing a community hermeneutic, have had a very narrow definition of that community, each following their own leader, whereas others are more united. Of course, all human groups have some tendency to split off into very narrowly-defined groups. The problematic aspect, in the context of the thread, is the insistence on a personal reading of Scripture being authoritative against all others.
Can I ask what you mean by “being authoritative”? Surely you don’t mean that after reading scripture, a person is not allowed to form an opinion about what it says which may contradict someone else’s opinion? (and by default, everyone is going to think their own opinion is the correct one or they wouldn’t hold it)… I don’t think having, and defending, personal opinions about scripture is the problem. Do you? I think using violence and coercion to shut down conversations around those opinions (and demeaning the worth of Christians who hold alternate opinions) is the real problem.
And I’m still not sure why you are single out the broad group of “radical reformers” for a personal reading of scripture here. The more well-known reformer groups such as the magisterial protestants Luther, Calvin, Zwingli etc. also relied on their own “personal” readings of scripture to agitate for change in the church and to attract their own supporters to their own individual interpretations, eventually forming their own strictly-defined denominations (which they defended with violence, unlike the Mennonites by the way).
Ultimately every reading of scripture is a “personal” one… The problem, as I see it, is not reading the text for oneself, but attitude and posture with which one defends one’s views in conversations with others.
Yes - the difference is between the importance of reading the bible for oneself and reading the bible by oneself. Do we consider the wisdom of others, especially those who have more knowledge about particular aspects or whose different perspective makes them likely to see blind spots that we miss?
Most of the violence in support of particular theological positions has come from the merger of theology and politics.
Yes, I agree…maintaining an attitude of humility when listening to other theological opinions is key. And the intrusion of politics certainly doesn’t help matters.
There were certainly a few radical reformers who used violence after getting involved in the revolutionary politics of the day (and others who did not), but just to note that I don’t see the “radical” wing of the reformation as being unique in such failings. @heymike3 just posted this on another thread, for example…
The big difference is that Chronicles of Narnia isn’t scripture, at least in their minds. They allow for Christians to express theology through myth, but not the Biblical authors.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, I do think this has something to do with modern apologetics, at least in the US. With the advent of the internet there are a whole host of different apologetics arguments and arguments against atheism that are swirling around Christian congregations. In this milieu you have stuff like the Kalam cosmological argument, the Moral argument, the most recent top 10 questions atheists can’t answer, and a whole slew of trite arguments that fits into a 30 second TikTok video. When I grew up in the church some 30 years ago, I don’t remember any of this being present.
In this arena of words, anti-theists make the accusation that the Bible is a myth. I think many Christians feel they are backed into a corner and feel they can’t admit that part of the Bible is myth, and that myths are perfectly fine for communicating theology. I have run into the same thing when I have been accused of having faith as an atheist. I fully agree with them. I do have faith in many things. I also have subjective beliefs, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. In some way, I think Christians would have a better foundation if they owned the truth of myth in scripture and show why it is perfectly fine.
Lack of evidence does not mean something is not true. Pottery is found in abandoned settlements, but they were in flight. Not likely to find something in a wind swept desert not knowing where to look.
Giants were 8-10 feet tall. In recent history the tallest person was Robert Wadlow who was 8’-11". Goliath was 9’-9". Hyperbole can be used when telling a story and when it is understood that way it doesn’t make the story false. One example is the description of the Hebrews being like grasshoppers in the sight of the Nephilim.
Not likely. I just read an article that mentioned that archaeologists have studied the matter of what traces nomads leave and concluded that unless they paused and made fortified camps we just wouldn’t find anything.
That would never have been recorded – or if one pharaoh did, the next would have had all traces eliminated; the Egyptians were very good at wiping out all traces of things they didn’t want remembered.
I saw an article that addressed this. It noted that at the likely (older) date of the Exodus there were likely 100k to 120k Semites living in eastern lower Egypt, while using just simple math not more than a tenth of those would have been actual Hebrews. The author claimed that the Egyptians would have viewed them as all one people with 20k - 25k men capable of fighting, which would have outnumbered Pharaoh’s standing army (estimated at 600 - 800 chariots, 8k - 10k foot soldiers, ~2k archers) and thus a potential concern. The argument was that the Exodus writer could easily have transferred that concern to just his own people. A different opinion was that the issue wasn’t that the Semites might take over (which actually happened more than once) but that their numbers meant that they were effectively a foreign entity that the Egyptians would not be able to overpower if those foreigners decided to disobey Pharaoh. A third view was a touch humorous: Egypt had found it necessary to chase out Semites and Canaanites from the delta area before when they got too powerful, and that with the Hebrews it was a case of “Not again; let’s send them away before they’re an actual threat”.
All three noted that we can’t be sure if the Exodus writer conflated multiple events – there is strong evidence for a Levite exodus and at least one other (possibly due to the Semites tending to be shepherds, while Egyptians considered shepherds an “abomination” [yes, the same term as is used in Leviticus for several things] and didn’t want too many of them around. All three also agreed that the total number of Hebrews was probably not greater than 10k, most likely around 6k.
Actually there is, though the heights match the Septuagint’s lower figure that works out to about 6’5" – an astounding number considering that typically 5’ was normal (though upper class folk were closer to 5’ 6").
Where are you getting “giant fruits”? I passed over that last time you mentioned it; what are you reading – Jewish mythology?
Actually there’s evidence that matches two or three, though they’re things that re-occurred depending on the condition of the Nile.
Yeah, even if the Nile turned red and was undrinkable (archaeologists have identified a few times that happened) the bit about the water in pitchers and jars also turning to “blood” is religious one-upmanship – but we have to remember that that sort of thing was acceptable in ancient near eastern religion as a way of saying “My god beats your god!”
I agree with the MT text which says 6 cubits and a span. A cubit is not an exact measurement and would be shorter in length for the average person being just 5’ tall. So Goliath may have been shorter than 9 feet.
This is pretty much all ad hoc apologetics though.
When I was a literalist as a teenager, I came up with the Egypt not recording angle, the nomadic lack of evidence angle. Most of this is because I started with the conclusion and then developed a mere possibility, not considering likelihood beyond this.
The earlier link to ancient-hebrew.com, stresses the incredulity of taking eleph to mean 1000 (in that it makes the text nonsensical), dances between septuagint and masoretic texts when convenient. Then referes to Strong’s entries (504 - which is about oxen… 441 - which is chiefs but again this is just a possibility).
Dismissing concerns of contradictions of Kenneth Kitchen by other scholars as (“new ideas” get trashed all the time*) is also a tired cliche. He has a a priori commitment to historicity while also doing great scholarly work in addition to apologetics.
I agree its teaching sacred myth and has historical elements and follows our theological history with God. It does not concern itself with science nor should be read as cleanly as modern evangelicals want.
I read something like 20k pages of scholars on these subjects back in grad school; the trend since then has been towards more acceptance of a real flood, an actual tower at ‘Babel’, and a real Exodus.
Doesn’t bother me – I write for the sake of people who could be misled, not so much for the people whose posts I respond to.
Luther may have gotten started due to his personal interpretation, but then he had been trained by the church to teach the scriptures, which is unavoidably a matter of interpretation. But once things got rolling it was no longer a one-man effort but a collegial one with a core group of five or six people. Luther refused to agree that Christians should interpret scripture on their own.
This is evidenced by the repeated phrase in the Lutheran Confessions, “We believe, teach, and confess…”
Also Luther didn’t form a denomination; the Wittenburg Reformers considered themselves the correct Catholic Church of the West, adding “Evangelical” to the front to make clear that the Gospel was the primary teaching of the church. Many Lutherans today still reject that label and still refer to themselves as Evangelical Catholics. Lutheran only grudgingly tolerate the label “denomination”; they organized a church polity independent of Rome only because Rome rejected reform and excommunicated them all.
Interestingly, there are Lutherans who to this day maintain that they should have organized as the German Catholic Church, following the pattern of independent churches with their own heads as the East had.
Last, I can’t recall that Lutherans ever “defended with violence” their ‘denomination’, though they did defend with violence against Roman Catholic efforts to impose their doctrines by violence. Though Luther maintained that killing heretics was acceptable by good Christian princes, Lutherans never burned anyone at the stake, something that could be found in Switzerland and England.
I get so tired of those lists. I come across a new one every few months and my reaction is always a line from a C S Lewis novel, “What do they teach in those schools, anyway?!” except that almost always there’s at least one question that deserves my response of “Come on, use the brain God gave you!”
I’ve met some who get really bent out of shape when they learned that though I am confident that there really was a “Noah’s Flood”, I consider the account as written to be mythologized history – they can’t grasp those two words going together, even.
First most Christians would have to sit down and learn what myth is in the literary sense. Though militant atheists online are just as ignorant generally.
I’ve always regarded the idea that God couldn’t communicate using myth to be quite silly given that for the most part humans are heavily guided by myth (though few recognize it). My view of God says He will communicate in whatever ways people will listen to because He is determined to get as many of us as possible “back to the Garden”.
Those figures rely on what is actually an unlikely reading in the Masoretic text. Other Hebrew texts, notably in the Dead Sea scrolls, agree with the Septuagint that Goliath was 6’ 6" or 6’ 9".
I didn’t “come up” with either of those, I learned about the “Egypt not recording” thing from grad courses in ancient Egyptian history and the “nomadic lack of evidence” from more recent papers.
Huh? I didn’t dismiss anything, I noted that there is controversy and that this shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve gone back and forth on the eleph matter as I’ve read articles I hadn’t come across before; in fact I spent half an hour this morning trying to find an article I recall as having noted that this was a word shared by both Egyptian and Ugaritic . . . but I can’t recall which way their use tilted things.
Sure… Luther eventually had others in his group but some reformers in the “radical” stream also drafted statements of faith that used language like "we believe, we affirm… etc. and emphasized a group-effort in reading and interpreting scripture so I don’t see this process as being much different across the various reforming groups. And whether Luther called his new “correct Catholic Church” a “denomination” seems to be just semantics? I’m not sure what your point is there…he did distinguish his interpretation and practice from that of the Roman Catholic group.
And perhaps Luther himself didn’t kill a “heretic” but by ordering killing of heretics by the “good Christian princes” in the German lands those princes would have been Lutherans, no? In any case it again seems to be semantics…Luther ordered violence to kill rivals to his own interpretation and version of “Christendom”.
But on a much happier note!!..this article describes recent reconciliation between Lutherans and Anabaptist for historical wrongs.
As far as I understand, the persecution of Mennonites in the Lutheran lands was a typical guilt by association case. They were theologically close to the other Anabaptists (Thomas Müntzer, the leaders of the Münster rebellion, and the like) who endorsed and organized violent uprisings - therefore, they also seemed politically suspicious. Of course, it was a huge mistake (although not a crime according to the laws of the epoch) - and it’s very good that nowadays we have a reconciliation and a theological dialogue between the Mennonites and the Lutherans.
It seems to me that this approach is widespread among all kinds of Protestants - and it arose not so much from the humanist background as from accepting the sola Scriptura doctrine without contextualizing it properly. People tend to believe that the Bible must be entirely clear by itself, that there shouldn’t be any extra-biblical guidance on reading and comprehending it.
Hence they are predisposed to reject the obvious idea that no biblical text was written in a cultural vacuum but was related to a broad cultural context and can’t be understood apart from the latter. The implicit logic of this obstinate rejection is as follows: the cultural contexts of the Hellenistic era and especially of the ancient Middle East are only partially accessible today. Therefore, no biblical exegesis can escape a degree of uncertainty - and they can’t bear this conclusion. That’s why, in the end, they prefer to read the Bible as a self-sufficient and self-referential text. Having substracted any other cultural context but their own, they tend to understand any biblical passage (unless it is unambiguously written otherwise) as a plain instruction (or description) addressed to them directly.
Assuming that my arms are typical (which is probably giving an overestimate, as my torso is pretty long), I get that 6 cubits and a span (assuming someone about 5’ tall is the basis) would give about 8’ 6", which I would still be suspicious of as too high, given that basically no one over 8’ has been able to walk well without leg braces. A burly 6’ 6" or 6’ 9" man would still be pretty scary for someone who is say, 5’ 3" (typical for men of the time). Whilst I have not actually tried fighting someone with a sword, the ineffectiveness of my younger cousin (who was about 4’ 10" and sturdy) trying to wrestle me (6’5" then, more like 6’6" now and also sturdily built) gives me a sense of what a fight like that might have been like. The description of Saul’s height relative to the general population suggests to me that he might have been about 5’11" or 6’ 1".
And for an immediate sense of what those sizes are like–here are presenters at a conference last month: We are, respectively, 5’2", 5’10", and 6’6". I don’t think that either of them would particularly want to try fighting me, if any reason to do so would arise.
