The BASIS of your so-called Religion, the Cult of Jesus, was actually purloined from the Egyptian Cult of Osiris, by the Roman, anti-semite, Agent Sabatour Paulis, mentioned in Josephus Wars of the Jews several times. The so-called christer religion was "Invented" as a method of mollifying and comforting the millions of Roman Slaves, especially after the bloody slave revolts. Here is examples of Historical documents that establish the pre-existance of a PAGAN religion upon which the Romans builded the Cult of christern worship:
Such was the great god-man Osiris: human like us, and thus able to take upon
himself all our sorrows, but also divine, and therefore able to confer divinity upon
us. He brought the divine bread from heaven for mankind; he taught justice and
practiced mercy; he died, was buried, and rose from the grave; he gave to all who
became members of his mystical body his flesh to eat and his blood to drink so
that this divine sacrament might then transfigure them into celestial gods; he went
before to prepare mansions for his initiates in Elysium; and he was to be the just
and merciful judge before whom men and women must appear beyond the grave."
The foregoing statement dates back to the Fourth Egyptian Dynasty, about 2700
B. C. It appears in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, edited by E. A. Budge.
On my recent visit to Pompeii in southern Italy, the incredible excavations reveal
that the predominant religion in the year 70 A. D., based on the plethora of Egyptian
temples, was the religion of Osiris and Isis. When Paul of Tarsus proclaimed
Jesus of Nazareth as the promised messiah to the only other monotheisistic
religion, Judaism, and was rebuffed , Paul offered this
message to the pagan slaves, most of whom worshipped in the Egyptian temples. It was
natural, therefore, for this heathen doctrine, which became known as the Eucharist, to be
incorporated into the new heretical anti-semite cult that became Roman Catholic Christianity.
CANNIBALISM TODAY
We are conditioned to believe that all the taboos are historical things. They are things of the past that our "good" civilization has made nonexistent. This is the conditioned reality, the told/taught stuff used to perpetuate the culture at hand. When the artistic/creative mind finds the true reality so different he begins to chop away at the taboos.
Here are some 1998 examples:
"CLARI-ITEM STORY LONDON, Jan 27 (AFP)- Eating people may be morally wrong and repugnant but it is not, strictly speaking, illegal, the British government disclosed Tuesday. Home Office Minister Alun Michael said in a House of Commons written reply that the government had no intention of making cannibalism a specific criminal offence."
"SUNDAY TIMES LONDON, Apr 12- Starving North Koreans are being driven to cannibalism....One unidentified 23-year-old from the Chinese border village of Buk Cheng told the charity of seeing a family eat their own daughter. "It is true. I saw it with my own eyes," she said. An 18-year-old said: "Our cousin killed, salted and ate an orphan whom no one cared about."
I, and other artist, see that all is not well in our industrial culture. I, and others, use this last taboo in our art to awaken others to this fact.
Of course, in the Christian new-testament so-called 'Bible' the Jesus taught "Unless you DRINK MY BLOOD, and EAT MY FLESH, you have no part in me." Most ministers and pastors gloss over this unseemly statement as a 'esoteric, spiritual' doctrine, but HISTORY, from ROMAN HISTORIANS in the centuries subsequent to Constanople (430 CE) railed against the 'christians' as a 'degenerate, amoral sect of bloodthirsty cannibals and repulsive sodomites." THIS was the ACTUAL,TRUE reason for the PERSECUTION of 'christians' NOW redacted into MARTYRS for the FAITH! The FAITH of the FATHERS was SODOMITE CANNIBALISTIC "AGAPE' SEXUAL VAMPIRE-FEASTS! Shall we PREY, brothers?
If our perceptions are what keep us in the Matrix, how do we go about changing them? How do we go about waking up? How do we unplug ourselves and become Free?
The first thing that we think about in considering this problem is that knowing the Truth of our reality as it really IS might be the logical first step. And, of course, we all think that we know the truth of our reality.
"You shall KNOW the TRUTH, and the truth shall set you FREE!" This seemingly simple statement is loaded with all sorts of explosive questions and ideas which have often led to, historically speaking, mayhem, murder and mass destruction. The problem seems to lie with differing definitions of what is or is not to be known, how to know it, and why.
The word "Know," is derived from the Latin root "gnoscere," which is "to know, have a clear perception or understanding of, be sure of or well informed about."
But "truth" is more difficult. It is actually derived from the same root as "tree," and the problems immediately become apparent with this word. The first definition is "that which accords with reality or fact." But, it can also mean a "particular belief or teaching regarded by the speaker as the true one!" (And some trees are sturdier than others!)
The problem with the first definition is related to our definitions of reality. And what is a fact? It seems that facts about our world change from one generation to the next. Many years ago it was a fact that it took weeks to cross the Atlantic by the fastest means, now it only takes hours. So it could be said that facts define our reality. But facts are NOT reality nor are they absolute. It seems that facts are based on knowledge, and knowledge seems to be predicated on what kinds of questions are being asked and how open the seeker is to receive answers.
Yet we come back to the statement: "You shall KNOW the TRUTH and the truth shall set you free." Those who think that "truth" is what is "believed" or "taught" by their particular religion or philosophy fail to note that the vast number of differing, and often opposing, beliefs would indicate that somebody is in error, if not all, and WHO shall arbitrate which?
At this point I would like to discuss the Matrix Control System in more specific terms. That is, can we discover tracks showing us where and how it was instituted, and by what means it has been imposed on us? I think we can, and I believe those tracks will be as evident to the reader as they were to me.
When I began to study the issues that concerned me: religious questions, philosophical problems, and so on, I really had no idea that I would uncover something so horrific and far reaching as what I came to realize about religions in general and monotheism in particular.
And please don't misunderstand me or think that I am promoting paganism or any other form of worship of "gods" or images of god. I am quite convinced that the source of all existence is consciousness, and that this consciousness is, at its root, what we would call God, or Divine Mind. What I am concerned about is the imposition of monotheism in the form of any one group claiming that their version of who or what god is or is not is the only correct one. And the further result of this is that Judeo-Christian monotheism prevailed with its conception of linear time. But, rather than arguing my point before I present my evidence, let us just get on with it and let the truth take care of itself.
People have been reading the Bible for two thousand years. It has achieved a status in our culture assigned to no other single body of text. There are more copies of the Bible on the face of the planet than any other single book. It is quoted
(and misquoted) more often than any other book. It is translated into more languages than any other book ever written as well. More people in recorded history have read it, studied it, taught it, admired it, argued about it, loved it, lived by it, and died for it. It is the singular document at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, and yet the common man doesn't really seem to ever ask: Who wrote it, really? They think they know: it is divinely dictated, revealed or inspired
In spite of what the average person believes about it, many investigators – mostly theologians - have been working on this question for about a thousand years – when they aren't being burned at the stake for even asking it. And, as noted, most of them have only been seeking closer communion with God by trying to get closer to the original text "from the Hand of God," so to say.
The results of these efforts, for the past two-hundred years, have led to quite different conclusions in a face-off between objective knowledge and tradition.
When one studies literature in a classroom setting, it is important to also study the life of the author, even if only through the clues of the literary works under examination. One is enabled to see significant connections between the life of the author and the world that the author is depicting. In terms of the Bible, these things become crucial. Nevertheless, the fact is, when we are talking about such "fuzzy" things as religion and history, we immediately come up against a certain problem.
As the reader might know,[1] I spent a lot of years as a hypnotherapist as part of my search for answers in the "realm of mind." That work gave me a unique perspective on just about every other branch of study I have followed since. The main thing I learned from this is that most, if not ALL, human perspective is rooted in emotional thinking. Emotions have a curious tendency to "frame" and "color" what we see and experience and remember so that what we think becomes, very often, a matter of "wishful thinking."
In doing good "science," a researcher must be aware of this tendency to be fooled by his own mind - his own wishes. And, a good scientist, because he is aware of this, must scrutinize things he wishes to accept as fact in a more or less "unemotional" state, as far as is possible. Things must be challenged, taken apart, compared, tested for their ability to explain other things of a like nature, and if a flaw is found, no matter how small, if it is firmly established as a flaw, the hypothesis must be killed.
The problem with the subject of the Bible and History is that there are so many fields that can contribute data - archaeology, paleontology, geology, linguistics, and so forth - these types of things provide DATA. On the other side we have mythology and history. They are, unfortunately, quite similar because, as it is well known, the "victors write history." And people are prone to do many evil deeds in difficult situations which they later wish to cover up and present themselves in a more positive light for posterity.
The oldest extant texts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are those found at Qumran which date only to two or three centuries before Christ. The oldest version before those were discovered was a Greek translation from about the same period! The earliest complete Hebrew text dates only from the tenth century AD! Something is wrong with this picture.
It is generally believed from textual analysis, that a very small part of this bible was written about 1000 BC and the remainder about
600 BC. The Bible as we know it, is the result of many changes throughout centuries and is contradictory in so many ways we don't have space to catalog them all! There are entire libraries of books devoted to this subject and I recommend that the reader have a look at the material in order to have some foundation upon which to judge the things I am going to say.
The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, also known as the Torah, were supposed to have been written by Moses. Early Christian and Jewish tradition held this view even though nowhere in these five books does the text say that Moses was the author.
Biblical scholars generally date Abraham to about 1800 - 1700 BC The same scholars date Moses to 1300 or 1250 BC However, if we track the generations as listed in the Bible, we find that there are only seven generations between and including these two patriarchal figures! Four hundred years is a bit long for seven generations. Allowing 35 to 40 years per generation, places Abraham at about
1550 BC and Moses at about 1300 BC. Tracking back to Noah, using the generations listed in the Bible, one arrives at a date of about 2000 to 1900 BC - about the time of the arrival of the Indo-Europeans into the Near East. Again, something is wrong with this picture.
Using the Bible as historical source material presents a number of very serious problems most particularly when we consider the "mythicization" factor. There are many contradictions in the text that cannot be reconciled by standard theological mental contortionism. In some places, events are described as happening in a certain order, and later the Bible will say that those events happened in a different order. In one place, the Bible will say that there are two of something, and in another it will say that there were 14 of the same thing. On one page, the Bible will say that the Moabites did something, and then a few pages later, it will say that the Midianites did exactly the same thing. There is even an instance in which Moses is described as going to the Tabernacle before Moses built the Tabernacle! (I guess Moses was a time traveler!)
There are things in the Pentateuch that pose other problems: it includes things that Moses could not have known if he lived when he is claimed to have lived. And, there is one case in which Moses said something he could not have said: the text gives an account of Moses' death, which it is hardly likely that Moses described. The text also states that Moses was the humblest man on earth! Well, as one commentator noted, it is not likely that the humblest man on earth would point out that he is the humblest man on earth!
All of these problems were taken care of for most of the past two thousand years by the Inquisition. The Jewish commentators took care of the problems for their own religion in novel ways that the Christian church might have done well to adopt,
(and I am not suggesting that it was right, just that it would have saved them a lot of later problems).
For the Jews, the contradictions were not contradictions, they were only "apparent contradictions!" They could all be explained by "interpretation!" (Usually, these interpretations were more fantastic than the problems, I might add.) Moses was able to "know things he couldn't have known" because he was a prophet! The medieval biblical commentators, such as Rashi and Nachmanides, were VERY skillful in reconciling the irreconcilable!
In the 11th century, a real troublemaker, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician in Muslim Spain, mentioned the distressing fact that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named a few kings who lived long after Moses was already dead. Ibn Yashush suggested the obvious, that the list was written by someone who lived after Moses. He became known as "Isaac the Blunderer."
The guy who memorialized clever Isaac this way was a fellow named Abraham ibn Ezra, a 12th century rabbi in Spain. But Ibn Ezra presents us with a paradox because he also wrote about problems in the text of the Torah. He alluded to several passages that appeared not to be from Moses' own hand because they referred to Moses in the third person, used terms Moses would not have known, described places that Moses had never been, and used language that belonged to an altogether different time and place than the milieu of Moses. He wrote, very mysteriously, "And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent."
So, why did he call Ibn Yashush a "Blunderer?" Obviously because the guy had to open his big mouth and give away the secret that the Torah was not what it was cracked up to be and lots of folks who were totally "into" the Jewish mysticism business would lose interest. And keeping the interest of the students and seekers after power was a pretty big business in that day and time. More than that, the entire Christian mythos was predicated upon the validity of Judaism,
(being its "New Covenant"), and even if there was apparent conflict between Jews and Christians, the Christians most desperately needed to validate Judaism and its claim to be the revelation to the "chosen people" of the One True God. It was on that basis that Jesus was the Son of God, after all.
In 14th century Damascus, a scholar by the name of Bonfils wrote a work in which he said "And this is evidence that this verse was written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it.. "He wasn't even denying the "revealed" character of the Torah, just making a reasonable comment. Three hundred years later, his work was reprinted with this comment edited out!
In the fifteenth century, Tostatus, Bishop of Avila also pointed out that the passages about the death of Moses couldn't have been written by Moses. In an effort to soften the blow, he added that there was an "old tradition" that Joshua, Moses successor, wrote this part of the account. A hundred years later, Luther Carlstadt commented that this was difficult to believe because the account of Moses' death is written in the same style as the text that precedes it.
Well, of course, things were beginning to be examined more critically with the arrival of Protestantism on the world stage, and the demand for wider availability of the text itself. The Inquisition and assorted "Catholic Majesties" tried, but failed, to keep a complete grip on the matter. But, it's funny what belief will do. In this case, with the increase in literacy and new and better translations of the text, "critical examination" led to the decision that the problem was solvable by claiming that, yes, Moses wrote the Torah, but editors went over them later and added an occasional word or phrase of their own!
Wow. Glad we solved that one!
The really funny thing is that one of the proponents of this idea of editorial insertions, who was really trying to preserve the textus receptus status of the Bible, was blacklisted by the Catholic Index. His work was put on the list of "prohibited books!" Those guys just kept shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, finally, after hundreds of years of tiptoeing around this issue, some scholars came right out and said that Moses didn't write the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was Thomas Hobbes. He pointed out that the text sometimes states that this or that is so to this day. The problem with this is that a writer describing a contemporary situation would not describe it as something that has endured for a very long time, "to this day."
Isaac de la Peyrere, a French Calvinist, noted that the first verse of the book of Deuteronomy says "These are the words that Moses spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan..." The problem was that the words meant to refer to someone who is on the other side of the Jordan from the writer. This means that the verse amounts to the words of someone who is WEST of the Jordan at the time of writing, who is describing what Moses said to the children of Israel on the EAST of the Jordan. The problem is exacerbated because Moses himself was never supposed to have been in Israel in his life.
De la Peyrere's book was banned and burned. He was arrested and told that the conditions of his release were conversion to Catholicism and recanting his views. Apparently he perceived discretion as the better part of valor. Considering how often this sort of thing occurred, we have to wonder about the "sanctity" of a text, which is preserved by threat and torture and bloodshed.
Not too long after this, Baruch Spinoza, the famous philosopher, published what amounted to a real rabble rousing critical analysis. He claimed that the problem passages in the Bible were not isolated cases that could be solved one by one as "editorial insertions," but were rather a pervasive evidence of a third person account. He also pointed out that the text says in Deuteronomy 34 that "There never arose another prophet in Israel like Moses...." Spinoza suggested, quite rightly, that these were the words of a person who lived a long time after Moses and had had the opportunity to make comparisons. One commentator points out that they also don't sound like the words of the "humblest man on earth!"[2]
Spinoza was really living dangerously because he wrote: "It is […] clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses."[3] Spinoza had already been excommunicated from Judaism; now, he was in pretty hot water with the Catholics and Protestants! Naturally, his book was placed on the "prohibited books" list, and a whole slew of edicts were issued against it. What is even more interesting is that an attempt was made to assassinate him!
A converted Protestant who had become a Catholic priest, Richard Simon, undertook to refute Spinoza and wrote a book saying that the core of the Pentateuch was written by Moses, but there were "some additions." Nevertheless, these additions were clearly done by scribes who were under the guidance of God or the Holy Spirit, so it was okay for them to collect, arrange and elaborate on the text. It was still God in charge here.
Well, you'd think the church would know when it was ahead. But, nope! Simon was attacked and expelled from his order by his fellow Catholics. Forty refutations of his work were written by Protestants. Only six copies of his book survived burning. One of these was translated by a guy named John Hampden who also got into some hot water. He "repudiated the opinions he had held in common with Simon [...] in
1688, probably shortly before his release from the tower."[4]
In the 18th century, three independent scholars were dealing with the problem of "doublets," or stories that are told two or more times in the Bible. There are two different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and Abraham. There are two stories of the naming of Abraham's son Isaac, two stories of Abraham's claiming to a foreign king that his wife is his sister, two stories of Isaac's son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God's changing Jacob's name to Israel, two stories of Moses' getting water from a rock at Meribah, and on and on.
Those who simply could not let go of the a priori belief that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were always complimentary, not repetitive nor contradictory. Sometimes they had to really stretch this idea to say that they were supposed to "teach" us something by their contradictions that are "not really contradictions."
This explanation, however, didn't hold up against another fact: in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh, and the other would refer to the deity simply as "God," or "El." What this meant was that there were two groups of parallel versions of the same stories and each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used. Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics that regularly appeared in one or the other line of stories and what this demonstrated was that someone had taken two different old source documents and had done the original cut and paste job on them to make a "continuous" narrative.
Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source documents must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story of creation and the rest was Moses himself writing! But, it was ultimately to be concluded that both of the two sources had to be from writers who lived AFTER Moses. By degrees, Moses was being eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch!
Simon's idea that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on the textus receptus was, finally, going in the right direction.
I would like to note right here that this was not happening because somebody came along and said "hey, let's trash the Bible!" Nope. It was happening because there were glaring problems and each and every researcher working on this throughout the centuries was struggling mightily to retain the textus receptus status of the Bible! The only exception to this that I have mentioned in this whole chain of events is our curious guy Abraham ibn Ezra, who KNEW about problems in the text of the Torah in the 12th century and enjoined others to silence! Remember what he said? "And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent." And what do we see as the result of this silence? Over eight hundred years of Crusades, the Inquisition, and general suppression, and in our present day, the wars between the Israelis and Palestinians based on the claim that Israel is the Promised Land, and that it "belongs" to the Jews. Which brings us to another most amazing event.
The great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, (1040-1105), makes the astonishingly frank statement that the Genesis narrative, going back to the creation of the world, was written to justify what we might now call genocide. The God of Israel, who gave his people the Promised Land, had to be unequivocally supreme so that neither the dispossessed Canaanites nor anyone else could ever appeal against his decrees.[5] Rashi's precise words were that God told us the creation story and included it in the Torah "to tell his people that they can answer those who claim that the Jews stole the land from its original inhabitants. The reply should be; God made it and gave it to them but then took it and gave it to us. As he made it and it's his, he can give it to whoever he chooses ".
This leads us to another interesting point: the establishing of "one god" over and above any and all other gods, is an act of violence no matter how you look at it. In The Curse of Cain, Dr. Regina Schwartz writes about the relationship between Monotheism and Violence, positing that Monotheism itself is the root of violence:
Collective Identity, which is a result of a covenant of Monotheism is explicitly narrated in the Bible as an invention, a radical break with Nature. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the demand that the people he constitutes obey the law he institutes, and first and foremost among those laws is, of course, that they pledge allegiance to him, and him alone, and that this is what makes them a unified people as opposed to the 'other,' as in all other people which leads to violence. In the Old Testament, vast numbers of 'other' people are obliterated, while in the New Testament, vast numbers are colonized and converted for the sake of such covenants.[6]
Dr. Schwartz also writes about the idea of the 'provisional' nature of a covenant: that it is conditional. "Believe in me and obey me or else I will destroy you." Doesn't sound like there is any choice, does there? And we find ourselves in the face of a pure and simple Nazi Theophany. Not only that, but we are beginning to close in on the source of the idea of linear time.
Back to our chain of events: in the nineteenth century, Biblical scholars figured out that there were not just two major sources in the Pentateuch; there were, in fact, four. It was realized that the first four books were not just doublets, but there were also triplets that converged with other characteristics and contradictions leading to the identification of another source. Then, it was realized that Deuteronomy was a separate source altogether. More than that, there was not just the problem of the original source documents, there was the problem of the work of the "mysterious editor."
Thus, after years of suffering, bloodshed and even death over the matter, it was realized that somebody had "created" the Bible by assembling four different source documents in an attempt to create a "continuous" history. After much further analysis, it was concluded that most of the laws and much of the narrative of the Pentateuch were not even part of the time of Moses. And, that meant that it couldn't have been written by Moses at all. More than that, the writing of the different sources were not even that of persons who lived during the days of the kings and prophets, but were evidentially products of writers who lived toward the end of the biblical period!
Many scholars just couldn't bear the results of their own work. A German scholar who had identified the Deuteronomy source exclaimed that such a view "suspended the beginnings of Hebrew history not upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings." Other scholars realized that what this meant was that the picture of biblical Israel as a nation governed by laws based on the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants was completely false. I expect that such a realization may have contributed to a suicide or two; it most definitely led to a number of individuals leaving the field altogether.
Anyway, another way of putting their conclusions was that the Bible claimed a history for the first 600 years of Israel that probably never existed. It was all a lie.[7]
Well, they couldn't handle this. After years of being conditioned to believe in an upcoming "End of the World," with Jehovah or Christ as saviors of the chosen during this dreaded event, the terror of their condition, that there might not be a "savior," was just too awful to bear. So along came the cavalry - Wellhausen
(1844-1918) - to the rescue.
Wellhausen synthesized all of the discoveries so as to preserve the belief systems of the religious scholars. He amalgamated the view that the religion of Israel had developed in three stages with the view that the documents were also written in three stages, and then he defined these stages based on the content of the "stage." He tracked the characteristics of each stage, examining the way in which the different documents expressed religion, the clergy, the sacrifices and places of worship as well as the religious holidays. He considered the legal and narrative sections and the other books of the Bible. In the end, he provided a "believable framework" for the development of Jewish history and religion. The first stage was the "nature/fertility" period; the second was "spiritual/ethical" period; and the last was the "priestly/legal" period.
As Friedman notes: "To this day, if you want to disagree, you disagree with Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you compare its merits with those of Wellhausen's model."
I should also note at this point, that even though Wellhausen was trying to save the buns of Christianity from the fire, he was not appreciated in his own time. A professor of Old Testament, William Robertson Smith, who taught at the Free Church of Scotland College at Aberdeen, and who was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was put on trial before the church on the charge of heresy for promoting the work of Wellhausen. He was cleared, but the tag "the wicked bishop" followed him to his grave. Indeed! Shot themselves in the foot again!
Opposition to critical study of the Bible has been spearheaded, throughout the centuries, by the Catholic Church. But, curiously, in the modern day, the Catholics are more open to examination of the text than the new American Christian Fundamentalists who resemble, more than anything, Holy Crusaders and Inquisitors!
Nevertheless, analysis of the Bible has proceeded. The book of Isaiah was traditionally thought to have been written by the prophet Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BC As it happens, most of the first half of this book fits such a model. But, chapters 40 through
66 are apparently written by someone who lived about 200 years later! This means that, in terms of "prophecy," it was written after the fact.
New tools and methods of our modern time have made it possible to do some really fine work in the areas of linguistic analysis and relative chronology of material. Additionally, there has been a veritable archaeological frenzy since Wellhausen! This archaeological work has produced an enormous amount of information about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other regions surrounding Israel, which includes clay tablets, inscriptions on the walls of tombs, temples and habitations, and even papyri. And here we find another problem: in all the collected sources, both Egyptian and west Asian, there are virtually NO references to Israel, its "famous people" and founders, its Biblical associates, or anything else prior to the 12th century BC. And the fact is, for 400 years after that, no more than half a dozen allusions can be deduced. And they are questionable in context. Yet the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews cling to these tattered references like straws in the hands of a drowning man. Oddly, the Fundamentalist Christians just simply close off any awareness to the entire matter by the simple expedient of the execution of the 11th commandment: thou shalt not ask questions!
The problem of the lack of outside validation of the existence of Israel as a sovereign nation in the area of Palestine finds correspondence in the Bible itself. The Bible displays absolutely no knowledge of Egypt or the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC The Bible says nothing about the Egyptian empire spreading over the entire eastern Mediterranean, (which it did); there is no mention of the great Egyptian armies on the march (which they were); and no mention of marching Hittites moving against the Egyptians (which they did); and especially no mention of Egyptianized kinglets ruling Canaanite cities (which was the case).
The great and disastrous invasion of the Sea Peoples during the second millennium is not even mentioned in the Bible. In fact, Genesis described the Philistines as already settled in the land of Canaan at the time of Abraham!
The names of the great Egyptian kings are completely absent from the Bible. In other places, historical figures who were not heroic have been transformed by the Bible into heroes as in the case of the Hyksos Sheshy (Num. 13:22). In another case, the sobriquet of Ramesses II is given to a Canaanite general in error. The Egyptian king who was supposed to assist Hosea in his rebellion of 2 Kings
17:4 has "suffered the indignity" of having his city given as his name. The Pharaoh Shabtaka turns up in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:7 as a Nubian tribe!
The errors of confirmed history and archaeology pile higher and higher the more one learns about the actual times and places, so that the idea that comes to mind again and again is that the writers of the Bible must have lived in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, or later, and knew almost nothing about the events of only a few generations before them. Donald B. Redford, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, has published extensively on archaeology and Egyptology. Regarding the use of the Bible as a historical source, he writes:
Although the Biblical historian is forced to admit that he has no means of checking the historical veracity of the Biblical texts, [he will claim] `nevertheless materials relevant for the historian can be gathered from the narratives…(and) the work appears to be rich in materials of high value to the historian."[8]
If we are still inclined to doubt, we are reassured by such statements as `there seems no reason to question (the) general reliability and the substantial accuracy of (the account's) chronological sequence,'[9] or `there seems to be no good reason to doubt the existence of a historical kernel.'[10] The case is argued no further, and one is left to wonder what clues the writer has which the reader lacks.
Bewilderment increases when one reads `our sources are the products of later working and editing, so that the original elements, more often than not, cannot be isolated with any exactitude.'[11] Yet the writer obviously feels he has isolated them, and can stamp one passage `a rather realistic report of what actually happened,' another episode `legendary,' yet other details `non-controversial matters of fact,' and still others `impossible to consider … a historical record.'[12]
One feels impelled to cry out: what criteria of evaluation are you using? What unpublished evidence do you possess? Sadly, in most cases of this kind, there is no answer to either question.
For the standard scholarly approach to the history of Israel during the United Monarchy amounts to nothing more than a bad attack of academic `wishful thinking.' We have these glorious narratives in the books of Samuel and 1st Kings, so well written and ostensibly factual. What a pity if rigorous historical criticism forces us to discard them and not use them. Let us, then, press them into service – what else have we? – and let the burden of proof fall on others.[13][…]
While one might be unwise to impute cryptofundamentalist motives, the current fashion of treating the sources at face value as documents written up in large part in the court of Solomon, arises from an equally misplaced desire to rehabilitate the faith and undergird it with any arguments, however fallacious.[…]
Such ignorance is puzzling if one has felt inclined to be impressed by the traditional claims of inerrancy made by conservative Christianity on behalf of the Bible. And indeed the Pentateuch and the historical books boldly present a precise chronology that would carry the Biblical narrative through the very period when the ignorance and discrepancy prove most embarrassing.
A totaling of the lengths of reign of the kings of Judah from Solomon's fourth year
(when allegedly the temple in Jerusalem was dedicated) to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC yields 430 years which should take us to the year 1016 BC for the reign of Solomon.
Again, according to 1 Kings 6:1, 480 years is supposed to have elapsed between the Exodus and the dedication of the temple, thus producing a date of 1496 BC for the [Exodus.]
Since the Sojourn in Egypt is stated to have lasted for 430 years
(Exod. 12:40), the descent of Jacob and his family to the land of Goshen must have taken place in 1926 BC
If now we add the lengths of life of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (290), we arrive at
2216 BC for the birth of Abraham. This would mean that Abraham's arrival in Canaan would have to fall in 2141 BC, and his descent to Egypt between that date and 2116 BC, or under the 10th Dynasty of Herakleopolis. Jacob's descent would have occurred in Senwosret I's reign, and the entire Sojourn would have occupied the outgoing 12th dynasty, the entire 13th Dynasty, the Hyksos occupation, and the early Dynasty to Hatshepsut's ninth year!
In the light of Numbers 32:13, which assigns 40 years to the Wandering, the conquest of the land under Joshua must have begun in
1456 BC, or on the morrow of Thutmose III's victorious campaigns when all Canaan belonged to Egypt, and on the eve of Amenophis II's deportation of the local population. Even more astounding are the implications of the resultant placement of the Period of the Judges, namely 1456 to 1080 BC This is almost exactly coeval with the Egyptian Empire in Asia! Yet our Egyptian sources mention neither the patriarchs, Israel in Egypt, Joshua, nor his successors, while the Bible says absolutely nothing about the Egyptian empire in the land.
In fact, the Biblical writers are wholly and blissfully unaware of the colossal discrepancy to which their "history" and "chronology" have given rise.
The strength, however, of a confessional commitment to bolster a prejudgment will not allow most conservative Jewish or Christian exegetes to discard the whole chronological arrangement, and recent work has proven Muslim scholars similarly in thrall. (Referring to A. Osman).
[Such True Believers think that ] the basic pattern of Patriarchal Age, Descent and Sojourn, Exodus and Conquest, and Judges MUST be essentially correct - Is it not inherently reasonable? Do you have a better one? - and consequently numerous ingenious solutions are devised. the most common trick has been to reduce time spans to generations: thus the 480 figure must really represent twelve generations: but 40 years per generation is too long, 20 being much closer to the average. Hence we can cut the figure in half and put the Exodus around 1255 BC instead of
1486, and lo! it falls squarely in the reign of Ramesses II, and thus allusion to "Ra'amses" in Exodus 1:11 can be nicely accommodated!
Similarly the 430 years of the Sojourn must simply be a curious equivalent of roughly four generations - does not Genesis 15:16 virtually prove it? - and so the Descent will come to rest about the middle of the fourteenth century BC, or at the close of the Amarna age.
Although the Gargantuan ages of the patriarchs are not extraneous to the Genesis material as we now have it, but actually inform it, nevertheless these too are swept away or transmogrified into normal generation estimates; and thus the "Patriarchal age" can occupy the fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries and accommodate the alleged "Nuzi" parallels.
And if one is still impressed by the "appropriateness" of having Joseph rise to power under the Hyksos who, as his Semitic congeners, would have taken kindly to him (although the Joseph story clearly distinguishes Joseph from Pharaoh and his court as Egyptians), then what matter if we NOW drop our objections to the 430 years and take them literally? Joseph would then come to Egypt around 1680, just as the Hyksos were taking power!
Such manhandling of the evidence smacks of prestidigitation and numerology; yet it has produced the shaky foundations on which a lamentable number of "histories" of Israel have been written. Most are characterized by a somewhat naive acceptance of sources at face value coupled with failure to assess the evidence as to its origin and reliability. The result was the reduction of all data to a common level, any or all being grist for a wide variety of mills.
Scholars expended substantial effort on questions that they had failed to prove were valid questions at all. Under what dynasty did Joseph rise to power? Who was the Pharaoh of the Oppression? Of the Exodus? Can we identify the princess who drew Moses out of the river? Where did the Israelites make their exit from Egypt: via the Wady Tumilat or by a more northerly point?
One can appreciate the pointlessness of these questions if one poses similar questions of the Arthurian stories, without first submitting the text to a critical evaluation. Who were the consuls of Rome when Arthur drew the sword from the stone? Where was Merlin born?
Can one seriously envisage a classical historian pondering whether it was Iarbas or Aeneas that was responsible for Dido's suicide, where exactly did Remus leap over the wall, what really happened to Romulus in the thunderstorm, and so forth?
In all these imagined cases none of the material initially prompting the questions has in any way undergone a prior evaluation as to how historical it is! And any scholar who exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions.[…]
Of much more significant reference are such questions as: Under what conditions and to what purpose did the ancestor traditions of Israel take shape? Where and when did the Exodus theme originate? Of what nature and how reliable is our evidence for the pre-monarchical history of the component elements of the Iron Age "Israel?"
And in all our efforts to formulate the right questions, we should be wise to reject the application of the adjective "Biblical" to "history" and "archaeology." […]
Too often "Biblical" in this context has had the limiting effect on scholarship by implying the validity of studying Hebrew culture and history in isolation. What is needed rather is a view of ancient Israel within its true Near Eastern context, and one that will neither exaggerate nor denigrate Israel's actual place within that setting.[14]
Please take careful not of Professor Redford's comment: "any scholar who exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions." The seriousness of this cannot be understated. You see, people have died by the millions because of this book and the beliefs of those who study it. And they are dying today in astonishing numbers for the same reasons!
In the end, if those who read and/or analyze this book and come to some particular belief about it are wrong, and they then impose this belief upon millions of other people, who are then influenced to create a culture and a reality based upon a false belief, and in the end, it is wrong, what in the name of God is going on? How do I dare to ask this question? I dare because it may be the single most important question in history. In terms of the Bible as history one needs to ask a very simple set of questions: WHO wrote the Bible and WHY?
It is Patently Obvious that the Results of Darkness Mongers, as I outline herewith, are the SLAVEMASTERS of All Humankind.
You, as a purveyour of the deceptfull Cult of christ, are one of THOSE-slavers.
Re: Whom,as it were, the Bible writ, MATRIX SLAVERY
--- In FreighttrainDomain@y..., "elijahradioprophet"
> > If our perceptions are what keep us in the Matrix, how do we go
about
> changing them? How do we go about waking up? How do we unplug
> ourselves and become Free?
>
> The first thing that we think about in considering this problem is
> that knowing the Truth of our reality as it really IS might be the
> logical first step. And, of course, we all think that we know the
> truth of our reality.
>
> "You shall KNOW the TRUTH, and the truth shall set you FREE!" This
> seemingly simple statement is loaded with all sorts of explosive
> questions and ideas which have often led to, historically speaking,
> mayhem, murder and mass destruction. The problem seems to lie with
> differing definitions of what is or is not to be known, how to know
> it, and why.
>
> The word "Know," is derived from the Latin root "gnoscere," which
> is "to know, have a clear perception or understanding of, be sure
of
> or well informed about."
>
> But "truth" is more difficult. It is actually derived from the
same
> root as "tree," and the problems immediately become apparent with
> this word. The first definition is "that which accords with
reality
> or fact." But, it can also mean a "particular belief or teaching
> regarded by the speaker as the true one!" (And some trees are
> sturdier than others!)
>
> The problem with the first definition is related to our definitions
> of reality. And what is a fact? It seems that facts about our
world
> change from one generation to the next. Many years ago it was a
fact
> that it took weeks to cross the Atlantic by the fastest means, now
it
> only takes hours. So it could be said that facts define our
> reality. But facts are NOT reality nor are they absolute. It
seems
> that facts are based on knowledge, and knowledge seems to be
> predicated on what kinds of questions are being asked and how open
> the seeker is to receive answers.
>
> Yet we come back to the statement: "You shall KNOW the TRUTH and
the
> truth shall set you free." Those who think that "truth" is what
> is "believed" or "taught" by their particular religion or
philosophy
> fail to note that the vast number of differing, and often opposing,
> beliefs would indicate that somebody is in error, if not all, and
WHO
> shall arbitrate which?
>
> At this point I would like to discuss the Matrix Control System in
> more specific terms. That is, can we discover tracks showing us
> where and how it was instituted, and by what means it has been
> imposed on us? I think we can, and I believe those tracks will be
as
> evident to the reader as they were to me.
>
> When I began to study the issues that concerned me: religious
> questions, philosophical problems, and so on, I really had no idea
> that I would uncover something so horrific and far reaching as what
I
> came to realize about religions in general and monotheism in
> particular.
>
> And please don't misunderstand me or think that I am promoting
> paganism or any other form of worship of "gods" or images of god.
I
> am quite convinced that the source of all existence is
consciousness,
> and that this consciousness is, at its root, what we would call
God,
> or Divine Mind. What I am concerned about is the imposition of
> monotheism in the form of any one group claiming that their version
> of who or what god is or is not is the only correct one. And the
> further result of this is that Judeo-Christian monotheism prevailed
> with its conception of linear time. But, rather than arguing my
> point before I present my evidence, let us just get on with it and
> let the truth take care of itself.
>
> People have been reading the Bible for two thousand years. It has
> achieved a status in our culture assigned to no other single body
of
> text. There are more copies of the Bible on the face of the planet
> than any other single book. It is quoted (and misquoted) more
often
> than any other book. It is translated into more languages than any
> other book ever written as well. More people in recorded history
> have read it, studied it, taught it, admired it, argued about it,
> loved it, lived by it, and died for it. It is the singular
document
> at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, and yet the common man
> doesn't really seem to ever ask: Who wrote it, really? They think
> they know: it is divinely dictated, revealed or inspired
>
> In spite of what the average person believes about it, many
> investigators – mostly theologians - have been working on this
> question for about a thousand years – when they aren't being burned
> at the stake for even asking it. And, as noted, most of them have
> only been seeking closer communion with God by trying to get closer
> to the original text "from the Hand of God," so to say.
>
> The results of these efforts, for the past two-hundred years, have
> led to quite different conclusions in a face-off between objective
> knowledge and tradition.
>
> When one studies literature in a classroom setting, it is important
> to also study the life of the author, even if only through the
clues
> of the literary works under examination. One is enabled to see
> significant connections between the life of the author and the
world
> that the author is depicting. In terms of the Bible, these things
> become crucial. Nevertheless, the fact is, when we are talking
about
> such "fuzzy" things as religion and history, we immediately come up
> against a certain problem.
>
> As the reader might know,[1] I spent a lot of years as a
> hypnotherapist as part of my search for answers in the "realm of
> mind." That work gave me a unique perspective on just about every
> other branch of study I have followed since. The main thing I
> learned from this is that most, if not ALL, human perspective is
> rooted in emotional thinking. Emotions have a curious tendency
> to "frame" and "color" what we see and experience and remember so
> that what we think becomes, very often, a matter of "wishful
> thinking."
>
> In doing good "science," a researcher must be aware of this
tendency
> to be fooled by his own mind - his own wishes. And, a good
> scientist, because he is aware of this, must scrutinize things he
> wishes to accept as fact in a more or less "unemotional" state, as
> far as is possible. Things must be challenged, taken apart,
> compared, tested for their ability to explain other things of a
like
> nature, and if a flaw is found, no matter how small, if it is
firmly
> established as a flaw, the hypothesis must be killed.
>
> The problem with the subject of the Bible and History is that there
> are so many fields that can contribute data - archaeology,
> paleontology, geology, linguistics, and so forth - these types of
> things provide DATA. On the other side we have mythology and
> history. They are, unfortunately, quite similar because, as it is
> well known, the "victors write history." And people are prone to
do
> many evil deeds in difficult situations which they later wish to
> cover up and present themselves in a more positive light for
> posterity.
>
> The oldest extant texts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are those
> found at Qumran which date only to two or three centuries before
> Christ. The oldest version before those were discovered was a
Greek
> translation from about the same period! The earliest complete
> Hebrew text dates only from the tenth century AD! Something is
> wrong with this picture.
>
> It is generally believed from textual analysis, that a very small
> part of this bible was written about 1000 BC and the remainder
about
> 600 BC. The Bible as we know it, is the result of many changes
> throughout centuries and is contradictory in so many ways we don't
> have space to catalog them all! There are entire libraries of
books
> devoted to this subject and I recommend that the reader have a look
> at the material in order to have some foundation upon which to
judge
> the things I am going to say.
>
> The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, also known as
the
> Torah, were supposed to have been written by Moses. Early
Christian
> and Jewish tradition held this view even though nowhere in these
five
> books does the text say that Moses was the author.
>
> Biblical scholars generally date Abraham to about 1800 - 1700 BC
The
> same scholars date Moses to 1300 or 1250 BC However, if we track
the
> generations as listed in the Bible, we find that there are only
seven
> generations between and including these two patriarchal figures!
> Four hundred years is a bit long for seven generations. Allowing
35
> to 40 years per generation, places Abraham at about 1550 BC and
Moses
> at about 1300 BC. Tracking back to Noah, using the generations
> listed in the Bible, one arrives at a date of about 2000 to 1900
BC -
> about the time of the arrival of the Indo-Europeans into the Near
> East. Again, something is wrong with this picture.
>
> Using the Bible as historical source material presents a number of
> very serious problems most particularly when we consider
> the "mythicization" factor. There are many contradictions in the
> text that cannot be reconciled by standard theological mental
> contortionism. In some places, events are described as happening
in
> a certain order, and later the Bible will say that those events
> happened in a different order. In one place, the Bible will say
that
> there are two of something, and in another it will say that there
> were 14 of the same thing. On one page, the Bible will say that
the
> Moabites did something, and then a few pages later, it will say
that
> the Midianites did exactly the same thing. There is even an
instance
> in which Moses is described as going to the Tabernacle before Moses
> built the Tabernacle! (I guess Moses was a time traveler!)
>
> There are things in the Pentateuch that pose other problems: it
> includes things that Moses could not have known if he lived when he
> is claimed to have lived. And, there is one case in which Moses
said
> something he could not have said: the text gives an account of
Moses'
> death, which it is hardly likely that Moses described. The text
also
> states that Moses was the humblest man on earth! Well, as one
> commentator noted, it is not likely that the humblest man on earth
> would point out that he is the humblest man on earth!
>
> All of these problems were taken care of for most of the past two
> thousand years by the Inquisition. The Jewish commentators took
care
> of the problems for their own religion in novel ways that the
> Christian church might have done well to adopt, (and I am not
> suggesting that it was right, just that it would have saved them a
> lot of later problems).
>
> For the Jews, the contradictions were not contradictions, they were
> only "apparent contradictions!" They could all be explained
> by "interpretation!" (Usually, these interpretations were more
> fantastic than the problems, I might add.) Moses was able to "know
> things he couldn't have known" because he was a prophet! The
> medieval biblical commentators, such as Rashi and Nachmanides, were
> VERY skillful in reconciling the irreconcilable!
>
> In the 11th century, a real troublemaker, Isaac ibn Yashush, a
Jewish
> court physician in Muslim Spain, mentioned the distressing fact
that
> a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named a few
kings
> who lived long after Moses was already dead. Ibn Yashush suggested
> the obvious, that the list was written by someone who lived after
> Moses. He became known as "Isaac the Blunderer."
>
> The guy who memorialized clever Isaac this way was a fellow named
> Abraham ibn Ezra, a 12th century rabbi in Spain. But Ibn Ezra
> presents us with a paradox because he also wrote about problems in
> the text of the Torah. He alluded to several passages that
appeared
> not to be from Moses' own hand because they referred to Moses in
the
> third person, used terms Moses would not have known, described
places
> that Moses had never been, and used language that belonged to an
> altogether different time and place than the milieu of Moses. He
> wrote, very mysteriously, "And if you understand, then you will
> recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent."
>
> So, why did he call Ibn Yashush a "Blunderer?" Obviously because
the
> guy had to open his big mouth and give away the secret that the
Torah
> was not what it was cracked up to be and lots of folks who were
> totally "into" the Jewish mysticism business would lose interest.
> And keeping the interest of the students and seekers after power
was
> a pretty big business in that day and time. More than that, the
> entire Christian mythos was predicated upon the validity of
Judaism,
> (being its "New Covenant"), and even if there was apparent conflict
> between Jews and Christians, the Christians most desperately needed
> to validate Judaism and its claim to be the revelation to
the "chosen
> people" of the One True God. It was on that basis that Jesus was
the
> Son of God, after all.
>
> In 14th century Damascus, a scholar by the name of Bonfils wrote a
> work in which he said "And this is evidence that this verse was
> written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it.. "He
wasn't
> even denying the "revealed" character of the Torah, just making a
> reasonable comment. Three hundred years later, his work was
> reprinted with this comment edited out!
>
> In the fifteenth century, Tostatus, Bishop of Avila also pointed
out
> that the passages about the death of Moses couldn't have been
written
> by Moses. In an effort to soften the blow, he added that there was
> an "old tradition" that Joshua, Moses successor, wrote this part of
> the account. A hundred years later, Luther Carlstadt commented
that
> this was difficult to believe because the account of Moses' death
is
> written in the same style as the text that precedes it.
>
> Well, of course, things were beginning to be examined more
critically
> with the arrival of Protestantism on the world stage, and the
demand
> for wider availability of the text itself. The Inquisition and
> assorted "Catholic Majesties" tried, but failed, to keep a complete
> grip on the matter. But, it's funny what belief will do. In this
> case, with the increase in literacy and new and better translations
> of the text, "critical examination" led to the decision that the
> problem was solvable by claiming that, yes, Moses wrote the Torah,
> but editors went over them later and added an occasional word or
> phrase of their own!
>
> Wow. Glad we solved that one!
>
> The really funny thing is that one of the proponents of this idea
of
> editorial insertions, who was really trying to preserve the textus
> receptus status of the Bible, was blacklisted by the Catholic
Index.
> His work was put on the list of "prohibited books!" Those guys
just
> kept shooting themselves in the foot.
>
> Well, finally, after hundreds of years of tiptoeing around this
> issue, some scholars came right out and said that Moses didn't
write
> the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was Thomas
> Hobbes. He pointed out that the text sometimes states that this or
> that is so to this day. The problem with this is that a writer
> describing a contemporary situation would not describe it as
> something that has endured for a very long time, "to this day."
>
> Isaac de la Peyrere, a French Calvinist, noted that the first verse
> of the book of Deuteronomy says "These are the words that Moses
spoke
> to the children of Israel across the Jordan..." The problem was
that
> the words meant to refer to someone who is on the other side of the
> Jordan from the writer. This means that the verse amounts to the
> words of someone who is WEST of the Jordan at the time of writing,
> who is describing what Moses said to the children of Israel on the
> EAST of the Jordan. The problem is exacerbated because Moses
himself
> was never supposed to have been in Israel in his life.
>
> De la Peyrere's book was banned and burned. He was arrested and
told
> that the conditions of his release were conversion to Catholicism
and
> recanting his views. Apparently he perceived discretion as the
> better part of valor. Considering how often this sort of thing
> occurred, we have to wonder about the "sanctity" of a text, which
is
> preserved by threat and torture and bloodshed.
>
> Not too long after this, Baruch Spinoza, the famous philosopher,
> published what amounted to a real rabble rousing critical
analysis.
> He claimed that the problem passages in the Bible were not isolated
> cases that could be solved one by one as "editorial insertions,"
but
> were rather a pervasive evidence of a third person account. He
also
> pointed out that the text says in Deuteronomy 34 that "There never
> arose another prophet in Israel like Moses...." Spinoza suggested,
> quite rightly, that these were the words of a person who lived a
long
> time after Moses and had had the opportunity to make comparisons.
> One commentator points out that they also don't sound like the
words
> of the "humblest man on earth!"[2]
>
> Spinoza was really living dangerously because he wrote: "It is […]
> clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by
> Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses."[3] Spinoza had
> already been excommunicated from Judaism; now, he was in pretty hot
> water with the Catholics and Protestants! Naturally, his book was
> placed on the "prohibited books" list, and a whole slew of edicts
> were issued against it. What is even more interesting is that an
> attempt was made to assassinate him!
>
> A converted Protestant who had become a Catholic priest, Richard
> Simon, undertook to refute Spinoza and wrote a book saying that the
> core of the Pentateuch was written by Moses, but there were "some
> additions." Nevertheless, these additions were clearly done by
> scribes who were under the guidance of God or the Holy Spirit, so
it
> was okay for them to collect, arrange and elaborate on the text.
It
> was still God in charge here.
>
> Well, you'd think the church would know when it was ahead. But,
> nope! Simon was attacked and expelled from his order by his fellow
> Catholics. Forty refutations of his work were written by
> Protestants. Only six copies of his book survived burning. One of
> these was translated by a guy named John Hampden who also got into
> some hot water. He "repudiated the opinions he had held in common
> with Simon [...] in 1688, probably shortly before his release from
> the tower."[4]
>
> In the 18th century, three independent scholars were dealing with
the
> problem of "doublets," or stories that are told two or more times
in
> the Bible. There are two different stories of the creation of the
> world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and
> Abraham. There are two stories of the naming of Abraham's son
Isaac,
> two stories of Abraham's claiming to a foreign king that his wife
is
> his sister, two stories of Isaac's son Jacob making a journey to
> Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two
> stories of God's changing Jacob's name to Israel, two stories of
> Moses' getting water from a rock at Meribah, and on and on.
>
> Those who simply could not let go of the a priori belief that Moses
> wrote the Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were
always
> complimentary, not repetitive nor contradictory. Sometimes they
had
> to really stretch this idea to say that they were supposed
to "teach"
> us something by their contradictions that are "not really
> contradictions."
>
> This explanation, however, didn't hold up against another fact: in
> most cases one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the
> deity by the divine name, Yahweh, and the other would refer to the
> deity simply as "God," or "El." What this meant was that there
were
> two groups of parallel versions of the same stories and each group
> was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used.
> Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics
> that regularly appeared in one or the other line of stories and
what
> this demonstrated was that someone had taken two different old
source
> documents and had done the original cut and paste job on them to
make
> a "continuous" narrative.
>
> Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source
> documents must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story
> of creation and the rest was Moses himself writing! But, it was
> ultimately to be concluded that both of the two sources had to be
> from writers who lived AFTER Moses. By degrees, Moses was being
> eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch!
>
> Simon's idea that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on
> the textus receptus was, finally, going in the right direction.
>
> I would like to note right here that this was not happening because
> somebody came along and said "hey, let's trash the Bible!" Nope.
It
> was happening because there were glaring problems and each and
every
> researcher working on this throughout the centuries was struggling
> mightily to retain the textus receptus status of the Bible! The
> only exception to this that I have mentioned in this whole chain of
> events is our curious guy Abraham ibn Ezra, who KNEW about problems
> in the text of the Torah in the 12th century and enjoined others to
> silence! Remember what he said? "And if you understand, then you
> will recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep
silent."
> And what do we see as the result of this silence? Over eight
hundred
> years of Crusades, the Inquisition, and general suppression, and in
> our present day, the wars between the Israelis and Palestinians
based
> on the claim that Israel is the Promised Land, and that
it "belongs"
> to the Jews. Which brings us to another most amazing event.
>
> The great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, (1040-1105), makes the
> astonishingly frank statement that the Genesis narrative, going
back
> to the creation of the world, was written to justify what we might
> now call genocide. The God of Israel, who gave his people the
> Promised Land, had to be unequivocally supreme so that neither the
> dispossessed Canaanites nor anyone else could ever appeal against
his
> decrees.[5] Rashi's precise words were that God told us the
creation
> story and included it in the Torah "to tell his people that they
can
> answer those who claim that the Jews stole the land from its
original
> inhabitants. The reply should be; God made it and gave it to them
> but then took it and gave it to us. As he made it and it's his, he
> can give it to whoever he chooses ".
>
> This leads us to another interesting point: the establishing
of "one
> god" over and above any and all other gods, is an act of violence
no
> matter how you look at it. In The Curse of Cain, Dr. Regina
Schwartz
> writes about the relationship between Monotheism and Violence,
> positing that Monotheism itself is the root of violence:
>
> Collective Identity, which is a result of a covenant of Monotheism
is
> explicitly narrated in the Bible as an invention, a radical break
> with Nature. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the
> demand that the people he constitutes obey the law he institutes,
and
> first and foremost among those laws is, of course, that they pledge
> allegiance to him, and him alone, and that this is what makes them
a
> unified people as opposed to the 'other,' as in all other people
> which leads to violence. In the Old Testament, vast numbers
> of 'other' people are obliterated, while in the New Testament, vast
> numbers are colonized and converted for the sake of such covenants.
[6]
>
> Dr. Schwartz also writes about the idea of the 'provisional' nature
> of a covenant: that it is conditional. "Believe in me and obey me
or
> else I will destroy you." Doesn't sound like there is any choice,
> does there? And we find ourselves in the face of a pure and simple
> Nazi Theophany. Not only that, but we are beginning to close in on
> the source of the idea of linear time.
>
> Back to our chain of events: in the nineteenth century, Biblical
> scholars figured out that there were not just two major sources in
> the Pentateuch; there were, in fact, four. It was realized that
the
> first four books were not just doublets, but there were also
triplets
> that converged with other characteristics and contradictions
leading
> to the identification of another source. Then, it was realized
that
> Deuteronomy was a separate source altogether. More than that,
there
> was not just the problem of the original source documents, there
was
> the problem of the work of the "mysterious editor."
>
> Thus, after years of suffering, bloodshed and even death over the
> matter, it was realized that somebody had "created" the Bible by
> assembling four different source documents in an attempt to create
> a "continuous" history. After much further analysis, it was
> concluded that most of the laws and much of the narrative of the
> Pentateuch were not even part of the time of Moses. And, that
meant
> that it couldn't have been written by Moses at all. More than
that,
> the writing of the different sources were not even that of persons
> who lived during the days of the kings and prophets, but were
> evidentially products of writers who lived toward the end of the
> biblical period!
>
> Many scholars just couldn't bear the results of their own work. A
> German scholar who had identified the Deuteronomy source exclaimed
> that such a view "suspended the beginnings of Hebrew history not
upon
> the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings." Other
> scholars realized that what this meant was that the picture of
> biblical Israel as a nation governed by laws based on the Abrahamic
> and Mosaic covenants was completely false. I expect that such a
> realization may have contributed to a suicide or two; it most
> definitely led to a number of individuals leaving the field
> altogether.
>
> Anyway, another way of putting their conclusions was that the Bible
> claimed a history for the first 600 years of Israel that probably
> never existed. It was all a lie.[7]
>
> Well, they couldn't handle this. After years of being conditioned
to
> believe in an upcoming "End of the World," with Jehovah or Christ
as
> saviors of the chosen during this dreaded event, the terror of
their
> condition, that there might not be a "savior," was just too awful
to
> bear. So along came the cavalry - Wellhausen (1844-1918) - to the
> rescue.
>
> Wellhausen synthesized all of the discoveries so as to preserve the
> belief systems of the religious scholars. He amalgamated the view
> that the religion of Israel had developed in three stages with the
> view that the documents were also written in three stages, and then
> he defined these stages based on the content of the "stage." He
> tracked the characteristics of each stage, examining the way in
which
> the different documents expressed religion, the clergy, the
> sacrifices and places of worship as well as the religious
holidays.
> He considered the legal and narrative sections and the other books
of
> the Bible. In the end, he provided a "believable framework" for
the
> development of Jewish history and religion. The first stage was
> the "nature/fertility" period; the second was "spiritual/ethical"
> period; and the last was the "priestly/legal" period.
>
> As Friedman notes: "To this day, if you want to disagree, you
> disagree with Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you
> compare its merits with those of Wellhausen's model."
>
> I should also note at this point, that even though Wellhausen was
> trying to save the buns of Christianity from the fire, he was not
> appreciated in his own time. A professor of Old Testament, William
> Robertson Smith, who taught at the Free Church of Scotland College
at
> Aberdeen, and who was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica,
was
> put on trial before the church on the charge of heresy for
promoting
> the work of Wellhausen. He was cleared, but the tag "the wicked
> bishop" followed him to his grave. Indeed! Shot themselves in
the
> foot again!
>
> Opposition to critical study of the Bible has been spearheaded,
> throughout the centuries, by the Catholic Church. But, curiously,
in
> the modern day, the Catholics are more open to examination of the
> text than the new American Christian Fundamentalists who resemble,
> more than anything, Holy Crusaders and Inquisitors!
>
> Nevertheless, analysis of the Bible has proceeded. The book of
> Isaiah was traditionally thought to have been written by the
prophet
> Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BC As it happens, most of
the
> first half of this book fits such a model. But, chapters 40
through
> 66 are apparently written by someone who lived about 200 years
> later! This means that, in terms of "prophecy," it was written
after
> the fact.
>
> New tools and methods of our modern time have made it possible to
do
> some really fine work in the areas of linguistic analysis and
> relative chronology of material. Additionally, there has been a
> veritable archaeological frenzy since Wellhausen! This
> archaeological work has produced an enormous amount of information
> about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other regions surrounding Israel,
which
> includes clay tablets, inscriptions on the walls of tombs, temples
> and habitations, and even papyri. And here we find another
problem:
> in all the collected sources, both Egyptian and west Asian, there
are
> virtually NO references to Israel, its "famous people" and
founders,
> its Biblical associates, or anything else prior to the 12th century
> BC. And the fact is, for 400 years after that, no more than half a
> dozen allusions can be deduced. And they are questionable in
> context. Yet the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews cling to these
> tattered references like straws in the hands of a drowning man.
> Oddly, the Fundamentalist Christians just simply close off any
> awareness to the entire matter by the simple expedient of the
> execution of the 11th commandment: thou shalt not ask questions!
>
> The problem of the lack of outside validation of the existence of
> Israel as a sovereign nation in the area of Palestine finds
> correspondence in the Bible itself. The Bible displays absolutely
no
> knowledge of Egypt or the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC The
> Bible says nothing about the Egyptian empire spreading over the
> entire eastern Mediterranean, (which it did); there is no mention
of
> the great Egyptian armies on the march (which they were); and no
> mention of marching Hittites moving against the Egyptians (which
they
> did); and especially no mention of Egyptianized kinglets ruling
> Canaanite cities (which was the case).
>
> The great and disastrous invasion of the Sea Peoples during the
> second millennium is not even mentioned in the Bible. In fact,
> Genesis described the Philistines as already settled in the land of
> Canaan at the time of Abraham!
>
> The names of the great Egyptian kings are completely absent from
the
> Bible. In other places, historical figures who were not heroic
have
> been transformed by the Bible into heroes as in the case of the
> Hyksos Sheshy (Num. 13:22). In another case, the sobriquet of
> Ramesses II is given to a Canaanite general in error. The Egyptian
> king who was supposed to assist Hosea in his rebellion of 2 Kings
> 17:4 has "suffered the indignity" of having his city given as his
> name. The Pharaoh Shabtaka turns up in the Table of Nations in
> Genesis 10:7 as a Nubian tribe!
>
> The errors of confirmed history and archaeology pile higher and
> higher the more one learns about the actual times and places, so
that
> the idea that comes to mind again and again is that the writers of
> the Bible must have lived in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, or
later,
> and knew almost nothing about the events of only a few generations
> before them. Donald B. Redford, Professor of Near Eastern Studies
> at the University of Toronto, has published extensively on
> archaeology and Egyptology. Regarding the use of the Bible as a
> historical source, he writes:
>
> Although the Biblical historian is forced to admit that he has no
> means of checking the historical veracity of the Biblical texts,
[he
> will claim] `nevertheless materials relevant for the historian can
be
> gathered from the narratives…(and) the work appears to be rich in
> materials of high value to the historian."[8]
>
> If we are still inclined to doubt, we are reassured by such
> statements as `there seems no reason to question (the) general
> reliability and the substantial accuracy of (the account's)
> chronological sequence,'[9] or `there seems to be no good reason to
> doubt the existence of a historical kernel.'[10] The case is
argued
> no further, and one is left to wonder what clues the writer has
which
> the reader lacks.
>
> Bewilderment increases when one reads `our sources are the products
> of later working and editing, so that the original elements, more
> often than not, cannot be isolated with any exactitude.'[11] Yet
the
> writer obviously feels he has isolated them, and can stamp one
> passage `a rather realistic report of what actually happened,'
> another episode `legendary,' yet other details `non-controversial
> matters of fact,' and still others `impossible to consider … a
> historical record.'[12]
>
> One feels impelled to cry out: what criteria of evaluation are you
> using? What unpublished evidence do you possess? Sadly, in most
> cases of this kind, there is no answer to either question.
>
> For the standard scholarly approach to the history of Israel during
> the United Monarchy amounts to nothing more than a bad attack of
> academic `wishful thinking.' We have these glorious narratives in
> the books of Samuel and 1st Kings, so well written and ostensibly
> factual. What a pity if rigorous historical criticism forces us to
> discard them and not use them. Let us, then, press them into
> service – what else have we? – and let the burden of proof fall on
> others.[13][…]
>
> While one might be unwise to impute cryptofundamentalist motives,
the
> current fashion of treating the sources at face value as documents
> written up in large part in the court of Solomon, arises from an
> equally misplaced desire to rehabilitate the faith and undergird it
> with any arguments, however fallacious.[…]
>
> Such ignorance is puzzling if one has felt inclined to be impressed
> by the traditional claims of inerrancy made by conservative
> Christianity on behalf of the Bible. And indeed the Pentateuch and
> the historical books boldly present a precise chronology that would
> carry the Biblical narrative through the very period when the
> ignorance and discrepancy prove most embarrassing.
>
> A totaling of the lengths of reign of the kings of Judah from
> Solomon's fourth year (when allegedly the temple in Jerusalem was
> dedicated) to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC yields 430
years
> which should take us to the year 1016 BC for the reign of Solomon.
>
> Again, according to 1 Kings 6:1, 480 years is supposed to have
> elapsed between the Exodus and the dedication of the temple, thus
> producing a date of 1496 BC for the [Exodus.]
>
> Since the Sojourn in Egypt is stated to have lasted for 430 years
> (Exod. 12:40), the descent of Jacob and his family to the land of
> Goshen must have taken place in 1926 BC
>
> If now we add the lengths of life of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
(290),
> we arrive at 2216 BC for the birth of Abraham. This would mean
that
> Abraham's arrival in Canaan would have to fall in 2141 BC, and his
> descent to Egypt between that date and 2116 BC, or under the 10th
> Dynasty of Herakleopolis. Jacob's descent would have occurred in
> Senwosret I's reign, and the entire Sojourn would have occupied the
> outgoing 12th dynasty, the entire 13th Dynasty, the Hyksos
> occupation, and the early Dynasty to Hatshepsut's ninth year!
>
> In the light of Numbers 32:13, which assigns 40 years to the
> Wandering, the conquest of the land under Joshua must have begun in
> 1456 BC, or on the morrow of Thutmose III's victorious campaigns
when
> all Canaan belonged to Egypt, and on the eve of Amenophis II's
> deportation of the local population. Even more astounding are the
> implications of the resultant placement of the Period of the
Judges,
> namely 1456 to 1080 BC This is almost exactly coeval with the
> Egyptian Empire in Asia! Yet our Egyptian sources mention neither
> the patriarchs, Israel in Egypt, Joshua, nor his successors, while
> the Bible says absolutely nothing about the Egyptian empire in the
> land.
>
> In fact, the Biblical writers are wholly and blissfully unaware of
> the colossal discrepancy to which their "history" and "chronology"
> have given rise.
>
> The strength, however, of a confessional commitment to bolster a
> prejudgment will not allow most conservative Jewish or Christian
> exegetes to discard the whole chronological arrangement, and recent
> work has proven Muslim scholars similarly in thrall. (Referring to
> A. Osman).
>
> [Such True Believers think that ] the basic pattern of Patriarchal
> Age, Descent and Sojourn, Exodus and Conquest, and Judges MUST be
> essentially correct - Is it not inherently reasonable? Do you have
a
> better one? - and consequently numerous ingenious solutions are
> devised. the most common trick has been to reduce time spans to
> generations: thus the 480 figure must really represent twelve
> generations: but 40 years per generation is too long, 20 being much
> closer to the average. Hence we can cut the figure in half and put
> the Exodus around 1255 BC instead of 1486, and lo! it falls
squarely
> in the reign of Ramesses II, and thus allusion to "Ra'amses" in
> Exodus 1:11 can be nicely accommodated!
>
> Similarly the 430 years of the Sojourn must simply be a curious
> equivalent of roughly four generations - does not Genesis 15:16
> virtually prove it? - and so the Descent will come to rest about
the
> middle of the fourteenth century BC, or at the close of the Amarna
> age.
>
> Although the Gargantuan ages of the patriarchs are not extraneous
to
> the Genesis material as we now have it, but actually inform it,
> nevertheless these too are swept away or transmogrified into normal
> generation estimates; and thus the "Patriarchal age" can occupy the
> fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries and accommodate the
> alleged "Nuzi" parallels.
>
> And if one is still impressed by the "appropriateness" of having
> Joseph rise to power under the Hyksos who, as his Semitic
congeners,
> would have taken kindly to him (although the Joseph story clearly
> distinguishes Joseph from Pharaoh and his court as Egyptians), then
> what matter if we NOW drop our objections to the 430 years and take
> them literally? Joseph would then come to Egypt around 1680, just
as
> the Hyksos were taking power!
>
> Such manhandling of the evidence smacks of prestidigitation and
> numerology; yet it has produced the shaky foundations on which a
> lamentable number of "histories" of Israel have been written. Most
> are characterized by a somewhat naive acceptance of sources at face
> value coupled with failure to assess the evidence as to its origin
> and reliability. The result was the reduction of all data to a
> common level, any or all being grist for a wide variety of mills.
>
> Scholars expended substantial effort on questions that they had
> failed to prove were valid questions at all. Under what dynasty
did
> Joseph rise to power? Who was the Pharaoh of the Oppression? Of
the
> Exodus? Can we identify the princess who drew Moses out of the
> river? Where did the Israelites make their exit from Egypt: via
the
> Wady Tumilat or by a more northerly point?
>
> One can appreciate the pointlessness of these questions if one
poses
> similar questions of the Arthurian stories, without first
submitting
> the text to a critical evaluation. Who were the consuls of Rome
when
> Arthur drew the sword from the stone? Where was Merlin born?
>
> Can one seriously envisage a classical historian pondering whether
it
> was Iarbas or Aeneas that was responsible for Dido's suicide, where
> exactly did Remus leap over the wall, what really happened to
Romulus
> in the thunderstorm, and so forth?
>
> In all these imagined cases none of the material initially
prompting
> the questions has in any way undergone a prior evaluation as to how
> historical it is! And any scholar who exempts any part of his
> sources from critical evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some
> or all of his conclusions.[…]
>
> Of much more significant reference are such questions as: Under
what
> conditions and to what purpose did the ancestor traditions of
Israel
> take shape? Where and when did the Exodus theme originate? Of
what
> nature and how reliable is our evidence for the pre-monarchical
> history of the component elements of the Iron Age "Israel?"
>
> And in all our efforts to formulate the right questions, we should
be
> wise to reject the application of the adjective "Biblical"
> to "history" and "archaeology." […]
>
> Too often "Biblical" in this context has had the limiting effect on
> scholarship by implying the validity of studying Hebrew culture and
> history in isolation. What is needed rather is a view of ancient
> Israel within its true Near Eastern context, and one that will
> neither exaggerate nor denigrate Israel's actual place within that
> setting.[14]
>
> Please take careful not of Professor Redford's comment: "any
scholar
> who exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation runs
the
> risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions." The
> seriousness of this cannot be understated. You see, people have
died
> by the millions because of this book and the beliefs of those who
> study it. And they are dying today in astonishing numbers for the
> same reasons!
>
> In the end, if those who read and/or analyze this book and come to
> some particular belief about it are wrong, and they then impose
this
> belief upon millions of other people, who are then influenced to
> create a culture and a reality based upon a false belief, and in
the
> end, it is wrong, what in the name of God is going on? How do I
dare
> to ask this question? I dare because it may be the single most
> important question in history. In terms of the Bible as history
one
> needs to ask a very simple set of questions: WHO wrote the Bible
and
> WHY?
>
> It is those questions we will be answering in the following
chapters,
> and in answering them, we may come to some realizations about the
> controllers of our Matrix Reality at the very deepest levels.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
--
> ----------
>
> [1] See: St. Petersburg Times Magazine section on February 13,
2000
> for a 20 page article on my work as a hypnotherapist and exorcist,
> written by Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas French.
>
> [2] Friedman, Richard Elliot, Who Wrote the Bible, 1987; Harper &
> Row, New York.
>
> [3] Quoted by Friedman.
>
> [4] Ibid.
>
> [5] Ashe, Geoffrey, The Book of Prophecy, 1999, Blandford, London;
> p. 27
>
> [6] Schwartz, Regina M., The Curse of Cain, 1997, The University
of
> Chicago Press, Chicago.
>
> [7] Of course, by now the reader has realized that it is not
really
> a "lie," properly speaking. It is just a highly mythicized account
> of the doings of some people in a certain historical context. But
> after the mythicization, and the imposition of the belief in the
myth
> as the reality, as well as the passage of a couple of thousand
years,
> figuring out who is who and who really did what is problematical at
> best.
>
> [8] Soggin, J.A., in Hayes and Miller, Israelite and Judaean
> History, quoted by Redford in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient
> Times, 1992, Princeton University Press, Princeton. P. 300
>
> [9] Ibid.
>
> [10] Ibid.
>
> [11] Ibid.
>
> [12] Ibid.
>
> [13] Ibid. p. 301.
>
> [14] Redford, Donald B., Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient
Times,
> 1992, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
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