I can't even pronounce Hero...Herowhatsis!
Submitted by Triple Q on July 10 1999 at 16:10:38
In reply to You haven't read Herodotus, obviously :) Submitted by Heather on July 10 1999 at 14:58:09
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Of course, you're right that this immediately puts all stories in the Bible under suspicion; I never denied that. But.... You just want to fight, don't you? Okay, babe, get out your boxing gloves. :) Or any classical historian, I'd guess. Everything that you get in the Bible – myths, legends, outright fiction – appears in every other classical work of history. Okay, it's going to be one of those "there's nothing new under the sun" arguments, huh? Actually, I have read enough. I just don't find them to be experiences that I would choose to relive. :) And I have no problem with the idea that it is possible that similar events can happen in different places within similar time-frames. In fact, considering the rather limited existances that they led, it would probably had been quite impossible for someone to come up with an idea that was TOTALLY original. Of course, you're right that this immediately puts all stories in the Bible under suspicion; I never denied that. But you have to understand that, from the ancient point of view, such writing wasn't lying. Thucydides, faced with reconstructing a speech that neither he nor anyone else had taken notes on (because everybody was too buy preparing for war) felt no qualms about constructing his own version of the speech which was far more rhetorical than the original speech must have been but which caught the gist of what was said. See now? I'm talking about an event, an event that supposedly took the course of 40 years. You're talking about a detail, one single speech. A detail can be used to enforce or detract from the event, but it is not the event itself. Or are you trying to say that because of the fabrication of one single speech that the war itself never happened? *chuckle* (Ding! Round Two!) Most of the Old Testament stories are (it is clear from what we know) as historically accurate as the ancient lives of Alexander the Great; the Gospels are considerably more accurate than the average history books in ancient times. As far as I know, no other incidents in the ancient world have four accounts written about them. Even if we take into account the overlap of the Synoptic Gospels, the New Testament is still a cut above the average for ancient historical writing, while the Old Testament is no worse than comparable documents. Personally, I don't see how you can say that "the Gospels are considerably more accurate than the average history books in ancient times" when the only book I know of outside the Bible that mentions any of the incidents recorded in the Bible is The Antiquities of Josephus. And it is quite obviously, even to a layman, that Josephus used the Bible manuscripts to write his history. He parallels the Bible documents practically word for word. Any decent historian can tell you that, if you want to prove something happened, you need to compare it to totally unrelated documents...preferrably from totally different cultures. So far, to my knowledge, no real proof has been found in Egyptian documentation that the Israelites were even really there. And the use of the term synoptic when written in relation to the Gospels is in fact quite misleading when one considers that the documents were written by four men who supposedly spent several years of their lives barely venturing out of sight of each other, figuratively speaking of course. And that the gospels were written in a very small area where it would be highly probable and in fact highly possible that the writers of the documents could use the documents of the others to write their versions of the story of Christ. In fact, considering the way the gospels "mold" together so well, it is highly probable that this did happen. Despite that, my dictionary (Oxford American) still defines Synoptic Gospels as: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which have many similarities (whereas that of John differs greatly) No mainstream biblical scholar believes that every single story in the Bible is literally true; no m ainstream biblical scholar ever believed that. (You should read the biblical scholarship of the early Christians; they loved to find symbolism hidden in every verse.) These days, the problem isn't finding biblical scholars who believe that the Garden of Eden actually existed; the problem is finding biblical scholars who won't immediately write off the possibility of supernatural events occuring. Okay, does that mean that even Christians don't believe that the incidents in the Bible happened? That would make this whole conversation redundant, wouldn't it? :) Don't get me started on that supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Love |