Not a new idea...which fundies hate to hear.

Joseph Wheless' "Forgery in Christianity" dates to 1930 and is available from Infidels.org online.

http://infidels.org/library/historical/j...istianity/


You may have to read their disclaimer to gain access to the "library."

Good morning... Sir minimalist!!

For the sake of completeness I will mention two relevant books, both by Bart D. Ehrman, which deal extensively with this subject, although I did not in fact use them in any of the previous posts.

Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics

The first book is written at a popular level and deals only with literary forgeries within the canon of the New Testament.

The second book is directed at Ehrman's scholarly peers. The body is littered with untranslated snippets of Greek from the texts under discussion, and the footnotes bristle with quotations in German or occasionally French. He again covers the canonized forgeries, but he goes far beyond that to deal with forgeries in Christian polemics during the first four centuries of the church.

On the canonical books of the New Testament his conclusion is that at best 8 of the 27 books are by the author whose name is attached. Seven of those are epistles from Paul which are considered authentic. The other one (ironically one of the most challenged books) is Revelation where the author simply states that he is named John (a very common name) and that he is an elder. There is no claim in the text to be the apostle John as many of the book's supporters supposed. The four gospels and Acts are anonymous and do not name any author in the text although the church with no evidence ascribed them to people from the apostolic age. The rest are all pseudonymous forgeries falsely claiming to be written by Paul (e.g. Ephesians, Colossians, Titus), by Peter and by James and Jude.

The forgeries go on and on outside the canon. Have you ever read 3 Corinthians? For centuries after the generation of the apostles books were being written in their names on every side of the various controversies, and also in the names of supposedly authoritative figures such as Clement from the generation immediately after the apostles.

Ehrman also writes of "counterforgeries." It is a delicious irony that many of these forgeries warn against forgeries and in many cases were written under a false name to refute an earlier forgery.

Many conservative scholars are unable to deny that these works are not by the named authors, but they have sought to come up with a more acceptable term than forgeries especially for the ones within the canon.. Commonly the argument is made that in ancient times it was not considered a lie for a disciple to write a new work and attribute it to his master.

Ehrman remorselessly explodes all such claims. The ancients, both pagan and Christians, stigmatized works with false authorial claims as "lies" or "bastards." And yet it was done on all sides.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the people who gave us the New Testament and the church were mostly inveterate liars.

(February 8, 2014 at 6:06 pm)Chad32 Wrote: On the one hand, lying is against the ten commandments. On the other hand, so is murder, but look what Yahweh commanded Moses to do when he got down from the mountain. 3000 people died because some of them wanted to make a golden calf after wandering the desert for 40 years. Note that everyone was a polygamist. Even Moses was a polygamist back then. He just wrote down the rule against serving other gods. Granted this bunch of people were quick to complain tthat they weren't immediately taken to a land of milk and honey that they wouldn't have to fight for, but sending Moses to kill people right after saying killing is wrong seems a bit hypocritical.

The moral of the story being that if it benefits Yahweh, it isn't wrong. Even when he says not to do something.

That Moses episode might well have been the Persian Emperor Darius suppressing a revolt in Egypt. The story about the golden calf could have been his son Xerxes melting down the Babylonian golden statute of Bel. At that time Xerxes assumed the title "King of Persia and Media, Great King, King of Kings (Shahanshah) and King of Nations (i.e. of the world)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I IOW, Xerxes became the God character and was worshiped as God. That's why the God character did human things. He was just a man who happened to have ruled all of the land from western India to Libya.

Possibly. and when the children of Egypt got killed, it might have just been a disease that killed the more vulnerable of the citizens and they said it was an act of god. Who knows?

And the most likely explanation for all these stories is that they are pure fantasies in the interests of nationalistic propaganda and a budding theocracy, written about 700 - 900 years after the supposed events.

There was no captivity in Egypt, there was no passover, there was no wandering in the desert, no golden calf, no invasion of Israel. The golden calf in particular was probably made up by the priests because the rural population were always indulging in idol worship, and so the priests told a story to show that it had been condemned from the very beginning of Israel's history.

During the reign of Ahmose I, Upper Egypt evicted the Hyksos from Lower Egypt and reunited the country. The Hyksos were Canaanites and Ahmose chased them back there and established 4 centuries of Egyptian rule of Canaan.

On a tomb inscription from one of his officers is a story of how Ahmose was called away from the siege of the Hyksos capital, Avaris, to deal with a revolt. While away his generals negotiated an end to the siege and allowed the Hyksos to withdraw back to Canaan. Upon his return, Ahmose disavowed the negotiations and went after them. Sound familiar? He did not drown in any fucking miracle though. He crushed the Hyksos at Sharuhen. In any case, the Hyksos were rulers - not slaves.

What we have is a rather garbled memory, written down many centuries later, of that tale to suit the political aspirations of later rulers of Judah.

(March 11, 2014 at 1:26 pm)Minimalist Wrote: During the reign of Ahmose I, Upper Egypt evicted the Hyksos from Lower Egypt and reunited the country. The Hyksos were Canaanites and Ahmose chased them back there and established 4 centuries of Egyptian rule of Canaan.

On a tomb inscription from one of his officers is a story of how Ahmose was called away from the siege of the Hyksos capital, Avaris, to deal with a revolt. While away his generals negotiated an end to the siege and allowed the Hyksos to withdraw back to Canaan. Upon his return, Ahmose disavowed the negotiations and went after them. Sound familiar? He did not drown in any fucking miracle though. He crushed the Hyksos at Sharuhen. In any case, the Hyksos were rulers - not slaves.

What we have is a rather garbled memory, written down many centuries later, of that tale to suit the political aspirations of later rulers of Judah.

The Jews never had an independent kingdom. They were always someone's flunky.

I'm sorry but you're wrong.

Quote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasmonean_dynasty

Quote:The Hasmonean dynasty[2] (Hebrew: חשמונאים‎, r Ḥashmona'im; Audio) was the ruling dynasty of Judea and surrounding regions during classical antiquity. Between c. 140 BC and c. 116 BC, the dynasty ruled semi-autonomously from the Seleucids in the region of Judea. From 110 BC, with the Seleucid empire disintegrating, the dynasty became fully independent, expanded into the neighbouring regions of Galilee, Iturea, Perea, Idumea and Samaria, and took the title "basileus". Some modern scholars refer to this period as an independent kingdom of Israel.[3] In 63 BC, the kingdom was conquered by the Roman Republic, broken up and set up as a Roman client state. The Kingdom had survived for 103 years before yielding to the Herodian Dynasty in 37 BC. Even then, Herod the Great tried to bolster the legitimacy of his reign by marrying a Hasmonean princess, Mariamne, and planning to drown the last male Hasmonean heir at his Jericho palace.

Prior to this there were two short-lived attempts at independence when Hezekiah revolted against Assyria and later when a king who the OT calls "Josiah" (but who is not archaeologically attested) tried to expand into areas vacated by the withdrawing Assyrians.

Both attempts were quickly crushed.

That leaves the Hasmoneans as the only time in the entire first millennium when an actual kingdom existed and became something of a regional power.

Oddly..or perhaps not...

the so-called Davidic Empire (which no one at the time seemed to know about)



covered pretty much the same area as the actual Hasmonean "empire."



Coincidence? I doubt it.

As you know, Min, The Bible Unearthed disposes of the notion of the great United Monarchy of David and Solomon.

Instead of having an army of 1.3 million fighting men, as claimed in Chronicles, his total number of subjects was somewhere around 45,000, and his capital Jerusalem was a one-donkey town of 1000.

But this is lying for Yahweh rather than lying for Jesus.