RE: The bible
August 20, 2012 at 1:45 pm
(This post was last modified: August 20, 2012 at 2:41 pm by Minimalist.)
Quote:Sure. But even if it WERE authentic, it's completely unconvincing of anything other than some-guy-named-David. It still wouldn't offer any proof of a grand empire that spanned from the Euphrates to the Sinai.
Of course, as archaeology has shown that there was no "city" located at the site which is now "Jerusalem." It was, at best, a miserable little village and Athas makes the case that it was in fact a fortified manor house for the local rulers...akin to medieval castles for dukes and barons.
Aramaic, the language of the stele, uses dots as word dividers and there is no dot between byt and dwd.
Quote:So did Marcion not bother to read Paul, did he promote Paul and hope no one would read his writings or do we not have the original epistles of "Paul" as Marcion originally discovered them?
Marcion seems to have been the first to champion "Saul/Paul" but who the hell knows what was really in there. Marcion's writings were wiped out by the proto-orthodox. The people who wielded the torches could have written whatever the hell they wanted and said it was by Paul. Who would know? There is precious little which can be used as historical markers in Paul. I've already mentioned one - the Damascus thing which dates that passage in 2 Corinthians to somewhere between 84 and 64 BC. The city of Corinth did not even exist at that time.
As for Marcion himself. We don't know what he believed. We know what his enemies said he believed but what does that mean? Why would we assume they were any more truthful in their categorizations than Romney and the other republicunts are being about Obama?
