(December 3, 2012 at 12:00 pm)pocaracas Wrote: hmmmm tricky... can you provide a sumerian equivalent of the bible?Suppose there are similarities between a Biblical text and another religious text, and the earliest extant copy of the other text is older than the earliest copy of the Biblical text.
I'd wager they wrote the book well before the hebrews wrote the Torah.
1. So what? As you note, the evolution of texts seems intuitive. So, people merely note that one text is older than another and has similarities, and allow people's intuition to infer that the later copied from the earlier. This is sloppy. The actual transmission is dismissed with a general wave of the hand - the latter must have acquired the material from the former via trade or conquest. Well, no, that's not a given. You need convincing evidence of the transmission to have anything more than speculation. Atheists frequently note our tendency to make patterns out of data to explain religion, but generally fail to apply this tendency to their own arguments. perhaps you're just intuitively seeing a pattern that doesn't really exist.
2. A Biblical viewpoint also explains similarities between the bible and other religions. Romans tells us that early people knew God but didn't want to worship him, so they made up their own gods. It wouldn't at all be surprising for some of these peoples to include some of the truth into their new religions. Then, when God gave the truth to Israel, there were similarities to older traditions.
In short, we see patterns that fit into our pre-existing paradigm.
