Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[Aractus]

Have you yet to notice I have nothing but contempt for you and your personal attacks and supercilious posts?

Do you realize that I get tired of reading your unsubstantiated bullshit that you didn't even think up on your own, and are just repackaged ideas of other failed so-called secular scholars who came up with way out there theories that have been discredited and disproven decades ago now.

The only source of claiming it is a translation is the forgery, period. There is no basis for any other claim.

Oh right I guess the other fucking source you keep claiming doesn't exist, you keep denying, the other source would be - the original fucking Hebrew text, right???

You haven't presented to me a single legitimate textual argument as to why the MT appears to be a translation of Greek. Not one. There are scholars out there, contemporary ones - some religious, some secular - who specialize in this, and in identifying whether a work was originally written in the language in which we have it.

What is the physical evidence the OT stories existed in any language prior to the Septuagint?

Matthew 5:18: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Luke 16:17: And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.

Let me guess - that's just vague, abstract, generalized language - right??

Yes you are trying to get out of the forgery by invoking the copy meme. As you know, there are only two related things, the oldest copy of a document and the oldest mention of a document. As you know NEITHER has any relation to the original contents. Changes in copying and even total fabrication was such a common problem that the closer a copy was to the original the more valuable.

Did that somehow sound coherent in your head before you typed it??

Canonical texts did not exist in the time of Josephus and likely did not exist until the Christian sect of Judaism invented it in the 5th c. AD.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Proof?

Wait, sorry, here's my proof on this one:

• Matthew 5:18: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
  Luke 16:17:
  And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.

Now produce yours.

Many of the quotes from "scripture" on the NT are not only from the Greek but also from either invented or non-existent or lost Judean texts.

See what I mean by non-original repackaged claims that have been long-since disproven? And your source of proof for this claim is?

Ah, let me point out to you, that your source is from the 3rd century AD, the fifth column of the Hexapla and we know Origen modified it substantially when he made the fifth column. So now you're essentially claiming that something that was modified in the 3rd century was quoted in the first century AD! LOL. Origen had copies of all the new testiment books and he used those whilst creating the "critical edition of the septuigant".

Also, there are actually more quotes that agree with the MT than there are those that agree with the LXX, and as you made the claim it's up to you to prove to me otherwise.

Overwhelming agreement among believing scholars that their theology is correct is not what I would put in the surprising category. No more than I would expect you, a declared Lutheran, to speak anything against your religious beliefs.

It's news to me that I'm a Lutheran. Also, there is huge amount of disagreement among professional scholars - just as there is among scientists of almost any discipline, so don't go claiming they all read the text and agree upon the same thing all the time, because they don't.

You please tell me how the Masoretic got vowel points without audio recordings to work from? Vowels change most quickly in every language.

What's this - you're now acknowledging that Hebrew is a language?!

They preserved the contemporary Hebrew sounds, happy? You can have that one, it's all yours.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Have you yet to notice I have nothing but contempt for you and your personal attacks and supercilious posts?

Do you realize that I get tired of reading

Then stop reading.

If you do you will also save yourself the effort of your compulsive responses.

your unsubstantiated bullshit that you didn't even think up on your own, and are just repackaged ideas of other failed so-called secular scholars who came up with way out there theories that have been discredited and disproven decades ago now.

If such things have been discredited and disproven, that is you are not lying about it, then you WHY do you find it impossible to recite all the discreditations and whatever the plural of disproven might since you have read them? Again you have mere assertion which is meaningless. If do in fact have personal knowledge those things occurred then you would have no problem reciting them. And if you understood them you could recite them in your own words. But you have nothing except two, idiot bible verses of disputed to unknown origin.

As you do not and CANNOT you are obviously making it up. That is not honest. Misrepresentation is lying and you categorize that under sin. Do you agree deception in furtherance of faith and rule by priests is acceptable?

BTW: Theories are only based upon physical evidence. A thing which requires things which are not physical evidence are not theories. They are at best speculation. Your assumption without evidence there was something to translate cannot possibly lead to a theory of origins as it assumes a fact not in evidence.

The only source of claiming it is a translation is the forgery, period. There is no basis for any other claim.

Oh right I guess the other fucking source you keep claiming doesn't exist, you keep denying, the other source would be - the original fucking Hebrew text, right???

To REPEAT: I am open to any evidence that is used for any other ancient document most of which are lost and known only by reference or mention. Reference and mention are considered legitimate evidence of existence. In no way does it address the content of the document as you are pretending it does. You are free to present mention or reference to the Hebrew scriptures which is older than the Greek. But you do not because you cannot because none exist.

You haven't presented to me a single legitimate textual argument as to why the MT appears to be a translation of Greek. Not one. There are scholars out there, contemporary ones - some religious, some secular - who specialize in this, and in identifying whether a work was originally written in the language in which we have it.

What is the physical evidence the OT stories existed in any language prior to the Septuagint?

Matthew 5:18: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Luke 16:17: And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.

Let me guess - that's just vague, abstract, generalized language - right??

Even if those two illiterate people are who believers want them to have been, immaculate classical Greek and all, who can vouch for their honesty and integrity? They are minor characters in the four canonical gospels and in some of the other gospels. And even those descriptions show them weak-willed to the point of spineless -- skip down to the Passover denying him part. Neither of them wrote a letter anyone thought worth preserving showing what the contemporaries thought of their word.

Beyond that, how do mid 1st c. AD (for believers) and mid 2nd c. AD (for honest people) gibberish scribblings reflect upon the existence of things to be translated into Greek two centuries earlier in the mid 2nd c. BC?

Yes you are trying to get out of the forgery by invoking the copy meme. As you know, there are only two related things, the oldest copy of a document and the oldest mention of a document. As you know NEITHER has any relation to the original contents. Changes in copying and even total fabrication was such a common problem that the closer a copy was to the original the more valuable.

Did that somehow sound coherent in your head before you typed it??

Did you not know the problems with making hand copies have been known for at least 2500 years? You keep arguing for original contents as in your Hexapla mentions that you NEVER explain the significance of to your position.

Canonical texts did not exist in the time of Josephus and likely did not exist until the Christian sect of Judaism invented it in the 5th c. AD.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Proof?

Wait, sorry, here's my proof on this one:

• Matthew 5:18: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
  Luke 16:17:
  And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.

Now produce yours.

Same as above. What would uneducated illiterates two centuries after the creation of the Septuagint know about the subject? What would they know and how would they know it? As peasants they would know no more than the average uneducated, illiterate peasant. But as this law they must be talking about includes not mixing linen and wool among so many other nonsense laws which HAVE passed away they obviously are bullshit artists by inspection. Or are you going to defend the prohibition against mixing fibers as divine law and have you looked at your clothes lately?

But if you simply meant canonical then I can refer to your introduction of the Masoretic as the first known canonical compilation for Jews no earlier than the 11th c. AD or are you going to claim the Hexapla is suddenly legitimate in this case only? I can also refer to the Vatican and Sinai Codices which are not identical but close. However they both leave out dozens of gospels and epistles for reasons no one knows as there is no record of the selection process. The latter has two epistles not in the former. Neither have Enoch. Why not?

That is what I mean by canonical. Those are largely what we have today but there was NO formal rejection or condemnation of all the missing books, gospels and epistles. At some point an official collection appeared in more or less its final form. And it still takes a few more centuries from the Codices to find any disapproval of changing the collection.

Many of the quotes from "scripture" on the NT are not only from the Greek but also from either invented or non-existent or lost Judean texts.

See what I mean by non-original repackaged claims that have been long-since disproven? And your source of proof for this claim is?

To repeat I simply point out there has never been any evidence of anything older than the Greek stories. I observe no rational person believes anything without physical evidence. But you believe in things for which there is no physical evidence. You believe without evidence there was something to translate into Greek. You believe there was a literate culture in Judea to create and preserve something to translate. In fact what you believe is based upon nothing but the forgery of a liar.

I think it reasonable to assume you do not believe in all forgeries. Is that a correct assumption? I have the Donation of Constantine in mind for openers. One forgery is as worthless as another.

But then you try to introduce essentially unprovenanced verses attributed to people of unknown character but were either not the people named for their literacy or were uneducated peasants whose opinion is of no interest.

Ah, let me point out to you, that your source is from the 3rd century AD, the fifth column of the Hexapla and we know Origen modified it substantially when he made the fifth column. So now you're essentially claiming that something that was modified in the 3rd century was quoted in the first century AD! LOL. Origen had copies of all the new testiment books and he used those whilst creating the "critical edition of the septuigant".

My source is the Letter of Aristeas. That is the forgery upon which there is a claim there was something to translate. Whichever books he was trying to convince people were translated are the ones I refer to. The issue is SOLELY and only the primary language of whatever the books. Aristeas claims it was into Greek from some unstated language but we know he is a liar as he is a forger.

So the only basis for claiming there was a translation into Greek is a liar. Liar in one, liar in all. The witness has been discredited. No rational person would accept a demonstrated liar as a credible source.

As to what Origen had, only four of the 46 gospels and but a handful of the epistles. Why would you consider such a trivial sample of interest?

Also, there are actually more quotes that agree with the MT than there are those that agree with the LXX, and as you made the claim it's up to you to prove to me otherwise.

I have pointed out that the DSS is an abbreviation of the Septuagint and the Masoretic an abbreviation of the DSS. I agree there are many differences but all the differences indicate the Septuagint is the original IF applied to any other text. How do you explain there being no indication of any other source from the DSS or the Masoretic than the Septuagint?

Please explain how it is possible to have an "original" version in one language translated into Greek and then all subsequent versions in that original language are based upon the Greek? Or if you prefer, NO evidence of anything older than the Greek even in the land in which that original was supposed to originate?

Overwhelming agreement among believing scholars that their theology is correct is not what I would put in the surprising category. No more than I would expect you, a declared Lutheran, to speak anything against your religious beliefs.

It's news to me that I'm a Lutheran. Also, there is huge amount of disagreement among professional scholars - just as there is among scientists of almost any discipline, so don't go claiming they all read the text and agree upon the same thing all the time, because they don't.

I have been completely honest about myself as self-taught and my own research. Are you also self-taught or can you cite the "scholars" you claim have such opinions? That does not mean googling a bunch of names. It means citing their papers. I doubt you are game.

As to agreement, I meant it no more than I have written. I have outlined the retreat in story creation times from Moses to Solomon to post Babylon and there are still "scholars" who support all three periods. For believers that is a major disagreement. They all agree the books were created by illiterate people in a land at a time without a scribal culture who were barely civilized. That in itself is an amazing agreement.

Of course they do not explicitly state no literate culture as that would burst the bubble of the scam they are running. You trying to claim disagreement on this matter is like disagreeing on number of dancing angels on the head of a pin when I am saying there are no angels in the first place. That is dishonest.

As to disagreements among scientists the less you say about that the less ignorant you will appear. It is nothing like you are pretending it to be. If you insist upon it I will simply ask you to give an example and explain it. What I am saying contrary to your beliefs is as different as thermodynamics to phlogiston, science and non-science.

You please tell me how the Masoretic got vowel points without audio recordings to work from? Vowels change most quickly in every language.

What's this - you're now acknowledging that Hebrew is a language?!

They preserved the contemporary Hebrew sounds, happy? You can have that one, it's all yours.

As I posted early on, before the DSS it was assumed Hebrew was a LITURGICAL language before the discovery of the DSS but a language never the less. Have you not been reading or are you inventing things as you go along? By experience it is the latter.

No language, written or spoken, can preserve letter sounds. No one who has listened to the dozen or so major pronunciations of modern English, called accents, can pretend that is possible. Are you deaf?

How do you propose exact pronunciation was preserved even without vowels when we all know for a fact that written English did not preserve a single pronunciation of English with vowel sounds?

What other than desperation causes you to keep making up this BS/crap/nonsense?

---

Good to see you have dropped your nonsense on carbon dating.

Do you want to come back to the Donai thing? I roughed out an entire line of exposition on Ha or Ho Donai. This would lead to the definite article in Greek and Hebrew being the same so I could ask how it indicates a translation.

Ready to go back to Ladinos and Yiddishkites pronouncing Hebrew the same? Have you found the missing audio recording from the 15th c.?

[Minimalist]

[A_Nony_Mouse]

[Tonus]

This is fascinating stuff.

A_Nony_Mouse, at first I thought this was more of a challenge or thought experiment, but I get the impression that you seek to get people to strip away all of the baggage that has been attached to the Bible for centuries (millennia?) and work with what is there. For someone like me, raised in religion and finally breaking away from it, it helps to realize that even now I still tend to work backwards when thinking about the Bible and its history.

[Aractus]

If such things have been discredited and disproven, that is you are not lying about it, then you WHY do you find it impossible to recite all the discreditations and whatever the plural of disproven might since you have read them? Again you have mere assertion which is meaningless. If do in fact have personal knowledge those things occurred then you would have no problem reciting them. And if you understood them you could recite them in your own words. But you have nothing except two, idiot bible verses of disputed to unknown origin.

There's no IF about it. You're simply presenting tired old ideas. And that's it, that's all you've presented. Time and time again I've requested from you evidence for your position - you have none. You simply claim that I, and others, can't substantiate the claim that the Hebrew was written first. Every time you are given evidence, you choose to ignore it. The fact that you can't produce a single *complete* LXX manuscript proves the point in itself. Almost every original Greek manuscript contains substitutions for the book of Daniel and usually other books too. This is true of Codex Vaticanus and all of the early codices. You have no response to this claim. And let me be even more clear - the book of Daniel has just ONE - that's right ONE SINGLE mss of the LXX version and that is codex Chisianos. Furthermore to this, the Septuagint as we know it contains 46 books as has been repeatedly pointed out to you. Yet not a single Hebrew source has all 46 books listed, not a single one. Now let's assume that the Apocrypha was considered scripture, which one would expect if the Septuagint was considered scripture. That would mean that all 7 of those Apocryphal books were translated and then never seen again, and we don't know anything about the Hebrew versions!

Your claim is inconsistent, incoherent, and ignores evidence. Okay, we have the Isaiah scroll and other DSS mss which go a way to proving that the LXX wasn't in use in Qumran at that time, and in fact many of the DSS discoveries go a way to proving, consistently, which books were considered scripture. They're akin to the claims made by Abelard Reuchlin and those before him, and more recently Bart D. Ehrman (the view of the NT as a Greek forgery). The only difference between them and you is that you've chosen to focus on the OT not the NT - oh and the fact that you have no real qualifications to make the claims which you do.

You keep claiming that the earliest biblical mss discovered at Qumran is 1st century BC. This is not true, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you it is second century BC, and possibly even earlier. This doesn't sit well with you.

So the evidence is clear, and the problem you have - that you cannot overcome - is that the LXX as we know it today doesn't appear until the Hexapla (mid 3rd century). I'm not interested in what may or may not have been around prior to the Hexapla - that's conjecture. You don't have any proof that the LXX was ever a complete work until the mid 3rd century AD! All the quotes that supposedly agree with the LXX can be explained by the fact that 1. We know that Origen modified the text substantially, 2. Origen also had a complete copy of the New Testament to work with.

Even if those two illiterate people are who believers want them to have been, immaculate classical Greek and all, who can vouch for their honesty and integrity? They are minor characters in the four canonical gospels and in some of the other gospels. And even those descriptions show them weak-willed to the point of spineless -- skip down to the Passover denying him part. Neither of them wrote a letter anyone thought worth preserving showing what the contemporaries thought of their word.

You forget that both passages are quoting Jesus who was not illiterate, read the temple scrolls and knew every jot and tittle.

Beyond that, how do mid 1st c. AD (for believers) and mid 2nd c. AD (for honest people) gibberish scribblings reflect upon the existence of things to be translated into Greek two centuries earlier in the mid 2nd c. BC?

There were NO complete Greek translations at the time of Jesus of the Hebrew scriptures. Prove otherwise.

[Minimalist]

The silver scroll is so amusing. May his light shine upon you. How can it be more clear that is talking about a sun god and from the time frame most likely Ra of Egypt?

For those who don't know, the Silver Scrolls were two tiny rolled up strips of silver found by Gabriel Barkay in a tomb near Jerusalem. They contain two variants of the same, rather generic, prayer...a prayer which was fleshed out and is now written in Numbers. The scrolls were written in paleo-Hebrew. In the translations I have seen that phrase does not appear clearly. There is some speculation by the translators as they try to help it along but the inscription itself is in execrable condition and much is illegible.

I'll see about re-writing what I lost.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

This is fascinating stuff.

A_Nony_Mouse, at first I thought this was more of a challenge or thought experiment, but I get the impression that you seek to get people to strip away all of the baggage that has been attached to the Bible for centuries (millennia?) and work with what is there. For someone like me, raised in religion and finally breaking away from it, it helps to realize that even now I still tend to work backwards when thinking about the Bible and its history.

Precisely! In fact I may start describing it that way. Baggage == religious tradition. But baggage is a more easily understood colloquial term.

As to the baggage, from the writings of Josephus, a priest of the Yahweh cult, it is a clear inference he did not consider the stories either authoritative or canonical. His only use of them as "true" I can find is in giving the oldest example of the false claim people hate the Judeans/Jews.

---

The silver scroll is so amusing. May his light shine upon you. How can it be more clear that is talking about a sun god and from the time frame most likely Ra of Egypt?

For those who don't know, the Silver Scrolls were two tiny rolled up strips of silver found by Gabriel Barkay in a tomb near Jerusalem. They contain two variants of the same, rather generic, prayer...a prayer which was fleshed out and is now written in Numbers. The scrolls were written in paleo-Hebrew. In the translations I have seen that phrase does not appear clearly. There is some speculation by the translators as they try to help it along but the inscription itself is in execrable condition and much is illegible.

I'll see about re-writing what I lost.

Point in fact paleo-hebrew is BS. The inscriptions in the region of that age are Phoenician and later Aramaic. How do they divide the finds into "paleo-Phoenician" and "paleo-Hebrew"? They get out the bible and see if the bible folk are said to have ruled the region where it was found. In other words, circular reasoning.

Here is another fact. When they talk about the changes in Hebrew over time they are talking about dating the books of the bible. There are not enough examples of any inscriptions from the mountain region of Palestine to fill an index card or two if you write large and that includes the tunnel inscription. Again circular reasoning.

Of course if I were wrong consider the museums in Israel would have their collections of inscriptions as central evidence of the zionist claims. The same for Christian museums around the world. They would be easily googled. They would be on tour. Instead, nothing at all or at most claims that it all exists but a refusal to present evidence it exists. Is a URL so hard?

[A_Nony_Mouse]

[Minimalist]