Announcement

Collapse

Apologetics 301 Guidelines

If you think this is the area where you tell everyone you are sorry for eating their lunch out of the fridge, it probably isn't the place for you


This forum is open discussion between atheists and all theists to defend and debate their views on religion or non-religion. Please respect that this is a Christian-owned forum and refrain from gratuitous blasphemy. VERY wide leeway is given in range of expression and allowable behavior as compared to other areas of the forum, and moderation is not overly involved unless necessary. Please keep this in mind. Atheists who wish to interact with theists in a way that does not seek to undermine theistic faith may participate in the World Religions Department. Non-debate question and answers and mild and less confrontational discussions can take place in General Theistics.


Forum Rules: Here
See more
See less

Ancient Sources: History and Theology.

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
    In fact, we know quite a lot about the city of Jericho
    We do indeed.

    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
    , and it all squares with the Biblical record.
    No it does not, insofar as Joshua allegedly destroying it. At the period the Conquest was supposed to have taken place the cities of Canaan were unfortified.


    Re Kenyon's discoveries at Jericho,in her first season Kenyon discovered that overlying the Middle Bronze Age defences was Iron Age material dating back to around the seventh century BCE. There was no evidence of any defences from the late Bronze Age, purportedly the period of Joshua. Those findings showed that Garstang's original datings had been wrong. The pottery that he had discovered was clearly Early Bronze Age and was dated to the third millenium BCE not to the period associated with the Conquest of Joshua.

    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
    There is evidence that the city was occupied into the late Bronze age
    There was no settlement of any kind in the thirteenth century BCE. The earlier Late Bronze Age settlement was small, poor, insignificant and unfortified. Nor were there signs of any destruction.


    As a further point of interest another discrepancy between archaeology and the Bible was found at the site of ancient Ai, where so we are told Joshua carried out his clever ambush. This site was identified as Khirbet-et-Tell, a large mound in the eastern area of hill country to the north-east of Jerusalem. Its geographic location closely matched the biblical description and nor were there any alternative Late Bronze Age sites within the vicinity. Excavations there in the 1930s discovered the remains of a huge Early Bronze Age city that was dated to over a millennium before the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. However, there was no indication [either by pottery sherds or any artefact] that there was a settlement there in the Late Bronze Age.

    [See, Miriam C. Davis Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging Up the Holy Land, Routledge, 2016; and Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Simon and Schuster, 2001]




    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    First, a note on the Bible and historicity from Thomas L Thompson’s The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel [1990, Jonathan Cape] [see Chapter 2, Confusing stories with historical evidence]

    "The Bible's world does not belong to the discipline of archaeologists. It has never been found in any tell: not even Jericho or Megiddo. The question is not really the simple one of historicity: whether the Bible's tales in fact happened, or might be dramatically illustrated with the help of biblical archaeology's naive realism. Of course, there was an Israel! The name itself is used already at the close of the Late Bronze Age on an Egyptian monument to refer to the people of Canaan that Pharaoh Merenptah's military campaign into Palestine fought against. But it is not this Israel that the Bible deals with. Our question involves more complicated issues of literary historicality and reference, of metaphor and literary postures, evocation and conviction. The Bible doesn't deal with what happened in the past. It deals with what was thought, written and transmitted within an interacting intellectual tradition.

    It may perhaps appear strange that so much of the Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people that never existed as such. This metaphorical nation's land and language; this imagined people's history, moreover, is an origin tradition that belongs to the 'new Israel', not the old. The Bible does not give us Israel's story about its past - or any origin story confirming Israel's self-identity or national self-understanding. The tradition gave not Israel but Judaism an identity, not as a 'nation' among the goyim, but as a people of God: an Israel redivivus in the life of piety. Naively realistic questions about historicity have always been most out of place when it has come to Israel's origins - if only for the fact that the genre of origin stories that fills so much of the Bible relates hardly at all to historical events, to anything that might have happened. It rather reflects constitutional questions of identity."

    And some comments on Jericho and other key sites in the Conquest narrative from The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel; Invited Lectures Delivered at the Sixth Biennial Colloquium of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, Detroit, October 2005 by Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar. Edited by Brian B. Schmidt, [2007, Brill]

    "First, excavations at key sites mentioned in the Conquest narratives of the Bible, such as Jericho, ¡Ai, Gibeon, Heshbon, and Arad, showed that they were either not inhabited in the Late Bronze Age or else were insignificant villages. Second, new finds at Lachish and Aphek and the re-evaluation of finds from the older digs at Megiddo and Hazor indicated that the collapse of the Late Bronze Canaanite city-state system was a long process that took at least several decades. Third, historical and archaeological studies have shown the strength of the Egyptian grip on Canaan as lasting well into the second half of the twelfth century BCE.; Egypt could easily have prevented an invasion of Canaan by a rag-tag army. Fourth, it has become clear that the collapse of Late Bronze Canaan was part of a wider phenomenon that encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. Fifth, the large-scale surveys that were conducted in the central hill country in the 1980s indicated that the rise of ancient Israel was just one phase in a long-term, repeated, and cyclic process of sedentarization and nomadization of autochthonous groups."
    In fact, we know quite a lot about the city of Jericho, and it all squares with the Biblical record. There is evidence that the city was occupied into the late Bronze age, we know the walls around the city collapsed all at once, and there is the curious detail that excavations have found jars filled with scorched grain which is consistent with the Biblical account that the attack occurred around harvest time, that the city was conquered quickly without a prolonged siege, and that the Israelites took no plunder from the city but burned it instead

    https://biblearchaeology.org/researc...lls-of-jericho
    https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2...es-at-jericho/

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Provide examples not excuses
    I did. In the OP.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post

    You'll need to elaborate. I'm not just going to take your word for it.
    First, a note on the Bible and historicity from Thomas L Thompson’s The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel [1990, Jonathan Cape] [see Chapter 2, Confusing stories with historical evidence]

    "The Bible's world does not belong to the discipline of archaeologists. It has never been found in any tell: not even Jericho or Megiddo. The question is not really the simple one of historicity: whether the Bible's tales in fact happened, or might be dramatically illustrated with the help of biblical archaeology's naive realism. Of course, there was an Israel! The name itself is used already at the close of the Late Bronze Age on an Egyptian monument to refer to the people of Canaan that Pharaoh Merenptah's military campaign into Palestine fought against. But it is not this Israel that the Bible deals with. Our question involves more complicated issues of literary historicality and reference, of metaphor and literary postures, evocation and conviction. The Bible doesn't deal with what happened in the past. It deals with what was thought, written and transmitted within an interacting intellectual tradition.

    It may perhaps appear strange that so much of the Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people that never existed as such. This metaphorical nation's land and language; this imagined people's history, moreover, is an origin tradition that belongs to the 'new Israel', not the old. The Bible does not give us Israel's story about its past - or any origin story confirming Israel's self-identity or national self-understanding. The tradition gave not Israel but Judaism an identity, not as a 'nation' among the goyim, but as a people of God: an Israel redivivus in the life of piety. Naively realistic questions about historicity have always been most out of place when it has come to Israel's origins - if only for the fact that the genre of origin stories that fills so much of the Bible relates hardly at all to historical events, to anything that might have happened. It rather reflects constitutional questions of identity."

    And some comments on Jericho and other key sites in the Conquest narrative from The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel; Invited Lectures Delivered at the Sixth Biennial Colloquium of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, Detroit, October 2005 by Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar. Edited by Brian B. Schmidt, [2007, Brill]

    "First, excavations at key sites mentioned in the Conquest narratives of the Bible, such as Jericho, ¡Ai, Gibeon, Heshbon, and Arad, showed that they were either not inhabited in the Late Bronze Age or else were insignificant villages. Second, new finds at Lachish and Aphek and the re-evaluation of finds from the older digs at Megiddo and Hazor indicated that the collapse of the Late Bronze Canaanite city-state system was a long process that took at least several decades. Third, historical and archaeological studies have shown the strength of the Egyptian grip on Canaan as lasting well into the second half of the twelfth century BCE.; Egypt could easily have prevented an invasion of Canaan by a rag-tag army. Fourth, it has become clear that the collapse of Late Bronze Canaan was part of a wider phenomenon that encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. Fifth, the large-scale surveys that were conducted in the central hill country in the 1980s indicated that the rise of ancient Israel was just one phase in a long-term, repeated, and cyclic process of sedentarization and nomadization of autochthonous groups."
    Last edited by Hypatia_Alexandria; 05-13-2021, 05:38 PM.

    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    Archaeology shows it is wrong.
    You'll need to elaborate. I'm not just going to take your word for it.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post

    Whatever you say, little lady.
    Archaeology shows it is wrong.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    That is exactly what we should expect to see from four separate accounts.

    What was actually experienced and seen?
    • One angel descending and an earthquake?
    • One young man who sat on the stone?
    • Two men in dazzling clothes who just appeared?
    • Two angels sitting where the body should have been in the tomb?

    Who actually went to the tomb?
    • Mary Magdalene and the other Mary?
    • Mary Magdalene, Jesus' mother, and Salome?
    • The "women"?
    • Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved?

    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    The Hebrew bible is wrong.
    Whatever you say, little lady.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post

    What about it?
    The Hebrew bible is wrong.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    It wasn't all that long ago that scoffers such of yourself claimed that Pilate never existed because we had no record of him. That Christian's simply concocted him out of whole cloth.
    Philo and Josephus both mention him.

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Then in the early 60s all of that changed when the "Pilate Stone was uncovered during an archaeological dig at Caesarea Palestinae. And since that time some coins and a ring have been found bearing his name.
    That later archaeological evidence confirmed his existence.

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    So for you to disdainfully sniff that there is "no extraneous contemporary evidence that Pilate was married at this time" is at the very least disingenuous and likely dishonestly duplicitous.
    The fact remains, as you have stated, that we know very little about this historical figure.

    However, I still have no idea why anyone thinks that even if he was married why his wife would have been present in Jerusalem at this time.

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    What I mean is that you have repeatedly demanded all sorts of contemporary documentation for someone you argue "had no impact on the world. He lived and died a nonentity" and then use the scarcity of such material to argue against his existence.
    You, along with some other Christians here, have an unfortunate tendency to conflate a real Galilean Jewish peasant who was executed by the Roman Praefectus of Judaea with a much later theological construct. The two are not the same.

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    But here we have a governor that we didn't have a scrap of documentation about outside of Christian sources.
    Again, I note that you appear to have forgotten the comments on Pilate from both Philo and Josephus. Or perhaps you did not know about them!

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    And ironically, even with only the tiny fragments we have, as Warren Carter informs us in Pontius Pilate: Portraits of a Roman Governor, modern scholars know a good deal more about him than about any other of the Roman governors there
    There have been a variety of works on Pilate. The earliest is G.A. Miiller’s, Pontius Pilatus, der funfte Prokurator von Judda und Richter Jesu von Nazareth published in Stuttgart in 1888.

    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Apparently, for some all we have is a name.

    So much for demands for contemporary documents mentioning someone.
    Firstly, and regrettably, so many ancient sources have not survived and secondly you need to realise that this province was not overly important as evidenced by the rank of those early Praefecti. They were men of the equestrian classes. Judaea was a comparative backwater. Yes it had geographical importance to Rome given its location on the Mediterranean littoral but the two really significant Roman provinces were Syria and Egypt.

    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    How about Jericho?
    What about it?

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post

    It is a fact that there is not a single piece of archeological evidence that contradicts the Bible.
    How about Jericho?

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post

    Yes, I suppose that's why I can present my arguments as a series of unbroken paragraphs instead of picking apart a post sentence fragment by sentence fragment
    :
    It's called analysing the text!

    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    It wasn't all that long ago that scoffers such of yourself claimed that Pilate never existed because we had no record of him. That Christian's simply concocted him out of whole cloth.

    Then in the early 60s all of that changed when the "Pilate Stone was uncovered during an archaeological dig at Caesarea Palestinae. And since that time some coins and a ring have been found bearing his name.

    And that is pretty much the extent of the historical record outside of the Bible that we have on him.

    So for you to disdainfully sniff that there is "no extraneous contemporary evidence that Pilate was married at this time" is at the very least disingenuous and likely dishonestly duplicitous. The fact is that we know exceedingly little about Pilate due to a lack of contemporaneous accounts concerning him.

    Moreover, isn't it interesting that we finally uncovered evidence for his existence during our lifetime. I mean, considering that he was the Roman governor of Judea? What I mean is that you have repeatedly demanded all sorts of contemporary documentation for someone you argue "had no impact on the world. He lived and died a nonentity" and then use the scarcity of such material to argue against his existence. But here we have a governor that we didn't have a scrap of documentation about outside of Christian sources.

    So if documentation from Pilate's time that mention him, probably the most important person in the region, were unknown until a little over 50 years ago, why should anyone expect a bunch of documentation concerning Jesus?

    And ironically, even with only the tiny fragments we have, as Warren Carter informs us in Pontius Pilate: Portraits of a Roman Governor, modern scholars know a good deal more about him than about any other of the Roman governors there. Apparently, for some all we have is a name.

    So much for demands for contemporary documents mentioning someone.
    It is a fact that there is not a single piece of archeological evidence that contradicts the Bible. There is much in the Bible for which there is no physical evidence (which is not unexpected for events that happened thousands of years ago), but every time a piece is discovered, it has always supported the Biblical record.

    Leave a comment:


  • rogue06
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    We have four supposed independent eye-witnesses to the alleged same event i.e. the empty tomb, who went to it and what was found to be there.

    Why do those four accounts differ in their specifics?
    That is exactly what we should expect to see from four separate accounts.




    Leave a comment:

Related Threads

Collapse

Topics Statistics Last Post
Started by whag, 03-27-2024, 03:01 PM
39 responses
192 views
0 likes
Last Post whag
by whag
 
Started by whag, 03-17-2024, 04:55 PM
21 responses
132 views
0 likes
Last Post Hypatia_Alexandria  
Started by whag, 03-14-2024, 06:04 PM
80 responses
428 views
0 likes
Last Post tabibito  
Started by whag, 03-13-2024, 12:06 PM
45 responses
305 views
1 like
Last Post Hypatia_Alexandria  
Started by rogue06, 12-26-2023, 11:05 AM
406 responses
2,518 views
2 likes
Last Post tabibito  
Working...
X