Goliaths Sword, page 2

Hi Ischyros:

Actually when I wrote "Christian Textual Scholars" I meant in the sense of "scholars who study Christian Texts" as opposed to scholars who hold to the "Christian" faith, so apologies for the confusion.

You do raise an important point: If the mangled texts of the "bible" (and I would have to include the "sacred" texts of both Jews and Christians, i.e. the OT and the NT) are seen by modern scientific textual research as socio-politico-religious propaganda (not only by their apparent form but also in technical midrashic language, import, purpose, source and content etc.), then what IS left for the modern human to believe in, i.e. in the 21st century?

We are living in the Information Age of Science and Space Exploration, so we would have to cling to ideas which reflect our values in these times, and not cling to ancient values which were only important to our pre-scientific ancestors who believed Fevers could be cured by excorsim of a Fever Daemon (e.g. "Jeezuzz" healing miracles using magical spells such as Talitha Cumi, or rubbing dirt and his own human spit into a man's eyes in order to cure him of blindness etc.)

Clearly, we must realise that the old ways and the old religious attitudes are no longer functioning in any useful way any more to control the common masses of people, who are left quite empty by all the "intolerant of difference" fundamentalist yelling and screaming found today (as in the past) in Christianity, Judaeism and Islam.

Take a look around to see where the tenets of religious bigotry and extremism has brought us in the 21st centuiry. Take an even closer look at the ancient texts in question that these zealots base their acts upon and you will begin to see what the net result is of for example "torah based racism" which is often expressed in acts of racist violence (e.g. in Iraq, and in Occupied Palestine today---and both Jews and Muslims are guilty of this religious extemist violence, their acts based on racist extremist interpretations of words in their so-called "sacred texts").

Don't ever forget what the Zionist Extremist (Brooklyn born) Dr Rabbi Baruch Goldstein perpetrated in the Cave of the Patriarchs in February 1994, when he took his automatic weapon (being a settler in Hebron, he was heavilly armed) and slaughtered in cold blood 29 Arab men and wounding another 87 persons in the process) wall of whom were on their knees at the time praying to their god Allah---butchered by this religious zealot (a member of the JDL among other groups) simply because they were "facing the east" (The good Rabbi was screaming Torah and Prophetic verses while he was busy killing, quoting loosely from Hezekiel chapter 8 and chapter 9, Deuteronomy chapter 13 and chapter 20).

In other words, this is what can happen when people take the "holy texts of the Jews" literally (i.e. "kill them all, exterminate, them, leave notning breathing, women, men, children AND THE ANIMALS...") an entire Weltanschauung which is ultimately based on racist, pre-scientific thinking which has little place in the Information Age where people no longer believe that fevers are caused by Daemons that need to be excorcised, the net result of much of their efforts has done little in the modern world except to marginilise whole populations as inferior (women) or sinful (gays) with an absolute intolerance of anything outside of their own Weltanschauung

In the not too distant past, Religion was very useful for world leaders to manipulate the common herd with (as Napoleon rightly commented) but this has radically changed since the Age of Enlightenment and the dimihshment of the Power of the Catholic Church in Europe, and with the emergence of the Scientific Revolution which began to take off especially since the invention of the printing press).

But Christianity and Judaeism are too localised to be of any "universal" use for anyone in the west (worshipping as it were a MiddleEastern post Exilic Israelitish clan god who uses blatantly racist terms like "Chosen People" (i.e. master race) and among other charming attributes, wants all the Amalekites dead and at times seems to think nothing of of a little ethnic cleansing now and then).

What we MUST do, if we are to survive as a human species into the 22nd century (the antagonism between nations holding to the Muslim faith and the so-called Judeo Christian countries will ultimately lead to Nuclear Annhialiation for most of the planet if left unchecked) is to find a belief system that ACCORDS WITH THE FINDINGS OF MODERN SCIENCE as well as HAS RESPECT FOR THE PLANET--in other words, rediscover our roots as a species and re-introduce some of the higher aspects of our ancient past such as reverence for Sex in Nature (in all of its forms without pejoratives" where women can be finally re-instated in their proper place as equals to men (and not as socio-economic or even moral-religious inferiors) in society at large, and other groups are not marginalised (e.g. gays).

We've come a long way from burning people at the stake for being homosexual or for even being left handed ("sinister" as it says in the Latin) and therefore alligned "with the devil", but NOT FAR ENOUGH.

We need to seek a TRULY UNIVERSAL RELIGION (or PHILOSOPHY) where there are no CHOSEN PEOPLE WHO HAVE A MONOPOLY on RELIGIOUS TRUTHS or REVELATION, but where there is more of a balance between SCIENCE and THE GENERNAL PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD VIEW, between MALE AND FEMALE ENERGIES and between THE PLANET AND OUR ECONOMIC SYSTEMS, and a MORE SCIENTIFIC /FACTUAL APPROACH TO BIRTH DEATH AND RE-INCARNATION---all of which are wholly lacking in Judaeism and Christianity and Islam---which is androcentric (male-based) and uses racist language ("No Moabite shall ever enter into the Congregation of Israel, not even beyond the 10th generation..." which I suppose counts out King David whose Grandmother Ruth was...you guessed it....a Moabitess).

You ask if I demand all ancient texts are to be held by the same rigorous standards of scholarship as the Biblical material? It would depend on what text we are talking about, whether a cookbook, or a law code, and what words are actually in the text at hand.

We may, say, have only one single ancient copy (made up example) of the text of the Grek Epic The Iliad, and yet we may have at our disposal have 1477 copies of the Hebrew book of Jeremiah, but the quality of the single text of the Iliad may be much higher (i.e. show less sign of multiple redaction) than the 4 different families of manuscripts of Jeremiah (e.g. the LXX compared to some of the Dead Sea Scroll copies compared to the Targums compared to the Masortetic Text, the last of which is a full 13 chapters longer !)---so it is a kind of non question you are asking.

Do you want to rephrase it?

The number of copies of any text is not always a test of accuracy or worth in terms of a text contains but rather that which is actually contained in any given text is what counts---i.e. quality NOT quantity.

And the sheer massive number of copies of the writings of the Jews and Christians only compounds the complexity of the manuscript traditions (more copies, means more tampering with the texts).

2. You mention that if the Scribes (both Jewish and Christian) copied and re-edited their sacred texts so often, why didn't they smooth out the contradictions a little better.

As Friedmann points out in WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?, this is because of what we today would call POLITICAL pressure to retain as much of a given tradition in the combination of sourcing e.g. when Ezra after 480BC had to combine scribal texts from the Northern Priests (i.e. the E and D writers) with those of the southern priesthoods of Hebron and Jerusalem (i.e. the J and P writers), he had to compromise to keep both halfs of the newly formed post exilic state of Israel happy and ended up with a composite document which does not satisfy modern minds, but kept the two rival factions happy (e.g in the Flood story exegesis in the book).

The same kind of political redaction happens today in Congress where the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES "passes" one version of a bill, then it goes to the SENATE, who passes another version of the bill, then it goes to a committee who re-edits the bill and sends up the COMPOSITE BILL to the president for signature. The bill which is signed by the president of the US is often quite different than either version (house or senate) and is a curious mix of language and import. Ditto for much of the "sacred" literature of the Jews and the Christians.

The editing was done for political expediency in order to get a given text accepted (and copied, which meant, survival of the text for posterity).

You might as well ask, Why are there FOUR CONTRADICTORY Gospels in the NT, when there easily could have been a council to harmonize them all like Tatian (later the heretic) did? The answer is that each of the FOUR "canonical" gospels represented FOUR of the LARGEST AND DISTINCT CULT CENTERS for early Christianity (e.g. the centre at Antioch for Matthews' Judeo-Christian Nazorean "gospel", Rome was the centre for the material found in "Mark", Alexandria seems to have been the location for the language found in the Gospel of John the Elder (whoever he was) and Luke's gospel seems to have emanated from Ephesus).

None of these important dioceses wanted their own books (that were read in THEIR churches for decades) to be tampered with, and so the councils in the 4th and 5th centuries "bowed to extreme political pressure" in order to unite these diverse, highly rival and often infighting "Christian Church" centres.

One has to see the complex history behind the socio-politico-religious world in which these texts were voted upon in the councils (the Rabinnic council in AD 90 at Janveh included) to understand how these texts eventually came to be regarded as "sacred": unfortunately very very few persons on these threads knows any of this important background, and come up with the most absurd conclusions, as you will see when you commence your own (hopefully open-minded) research on the subject.