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not to be rude, but when you quote really long posts like those, could you put <snip long post> or something in the quote pleaseOncedeceived said:
especially when both replies are essentially the same, thanks 
Jet Black said:not to be rude, but when you quote really long posts like those, could you put <snip long post> or something in the quote please
...as proof that Genesis is wrong. How are any of these misconceptions?Oncedeceived said:
I did already list Enuma Elish, the epics of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, and the Sumerian Book of the Kings, all from Ashurburnipal's library, as well as the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, and other Greek myths you should have learned in your high school literature classes.
Gladly. But will it really make a difference?
That's fine. But since you want a complete education on middle-Eastern mythology, its going to take a couple of days to find a source for everything else you're asking for. And I have the feeling that none of it would matter to you no matter how much evidence you saw or how profound it was.
Aron-Ra said:
That's fine. But since you want a complete education on middle-Eastern mythology, its going to take a couple of days to find a source for everything else you're asking for. And I have the feeling that none of it would matter to you no matter how much evidence you saw or how profound it was.[/QUOTE]
.
Then why didn't you point out any of these misconceptions then?Oncedeceived said:
This doesn't equate. Was Saul dated to 2,000 BCE? Are you saying that the oral traditions of Judaism were around in 2400 BCE? If so, then why is Job considered the first book of the Bible? Because it didn't even exist until some 900 years later. And when I look these up on the educational sites, I find that Saul was from the 10th century BCE. Gilgamesh ruled about 1,700 years earlier than that, and his Epic is about 1,000 years older than Saul. If I understand this correctly, the very oldest of the Biblical works was estimated to have been written about 3,500 years ago. But even the most recent of the pagan works in Ashurburnipal's library are still at least a couple centuries older than that, and some of them are still much older.
Perhaps. There still isn't any archaeological evidence for any of the Biblical works prior to the 3rd century BCE. But it appears that the beginnings of what would become Judaism didn't begin to take shape until some time after the fall of the Mesopotamian empires in about the 17th century BCE, when Yahweh was still a lesser god in the Canaanite pantheon. In the book of Job, God is the sun, and the sun is God, just as Shamash was under Hammurabi's rule. This is apparent in Genesis 32 as well. It is also evident that there were a great many changes still to come before Judaism would become recognizeable as the religion it is today. Mithras does appear to have influenced the Bible, and you can see evidence of that influence in several passages. Mithras was a sun-god, and Psalms 104:2 reflects Mithraic belief. Remember that Mithras wore a cloak in which all the stars of the Heavens were sewn. And that it was he who brought on the night by draping his cloak over the crystal dome that was the firmament over the flat Earth.
Lord Krsna is a pre-Christian Christ of sorts. I've even been told that his name means Christ. In the Mahabharata, Krsna gives sight to the blind, and there is a terrific parallel to Jacob's wrestling match in Genesis 32, but from the other perspective. In that one, Krsna instructs king Arjuna to disable his opponant by touching him in the hollow of the thigh. In the Bhagavad Gita, a sub-chapter of the Mahabharata, Krsna parallels Jesus several other ways, particularly in his explanation of himself as an avatar, a carnal extension of the holy trinity. Krsna, Mithras, Jesus, and Amenhotep all promoted themselves as the sole, immediate prophet of their versions of the "one true" god. The biggest difference I see between them is that Jesus never said he was God, but Krsna did. Krsna claimed to be a physical manifestation of God, the supreme personality of the god-head, just as many Christians believe Jesus was also. And where Jesus claimed to have present to witness the creation of the world by God, Krsna claimed to have created the whole of the vast universe himself as Brahma.
Because you're not just asking for a source. You're asking for very specific references from Greek, Persian, Indian, Egyptian, Canaanite, and Mesopotamian religions all at once, as if you never knew anything about any of them. When I cite the ancient tomes this information is in, that's not good enough for you. Apparently, you want the specific passages, and that takes time to come up with. Being a full-time employee and a full-time student, and a single parent of two, I don't have a lot of time to show you everything I know about these subjects. That's especially hard in Mithras' case since that religion isn't known only from the Avesta but from Roman and even Vedic documents too. I don't know if I can assemble all the specific references for you without having to read a whole lot more than I have time to. But I will do what I can.
Me too. Perhaps you can help me then. I've heard some vague references to Yahweh in Canaanite mythos, but I've never been able to find any for myself. Where should I look? Because as far as I know, there is no mention of that name in any document anywhere prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It may be. I can accept that, just as I can accept that James' ossuary and the "sacred" shroud of Turin might also both be forgeries or frauds. My evidence is not based on anything so flimsy as a single trinket. Whether this item was carved prior to Jesus' time or not, we still know that Dionysus/Bacchus/Orpheus/Tammuz was believed to have turned water into wine and that he was reserrected from the dead to live again, and that both of these beliefs pre-date Christianity by centuries. We also know that Prometheus and Alcestis were both crucified as I described, to atone for the sins of others, for their salvation, in documents that are known to have been written in the 5th Century BCE. Now, how do you intend to counter / explain that?oncedeceived said:
This is a forgery according to the source that Freke and Gandy gave for their book cover.
I doubt very much if you'll find many of either. But my honor demands that you try. Its one thing to simply make a claim. But quite another to see it withstand critical analysis in peer review.
It was my understanding that Isaiah was the only complete Biblical text to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls; that there were some fragments of other books, Exodus, Genesis, etc., but that even then some of the works weren't verbatim with the newer versions, or that there were paraphrased passages "based on" other books of that compilation. And as I look into it now, that still seems to be the case. Regardless, the Old Testament was supposed to be older than Jesus, a lot older in fact. But what we have here is a scenario where the god of the Jews isn't mentioned in any document anywhere prior to the 1st or perhaps 3rd century BCE at the very earliest. Only a single silver trinket exists prior to that, one bearing part of the the benediction of Aaron:Oncedeceived said:
And no different than the hundreds of millions of Hindus who make similar claims regarding Krsna conciousness.
I've noticed many religions make similar claims, and all of them purport to have thier proofs. But with the Bible, as with Vedic scriptures, what you have is people who act as though by reading it will evoke magic spirits to take them over, and I have experienced that sort of sensation myself. Many religions are dependant on that sort of experience, and each claims it as proof of their validity.
Manifestations of the occult. If properly primed, one can be lead to see, hear and even feel that which isn't really there. Its the power of suggestion exploiting the subject's faith. I've seen that done many times, both as a Christian and as a pantheist occultist. And I've read of it being done in numerous other religions that aren't based on the god of Moses. It was the realization of what I was doing, causing my subjects to experience things on the power of my suggestion, and how I was making that happen, that made me question the auto-deceptive nature of faith.
No. I'm not going to argue the crucified orpheus because I don't need it. My evidence is much stronger than you realize, as you're about to see as this discussion continues.
It was Christians who discovered that the Earth was not fixed, and that it did move. It was Christians who discovered deep time, and realized that the Earth was in fact many millions of years old. It was even Christians who discovered genetics and evolution, and who ultimately realized that Genesis couldn't be literally accurate.
Yes it is. It would be their opinion. But it is not my opinion that most Christians are evolutionists, and therefore not Biblical literalists like yourself. I base this conclusion on several things; the fact that Catholocism is the largest Christian denomination, and the pope himself has announced that evolution is credible science. And since most of the third-world Christian countries are predominantly Catholic, that would imply that a significant number of them would accept evolution if they follow the pope the way they say they do. There are other significantly large denominations, Episcopalians, Mormons, Methodists, etc., -who also strongly or predominantly support the concept of evolutionary origins over a literal Biblical account. There are even some Southern Baptists and Pentacostals who do the same. Rev. Robert Bakker is a Pentacostal preacher. He is also one of the world's foremost paleontologists and evolutionary scientists. My professor in cellular biology is in the same position:
Aron-Ra said:
I've ran out of time. Be back later.
Aron-Ra said:
Aron-Ra said:
I don't have time to clean up now so try to look inside the quotes that are suppose to be just yours because my responses are in some of them. Sheesh.
Although I may not have been clear about that, I do understand the difference between the dates of the archaeological copies and the historical/contextual evidence of earlier written versions and oral traditions. It was my understanding that Job began as an oral tradition, which was 'composed' around 1500 BCE, with other traditions added to it over the years, and that it was eventually written down by the Phoenicians and the Greeks long about the 10th Century BCE. But thank you for this link!gluadys said:
Aron-Ra said:
Yes, but I also showed that to be the correct, (and only possible) interpretation. It doesn't say "he created the Heaven, waited a while, and then created the Earth." It says "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth".Everything else he did after "the beginning", including sculpting details into the formless mass of Earth on Day Two that he had already created, (poofed out of nothing) on Day One.Aron-Ra said:
Here is where we have to make an important distinction between the date of the texts we physically have, and the dates archaeologists and historians describe for the contextual first appearance of these stories. As Gluadys pointed out, our earliest archaeological record of the Bible is only from the 1st - 3rd Century BCE, except for one passage used in one of its texts which is dated from the 7th Century BCE. But taking historical context and cultural parallels into account, we know that many of these passages are copies of much older written and/or oral traditions from centuries earlier. I'm sure we both agree on this. Where you said Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh were contemporary with Saul, both are definitely much older. According to contextual historical estimates. Enuma Elish is typically dated from 1800 BCE to as much as 2000 BCE, and the Epic of Gilgamesh dated from 1800 BCE to as much as 2500 BCE, which is actually a conservative estimate since the man ruled a couple centuries earlier than the earliest date estimated for his saga. Even looking at the most recent estimates for either work, they are still at least 800 years to 1000 years older than Saul, and 300 to 500 years older than Job, which (as Gluadys pointed out) was the beginning of the oral tradition of the Hebrews.
This doesn't compute either for several reasons. One being that the Chaldean ancestors of the Hebrews were still a literate people in 1900 BCE. There would be no need of an oral tradition at all in that case. They didn't resort to oral traditions until the fall of the Mesopotamian empires which began, but never completed, your tower of Babel. Obviously, the oral traditions of the Hebrew could not have preceded that project, which was indefinitely postponed around 1700 BCE.
Yes I see. But if I remember correctly, you said that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, right? That's the common belief anyway. Now while most archaeologists and even some rabbinical scholars have recently conceded that the exodus never happened the way the Bible said, (if it ever happened at all) the most probable estimates are that this event was supposed to have occurred during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses II. That would have put Moses and his Pentateuch at around 1250 BCE, a quarter millennia after the estimated origin of the Hebrew tradition with Job and again, much more recent than Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, or Enuma Elish. That also makes the Pentateuch younger than the religions dedicated to Marduk, Ba'al, Amen-Ra, and everyone in the Hindu trinity.
The important thing to remember here is that you and I both agree that the Bible was composed bit by bit over several centuries. So one passage from 600 -700 BCE does not imply an entire Bible. Nor does this one even specifically imply your particular god. My position is that such passages would have existed, but that many of the earlier ones would have been significantly different than they are recorded today. You yourself have already conceded that point with the admission that portions of the dead sea scrolls are worded differently than any modern variant of those same tomes. Much of this evolution came about because of the influence of neighboring religions over the ages, particularly during that 50 some-odd generations between the Semitic people's loss of literacy and its eventual return to them via the Greeks and Phoenicians.
This of course means that there is no way the Gilgamesh epic could have been influenced by anything Biblical.
The library itself was from about that time because that was when Ashurbanipal lived and collected these works. But most of the books in his library were already ancient collector's items by then.
I don't see how it could if the first of the distinctly Hebrew traditions didn't take shape until 300 to 500 years later at the very earliest. Even if you could somehow excuse all these other works, (which you still have not done) you still couldn't possibly explain the Sumerian king list (even though it also lists some of the characters from the Bible) because it is definitely older than any of the Biblical texts, (or any other text for that matter) and it too supports the elder mythologies over anything in Genesis.
