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As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting
N.Y. Times online ^ | March 9, 2002 | MICHAEL MASSING

Posted on 03/09/2002 6:05:30 AM PST by eddie willers

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To: ThinkinGal
ping--
21 posted on 03/09/2002 6:57:41 AM PST by Dallas
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To: eddie willers
"Whenever you have two Jews, you have at least three opinions."

-- Joseph Myerson, 1873 - 1956

22 posted on 03/09/2002 7:01:22 AM PST by pabianice
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To: abwehr
The same dynamic no doubt occured in ancient times. If MLK can, in less than 50 years, go from being a plagiarizing , philandering, trouble making communist sympathizer to an exalted place in the American pantheon of heroes it should be obvious that people a hundred generations removed from living memory and with few if any written records other than the official one could also become something far different than what they actually were in life.

What you say is obviously true and the obvious truth of it should not threaten anyone's religion or religious ideals. The Judeao-Christian religions and systems of morality have stood the test of time, have shown their value in a spiritual sense in a thousand different ways for billions of people, and lose nothing as time marches on and historical references are exposed as less-than-literal.

True Christians, and true Jews, should not fear truth.

23 posted on 03/09/2002 7:13:04 AM PST by samtheman
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To: abwehr
But that is the point. Martin Luther King is being transformed from a flesh and blood man into a Saint not by anything he did but by those who came after and have an agenda.

The same folks who venerate Dr. King, tear down American History, as well as the Bible. These attacks have been going on for years, and has been adopted by Hollywood, government(public) schools, and the mainstream press. There are some freethinkers who believe the Torah is quite true, but it is amazing there are any left.

24 posted on 03/09/2002 7:13:08 AM PST by week 71
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To: eddie willers
The Bible is accurate enough for the Smithsonian Institute to use as an historical reference.
25 posted on 03/09/2002 7:13:11 AM PST by ChocChipCookie
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To: week 71
The New York Times agenda is to replace the Bible with the Holocaust as the center of Jewish faith.
26 posted on 03/09/2002 7:20:48 AM PST by LarryLied
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To: eddie willers
We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. - 2 Peter 1:16

Good thing for Peter the "scholars" weren't around to set him straight.

27 posted on 03/09/2002 7:25:23 AM PST by kezekiel
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To: abwehr
You are mostly correct, but you are slightly off on one detail. MLK is not intended to be a modern day saint, he is intended to become a modern day replacement for God, while Adolf Hitler is the modern day replacement for Satan. Mark my words, within one hundred years there will be churches with preachers who call upon MLK to deliver humanity from evil.
28 posted on 03/09/2002 7:27:06 AM PST by Billy_bob_bob
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To: abwehr
Call it the 'deconstruction' of the bible but there is no doubt a lot of historical embellishment in all human history.

This is especially true in the case of supreme rulers who failed in some way. History is littered with rulers who erase and re-write history to cover their failures.

One can well imagine that, had the American war of independance begun in 1776 B.C. instead of A.D. the story would have transmogrified considerably as it passed from generation to generation in a less than scientific era.

Not necessarily. If it was written down at the time, and copied faithfully over the centuries, it would still be as accurate as the day it was recorded. Even stories passed down orally can remain accurate for many generations. My grandfather told my dad and I about an ancestor of ours who was wounded fighting against the British during the American Revolution. He heard the story from his grandfather, but could not remember the name of the ancestor. He urged us to try to find the ancestor's name by searching the Revolutionary war pension records at the National Archives. We found the battle story, and it was exactly as my grandfather had told us. In this case, the story remained accurate from the 1790's until the 1990's. There was some information *loss*, (the name) in the verbal account, but no corruption of the transferred information.

29 posted on 03/09/2002 7:27:09 AM PST by e_engineer
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To: eddie willers
Jesus Group = Jesus Seminar

Ah yes, that blue-ribbon committee of cutting-edge scholars who will tell you How to Make Your Very Own Jesus.

Dan

30 posted on 03/09/2002 7:27:59 AM PST by BibChr
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To: eddie willers
To the editors who worked on the book, it represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document.

Talk about faith in vain. Why worship, why go to synagogue, why follow Jewish law if you believe it's all simply Hebrew mythology? I want to puke every time I hear "my faith tradition" (ala AlGore). Traditions don't save, and it's foolishness to profess faith in something you don't believe.

31 posted on 03/09/2002 7:28:58 AM PST by kezekiel
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To: eddie willers
As for the mounting archaeological evidence suggesting the contrary, Rabbi Grossman said: "There's no evidence that it didn't happen. Most of the `evidence' is evidence from silence."

At one time, Pontius Pilate and King David were considered by "scholars" as mythological figures. Then, a war memorial was discovered that celebrated one of Israel's enemies' defeat of "the sons of David." Then, a cornerstone was found that contained an inscription dedicating the structure to Ceasar - signed, Pontius Pilate.

As has been noted, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

32 posted on 03/09/2002 7:34:46 AM PST by kezekiel
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To: eddie willers
Archeological facts??? Never have they found in their "digs" any evidence of a partial evolution of even one species to another let alone to a human...nothing anywhere in the world yet they continue to accept "on faith"
33 posted on 03/09/2002 7:35:06 AM PST by Sneer
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To: eddie willers
Inn a project of such complexity, there were inevitably many points of disagreement. But Rabbi Kushner says the only one that eluded resolution concerned Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence." "We couldn't come to a formulation that we could all be comfortable with," the rabbi said. "Some people felt that homosexuality is wrong. We weren't prepared to embrace that as the Conservative position. But at the same time we couldn't say this is a mentality that has been disproved by contemporary biology, for not everyone was prepared to go along with that." Ultimately, the editors settled on an anodyne compromise, noting that the Torah's prohibitions on homosexual relations "have engendered considerable debate" and that Conservative synagogues should "welcome gay and lesbian congregants in all congregational activities."

Except that modern biology has done no such thing. These Jews wish to be politically correct so strongly that they accept every shed of gay propoganda as truth. There is no gay gene, and the cause of homosexuality remains a mystery, especially as so many of them are bisexual.

34 posted on 03/09/2002 7:47:40 AM PST by RobbyS
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To: eddie willers
Time to grow up. People should not live by myths. Let's be practical and real and work hard. It does more wonders than any religion.
35 posted on 03/09/2002 7:51:07 AM PST by Eternal_Bear
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To: DugwayDuke
If one believes Exodus never happened and one believes Moses never existed...

The article does a poor job at explaining the complexity of the theological issues. It seems to be written by a secularist who believes that the only logical alternatives are that every word of the bible is literally given by God to Moses or that the bible is only a primitive "mythology" that perhaps contains important lessons for us today (written in a patronizing tone suggesting only primitive people need the myths). But even if intervening humans transmitted the bible until its text became fixed, the secularist bias is apparent in the assumption that God could play no role in that process.

In any event, there is a lesson in the Passover seder service, in which we teach children that we must create the mindset that we, too, personally were slaves in Egypt and were freed from bondage by God. Our lives are not to be lived differently because we personally did not happen to have been born in slavery. So, what if there was only one Jew ever taken into slavery in Egypt (does anyone believe that no single Jew was ever, for any reason, made a slave???)and the rest is embellishment? It makes no difference. God wants us to personally identify with slavery and credit God for our freedom. For thousands of years Jews have been adopting this mindset.

Historical honesty and truth are important, but it is a mistake to think that the legitimacy of one's religion or the truth of divine presence in one's sacred books hinges on the findings of archeologists.

36 posted on 03/09/2002 7:51:22 AM PST by Starrgaizr
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Comment #37 Removed by Moderator

To: eddie willers
It's so easy to tell when Easter/Passover season arrives by the hit pieces run in the "mainstream" media. Another year where that fact that the majority of scholars are conservative escapes our investigative media.
38 posted on 03/09/2002 8:02:39 AM PST by Sci Fi Guy
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To: eddie willers
Terrific example of what liberalism has done to a religion. Orthodox Jews, meaning those who believe in their religion, that the bible is the Word of G-d, have been taking hits from the other "branches" of Judism for years, not unlike Christian conservatives.

Leave it to these "other" Rabbis to come up with the idea that the religion that they practice and preach is a fraud... This is sort of like the episode of South Park, where there was a council of jews, including the "anti-semetic" branch!

Mark

39 posted on 03/09/2002 8:03:40 AM PST by MarkL
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To: eddie willers
Excavations showing that Jericho was unwalled and uninhabited

What an odd statement, if Jericho was uninhabited, how was it a city at all?

Plus, I have seen pictures of the rubble of the wall, they are often shown on the history channel.


40 posted on 03/09/2002 8:05:24 AM PST by razorback-bert
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