Posted on 03/09/2002 6:05:30 AM PST by eddie willers
-- Joseph Myerson, 1873 - 1956
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value in a spiritual sense in a thousand different ways for billions of people, and lose nothing as time marches on and historical references are exposed as less-than-literal.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.
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.
Good thing for Peter the "scholars" weren't around to set him straight.
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.
Ah yes, that blue-ribbon committee of cutting-edge scholars who will tell you How to Make Your Very Own Jesus.
Dan
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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