Reply #78: Did you know Shakespere was gay? And he was really some aristocrat? [View All]

[bemildred]

And that Homer was a woman and so was one of the authors of the Torah?
:evilgrin:

Butler developed a theory that the Odyssey came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily and its nearby islands. He described the evidence for this theory in his The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on this hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter. In a lecture titled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Man's College in London, 1892, Butler argued that Homer's gods in the Iliad are like men but "without the virtue" and that the poet "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously."

Wikipedia

Modern biblical critics have called the author of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible J, standing for Jahweh. Bloom and translator Rosenberg, authors of many works of literary criticism and of Jewish and biblical studies, have collaborated on a clear but controversial translation and analysis of parts of the Pentateuch using the term Jahweh. Bloom claims that the author of J was a woman, living in or at the time of the Solomonic court, 950-900 B.C.E., who wrote these selections not as a religious or historical treatise but as a literary work that Bloom compares to Shakespeare. While Rosenberg's translation is both modern and moving, he has made significant changes in the meanings of the Hebrew text. The proofs offered for these theories are no substitute for hard evidence. Nevertheless, The Book of J deserves consideration as a literary work.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-J-Harold-Bloom/dp/0802141919