“The Bible’s Buried Secrets" on NOVA

[moobu2]

It's not airing until November 18th and thumpers are already circulating petitions to get congress to de-fund PBS over it. I know, they hate PBS anyway, but this really has them riled (Kind of fun to watch in itself), anyway, NOVA’s special should be fascinating..

It’s not often you hear “Nova” and “shocking” in the same sentence.
But participants in “The Bible’s Buried Secrets,” a two-hour special airing Nov. 18 on the PBS program, promised this morning that the show would trigger a fair share of controversy.
The special explores the ancient Israelites’ adoption of monotheism and seeks to explain who wrote the Hebrew Bible and what influenced them. Relying on archaeological work and biblical scholarship, the show poses provocative ideas -- including the notion that many Israelites believed that God had a wife –- and disputes literal readings of the text.

<snip>

The stories of Exodus and Abraham and Sarah “are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there’s some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time


More

[intheflow]

1. This is what I learned at my Methodist seminary.

It's mainstream theology from mainstream Christianity. These filmmakers are only sharing what is being discussed freely in Christian religious circles. This fundy zeal is exactly why ancient rabbis and priests thought they needed to build up walls and rituals around the sacred--they feared the people couldn't handle the truth. And this sheep mentality would prove them right.

[crimsonblue]

2. no offense...

but the truth? there's not a single bit of truth to be found in the whole of the bible. I don't why people believe in a 1500 yr old book than they do in observable facts of science.

[intheflow]

3. First of all, you can't offend me on this.

I'm not Christian, so I don't have a pony in this race, per se.

That being said, many any of us (mainline clergy of all faiths) look at the bible as allegory. For example, I don't think The Sneetches has a shred of truth in it, but it's still a good story that taught me about the evils of racism at a very early age. That's kind of how I view the bible: I don't believe in heaven. But I can appreciate the sentiment behind the parable that states it'll be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it would be for Cheney, er, a rich man to get into heaven. What you're supposed to learn about are the evils of greed and avarice.

It's just the extremists, the literalists who think it's all true word for word. They're vocal and nutty as squirrels, but I don't think they make up the majority of Christians.

[crimsonblue]

4. i can see your point

but i doubt the good book was made as an allegory. I see it as a profit making scheme and a means to wrestle complete control over the lives of man.

[intheflow]

5. Ah, you're confusing the message and the manipulation.

I believe Jesus talked in allegory a lot. But his followers were dense and didn't "get it," they were always asking him to explain his parables. Unfortunately, it was that same dense genus of followers who eventually wrote down his stories--which were written down, btw, 50-300 years after his death so if had become a big game of telephone. I agree the bible as it was canonized was heavily edited to fit one viewpoint only, but I don't think it was so much a conspiracy to make money or control the masses, but more because they wanted everyone to be on the same page when spreading the story. It's just easier to teach if everyone's using the same textbook.

OK, some people probably liked controlling the masses, but there were probably as many reasons men participated in the canonization as there were men participating. I think most believed they were doing the world a favor. You know that saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" If they were grateful that they had "seen the light," they wanted others to have that same experience. That's not evil, it's them trying to share. It's totally misguided, they shouldn't assume everyone wants or needs that kind of experience, but it's not inherently evil for them to want to share. It's the people who use religion as a weapon that are really the root of your interpretation of the bible--and we need look no further than James Dobson or Fred Phelps to see that those types still get all the press.

[HamdenRice]

6. "not a single bit of truth to be found in the whole of the bible" -- huh???

You realize most professional historians would disagree with you, right? Maybe you are exaggerating, but for your statement to be true, there would have to be not a single true historical statement in the entire bible.

The bible was composed over thousands of years for various purposes -- historical record, law book, statement of custom, as well as myth, legend and outright fabrication. But the assertions that can be corroborated are important contributions to ancient history.

[Goblinmonger]

7. I would agree that is unneeded hyperbole

and I would not make an absolute statement like that. I would argue that the "biggies" in the bible aren't true: Jesus, Exodus, Garden of Eden. Sure there are some things that may be historically accurate, but what we know is historically accurate is learned elsewhere.

[HamdenRice]

9. I'd agree with two out of three

It is very odd that Exodus appears to have no archaelogical basis at all. Usually, big events like that aren't just fabricated and have some basis in fact, however tenuous, but this one appears to be entirely fabricated.

As for the historical Jesus, the evidence is compelling that there was a rabbi/healer/radical of that name around that time. Jonathan Croson does a really meticulous job in The Historical Jesus for showing why, and what may be true about him in the oldest books of the New Testament.

When I was young, I did a research project in Africa and interviewed a number of elderly people about a certain chief who had been very active politically from around 1910 to 1940 when he died (he was a founding member of the ANC despite living in a sleepy backwater village). I was doing these interviews around 50 years later, but also had written records to which to compare the elders' recollections. The elders' recollections were remarkably accurate, and in some cases more accurate than contemporary written records (I discovered that officials lied in their own records at times).

The NT began to be written down in a similar time frame, and despite the already creeping divinity of Jesus stuff, there is little reason to believe that the basic outline is wrong.

I recall an article I read many years ago in the field of African historiography, that basically provided a kind of timeline/matrix for the reliability of oral history and recollections, and it basically said that information about personalities that the current generation knew is generally accurate. Information gets more inaccurate, though, the further back you go, and after about four generations, the personalities become more and more mythic, so real chiefs get turned into mythical heroes after about 150 years.

The original texts of the NT are on the newer/more accurate scale of that phenomenon.

[Goblinmonger]

10. Haven't read the Croson book

and probably never will. I have way too long of a list of books to read to keep me feeling like I'm an "on top of it" English teacher. Do I doubt that there was a rabble-rouser during the time of Roman Occupation? No. Do I think that person was Jesus? No. There is enough written history from the time and the only place we hear of the miracles et al is in the gospels. Plus the parallels to Odysseus and other prior epic heroes is just too much. Perhaps if I catch up on my reading, I'll give Croson a whirl.

[Viva_Daddy]

13. What is your evidence that the Gospels were newer/more accurate?

Paul's letters were circulating circa 55 to 70 AD but the four Gospels we have in our NT were not circulating or being quoted by the early Church fathers until around 160 to 180 AD...well over 100 years after the supposed time of Jesus. The earliest extant Gospels we have are from the 4th or 5th century AD.

[HamdenRice]

15. It depends on what you mean by "Gospel"

The question at hand isn't when stable, orthodox, canonical gospels emerged, but when the information in the synoptic gospels was written, and hence how accurate the information is likely to be.

At the moment, I don't have either Croson or the New Jerusalem Bible in front of me, but basically biblical scholars date the "writing down" of the gospel stories to the earliest fragments available that get repeated in the canonical texts.

The consensus seems to be that the earliest "gospels" are Mark and the "Q Document," which are likely dated to around 70 AD. Depending on what date you accept for the birth of the historical Jesus, and how old he was when he died, this would put the time lag between the initial recording of the information contained in Mark and Q and the events recorded in them at around 30 to 50 years.

[Viva_Daddy]

19. The 4 Gospels in our NT are not the earliest

If Mark was written around 70 AD then why did it take almost 100 years for any of the early Church fathers to quote from it? There were "gospels" circulating around in the first half of the second century AD but they were all talking about the "good news" of salvation for gentiles and most were praising Plato rather than Jesus. No early church father quoted from the 4 gospels we have in our NT until circa 160 to 180 AD, nor were any of these 4 gospels identified by name until 180 AD. For background on this see The Jesus Puzzle and especially the article on the 2nd century apologists. Also check out the writings of biblical scholar Richard M. Price.

[HamdenRice]

20. You are focused on the semantics, not the historicity issue

Few professional historians of antiquity believe that the gospels originated when someone sat down with a quill and said, gee, I going to write the gospel of Mark today, and did so creating a gospel in final form. The fact that certain documents weren't recognized as and called gospels until much later is a different question from when the information contained in the synoptic gospels was first committed to paper, and therefore, the extent to which they reflect the historicity of Jesus and the various events portrayed in the texts.

Obviously, in an age before word processors, people copied and recopied texts by hand rather than saving them to their hard drives in completed form.

The dating of when Mark (or proto Mark, if you like) and Q were written is based on a variety of historical evidence, as well as comparison of various fragments, non-cannonical texts, and internal evidence in the texts themselves.

As for the Jesus puzzle material, that is a far outlier (and not in a good way) in terms of quality and scholarly acceptance -- even the very few scholars who don't think there was an historical Jesus don't think very highly of it.

The consensus of professional scholars who have studied this very closely using the most advanced methologies is that the gospels (or proto gospels) were written around 70 AD.

[Viva_Daddy]

21. Most "professional scholars" are believers

so I take their opinions are inherently biased for an early date. That's no problem as long as we don't forget their bias (and,yes, the other side is also biased). However, where is the EVIDENCE? Reading the historical record of anti-nicean church fathers is the best evidence for the existence or non-existence of texts and their dates (although not all these church fathers have been definitely dated). At least that's evidence, not just the opinion of those who simply want to believe otherwise.

[AmyCamus]

17. The first few words cancel out all the rest.

It might as well begin "Once upon a time..."

[HamdenRice]

18. How do the first few words of one book cancel the entire work?

I agree that Genesis is written as a fable. In fact, in ancient Hebrew, Adam simply means "man" or "a man," and clearly was not intended to refer to a person or individual character.

But the books of the bible were written over several thousand years, with very different intentions. How do the first few words of the fable of Genesis "cancel" the books that were intended as historical records?

[uberllama42]

8. There's something seriously wrong with this coutnry

when the suggestion that 3000 year old myths made up by Bronze Age desert nomads on the opposite side of the Earth are false incites considerable controversy.

And what's with the idea that God had a wife? It's long been suspected that that meme resided within the ancient Hebrew meme pool? It's not new and provocative, it's a long-established theory.

[Viva_Daddy]

12. God's wife not just a meme

Archaeologists found around three Jewish temples in Egypt at Elephantine about the time of the prophet Jeremiah. There they found that the Jews in Egypt were worshiping a God named "Jahweh" and his consort "Anat".

[knitter4democracy]

14. Poor Anat.

I wonder what her divorce settlement was.

[Crowman1979]

11. The Bible was a stepping stone for humanity that had it's faults.

It was a step forward from the wanton worship of various gods that required demanding sacrifices from it's followers. Yet it continued instilled a slave and consequence mentality. In the long run it still provided an origin and inspiration for a better way of life for mankind by way of science and democratic law, in which humanity has become less dependent on this and other sacred texts, with all of the questions and problems of life being solved as mankind progresses, while our fears of submisssion to a belief system subside.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. I learned all this stuff in my Episcopal-church sponsored course for lay people

:shrug:

It will be interesting to see what ends up on Nova.