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21/04/09 10:33 AMThe Bible And Christianity -- The Historical OriginsPage 1 of 28http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm
The Bible And Christianity - The Historical Origins
A rational, secular, historical perspective on the history of Christianity and its scripture
An essay byScott Bidstrup
"If the truth is that ugly -- which it is -- then we do have to becareful about the way that we tell the truth. But to somehow saythat telling the truth should be avoided because people may respondbadly to the truth seems bizarre to me."
--
Chuck Skoro,
Deacon, St.Paul's Catholic Church
T
he Bible is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to Christians, especially, it is a source of inspiration and a guideto daily living.To others, the Bible is a historical document and a source of controversy.To others still, the Bible is a self-contradictory mish-mash of arcane rules and proscriptions, mostly relevant to long-dead cultures in far away places.What is the truth in all of this?The reality is that it is all true to an extent, and equally nonsensical at the same time. The Bible has meaning to allits readers, but it is important to consider that the meaning it has is informed by the prejudices the reader brings toit.To really understand the Bible and what it intends to say to present generations, it is necessary to understand whowrote it and why, and the cultural context in which it was written. The story is an interesting one, in no small partbecause the story is so much messier than most of its advocates would have you to believe. And its very messinessis why it is a story rarely told in any completeness to Christian audiences.The overriding theme of the Bible storylines is the theme of cultural conquest. Conquest by the Hebrews over their enemy neighbors, culturally by the Jews over the Israelites (used here to mean members of the ten "lost" tribes),the Christians over the Jews, the Catholics over the Gnostics, Marcionites, and other pre-Catholic factions, and onand on. In some cases, the conquest is recordedas a historical, often military event. In others, it merely is recordedas a change in content and context, an alteration of the storyline and outlook and worldview.And the story of the editing and translation of the final form of the Bible into what today is regarded as holy scriptureis a story not just of cultural conquest, but of political intrigues, and not just between competing bishops, but withsecular political authority itself. It is as if the U.S. congress or president were to decide what constituted Christiandoctrine and scripture, and everyone went along - at the peril of their lives - until no one even questioned theaccuracy of the official viewpoint.The effect of its origins as selected parts of whole bodies of scripture, written by at least a hundred and fifty differentpeople in dozens of different places at different times, many centuries apart, and for different reasons, colors whatits authors wrote. Yet that simple fact is widely ignored, both by people who naively follow what they read in it asthe inerrant word of God, and by more liberal scholastic theologians, who seek to understand its historical contextas well as a body of doctrinal scripture, which they often blindly follow, even though they know full well its messyorigins.
Origins of the Earliest Scripture
 
21/04/09 10:33 AMThe Bible And Christianity -- The Historical OriginsPage 2 of 28http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm
This book is anexcellent surveyof the currentstate of OldTestamentarchaeology. Itwill be of considerableinterest to bothskeptic andapologist alike!
Get it here!
The BibleUnearthed :Archaeology'sNew Vision of Ancient Israel andThe Origin of ItsSacred TextsbyIsrael Finkelsteinand Neil Asher Silberman,published 2001.This book was abest-seller on theNew York Timesbest seller list andfor good reason: ittraces thefascinating originsof the Christian,Judaic andIslamic god backto its CanaaniteandMesopotamianroots. Good read!
Prehistory to 1850 B.C.E.
Scholars have traced the roots of many of the Old Testament stories to the ancient, paganmyths of the ancient Mesopotamian cultures. In the Fertile Crescent, the waters of the Tigrisand Euphrates rivers, in present-day Iraq, gave birth to some of the worlds first civilizations.In this early flowering of civilization, many religious myths abounded, seeking to explain whatwas then unexplainable. From this context comes the oldest complete literary work we have,the age of which we are certain, dating back at least 7,000 years. The Epic of Gilgamesh isa lengthy narrative of heroic mythology that incorporates many of the religious myths of Mesopotamia, and it is the earliest complete literary work that has survived.Many of the stories in that epic were eventually incorporated into the book of Genesis.Borrowed from the Epic of Gilgamesh are stories of the creation of man in a wondrousgarden, the introduction of evil into a naive world, and the story of a great flood brought onby the wickedness of man, that flooded the whole world.In this Mesopotamian basin civilization, known to us today as the Chaldean Empire, tribalalliances that predated the amalgamation into a single empire, continued to exist andflourish. Many were allied to the palace, many opposed, all retained elements of their pre-conquest cultures.The patriarchs first appear in our story with the journey of one of them, Abraham, who, thestory tells us, led members of his tribe from the city of Ur, west towards the Mediterranean,to the "promised land" of Canaan, sometime between the 19th and 18th centuries B.C.E. Or so the story goes.The problem is that we don't really have any good archeaological evidence to support theAbraham story, and there is much archaeological evidence to contradict it. The land whereAbraham supposedly settled, the southern highlands of Palestine (from Jerusalem south thethe Valley of Beersheba) is very sparse in archaeological evidence from this period. It isclear from the archaeological record that its population was extremely sparse - no more thana few hundred people in the entire region, and the sole occupants of the area during thistime were nomadic pastoralists, much like the Bedouin of the region today. We know fromclear archaeological evidence that the peoples known as the Phillistines never even enteredthe region until the 12th century B.C.E., and the "city of Gerar" in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, had his encounter with Abimelech, the "king of the Phillistines" (in Genesis 26:1)was in fact a tiny, insignificant rural village up until the 8th century B.C.E. It couldn't havebeen the capital of the regional king of a people who didn't yet exist!This isn't the only problem with the account of the Age of the Patriarchs, either. There's theproblem of the camels. We know from archaeological evidence that camels weren'tdomesticated until about the late second millenium B.C.E., and that they weren't widely usedas beasts of burden until about 1000 B.C.E. - long after the Age of the Patriarchs. And thenthere's the problem of the cargo carried by the camels - "gum, balm and myrrh," which wereproducts of Arabia - and trade with Arabia didn't begin until the era of Assyrian hegemony inthe region, beginning in the 8th century B.C.E.Yet another problem is Jacob's marriage with Leah and Rachel, and his relationship with hisuncle, Laban, all of whom are described as being Arameans. This ethnic group does notappear in the archeological record prior to 1100 B.C.E., and not a significant group until the9th century B.C.E.Yet influences from the east must have been, because we have evidence of worship of their gods and goddesses. The heiarchy of gods and goddesses who included Baal, the god of storms, who made the land fertile, and Lotan, the seven-headed dragon, known to OldTestament readers as Leviathan. There is Yam Nahar, the god of the seas and rivers, andother pantheons and heiarchies of gods and goddesses.
1
Reigning over them all was El, theking of the gods, ruler of the pantheon. Remember the name, we'll encounter it again.
 
21/04/09 10:33 AMThe Bible And Christianity -- The Historical OriginsPage 3 of 28http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm
Get it here!
A History of God:The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism,Christianity andIslamby KarenArmstrong,published 1994.
The Problem of the Exodus Story and the First Great Revision of Judaism
about 1200 B.C.E.
The fact is that with all that is known of Egyptian history from this time (since scholars cannow read the records the ancient Egyptians with the ease of a modern newspaper), and thefact that the history of Egypt in this period is well documented, there is no evidence from therecords of Egypt itself that the events of Exodus ever occured, either archaeologically or documentarily in the manner in which the Bible describes the events. The reality is that if aseries of plagues had been visited upon Egypt, thousands of slaves escaped in a massrunaway, and the army of the Pharaoh were swallowed up by the Red Sea, such eventswould
doubtless
have made it into the Egyptian documentary record. But the reality is thatthere isn't a single word describing any such events.Instead, what we do have from Egyptian sources is a remarkably different story of theExodus. From about the beginning of the second millenium B.C.E., through about 1200B.C.E., Egypt ruled the region known today as Palestine. How do we know this? We know itnot only from Egyptian records themselves, which talk about tribute taken from the varioustowns and cities in Canaan, but from archaeological evidence within the region itself, which shows a number of settlements which were clearly Egyptian military outposts.During this time, the region which was to become the land of Israel, occupying the northern highlands between thecoastal plain and the valley of the Jordan river, was sparsely populated and densly forested with stands of oak andterebinth trees. This land was populated by one of two groups (we're not sure which), either the Apiru or Shoshupeoples. The former were known to have originated as intinerant nomads, largely on the fringes of lowland society,who may have taken refuge in the highlands, or the Shosu, a more cohesive, well-defined group. The linguisticassociation of Apiru (sometimes Habiru) with the word, "Hebrew" had long, in the minds of scholars, beenconsidered good evidence that this was the group that gave rise to the Hebrews, but we now know that theassociation wasn't quite that simple. The name may have been from that source, but the people probably weren't.In any event, the highlands of northern Palestine which was home to the Kingdom of Israel has a highly variableclimate. Agricultural productivity, and the ability of people to sustain trade with the lowlands, was subject to varyingclimatic conditions, meaning that famine was a frequent occurence. When crops failed and trade could not besustained, it was not uncommon for people to flee the region and head for refuge where crops were dependable.The nearest such place was the Nile delta in Egypt.So many of the "Hebrews" (culturally indistinct from the Canaanites at this time), who were citizens of Egypt, fled tothe Nile delta. Time and again. Every time there was a famine in Judah, Israel or Canaan, refugees headed for Egypt. The event was so common, and the refugees so numerous, that they eventually became a substantialminority group, influential in Egypt, where they were known as the Hyksos, as is now very clear from thearchaeological record.The story of the expulsion of the Hyksos is easily the closest parallel we have from either the Egyptian record or thearchaeological record to the story of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible. There are problems, though. Besides theExodus story line, the biggest problem is the dates: the Bible places the Exodus at about 1200 B.C.E., yet the storyof the Hyksos culminates in 1570 B.C.E. It is quite likely that the story of the Hyksos is the story that eventually,through generations of revisionistic retelling, became the myth of the Exodus -- another example of history beingrewritten to flatter the storytellers rather than to record the unvarnished truth.Anyway, the Hyksos grew in influence until they eventually took control of Egypt, which they ruled, withconsiderable cruelty and tyrrany during the Fifteenth Dynasty, beginning in 1670 B.C.E. The Egyptians had finallyhad enough, though, and rebelled against the rule of the Hyksos and drove them out a century later in 1570 B.C.E.They weren't just driven out, either; the Egyptians pushed them back into Canaan with considerable force, drivingthem all the way to the Syrian frontier, sacking and burning Canaanite cities along the way. Sometime later, theHyksos capital in Egypt, Avaris, in the eastern Nile delta, was razed to the ground by the Pharoah Ahmose, whochased the last remnants of the Hyksos back into Canaan and even laid siege to Sharuhen, the main Canaanitecitadel, destroying it and ending Canaanite influence there. At least one historian claims (a millenium after the fact)that the Hyksos refugees settled in Jerusalem and built a temple there, but the archaeological record does notsupport the claim of either a temple or large numbers of refugees in Jerusalem from this period.It is quite clear from the archaeological record, as well, that there never was a "wandering in the desert for 40
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