Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses

Ibn Khaldun, a Neglected Source of Antichristianity or Attacks on the Bible · Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I · More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now · Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses · Israelites at the Exodus

Well, they would claim:

Ezra wrote "Moses"

as they don't recognise Moses as a historical person or as a real author. And likewise kings David and Solomon are a mythical touch to two kingdoms that had broadly speaking the same religion, but had never been actually one single united kingdom. It was all invented during the exile.

Horseback riding in regular use, especially military such or for hunting, was invented some time in 800 BC by the Assyrians.

If the story of Genesis and Exodus were written after this, and if the story of kings David and Solomon were written after this, why did those inventing "myths" not put horseback riding as a regular and utilitary feature into these "myths"? It would have been within their experience. With no real historic tradition from before this time, they would have had no means of checking that horseriding hadn't been practised earlier.

Yet ... Absalom rode a mule and would not have ridden the mule in battle (or presumably even for hunting). Horses and their bits tend to come behind chariots, even into the time of King David. If Ezra had been inspired by Babylonian culture without any own historical culture, how would he have known?

Yet, someone knew, as I noted in the PS of Centaurs Revisited:

Did riding exist in the time of King David? According to above, it shouldn't have. So, I looked for the Latin case forms of "equus" in the psalms:

These, first of all, have no relation unambiguously to riding:

Nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus, quibus non est intellectus. In camo et freno maxillas eorum constringe, qui non approximant ad te.
[Psalms 31:9]

Fallax equus ad salutem; in abundantia autem virtutis suae non salvabitur.
[Psalms 32:17]

Non in fortitudine equi voluntatem habebit, nec in tibiis viri beneplacitum erit ei.
[Psalms 146:10]

Hi in curribus, et hi in equis; nos autem in nomine Domini Dei nostri invocabimus.
[Psalms 19:8]

This one, of course, does:

Ab increpatione tua, Deus Jacob, dormitaverunt qui ascenderunt equos.
[Psalms 75:7]

But : In finem, in laudibus. Psalmus Asaph, canticum ad Assyrios. It's not a psalm of David, but one of Asaph.

But didn't Absalom ride when his hair got stuck in a tree?

And it happened that Absalom met the servants of David, riding on a mule: and as the mule went under a thick and large oak, his head stuck in the oak: and while he hung between the heaven and the earth, the mule on which he rode passed on.
[II Kings 18:9]

He rode a mule, not a horse. Mule riding and donkey riding is older and it is not used in battle.

So far my PS ... so, the Ezra idea of Mosaic authorship should be at least somewhat shaken by the accuracy about conditions centuries older than Ezra in which there were no horseriders.

There is another idea which is also ludicrous, and I have seen AronRa propose it - the Tower of Babel story records the loss of one common language.

• First, cuneiform writing had been used for both Sumerian and Akkadian (two languages about as different as Chinese and Japanese) since centuries before the exile.
• Second, the cuneiform writing was not lost, it continued to be in a somewhat more restricted use after the fall of Babylon for a few centuries more, up to 1st C BC for last Sumerian and 1st C AD for last Akkadian texts.
• Third, Aramaic immediately took over as new official language, and it was a more practical one, closer to the actual spoken languages.

In other words, the non-miraculous event pretended to be behind the Tower of Babel story is impossible historically. It's as impossible as Queen Victoria getting exited at watching Back to the Future. Or C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien plagiarising George Lucas' Star Wars. Or a huge civil war breaking out in Germany when Hitler died, due to the power vacuum. This is impossible as in truly impossible, whether miracles be possible or not.

As a matter of fact, I think miracles are possible. But even if they weren't, that "explanation" behind the linguistic miracle of Babel would be Scooby Doo on an entirely wrong track.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Matthew, Apostle
21.IX.2021

John Shelby Spong Decided to be Wrong ...

Progressing Spirit had a new article on historicity of the Gospels, with the Questioner asking what we can historically actually know, given that, on their common view, Matthew is supposed to be liturgy which by definition is supposed to be non-historic.

I just finished Bishop Spong’s book arguing for Matthew as 1st century synagogue liturgy. ... Accepting that the Gospel accounts of events in Jesus and the disciples’ lives are nonhistorical creations intended to reach Jews in a traditional Jewish liturgical framework,

which obviously leads up to the question:

what *did* Jesus do and say that made the God’s presence in human life so clear to his followers, that it was worth teaching about in synagogues 50 years later?

Now, the obvious stumbling block is Spong's assumption (according to the Questioner Hugh's resumé) that liturgy by definition is non-historical.

It would be a very Protestant approach to imagine the Martyrology entries are non-historical, and it would be a very ignorant approach to imagine they are not liturgy. The Martyrology was read at a specific entry in the liturgy of hours, during Matins.

In Pagan liturgy too, namely Greek tragedy, the fact that the context is a liturgy of Dionysus doesn't mean that the tragedies are supposed to be non-historical (note, in the case of dialogues, it was accepted that dialogues were fictional renderings of what was said rather than straight recordings, but as the dialogue snippets in the Gospels are much shorter, this need not have been the case with these, as with predecessors even back to Genesis).

Disqualifying liturgy and other religious text types from being thereby historical accounts would definitely leave us with questions like the follow up by Hugh.

Behind the proposition, sometimes you do find rank atheism, but in this case it's revolutionary para-Christianity:

But then matters changed. As the disciples died a new generation of followers arose and the thinking and organization of the “Way” changed dramatically. The written gospels took shape in different locales with different purposes, and so also did other Christian writings of the same period. Much of that writing makes it painfully obvious that a reaction to the revolutionary impetus of Jesus and his disciples had set in. If Jesus had manifested equality of caring and sharing in the community of friends, much of the later writing rejects that vision, epitomized in the warning of 1 Timothy that slaves obey masters, women obey men, the church obey the bishops, and everyone obey the rulers. Not what Jesus had in mind.

So, Dr. Carl Krieg claims to know what Jesus had in mind despite tradition and despite texts accepted by tradition as by contemporaries (directly with Matthew and John, by intermediates who took good note with Marc and Luke). With such an agenda - for his agenda is showing "Jesus" forth as a prophet for Lenin - he has a vested interest in the pretexts that Spong and others invent for not taking the texts as what tradition accepted them as.

Then the fact that such apostates with "Christian" sugarcoating invest their erudition and reputation as scholars into such wild schemes helps atheists to pretend "we don't know who wrote the Gospels."

We do, but some don't want to know.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Dorotheus and Gorgonius
9.IX.2021

Quoting first entry for today's martyrology:

Nicomediae passio sanctorum Martyrum Dorothei et Gorgonii, qui, cum essent apud Diocletianum Augustum honores amplissimos consecuti, et persecutionem, quam ille Christianis inferebat, detestarentur, praesente eo, jussi sunt primo appendi, et flagris toto corpore laniari; deinde, visceribus pelle nudatis, aceto et sale perfundi, sicque assari in craticula; atque, ad ultimum, laqueo necari. Interjecto autem tempore, beati Gorgonii corpus Romam delatum fuit, ac via Latina positum, et inde ad Basilicam sancti Petri translatum.

Of course the Gospels were meant for liturgic reading, that makes them a very conservative and well conserved text type. Like martyrologies./HGL

PS, it seems Jewish rejectors of Jesus are also into the game, an ex-Christian Muslim just recommended Geza Vermes.

He was also an apostate from Catholic priesthood.

And when getting back to the Judaism he came from, very badly wanted to get Jesus with him, so badly he was willing to invent "Christian editing" adding fake stories to the Gospels. He pretended even the reachout to Samaritans was an invention, not a fact.

He died 2013 and is arguably in Hell.

Also in Paris, Vermes befriended and worked with Paul Demann, a scholar, like him, of Hungarian Jewish origins.[7] Together with a third collaborator, Renee Bloch, they battled doggedly against the anti-Semitic content in Catholic education and ritual of the time.[7] The Second Vatican Council would later accept many of the trio's theological arguments.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9za_Vermes

With footnote 7 referring to:

Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to Jewish Roots, Dies at 88
Benjamin Ivry | May 15, 2013
https://forward.com/news/176752/geza-vermes-hungarian-bible-scholar-who-returned-t/