somewhere else

mercredi 12 janvier 2022

Where is the First Person if Moses and some Disciples wrote Torah and Gospels?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Bart answered ... · Continuing with Leo Yohansen · With Leo Yohensen, Snappy Version · Leo Yohansen is Back · somewhere else : Apostles and St. Irenaeus · Where is the First Person if Moses and some Disciples wrote Torah and Gospels? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Also under the video with GMS and Leo Yohansen

Silent Reading is a fairly recent invention.

I think it was St. Augustine who got surprised at St. Ambrose bending over a book, not voicing anything, but still apparently attentive and so apparently reading.

I have this from C. S. Lewis, and I forget which work. And it's so long ago, it could be the reverse, but the roles of the two people (bishop Ambrose teaching rhetoric to an as yet pagan Augustine) suggest I got it right.

Now, what has silent reading have to do with this? This: in a narrative read by a silent reader (after c. 380 AD), the reader may imagine the first person as speaking directly to him. But prior to this, standard procedure of reading was asking a slave to read to you, aloud.

You would not imagine the slave as actually the first person narrator.

Even if a priest read a certain text in Church, or earlier on in the Temple or the Tabernacle, during the Old Testament, you would not imagine the Cohen as Moses, especially if the first Cohen Gadol was Moses' brother Aaron, and you would not imagine the Christian priest as St. Luke watching St. Paul raise the dead boy or as The Beloved Disciple.

The use of first person in any kind of narrative was rare.

In the case of Augustus Caesar, steles were raised with his self account in the first person, very few are left, one very complete one being in modern day Ankara, back then Ancyra, therefore the text is known as Monumentum Ancyranum. Probably having the priest to Augustus (who was deified) read from the Stele did not work very well for imagining Augustus speaking. And the show being bad was called off in more than one place.

So, what was the solution? Moses wrote of himself in the third person, so did Julius Caesar, and so did the Beloved Disciple. This way, when someone else was reading the story, aloud to you, you did not need to be able to imagine that someone as the narrator speaking to you of his own life - the authors imagined how someone else would sound when speaking of them.

One of the first longer accounts in he first person was speech number 1 by Libanius. Speeches by orators were typically (first time over at least) performed by the orator himself who had written them. Except when the first person of the speech was their client, back in Athens - and the orator was coaching the performance of the client before he spoke on his own behalf (but not without all the aid of an orator).

The persons who claim, the lack of first person in Torah and Gospels, as well as Acts, prove the authors are not Moses, actual disciples, or St. Luke, are simply handicapped in cultural history. And for one, haven't read Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars or even Asterix, where Goscinny ridicules this "speeking of himself in the third person" as if it were a personal foible of Caesar.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ember Wednesday after Epiphany*
12.I.2022

* No Ember days after Epiphany, I misplaced the Ember days after As Wednesday ... my bad.

lundi 27 décembre 2021

Apostles and St. Irenaeus

mardi 21 septembre 2021

Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses

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

jeudi 9 septembre 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/

jeudi 15 juillet 2021

The One Myth that is True?

New blog on the kid: Was C.S. Lewis refuted by Elisabeth Anscombe? · somewhere else: The One Myth that is True?

C.S. Lewis:: Baldr, Osiris, how come Jesus isn't also a myth?
J.R.R. Tolkien:: Of course it is, but it's the one myth that is true.
T.W. Rolleston:: [named a book Celtic Myths and Legends]

How come Baldr and Osiris are untrue myths and Jesus is a true one?

Now, I would say definitely that Baldr is an untrue myth, the Danes seemed to have kept a memory from before they became Odinists of Odin simply grieving over a Baldr killed in battle (see Saxo). The ideas later spread of Baldr being killed by Hodr and then ruling a land of blessed dead in the underworld is simply a rip off from the Osiris story.

Osiris could have lived and been killed by his brother Seth and had his wife and sister impregnated by some primitive type of artificial insemination, but the parts about his then going on to rule the blessed dead in the netherworld is an error. It's wishful thinking on part of those grieving. It involves no immediate nor any observed resurrection.

With Perseus, I don't deny he killed a dragon to save Andromeda. I do deny he went up to heaven to form a star constellation and that she did so.

Romulus, Perseus, perhaps (as said, it's more questionable to me) Osiris were played out by real men, before their eyes. Like Ulysses getting home to Ithaca, like Aeneas leaving Troy.

What one would normally mean by "divine myth" (Göttersage in German) are things like Apollo chasing Daphne and then turning her to a laurel tree or Ymer proceeding with the cow Audhumbla from a mixture of ice and fire. If true, we would not have seen it, and it concerns the divine.

What one would normally mean by "heroic legend" (Heldensage in German) is - if true - played out before human eyes.

Sometimes these overlap, as with Romulus : it is divine myth that he and Remus were sired by Apollo or that he vanished and was taken up to the gods and one ows him worship. It is heroic legend that he and Remus had a part semi-feral upbringing (semi-feral, since having each other, if no adult humans around among the wolves, or with the she-wolf). It is also so that they revenged their at least reputed grandfather Numitor on the grand-uncle Amulius and that they founded Rome, on which occasion Romulus hit too hard, namely with a sword, and killed Remus.

Now, I would definitely say that in the divine myth part of mythology (the pure divine myths, and the divine myth part of overlapping myths/legends) Pagans were bad theologers. Their views include errors. But I would equally say, that in the heroic legend part of it (pure heroic legends and the heroic legend part of overlapping myths/legends), they were decently good historians.

Hercules was a strong man, and wrongly taken to be son of Zeus. Romulus and Remus were sired mysteriously (bad guarding or demonic versions of medically assisted procreation) and belligerent and victorious and this was wrongly taken to mean they were sons of Mars. Nothing in the lives indicates any serious claim to real divinity, except to Pagans who have low bars. Hercules restoring Alcestis to life could be plagiarised from an event older than the oldest telling we know of Alcestis, namely Elias raising the boy.

Gospels are far nearer, and Jesus raising dead and even, very uniquely, resurrecting without someone else raising Him, that argues the divine of some sort. And the Church, founded on a basis of pious Hebrews, give a faithful recording, both of the miracles and of the claims to be God, the Son.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St.Henry I
15.VII.2021

vendredi 25 juin 2021

Do Different Interpretations of Christianity Make God a Liar if Existant?

somewhere else: Do Different Interpretations of Christianity Make God a Liar if Existant? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: OceanKeltoi on The Interpretation Argument ...

Lita Cosner answered a question for CMI, but not on Creation Science. It is more into general Christian apologetics, though it has ramifications into my specifically Catholic apologetics.

Here is the article:

The ‘interpretation argument’: an irrefutable argument against Christianity?
Published: 26* June 2021 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/interpretation-argument

Here are two arguments by the arguer who is there answered, both are right:

1. For any event God wants, he knows how to bring it about (omniscience)
2. For any event God wants, he is capable of bringing it about (omnipotence)
Therefore: If God chooses to bring about a particular event, it must occur.

1. For any message God wants to communicate, he knows how to communicate it such that it will be interpreted correctly
2. For any message God wants to communicate, he is capable of communicating it such that it will be interpreted correctly
Therefore: If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted correctly.

I absolutely agree to both.

I also consider there is freewill and there is the fall. It would be contradictory for God to want to have any message ONLY interpreted correctly, overriding freewill with mistakes and overriding sin, so the consequence of error doesn't occur.

If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted correctly.

Correct as it stands. This does not mean:

"If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted ONLY correctly."

But there must be a means for a man of goodwill to get to know the difference, if it is important to him and the matter is important.

The solution is, there must be some kind of "denomination" (for want of a better word) which is not just a denomination, but outstanding.

There exist two types of claim to being that:

the claim of having preserved unaltered apostolic tradition;
the claim of having restored correctly a previously altered apostolic tradition.

Modern Anglicans claim neither.

Roman Catholics, Greek or Slavic or Eastern Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Assyrians claim the former. So du certain Baptists with Baptist Continuity theory.

Mormons, JW, Church of God, and if I get them correctly, Messianic Jews as well, make the latter claim.

Now, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anglicans, Calvinists once upon a time used to be making the claim, not quite "we have successfully and correctly restored the true apostolic tradition" (though I think Lutheran Orthodoxy in Sweden came fairly close to making it), but at least "we are in the process of restoring the apostolic tradition that the RCC bungled or perverted intentionally" - the kind of claim the JW sect would be making for Charles Taze Russell back when he was reconsidering whether rapture was Biblical doctrine or Christian tradition.

This would mean, on a first approximation, look to those making the claim of perfect doctrine.

However, there is a second approximation to make, namely to avoid the restorationist type of claim. I don't mean claims of restoring papacy after a gap of 32 years, I adher to one such claim myself, but more like claims of restoring Bible obedience after gaps of centuries. The reason is, messages of God supposedly "stantis et cadentis ecclesiae" would have been for centuries inaccessible to men of good will.

On the other hand, the mainstream of either RCC or EOC would by now accept Evolution - no way that could be part of apostolic tradition or the accomodations it now calls for (I have recently seen RC or so called such denying the individuality of Adam, a Babylonic trait in theology, and a documented such, since Babylonian "gods" were supposed to create mankind directly on a collective level, fit for working to make their celestial lives a bit easier with sacrifices of food) being accomodations that apostolic tradition allows.

One could take the view this mainstream only allows evolutionism, but this seems less and less likely to be true. Once it de facto demands it, for instance by stamping Young Earth Creationists not just as kooks in the colloquial sense, but as mentally ill, that departure from Apostolic tradition seems to be already done. Such RC are not RC, such an RCC is not the RCC. Similar observations for EOC.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. William the Confessor
founder of Order of Monte Vergine
25.VI.2021

* CMI articles are published in Australian Time Zone, available while it is still previous date in Western Europe.

samedi 5 juin 2021

Does 3.14 in any sense mean 3?

"Also a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass: it was five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about."
[2 Paralipomenon (2 Chronicles) 4:2]

"He made also a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round all about; the height of it was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about."
[3 Kings (1 Kings) 7:23]

Sounds like someone rounded off 3 point 14 to 3, right?

Now, I was told early on by my mother that "pi" is "tre komma 14" (3,14 as per non-English for instance Swedish notation of decimals) and that area of a circle was "radius times radius times pi" and circumference was "radius times two times pi".

But here the circumference seems to be only 3 times the diameter, as if pi had shrunk?

The mathematical solution is arguably hidden in plain sight a few verses further down:

Now the thickness of it was a handbreadth, and the brim of it was like the brim of a cup, or of a crisped lily: and it held three thousand measures.

And the laver was a handbreadth thick: and the brim thereof was like the brim of a cup, or the leaf of a crisped lily: it contained two thousand bates.

When measuring the diameter from brim to brim, you measure across the top. And you hold the measure strings on the outside of the brim.

When measuring the circumference compassing it round about, you hold the measure string, the "line" as it was called, end to end with all around the "molten sea" at its cylinder below the rim, a handbreadth further in. They are diameter and circumference of two different but concentric (and vertically somewhat displaced) circles. Pi is still pi. Hat tip to Jonathan Sarfati for this solution!

King Solomon would have known a fairly exact value of pi from Egypt. He would also have known Babylonians round it off to three (Mesopotamians had made two incursions into the Holy Land, see Genesis 14 and Judges 3. He would have enjoyed the mathematical pun.

But there is another thing. As all patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings, he was aware of the Holy Trinity. He was also aware - by prophecy - that a certain passage in Exodus would be numbered as part of chapter 3 (not yet in existance) and even later than that as verse 14. Here God gives His name, which is pronounced Adonai.

So, by "making pi equal 3" he was stating "the Trinity is Adonai" or "the Father is Adonai, the Son is Adonai, the Holy Spirit is Adonai, yet not three Adonaim, but one Adonai" as St. Athanasius was going to write later on.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Boniface of Frisia
5.VI.2021

dimanche 16 mai 2021

St. Luke's Reliability in Acts 4:4

Robert M. Grant has noted that although Luke saw himself within the historical tradition, his work contains a number of statistical improbabilities, such as the sizable crowd addressed by Peter in Acts 4:4.

Now, what is the text:

But many of them who had heard the word, believed; and the number of the men was made five thousand.

We do not know how many had been converted between Pentecost day and this event, so we do not know how big the crowd was.

On the other hand, it was the number of the men, meaning women and children were also among the converts, but since the conversions happened while Peter was in prison overnight, we need not be sure that they all were present when St. Peter spoke.

Let's say the crowd adressed was 1000 people. 700 men, 300 women who told their men.

Now, let's suppose each person had room to 1 meter squared. This means, a circle of 1000 meters squared.

1000 / 3.14 = 318, sqrt of 318 = a radius of 17.846 meters.

I think that the crowd would have been able to hear what was said.

Is the statistic improbability supposed to be about the total of conversions early on?

There is a very much more improbable option, if you doubt that : namely that 4300 + 700 men, plus their women and children, were invented later on as converts first year, if only 500 men or so were. How do you convince a group that were 1500 - 2500 persons, that they were in fact 15 000 - 25 000? Even with decades of reworking memories, you can see a difference between a small and a big group you were part of./HGL

samedi 26 décembre 2020

More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now

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

Does the genealogy in Exodus 6 between Levi and Moses add up to the 430 years Israel was in Egypt according to Exodus 12?

Exodus 12:[40] And the abode of the children of Israel that they made in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.

In fact, this seems to have a connection to the actual present feast, Christmas, since there is a genealogy in Matthew too ...

Here is that of Moses:

Exodus 6:[16] And these are the names of the sons of Levi by their kindreds: Gerson, and Caath, and Merari. And the years of the life of Levi were a hundred and thirty seven. [17] The sons of Gerson: Lobni and Semei, by their kindreds. [18] The sons of Caath: Amram, and Isaar, and Hebron, and Oziel. And the years of Caath's life were a hundred and thirty-three. [19] The sons of Merari: Moholi and Musi. These are the kindreds of Levi by their families. [20] And Amram took to wife Jochabed his aunt by the father's side: and she bore him Aaron and Moses. And the years of Amram's life were a hundred and thirty-seven.

137
133
137
________
407

And worse, they are not 407 consecutive years, since they are life years of three consecutive generations, Levi did not die when Caath was born, Caath did not die when Amram was born. Assuming they so had died and that Amram had died when Moses was born and the rest, would have put the Exodus too late, on the other hand ... 407+80 = 487.

So, what is going on?

I see another problem, which is worse:

Exodus 6:[2] And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: I am the Lord, [3] That appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, by the name of God Almighty; and my name ADONAI I did not shew them.

ADONAI is a rendering of another name, which comes in a shortened version in the beginning of - Moses' mother: Jochabed.

Meaning: Yah Gives Weight, Yah Is Impressive
Etymology: From (1) יה (yah), the shortened name of the Lord, and (2) the verb כבד (kabed), to be impressive.

https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Jochebed.html#anc-3

How could someone be named with reference to a name of God that wasn't revealed yet? Manis Friedman might speak of time travel, but ... it is as simple as the name of God being known by other means than revelation to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - for instance, by human conjecture based on Adam's knowledge or by God revealing it to Adam:

Genesis 4:[26] But to Seth also was born a son, whom he called Enos; this man began to call upon the name of the Lord.

The Lord here is, like ADONAI, this name of God which He had not revealed to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

But back to Genesis 6 genealogy ... as father's and son's years overlap, we don't get 430 years.

Here is one solution, claiming genealogies tended to be gapped:

I Dream of Genealogies
23 déc. 2019 | tektontv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRTs30Wny8

I don't agree. Gaps in Biblical genealogies are there for a purpose. The gaps in Matthew 1 are generations for some reason falling foul of God - descendants of Athaliah, for instance, three generations shorter, and another one, I think.

So, what is the solution?

The stay in Egypt from when Jacob's family moved to Goshen was not 430 years. Here is (English translation from) LXX on Exodus 12: 40 And the sojourning of the children of Israel, while they sojourned in the land of Egypt and the land of Chanaan, [was] four hundred and thirty years.

The soujourning in a foreign land begins when Abraham receives the promise. This is confirmed by St. Paul:

Galatians 3:[16] To Abraham were the promises made and to his seed. He saith not, And to his seeds, as of many: but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. [17] Now this I say, that the testament which was confirmed by God, the law which was made after four hundred and thirty years, doth not disannul, to make the promise of no effect.

So, no wonder the genealogy of Moses from Levi doesn't add up to 430 years, these years had begun before Abraham even had Isaac.

This also explains why both the Roman martyrology for Christmas Day and George Syncellus have a time scale from birth of Abraham to Exodus as consistent with "a short stay" in Egypt. Abraham's birth + 75 years (when he gets the promise) + 430 years = 505 years (like 2015 to 1510 BC in Roman martyrology).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Stephen's Day
26.XII.2020

mercredi 9 décembre 2020

Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I

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

One of the youtube atheists I like to follow and refute videos by linked to Recovering from Religion. On that, you find a blog, where one Tim Zeak attacked the historicity of the Exodus.

Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus is Not True
And why it really matters.
Tim Zeak, Oct 26 · 14 min read
https://medium.com/excommunications/ten-reasons-why-the-bibles-story-of-the-exodus-is-not-true-4144bc305665

The most urgent of these, if you will excuse the pun, is the toilet problem.

5. Unrealistic hygiene requirements: Deuteronomy 23:12–14 says, “You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement. Since the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He will turn away from you.”

For those living near the center of camp, it would probably require a couple of miles each way, given the estimate of the population, animals and bare-bone infrastructure. Below is a refugee camp with tents. To house the 2,500,000 people, they would have needed around 625,000 of them with no restroom facilities inside its perimeter.

Well, is that so ...

I will first of all assume tents were family tents and somewhat crowded : 2.5 m² per person.

Now, let's first assume, the camp was - as it was in fact not - one big square.

2 500 000 * 2.5 m² = 6 250 000 m².

If we assume the camp was one big square, we get a side of the square root of that surface : 2 500 m.

Let's again assume no one was leaving across the middle, so all took the shortest way, this was 1 250 m to go out, and - less enerous - same way back again.

But ... if we read Numbers, we see that the camp was a big cross.

Camp of the Levites in the middle. Judah and two more tribes in the East, Ruben and two more tribes in the South, Ephraim and two more tribes in the West, and Dan with two more tribes in the North. One can imagine squares of three tribes at a go, but it is more correct, I think, to imagine the first named tribes closest to the middle and and the other two in each direction sticking out from these four either serially or in a Y-shape.

This leaves biggest square - if such - sth like ...

Numbers 2:3 On the east Juda shall pitch his tents by the bands of his army: and the prince of his sons shall be Nahasson the son of Aminadab. [4] And the whole sum of the fighting men of his stock, were seventy-four thousand six hundred.

Now, 74 600 fighting men = how many persons overall?

For 2 500 000 persons, the Biblical figure of fighting men was ...

Numbers 2:[32] This is the number of the children of Israel, of their army divided according to the houses of their kindreds and their troops, six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty. [33] And the Levites were not numbered among the children of Israel: for so the Lord had commanded Moses. [34] And the children of Israel did according to all things that the Lord had commanded. They camped by their troops, and marched by the families and houses of their fathers.

2 500 000 / 603 550 = 4.142

74 600 * 4.142 = 309 005

309 005 * 2.5 m² = 772 512.5 m²

And the square root of that is : 878.9 m. The walk out, South or North, from the first square East of the Levites was then 439.5 m. I have for a few months been living as homeless in one porch of a school (a professional high school) not used during the first confinement, and the public toilet in use was about 500 meters away. For much of the time, I made it. Not always for peeing, but for the excrements.

Add into this, that the Israelites were not eating lots of croissants and pains au chocolat as like people offered such to me, their digestion was lighter. Add unto this, they could have taken to going out while collecting mannah, which was also around the camp.

A gomor is 2.3 litres. 309 005 * 2.3 l = 710 711.5 l. Or, on each side of the camp, 355 355.75 l. One l = 1 dm³. Let's assume the thickness was 0.5 cm or 0.05 dm. This means a surface of 355 355.75 dm³ / 0.05 dm = 7 107 115 dm². Divide this by the sidelength ... 7 107 115 dm² / 8 789 dm = 808.6 dm or 80 m thickness before you are outside the mannah field.

And, add into this that the camp of Judah need not have been a square, if it was a rectangle, the way out of the camp was arguably shorter still. Let's assume proportions were 1:2, this means 1.4 times as long, and 1.4 times less broad, and the thickness of the mannah fringe is also lessened. 368 meters before you can sit down.

In other words, the requirement is not beyond realisation. I'll be back on more.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Restitute of Carthage
Bishop and Martyr
9.XII.2020

Carthagine sancti Restituti, Episcopi et Martyris, in cujus solemnitate sanctus Augustinus de ipso ad populum sermonem habuit.

mercredi 19 août 2020

Link. A good overview over NT manuscripts, a somewhat less good overview over doctrine

Ken Boa : How Accurate Is the Bible?
https://kenboa.org/apologetics/how-accurate-is-the-bible/

Ken Boa makes a page with textual history on NT writings, perhaps especially Gospels.

However, in the intro, he makes a blunder:

Consider the following statements:

The Bible says that God helps those who help themselves.
The books of the New Testament were written centuries after the events they describe.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness” is in the Bible.
According to the Bible, the earth is flat.
The earliest New Testament manuscripts go back only to the fourth or fifth centuries AD.
The Bible teaches that the earth is the center of the universe.
The English Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation (etc.) of the original, and fresh errors were introduced in each stage of the process.

How many of the above statements do you think are true? The answer is none; all of them are false. Yet these false impressions persist in the minds of many, and misinformation like this produces a skeptical attitude toward the Bible.

It is true that the Bible does not say the Earth is flat. However, it is also true it includes a few statements which might lead an unaware reader to conclude it does. 4 corners in at least one location of the Bible means specific locations, not points of the compass, so what about that? Well, the Hebrew word for earth can also mean land. And the main landmasses do show like a Riemann rectangle with some holes in it on the hemisphere opposite the Pacific.

However, it is hard to escape the conclusion the Bible says the Earth stands still or that Sun and Moon have daily movements, that were arrested for a full "day" (12 hours? 24 hours?) when Joshua fought a battle. Or that Heaven (religious sense) is very arguably a place above the stars, so that the space in which stars are cannot be infinite, but must be limited, and therefore also have a centre.

As for "New Testament manuscripts", it is possible that manuscripts of all 27 books (or of wholes Bibles overall) go back to only 4th or 5th centuries, but this is probably due to the codex book form only then getting large enough for that, and Ken Boa talks of what can be expected from papyri : single book manuscripts.

But it is worthwhile he gives a very good overview, I think./HGL

dimanche 31 mai 2020

C. S. Lewis - Link to Video

C.S. Lewis shares "Why I'm Not an Atheist"
18.VIII.2009 | Akha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzaLp3aL_f8

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