Talk:On the Reliability of the Old Testament

Untitled
See Talk:The Making of the Pentateuch for reasoning behind see also. --Firefly322 (talk) 07:51, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Cocky words
That Kitchen has demonstrated that the mainstream academic view is wrong are cocky words. Who can demonstrate that the mainstream academic view was wrong? Well, only the subsequent mainstream academic view itself.

Also, the problem with your edits is WP:GEVAL. While there are many evangelical scholars who agree with your POV, they are not mainstream Bible scholars. What is a mainstream Bible scholar?

"Modern Bible scholarship/scholars (MBS) assumes that: • The Bible is a collection of books like any others: created and put together by normal (i.e. fallible) human beings; • The Bible is often inconsistent because it derives from sources (written and oral) that do not always agree; individual biblical books grow over time, are multilayered; • The Bible is to be interpreted in its context: ✦ Individual biblical books take shape in historical contexts; the Bible is a document of its time; ✦ Biblical verses are to be interpreted in context; ✦ The "original" or contextual meaning is to be prized above all others; • The Bible is an ideologically-driven text (collection of texts). It is not "objective" or neutral about any of the topics that it treats. Its historical books are not "historical" in our sense. ✦ "hermeneutics of suspicion"; ✦ Consequently MBS often reject the alleged "facts" of the Bible (e.g. was Abraham a real person? Did the Israelites leave Egypt in a mighty Exodus? Was Solomon the king of a mighty empire?); ✦ MBS do not assess its moral or theological truth claims, and if they do, they do so from a humanist perspective; ★ The Bible contains many ideas/laws that we moderns find offensive; • The authority of the Bible is for MBS a historical artifact; it does derive from any ontological status as the revealed word of God;"

- Beardsley Ruml

Quoted by tgeorgescu (talk) 04:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)


 * @Tgeorgescu Do you think Kitchen uses circular arguments? looks like you haven't read his book because he is a listed in the world of top Egyptologists including James K. Hoffmeier and I never said Mainstream Scholarship is wrong but just said he criticized it(On the Reliability of the old testament page 224-230) the same goes for New Testament studies, Bart Ehrman is not to be taken seriously in theology. Eternal Spirit 123 (talk) 11:36, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Tgeorgescu offensive? where did your modern values come from? Eternal Spirit 123 (talk) 11:37, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * WP:NOTAFORUM.
 * Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160722024905/https://www.thesphinx.co.uk/2013/05/archaeology-and-the-bible-at-liverpool/
 * About Ehrman: he is not a theologian, he is a historian. Different academic fields, with quite different rules and quite different shared assumptions. 95% of what Ehrman publishes for broad audiences was created or at least supported by Christian Bible professors. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:49, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Tgeorgescu: I don't agree with the quotes that you have put there. Scholars such as Kitchen (1998, 2003), Hoffmeier (1999, 2005), Bietak (2015, 2022) and Falk (2018) all agree that there was an historical exodus event and you cannot just dismiss their stances by saying that they are marginal scholars or apologists: Those guys are all very qualified Egyptologist with ample academic credentials, and they don't limit to say that "the Exodus has not been proven false", but they also argue that the details of the narrative more closely fit the second millennium BCE rather than later periods, which means that it is unlikely that the story could be a later invention. Potatín5 (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yup, many MBS would grant the point there is a nugget of historical truth behind the story of the Exodus. But their point is: very different from what the Bible tells it happened. As Joel S. Baden argued: there are at least four Exodus stories in the Pentateuch, in one of those they came from Egypt, in another they did not come from Egypt, one with 40 years wandering through the desert, one without it, and so on. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * About Ehrman: he is not a theologian, he is a historian. Different academic fields, with quite different rules and quite different shared assumptions. 95% of what Ehrman publishes for broad audiences was created or at least supported by Christian Bible professors. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:49, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Tgeorgescu: I don't agree with the quotes that you have put there. Scholars such as Kitchen (1998, 2003), Hoffmeier (1999, 2005), Bietak (2015, 2022) and Falk (2018) all agree that there was an historical exodus event and you cannot just dismiss their stances by saying that they are marginal scholars or apologists: Those guys are all very qualified Egyptologist with ample academic credentials, and they don't limit to say that "the Exodus has not been proven false", but they also argue that the details of the narrative more closely fit the second millennium BCE rather than later periods, which means that it is unlikely that the story could be a later invention. Potatín5 (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yup, many MBS would grant the point there is a nugget of historical truth behind the story of the Exodus. But their point is: very different from what the Bible tells it happened. As Joel S. Baden argued: there are at least four Exodus stories in the Pentateuch, in one of those they came from Egypt, in another they did not come from Egypt, one with 40 years wandering through the desert, one without it, and so on. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * About Ehrman: he is not a theologian, he is a historian. Different academic fields, with quite different rules and quite different shared assumptions. 95% of what Ehrman publishes for broad audiences was created or at least supported by Christian Bible professors. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:49, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Tgeorgescu: I don't agree with the quotes that you have put there. Scholars such as Kitchen (1998, 2003), Hoffmeier (1999, 2005), Bietak (2015, 2022) and Falk (2018) all agree that there was an historical exodus event and you cannot just dismiss their stances by saying that they are marginal scholars or apologists: Those guys are all very qualified Egyptologist with ample academic credentials, and they don't limit to say that "the Exodus has not been proven false", but they also argue that the details of the narrative more closely fit the second millennium BCE rather than later periods, which means that it is unlikely that the story could be a later invention. Potatín5 (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yup, many MBS would grant the point there is a nugget of historical truth behind the story of the Exodus. But their point is: very different from what the Bible tells it happened. As Joel S. Baden argued: there are at least four Exodus stories in the Pentateuch, in one of those they came from Egypt, in another they did not come from Egypt, one with 40 years wandering through the desert, one without it, and so on. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)