Friedman's "Who really wrote the bible"

by bohm 18 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  bohm

  Yesterday i began reading Friedmans "Who really wrote the bible" and it is a deeply satisfying experience. I was looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the book, in particular, i am very interested in how it conflict with the typical WT explanation of how the bible came to be (which i find very confusing; i think its very hard to figure out how, exactly, the WT view the history of this periode), how usefull it has been in terms of reasoning with JWs, and experiences in general.

  To kickstart, here is what the book has given me:

  I have generally looked at the bible in a way i now see as quite naive, namely as a collection of more or less conflicting stories that made very little sence. I didnt really have a verbalized explanation of why it was like that beyond "the OT is silly". The WT explanations i am familiar with only add to the sillyness, mainly because they offer so straine explanations it only draw more attention to them.

  If i just accept all of Friedmans explanation at face value, the bible suddenly make a lot more sence; there is a reason for why many strange things is like it was, and it tell a much larger story than a litteral christian/"atheist" reading of the stories reveal.

  Rather than having a rather braindead God/Moses keep changing minds and make plainly self-contradictory or silly statements, many of the various stories now reflect very smart people who try to make sence of a changing political/religious situation, and interpret it based on past events and revelations. Its a lot more sattisfying than the brick-testemony level of reading the bible i was previously familiar with.
• 

  Heaven

  bohm... I have not read Friedman's book but may do so one day.

  For me, many things didn't add up as a child studying with the JWs. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly what it all was but there was a constant theme running in my head of 'I don't think that's what that means'. As I moved into my teen years, I was struck with the contradictions of not only the WTS interpretation of scripture and their flip flops but also in the scriptures themselves. One of the biggest ones for me was the whole concept of headship. To me, it was a direct contradiction to the entire principle of Love and the Golden Rule.

  As I am getting older it is striking me that alot of this religious crap is all about control, possession, and power. It always has been and it always will be.
• 

  zoiks

  Friedman's book is excellent and well-written. I highly recommend it
• 

  bohm

  Zoiks: It reads like a good murder plot, right? A general question, do you have some idea of what picture of higher critisism one would get from reading the WT and other litterature?
• 

  TD

  R.E. Friedman is an excellent read that I'd recommend for anyone interested in the Bible. --Especially JW's

  I don't think very many practicing JW's are fully aware of the extent to which their religion is based upon 19th century Protestantism's prior assumptions about the Bible.

  Friedman, of course does not deal with that specifically, but his summary of the religious and political rivalries in ancient Israel and their unmistakable influence on the OT show how shallow and naive those prior assumptions are.
• 

  PSacramento

  Another I would suggest is Bruce Metzger's "The canon of the New testament".
• 

  bohm

  PS: Duly noted!
• 

  Giordano

  I also recommend:

  Bart D. Ehrman who is an American New Testament scholar, currently a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel

  Hill. He is the author of a number of books, including Misquoting Jesus (2005), God's Problem (2008), and Jesus, Interrupted (2009).

  "scholars have unearthed information that the authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was and how salvation works.

  That the New Testament contains books that were attributed to the names of the apostles but were written by writers who lived decades later.

  That Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all represented fundamentally different religions.

  Established Christian doctrines

  — such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity — were the inventions of still later theologians.

  These are not idiosyncratic perspectives of just one modern scholar......... they have been the standard and widespread views of critical scholars across a full spectrum of denominations and traditions. "
• 

  eric356

  It is a great book. It's amazing how well the Documentary Hypothesis (a version of which Friedman espouses) explains all those things that seemed so weird about the Old Testament. I always wondered why they would repeat stuff over and over again. Now I can read it and understand that they passages are separate stories that have been redacted together. It's also good to get Friedman's "The Bible with Sources Revealed". It' the Torah with all the differing "sources" and redactions colored. That way, you can read just one source and see how it flows together so much better. It also helps you understand the cultural and theological biases of the redactor, as Friedmans explains.

  For people who enjoy Biblical studies like this (from a real scholarly perspective, not apologetics) there's a great podcast called "The Bible Geek" by scholar Robert M. Price. http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/biblegeek.htm He answers questions that are emailed to him by listeners, with humor and intelligence. Listening to it has broadened by perspective considerably. If you search for it on iTunes, I think there's still a big backlog of older Bible Geek shows where he covers a lot of basic topics like the Documentary Hypothesis, Markan priority, the Q document, pseudepigrapha, etc.
• 

  VM44

  http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/theology_occultism/west_religion/Who_Wrote_the_Bible.html