methodologies

by peacefulpete 2 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  Anyone who enters the fray of Bibical scholarship finds a world of empassioned arguments drawing diametrically oposing conclusions. Both/all sides of a debate claim relevant archaeologically and paleographically established facts to support their position. What is going on?........

  I propose to describe the methodologies of the 3 foremost camps of thought on this subject.

  The 3 camps are in my estimation, 1..the conservative historical critical method (hcm)supporters, 2...the so called "minimalists", and the 3...Bible inerranists.

  To roughly approximate the priciples and approaches of these 3 groups I have supposed a hypothetical Bible text that has 3 elements open to historical review and proof/disproof, I will call them A,B,C. These may be names of Kings, cities, dates, descriptions of the political and religious environ, stuff like this that archaeology and other historical sciences can offer input.

  Lets say that modern study and digging has revealed an inconsistancy with detail A. The hcm group will publish their findings but assume an essentially historical core. The new information will be seen as an embellishment of an otherwise historically valuable text. Group 2 the "minimalists" will see the inconsistancy of detail A and suspect B and C are likewise fictional until B and C can be demonstrated to be historical. Group 3, the Bible inerranists will see point B and C as unDISproven and therefore have faith that detail A is being misinterpreted or worse the information is being distorted by Bible haters.

  This gets complicated when more and more evidence comes in as inconsistant with the Bible narratives. Many hcm scholars are left with questions of just what is left to regard as historical. The minimalists are derided for questioning everything, even the traditionally "established" history. The Bible inerranists are cornered and become more certain that conspiracy is everywhere, some resort to out dated reference works to cling to a semblence of rationality.

  I welcome serious discussion about the methods only, please no posting of links.
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  peacefulpete

  Sorry for the typos I still can not edit from home and can only post from here every once in a while.????
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  JCanon

  This gets complicated when more and more evidence comes in as inconsistant with the Bible narratives. Many hcm scholars are left with questions of just what is left to regard as historical. The minimalists are derided for questioning everything, even the traditionally "established" history. The Bible inerranists are cornered and become more certain that conspiracy is everywhere, some resort to out dated reference works to cling to a semblence of rationality.

  You know, all this is interesting if one presumes there are no Freemasons interested in suppressing Biblical truth out there. Well, are there?

  Even so, there presently is sufficient evidence now to understand WHY the Bible conflicts, historically especially, during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods with the secular records. That is, Xerxes claimed to be his own son Artaxerxes to avoid a war with the Greeks in retaliation for his destroying Athens. The Persians, later, in control of all the records from Assyria to Egypt simply did a bang-up job in revising the records they intended to leave behind. And don't presume it was the entire nation smart enough to pull this off, it could have been some of the brightest court officials alive at the time.

  So at this point, it is not as thought we don't know exactly what happened and why; it's just that people are biased in their own direction and many are served by the confusion, in my opinion. Interestingly enough, that's what is nice about the VAT4956. It's the pagan's own record of the conspiracy changes they made, caught red handed, thus we know for a fact that year 37 in 511BCE was changed to 568BCE. If you haven't updated to that reality then you're simply playing the comfortable academic fantasy game that allows one to think they can question Biblical chronology "until proven otherwise". It's just a joke.

  The other thing is, few are truly qualified as historical "investigators" and thus settle for less. But at this point, knowing there was this huge adjustment in the years for this period, for the academic community not to have noticed either suggests they are incompetent or religiously or politically biased or part of a their own motivated propagandist agenda. Interesting, therefore, in probably the most critical astronomical text of all time we find the formost (but Jewish/Freemason?) assyriologists Sachs and Hunger lying about what was actually in the text that others depended upon them to translate. Now that they are caught and forced to correct it, have they? So what good is their academic input?

  Thus given the choice to be a Biblicalist or a secular academist, it's the same choice; there is no edge now in the secular history over the Bible's.

  Canon