Subject: Re: Matthew/Josephus in Aramaic?
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 11:00:22 +1000
From: Gordon Coleman <>
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

Chris,

Chris Ho-Stuart wrote:
> 
> Chris Ho-Stuart <> wrote:
> > On point 3. Quite so again. Modern scholarship is not content to
> > break the Torah into pieces to be analysed independently of each
> > other; a study which does consider the whole Torah as a unity is
> > quite inadequate.
> 
> Argh... insert "not".
> 
> a study which does NOT consider the whole Torah as a unity is quite
> inadequate.

Thanks for the clarification: the tone of your comment sounded like it
was expressing agreement, but that last sentence seemed to flatly
contradict me.  It all makes more sense now.

FWIW, the position I've put forward (which I won't necessarily put my
name to - at least, not until I've evaluated it further) doesn't negate
the possibility of Mosaic authorship - but would tend to suggest that
there may have been some refining or compiling that took place at a
later stage.  It's blatantly obvious, just from a superficial reading,
that some of the statements about "That's why such-and-such a place is
called so-and-so to this day" would be nonsensical were they written at
the time by Moses.

Another issue that knocks the *basis* for the documentary hypothesis on
the head is that the elaborate priestly and religious rituals described
in the Torah were anachronistic - that contemporary religions of
surrounding nations were much more primitive, so the Israelite religion
probably was also.  Modern archaeology has confirmed that much of what
is described in Israelite religion was similar to religious practises of
contemporary groups - Canaanite temples were similar in structure to the
tabernacle (though not identical); priesthood and institutionalised
national religion were common phenomena.  Much of Graf and Wellhausen's
theories were based on faulty assumptions, which have since been
disproved.

Of course, the other problem *historically* is that there is no direct
evidence for the existence of the patriarchs.  It is quite conceivable
that they lived and acted as recorded in the Scriptures, but they
didn't, by and large, create a big enough "splash" to be recorded in the
annals of surrounding nations.  But archaeology is a tricky thing: it's
tempting to argue from the gaps, but different gaps are filled every
day, and the arguments over the *true* (objective) history of Israel
(rather than that recorded by their own scribes) swing back and forth
with great regularity.

Ah well.... I've only just scratched at the surface.  It's fascinating
stuff, and (for me) tends only to confirm belief in the truth of the
Scriptures about God's dealing with humankind in the past - but I need
to do a lot more reading if I want to get on top of it all.

Regards,

Gordon