Doubts about the Bible, Particularly the Old Testament

[Dorothy]

I don’t mean to be critical, but I’m talking about the Old Testiment, which is completely separate from what this is about.

These and other responses I’m seeing in this thread are also basically doing the very things I said I expected many would do, which is to accuse scholars of being absurd or anti-religious and all we need is faith to know it, and also the things I tried to indicate would be unhelpful responses. If “Just believe in these things blindly” were a response that was going to help me, I wouldn’t have asked the question.

Sorry that it was of no help to you. I just felt the need to point out that such critique and unbelief is in the NT as well.

Peace,

Dorothy

 

[Contarini]

I’m not a practicing Catholic, but as a Religious Studies scholar specializing in Catholicism I think I have a fairly good grasp of Biblical Scholarship. Just to warn you Religious Studies is rather different from standard Biblical studies/Theology, we don’t work from the position the bible is true or false, we simply don’t care either way

Not a believable claim. At least, if it were really true, that would disqualify you from being worth listening to. How can you not care?

I understand that the discipline itself doesn’t depend on the question, and the goal is to talk about religion in ways that are neutral and accessible to anyone. (I think there are problems with this understanding of religious studies, well laid out by Paul Griffiths.) But if you as a person don’t care, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

One area where Biblical Studies has been continually condemned by the Catholic Church since the late 1780’s is assessments on the Old Testament.

Continually?

Cite a condemnation since Vatican II, please, or retract that claim.

Your information is correct, most scholars do not consider exodus to be a literal event, neither do they believe Moses wrote the first five books. The evidence from both material culture and other contemporary documents suggest Yahweh was one god amongst many not only during the Caananite rule, but for many Israelites for centuries after ceasing to identify as Caananites. Yahweh did eventually supersede the others, whether violently by persecution or as a natural development over time we don’t really know yet, but the early Jews certainly were not Monotheists so that does discourage the idea of some of the claims in the OT.

Maybe, insofar as the OT claims that there were originally faithful Israelites who worshiped only YHWH. (I do not think that most of the OT is at all interested in what many modern people mean by “monotheism.”) Many scholars, perhaps most, would question this and see YHWH-only worship as a late development. However, it’s important to note that the OT and modern scholarship agree entirely in saying that most Israelites for most of their history worshiped many gods. The archeological evidence showing worship of other gods alongside YHWH confirms, rather than denying, the claims of the OT.

Yahweh is thought to have became more popular after the book of Deuteronomy was compiled, and the book itself was written to bolster the claims of Yawhite clergy to authority.

Maybe, depending on how you define clergy. Isn’t Deuteronomy generally thought to be linked to the prophets? Calling them “clergy” is, I think, a bit questionable.

Prior to this he thought to have been something akin to the semetic version of Mars or Ares. He did have his followers, especially during wartime

I’ve certainly seen these claims, but not much solid evidence for them. Yes, YHWH is often referred to as a warrior. But so, for instance, is Ishtar in Mesopotamia, although she was a fertility goddess. These categories aren’t necessarily watertight.

We don’t have a lot of evidence for what specific role YHWH played for people who worshiped him alongside other gods, because they aren’t the people who wrote the Bible, obviously!

but for most in Palestine the main Gods worshipped by the masses were the Gods of fertility and the weather; Baal and Ashera (hence why we suspect they were so regularly condemned in the OT. Ashera is an especially interesting case as while not yet widely supported there have been finds in Egypt that suggest she might once have been the wife of “El”, a King/Sky-God akin to Zeus and when he became assimilated/overtaken by Yahweh might have continued to be considered his Spouse. I personally don’t know, that’s for an expert on Judaism and Mesopotamian Religion not me).

I thought there was some actual evidence for some people worshiping Asherah as the spouse of YHWH (that would certainly, again, fit the OT evidence fairly well, particularly for the Southern Kingdom where abandoning YHWH altogether does not seem to have been as much of an option). But you may be right that this is an extrapolation from the evidence about El.

What are these finds in Egypt, and why would Egyptians be worshiping Canaanite gods?

the OT is not literal history and if anything contradicts archeological evidence at several points. Not all, there are episodes that do seem to align with material evidence but much of the early stories are considered purely mythical.

But the “early stories” are just part of the picture. The books of Kings clearly look like history–in fact they are some of the oldest examples of extended history-writing we have from any culture. I understand that many scholars today think that even these books are fundamentally unreliable, though I question this.

As far as I am aware the most popular theory that best aligns with the OT at the moment is that the “Hebrews” were discontent Egyptians who emigrated and eventually assimilated with the Caananites. Prior to that they were not thought to be a separate “group” and Monotheistic claims came later as a way of affirming a separate identity.

I think that the term “monotheism” is a bit of a red herring. And I thought that the dominant theory these days is that the Hebrews originated from Canaan itself and that the whole Egyptian Exodus story probably has little basis in history.

I have never actually heard the theory that they were Egyptians originally. What scholars hold this theory?

 

[Contarini]

In fact, what scholars are you basing this on in general? You use a lot of passive voice, which gives an impression of authority. But things aren’t just “thought.” People think them. I know that professors and textbooks often speak this way–I’ve been guilty of doing so myself–partly for the legitimate reason of not overwhelming students with too many names, and partly for the less legitimate reason of overawing students with the sense that it’s all been already decided and can’t be questioned. (Also, when the professor is a generalist teaching out of his specialization, as I was when I taught this material, there’s the further not-creditable-but-hopefully-understandable reason that the professor may himself be repeating what he’s been told “is thought” without a very good understanding of who specifically thinks these things.)

Now…As for what the Catholic Church thinks about this, unlike a few protestant denominations it fully condemns any suggestion that Exodus did not happen

The Catholic Church certainly speaks as though the Exodus were a real event. But then, so do mainline Protestant institutions, even if scholars in those traditions are free to question.

What condemnations, post-Vatican-II, do you have in mind, specifically?

. and has threatened to excommunicate several scholars who over the past two hundred years have suggested otherwise.

The Magisterium’s attitude to Biblical scholarship changed quite dramatically in the middle decades of the 20th century, so invoking “the past couple centuries” won’t cut it. You need to cite recent condemnations.

Rather like how Catholics are to believe in Matthean priority as opposed to that of Mark with full faith so too are they to believe in the literal exodus.

If it’s rather like that, then no such obligation exists. The pre-Vatican II statements about Matthaean priority were not infallible and have clearly, de facto, been abandoned. Popes and other authoritative figures regularly assume Markan priority. You are clearly wrong about this.

I can’t actually think of many Biblical Studies scholars who are Catholics

Roland Murphy (no longer living) is the only name that leaps to my mind in OT scholarship (I’m sure there are more that I don’t know off the top of my head), but there are a lot of eminent NT scholars living or relatively recently deceased: Raymond Brown, John Meier, Joseph Fitzmyer, Luke Timothy Johnson . . . .

If you get your idea of Catholicism from Abu, no wonder you find it hard to believe.

Edwin

 

[Kevin12]

Sorry that it was of no help to you. I just felt the need to point out that such critique and unbelief is in the NT as well.

Peace,

Dorothy

This is really going to be my last comment here. Thank for what you tried to do. I tend to agree that there is a lot of misplaced skepticism about the Gospels, particularly because unlike the OT, it is not relating the history of a whole people throughout their history, but the struggles faced by a single small group over a short period of time. The OT, at least the Pentateuch, assumes a much wider historical burden.

 

[Contarini]

This is really going to be my last comment here. Thank for what you tried to do. I tend to agree that there is a lot of misplaced skepticism about the Gospels, particularly because unlike the OT, it is not relating the history of a whole people throughout their history, but the struggles faced by a single small group over a short period of time. The OT, at least the Pentateuch, assumes a much wider historical burden.

I don’t know why you say that this will be your last comment. It seems to me that the thread has barely started to answer your excellent question.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

I’m sorry if I was being rude. I’ve just realized that, though I thought it was a good idea when I made the thread, these sorts of conversations are just too stressful for me, so I’m unsubscribing. What I should have said was "If anyone wants to linger and rail against Biblical Criticism or defend Biblical Criticism, I’m probably not going to be reading. " I think DCNBILL’s book is something I want to look at before I do either.

Well, maybe that’s the best choice for you, but please don’t take the opinions of the people on this thread as representative of Catholicism as a whole.

I don’t think the Catholic position on the historicity of the OT is as fixed as some would imply.

Clearly a Catholic, or any orthodox Christian, would be very reluctant to throw out the historicity of the Exodus and other key OT events, and I’m not convinced that the historical evidence requires us to do so.

However, a good friend of mine who is a (Protestant) OT scholar argued in a conversation I had with him a few years ago that theologically it makes little difference whether some kind of Exodus happened or not. Our mutual premise is that the details of the Exodus account are legendary–I maintained, and still maintain if more tentatively after this conversation, that the historicity of the basic event is important. My friend argued that our starting point as Christians is the post-exilic, Second Temple Jewish situation, in which God’s mighty acts of the past were looked back to as a lost golden age. Since for Christians, the culmination of God’s mighty acts is Jesus’ death and resurrection, whether these acts fulfill historical events or the nostalgic hopes of God’s people for the return of a past that never historically existed may not make a huge difference.

I’m not saying that there are no problems with this suggestion, or that it’s required by the historical evidence. Just that the common conservative claim “if the OT events didn’t happen there’s no reason to believe the NT ones did” just doesn’t follow logically.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Also, K. A. Kitchen’s Reliability of the Old Testament is a massive, well-documented (if too tendentious) affirmation of a conservative view of the OT, and well worth looking at. For a mildly critical review, see here.

 

[ericc]

Anyone seen Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus by filmmaker Tim Mahoney? Is it a solid, fair documentary or is it more James Cameron-Lost Tomb of Jesus kind of movie? Is there enough evidence suggesting Exodus is real?

 

[Thomas1981]

I had many of the very same questions as the OP. The new Catholic Study Bible edited by Donald Senior really helped me along the way. There are many events in the OT which we just cannot verify historically. However, the Bible scholars put it in a very helpful way. Basically, God works through people where they are in their development in ways they can understand. And that goes for us individually and as groups (for example, reading Summa Theologica to a 3 year old would not be the best method of catechism, but it might be for a graduate student). In the world of the ancient Israelites, worshipping many gods was the norm. The key challenge was to get the people to worship one God, which is why there are so many admonitions in the OT against worshipping other gods. The types of literature that were accepted as valid at the time were also much different, myths, legend, genealogical tables were all accepted as a basis for belief. A straight historical account of everything (in a way that we would be familiar with today) would have been incomprehensible to the Israelites the of OT. God spoke to the Israelites in a language they could understand to further their development as people of God. There is evidence that God changes his ways of working with His people as his people change, he meets us at our level. The best example of this is the focus on the Law in the OT versus the very different commands in the NT. In the OT, strict adherence to the Law was necessary just to get the people to the point where Israel could be the vessel of action for the One True God, which could set the stage for the NT and the coming of Christ. After Christ’s coming, certain things passed away (no longer necessary) and new things became important. That is the best answer I can come up with for the “troubling” issues with the OT, and I think it is the correct one. We have to put ourselves in the position of ancients and see how they viewed the world to understand why God spoke to them in the ways He did.

The key I think is to understand that the ancient Israelites were the chosen people for God to transmit knowledge of Him to us, and spread it out therefrom through Christ. God’s way of doing this was appropriate for that purpose. (I’m not claiming that the Exodus or other events in the OT didn’t happen, just that there are some things that we cannot affirm empirically using modern scientific methods).

 

[Ignatius]

I learned that even moderate scholars like William Dever who believe.

As far as I know, William Dever does not agree with Catholic teaching.