BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

45 Responses:

1. Gene R. Conradi says:

   November 7, 2015 at 9:17 pm

   Additional ancient testimony. One of the chief external evidences against the canonicity of the Apocrypha is the fact that none of the Christian Bible writers quoted from these books. While this of itself is not conclusive, inasmuch as their writings are also lacking in quotations from a few books recognized as canonical, such as Esther, Ecclesiastes, and The Song of Solomon, yet the fact that not one of the writings of the Apocrypha is quoted even once is certainly significant. http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200000305#h=1:0-48:292

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2. arjun jobil says:

   November 8, 2015 at 10:13 am

   Jesus does quote from at least one non-canonical work.

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3. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 8, 2015 at 1:01 pm

   Thank you, commentator Gene R., for highlighting the rigidity of the biblical canon that ws accepted by the Christian orthodoxy at the same time, as the article mentions, when the Jewish orthodoxy were composing copies of the Tanakh that included vowel points in the 3rd century C.E. (or A.D., for those who can’t get over that hurdle like something out of Monty Python’s “Upperclass Twit of the Year” video).
   This didn’t stop the mystics from receiving oracles by reading the Hebrew scriptures without the vowel points, enabling alternate interpretations of a word based on similar words built round the same root, as in the root word “selah” that is translated as “sent forth” in John 9:7, as relating to the Pool of Siloam. The author of this gospel seems to portray this type of divination (utilized in the Book of Zohar) as being an acceptable form of legislation, known in Hebrew as “halakha” or “laws” which is also the word for “walk,” as in “Jesus was walking along” in John 9:1.

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4. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 8, 2015 at 2:26 pm

   The designations of B.C.E./C.E and B.C./A.D. can be reconciled when we see the Christian era as beginning around 6 B.C.E. at the time of a scholar known as Judas the Galillean, of whom it was said led a revolt against the Romans. It is more likely that prophecy invoked in Matthew 4:16 concerning the light and the darkness (a dualism often emphasised in the Dead Sea Scroll) that was borrowed from Isaiah 9:1-2, was first brought to fulfillment by Judas the Galillean with the light being the scriptural interpretations (probably not unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls) shining into a world dominated by the gentiles, the darkness of ignorance.
   It is interesting to note that this prophecy was also applied by the priest Zechariah to bless his son John in Luke 1:79, and who would go on to make the rite of water babtism accessible to all (the requirement for a “mikveh” immersion bath is that it must be fed by a natural water source, in this case, the Jordan River).
   Carlos Suarez, in his “Cipher Genesis,” explains it best:
   “The names and quasi-historical events recorded in the Bible are, regarded from the point of view that only ‘ordinary’ history occurs, fixed in time and space to definite individuals and periods. This is probably indeed the case, judging from the results of contemporary Biblical research. But if there is also aa ‘sacred’ history, it escapes from time and space save for those tremendous historical moments, the ‘kairoi’, such as ‘the time of Christ,’, when the two histories coalesce into one. The time of Abraham’ may have been also such a time, or it may not have been. It may be that the sacred history has become, for convenience, ‘grafted onto’ the account of secular history given in the Bible. Thus it may be that the Jesus of the New Testament actually lived, at the time of Pontius Pilate, or some hundred years earlier as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ of an Essene Brotherhood. The evidence for the ‘ordinary’ historical existance of Christ is too scanty to be reliable. All the Gospels were written much later than the events they describe.”
   Suarez then cites a quotation from Josephus as evidence of the “grafting” theory, but I’ll quote instead from the interpretation of this passage from “The Historical Jesus” by John Dominic Crossan, p.112:
   “Under his [Coponius] administration, a Galilean, named Judas, incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their Lord. This man was a sophist [that is, a school of thought] of his own, having nothing in common with the others. Jewish philosophy, in fact, takes three forms. The followers of the first school are called Pharisees, of the second Sadducees, of the third Essenes. (Jewish War 2.117-118)”‘

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5. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 8, 2015 at 6:00 pm

   I incorrectly stated in my previous comment that the Masoretes began adding vowel points to the Tanakh in the 3rd century when it wasn’t until the 6th century when this process began. It was in the 3rd century that the Christian canon resembled the “accepted” scripture of the church tradition today. As for Judaism in the 3rd century, it was predicated on the legalities of the “halakhic” tradition exemplified in the writings of the Talmud, with the exception of a mystical stream that remained firmly within the rabbinical orthodoxy that traced its origins back to the book of Ezekiel and the vision of the “Glory of the Lord” (Kabod Yahweh) in Ezekiel 1:28 and 10:4, and that the terminology for the “glory/kabod” of Gos also appears in the book of Tobit, the book of Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls (noncanonical sources). These mystical speculations found their way into doctrines that the rabbis considered heretical. Gershom Scholem, in his book “Kabbalah,” states that “in this period [3rd and 4th centuries] a Jewish Gnostic sect with definitive antinomian tendencies was active in Sepphoris” (p.12). This esoteric tradition, known as the “ma’aseh bereshith” (workings of creation) and the “ma’aseh merkabah” (workings of the chariot), became popular in Gnostic writings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries that through their destruction under orthodox Christianity under the Byzantines, they were lost to humanity and ultimately reduced to a mere footnote by church historian Eusebius, until, that is, their discovery in a cave near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.

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6. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 8, 2015 at 6:03 pm

   Correction: the “Glory/Kabod” of God, not Gos.

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7. WDK says:

   November 10, 2015 at 12:34 pm

   We speak of “canonicity” both as convenience and convention since its derivation resembles common law.
   Scriptures anthologies such as the Septuagint and scrolls of Qumrum precede our print definitions evolved from Josephus in Contra Apionem in the late 1st century and Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century AD. Yet what Josephus provides in one hand he wipes away with the other. In his Judean history leading up to Jerusalem’s siege he provides the varied canvas of Judean beliefs: Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. In light of this and the variety of Qumrum scrolls, is there such a thing as a “normative 2nd Temple Judaism”? If there was not, then why was one tradition accepted over another to be incorporated into Christian coda? For the first two centuries of this era, whatever the consensus was in the Jewish community, the Christian church recognized the entirety of the late Septuagint as sacred scripture. It was a matter of 4th century debate among such as Jerome, Augustine and Athanasius as how to treat writings ranging from the Pentateuch to those added in the 1st century BC.

   The 27-book convention of the NT gained strength with the advocacy of Athanasius, but he was certainly not the only voice on which OT books should be adopted in the Christian community. At that, adjusting the canonical set understood today, Athanasius includes Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah; he also places Esther among the “7 books not in the canon but to be read” along with Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, the Didache, and Shepherd of Hermas.

   Our thread is the oldest Hebrew Bible in the context of archeology and antiquity as I remind myself. But I note that Apocrypha elements from the Septuagint were included in the King James Bible of 1611 between the testaments Old and New, not entirely different from the Vulgate based Bible approach canonized by the Council of Trent in 1546. It was with the 1647 Westminister Confession that the English speaking world began its great break with Apocrypha: “not being of divine inspiration , are no part of the canon of the scripture and therefore of no authority in the church of God; nor to be any [way] otherwise approved, or made use of than any other human writings.” In effect that is the canonization which appears in the current discussion. By 1827 as a result of controversy, the British and Foreign Bible Society excluded the Apocrypha from all its publications. Many Protestant English language Bibles still included these books decades ago (e.g., the Maccabees), but to acquire them today in the English speaking world, your most likely sources are the canons of other faiths, e.g., an annotated New Jerusalem Bible.

   If other writers wrote of Esther, Esther mentions neither deity nor scripture, but it does explain certain religious observances in commemoration – as do the “non-canonical” Maccabees. It seems no one asserts that Esther wrote Esther as is the case with other canonical works such as Daniel. We suggest that Daniel and Baruch had similar origins, yet experienced different fates. They share turns of phrase and subject material, but Daniel is “canonical” while Baruch is not. The modern reader notes in chapter 5 that Daniel describes Belshazzar as Nebuchadnezzar’s son when Babylonian records clearly indicate otherwise. Apologists claim the author simply means “son” in the sense of descendant. Baruch, however, in chapter 1 insists otherwise and goes as far to declare Belshazzar a co-regent with Nebuchadnezzar, among other revisions. Both books exist in Hebrew respectively in whole or part in the Qumrum collections ( Baruch 7Q2). As an element of the oldest Hebrew Bibles, parts of Daniel were in Aramaic, but only Greek antecedents were known for Baruch until the 20th century. Daniel’s later Septuagint chapters (13 and 14) are only known in Greek. Both books seem also tied to the Prayer of Nabonidus, the first person narrator of which is only identified with mention of his stay at Teima. But does the community which asserts Daniel was penned by Daniel appreciate the support of Baruch? Had Athanasius access in Alexandria to the Babylonian Kings List, we would better understand his “books to be read”.

   Referring back to the definition of canon provided by Josephus, this tight version of what constitutes the OT allows little maneuver room in Writings once Psalms are identified as a constituent. Moreover, chapter 9 of Daniel does damage to his cause for elevation to prophet since he appears to be speaking during the reign of Xerxes’s son (Darius II) who succeeds Artaxerxes, possibly explaining its post in the TaNaKh.
   To summarize let’s say that another benefit of canonicity is that it provides self-fulfilling prophecy.

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8. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 10, 2015 at 11:40 pm

   Thank you for your expertise, Wes, and elucidating that the Bible that our generation inherited was not intended to be a one-size-fits-all fig-leaf garment used by the first parents to cover their nakedness after partaking of the fruit of worldly knowlege under an assumption that this was all they needed by relying on knowledge that is incomplete without the variety of the trees of God’s garden that may symbolize the many books that were considered not worthy of inclusion in the canon. The so-called tree of prohibition symbolizes the law of Moses that transgressors were subject to, as Jesus himself indicated when he said that a person’s transgressions will make them answerable to the legislative body of the Sanhedrin (Matthew 5:22).
   It is interesting reading the comments of Paul #15 and Wes#18 & 27 about the change that occurred after the Jewish revolt against the Romans ended with the seige at Masada, among whom were likely familiar with the writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their use of the term “Kittim” (Genesis 10:4) to designate the Romans. The variety of sects mentioned by Josephus is replaced by largest sect, the Pharisees, and their legal hair-splitting successors, the Sanhedrin governed Rabbinate whose seat of government relocated from Jerusalem to Jabneh.
   You can see how the Jewish Christians in the Levant had processed these developments in the gospel of John where it mentions Jesus going to Jerusalem and his not trusting the authority of men (John 2:24-25) and then in Nicodemus is mentioned who was a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin. There was an oral tradition that was first composed in the form that now have in the writings of the Mishnah that became the foundation of the later Palestinian and Babylonian Talmud.
   The author of the Mishnah in the early 3rd century, Judah ha-Nasri (whose name, Nasri, means “prince,” the term used by Ephron the Hittite in addressing Abraham in Genesis 23:6, when purchasing a plot to lay Sarah to rest and whose name means “princess”) had the same source as the author of the gospel of John, in the tractate of Pirke Aboth, or the ” Sayings of The Fathers.” This ethical treatise is distinct from the halakhic work of the Mishnah and it traces back the authority of the Rabbinate of the post-Second Temple period to the men of the Great Assembly (the precursor to the Sanhedrin) that was founded after the return of the Babylonian captivity at the beginning of the Second Temple period, which is the period when scripture was considered valid before prophecy ceased in Israel under the domination of the Greco-Roman civilizations.
   The term “Kabbalah” that was first coined during the Middle Ages was derived from the word “kibel,” which means “to receive,” that is used in the Pirke Aboth:
   “Moses received (“kibel”) Torah from Sinai and gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets gave it over to the men of the Great Assembly…”
   Then the authority of one of the last surviving members of the men of the Great Assembly, Simon the Righteous, is received by Antigonus of Socho (who has a Greek name like Nicodemus).
   Another thing that’s interesting is the Wikipedia page on “Book of Baruch” which makes comparisons in phrases found in the Gospels, such as Baruch 3:29:
   “Who has ever climbed the sky and caught her (wisdom) to bring her down from the clouds?”
   “No one has gone up to heaven
   except the one who came down from heaven,
   the Son of Man who is in heaven” (John 3:13).
   In the wisdom psalm of Baruch 3:9-4:4 the Book of the Torah is the embodiment of the primordial wisdom like in the section of Proverbs 8:22-31 and the 24th chapter of the Wisdom of Ben Sirach.
   The reference to the gospel of John’s “Son of Man” can be found in Ezekiel 1:26 where it mentions the “semblence of a human form” upon the heavenly throne.
   Maybe some people don’t want us to know certain things like there being a higher authority like that old Hebrew National Hotdog television ad with Uncle Sam looking up in wonder. It reminds me of a song that’s not easy to find, called “Relay,” by The Who:
   “Every single dream
   is locked up in the scheme,
   they all get carried on the relay.”

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9. Paul Ballotta says:

   November 11, 2015 at 10:32 am

   Since the Mishnah tractate Hagigah 2:1 states that the relaying of the teachings of the divine chariot can only be transmitted to a wise man who can understand by himself, it is only fitting that I correctly “relay” the lyrics of the sage:
   “From tree to tree, from you to me,
   traveling twice as fast as on any freeway;
   every single dream, wrapped up in the scheme,
   they all get carried on the relay.”
   The oral tradition of the Pharisees which found their resting place in the writings of the Mishnah (which is a title derived from the Hebrew word “shanah,” meaning, “to repeat”) may date back to late 8th century B.C.E. and was probably alluded to in Isaiah 8:20 as “the Law and the Testimony.”
   “Wrap up the testimony, put a seal about the law among my disciples!” (Isaiah 8:16).
   This against a backdrop of the network of couriers relaying information within the Neo-Assyrian Empire similar to the tablets written in Akkadian found at Tel Amarna in Egypt and dating to the reigns of Pharaohs Amenhotep Iii and Amenhotep IV during the mid-14th century B.C.E.
   The “disaster stylus’ used to inscribe the tablet in Isaiah 8:1 was similar to the bold headlines of major events appearing on contemporary newspapers and the name Maher-shallel-hash-baz (hurry the plunder/chase the spoil) contains the word for a Hurrian chariot rider, “maher,” mentioned in the Papyrus Anastasi I that dates to the 13th century B.C.E.
   Of course the stability of Roman rule enabled the spread of information throughout the empire’s network of highways.

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10. WDK says:

    November 13, 2015 at 11:05 am

    Paul,
    Just want to acknowledge that I have read over what you said several times. I juar wish I knew more about Semitic and other ancient languages so that I had a better grasp on what you are saying. But I hope that our comments back the case for BAR to keep on digging – literally and metaphorically. There must be more dots to connect.

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