mass revelation -- other religions?

Factual Questions
1

First of all, this is not a Great Debate, so please try to keep the answers to facts. Secondly, please don’t assume anything about my religious approach based on the question.

About 10 years ago, I went to a class that was trying to propose a “historical proof” that the Torah was given to the Jewish people by God at Mount Sinai. (I really don’t want to debate whether such a proposition is possible or even worthwhile.)

One of the arguements was based on the fact that Judaism is the only religion that had mass revelation (at Sinai) to the entire nation. The speaker claimed that no other religion had an entire national revelation, or even a revelation to very large numbers of people. (He mentioned that this is predicted in Deuteronomy 4:30-32).

According to the speaker:

Is this correct? Are there no religions that make the claim of mass or national revelation?

2

I found a couple of links to similar talks:

http://aish.com/holidays/Shavuot/Did_God_Speak_at_Sinai.asp

http://aish.com/holidays/shavuot/last/know-f.htm

Again, please don’t turn this into a debate.

3

Would miracles before large groups count? (Thinking loaves and fishes).

On the Mt. Sinai side, didn’t the Almighty speak to Moses alone on the mountain and then Moses carried the tablets back to the waiting crowds?

4

I think Christians would claim the events recounted as having taken place at Penetecost in Acts 1 as being a mass revelation.

5

Am I missing something?

I don’t get why the claim that the revelation was to many rather then to just one is supposed to be important. One or many; either way, it’s something that adherants of the religion are supposed to take on faith. They have to, as no proof exists that any of these revelations occurred.

6

OK… simul-post with the links. :slight_smile:

Not sure it’s fair to say that DeMille made a mistake having Moses relay the news. During Exodus 19 to 30-something Moses spends a lot of time on the top of Mt. Sinai with the Lord, but the common folk seem to see smoke, fire and cloud and hear thunder. Where does the Lord speak directly with the crowd? (Or is it not in the Old Testament?)

7

From the talk:

So I think miracles aren’t the same as revelation, since they can be faked (or done through some “supernatural power”, without God’s approval). Also, the numbers here are much smaller.

No. according to the Bible, God spoke to the entire Jewish people (according to Jewish tradition, only the first two commandments, the rest were given to Moses alone). In Exodus 20:19: “You yourselves saw that I spoke to you (plural) from the very heavens.”

And again, the quote from Deuteronomy 4:32-33:

8

Well, the idea of the talk was that many historical events we believe to be true are because they were witnessed by vast numbers of people. An event of this magnitude would be much harder, if not impossible, to make up, whereas a prophesy to individual, or to a small group, could be much more easily faked.

9

I think Mormons would also claim the supposed events of 3 Nephi, chapters 9, 10, and 11 et seq. would also constitute a mass revelation.

10

Ewww… that’s a terribly slippery slope curwin. If we accept the possibility of a supernatural power that is not God, and which can fake miracles, then what limits do we place upon it?

Can it make loaves and fishes multiply?
Can it bring a (false?) prophet back from the dead?
Can it produce a convincing voice “from the very heavens” that could deceive a nation?

How do we tell the false manifestations from the real?

11

The Gnostics said that the physical universe was not created by an ultimate God, but merely by the Demiurge, which was basically an insane deity on a power-trip that merely believed itself to be omnipotent, and was keeping humanity imprisoned in a sick and false world. Sounds plausible to me. :wink:

12

Judaism doesn’t put much weight in miracles. We have a legal system whose authority goes back to the initial national revelation at Sinai, which everyone heard, so everyone can personally attest to its validity. There is an amazing story in the Talmud of a rabbi who had a voice come from Heaven exclaiming that he was correct on a certain legal issue, and the rabbis ignored that voice since the law “is not in heaven”.

I think there are likely two schools of thought as to how to explain strange miracles. Some would ascribe them to supernatural powers, but without God’s approval. Others would claim that they are more likely elaborate hoaxes. I personally fall in the latter category. But both would say that the miracles themselves don’t need to influence us.

13

Especially since 3000 were converted as a result of what they saw and heard…

Gp

14

<< Especially since 3000 were converted as a result of what they saw and heard… >>

The point of the “masses” argument is to try to prove historical veracity. Sort of like, enough people participated in World War II that no one can claim it was a fiction invented by the U.S. Government. It would have involved too many people lying. However, only a handful of people participated in the moon landing, so we do get people arguing it was a fake.

The other side of this argument is the passing of the story from generation to generation. I (as a father) tell my children bedtime stories about an incident in my individual life (say, the adventures I had when I was a soldier in John Carter’s Army on Mars) and they believe me. They tell their children about my adventures, who tell their children. A few generations later, we have a group who believe that their ancestor fought the green hordes on Mars. But it ultimately tracks back to one individual, and so could be false.

On the other hand, if my story involves the entire clan or tribe or city, there is far less chance of it being passed down from generation to generation. If I tell my children that the whole city faced the six-legged Martians, the story won’t hold up as true. My children would talk to other children in the same city and exchange the stories, and the other children would say, “Hey, MY grandma never said anything about that, and she would have been there too!”… this is evidence/indication of untruth to the story, and while it might be passed on as a good story, it wouldn’t be passed on as “true.”

Hence, the argument goes, the fact that a story is something witnessed by everyone’s ancestors together is “proof” of its veracity.

Since the documentation for the loaves and fishes story was written many years after the alleged event, this is not the same thing. It’s not the entire clan (or religion) that witnessed the event and converted, it’s a fairly small group. And there were lots of others converted at the time, Christianity was spreading like wildfire. Thus, a child tells his friend, “MY grampa saw the loaves and fishes miracle,” another child says, “Oh, mine didn’t, mine converted elsewhere.” There’s no disproof.

15

Dex writes:

When were Exodus and Deuteronomy written? This is a legitimate question, not flamebait. It is my understanding that the New Testament was written after the fact, and I’ve always just assumed that the Old Testament was oral tradition that was written down long after the fact. Am I mistaken?

I understand the argument about not being able to pass down even an oral tradition against a false ‘fact’ such as the entire city fought the Martians, but I think that well documented instances of mass hysteria give a hint as to how such stories could have originated. Given sufficient time in an oral culture, I don’t think it unreasonable that a legendary (as opposed to factual) mass revelation could be put forth as historical fact.

How about mass ‘revelation’ of deities now generally agreed to not exist, such as the Greek or Roman gods or Norse gods? I’m afraid I’m not familiar enough with the mythology. Anyone know of such appearances?

16

The Sinai argument is popular in Jewish apologetics. A rebuttal argument can be found here. In short, other religions do make claims of mass revelation, and certain claims of mass revelation are clearly false.

Douglips:

Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians will tell you that Exodus and Deuteronomy were written by Moses. Most others accept dates between 1000 BCE to 500 BCE, centuries after the fact.

Without turning this into a great debate, I think that the best rebuttal of the Sinai argument is that it is a strawman in the first place. No skeptic seriously believes that sometime around 1000 BCE, 500 years after the Exodus, some guy stood up in a public street corner in Jerusalem and said:

Hey everyone! Remember a long time ago when our people were fleeing Egypt and that guy named Moses was leading us? I’m sure all your fathers have told you the story. Well, what they didn’t tell you was that God revealed himself to the entire nation at Sinai. I know, you haven’t heard anything like this before, but trust me, it’s true.

Instead, the Sinai tradition can be seen as the development of a myth over time. Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt. For this, he is revered as one of the greatest people in Israelite history. Perhaps he occasionally ascends a mountain to meditate. He never tells anyone what he’s doing, so the legend develops that he is talking to God. Moses also gives the Israelites certain rules to live by, which, coupled with the previous legend, makes people think that these rules are not from Moses, but from God. One day in the desert, there is some sort of weather phenomenon that the Israelites do not understand, like a lightning storm, which is interpreted as the “voice of God.” The legend grows, and as time and generations pass, it is forgotten what exactly the “voice of God” that the people heard was. And we get the Sinai story.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily how it happened. It’s just a possibility that I threw together.

Consider the story of Noah as another example of something that probably had an historical core that grew to mythic, worldwide proportions over time.

Or, as another example, consider the widespread belief that the Nazis turned people into soap in the Holocaust. Michael Shermer talks about this in his book Denying History. While enough people experienced the Holocaust for us to know that it really happened, there is zero evidence that the Nazis actually turned people into soap. And yet Shermer relates an incident with a Holocaust survivor who swore that this is true, and that she saw it with her own eyes.