Back when I was a church-goer, I attended a United Methodist Church in Lewisville, Texas for a couple of years that was extraordinary. The pastor was intelligent, witty and a great cook. (okay that last part was irrelevant; but every dessert recipe he submited to the cook book had rum in it). Every Wednesday he led a “Pastor’s Bible Study” that was quite informative. We spent some time on the Apocryphical books; discussed theological disputes including Arianism, necessity of Baptism and the different creation stories of Genesis; compared and contrasted the starkly different stories of the Gospels; and questioned common (mis)understandings on the works of Paul. Even after leaving the faith, I still think those Wednesday evenings were well spent. Christianity would be well served by having more Pastors leading such a study.
It is really horrible. It is also religions great stench, I mean, strength.
A typical pattern seems to go like this: religious group gets persecuted, gets into power, persecutes and kills others to an almost unthinkable degree, comes out on top of a civilization, then disowns all the irrational mindsets, and brickheads that have gotten it so far, and points to what the elite believed, back in the day, as proof that it has always been enlightened.
I’m sure others have said similar things, it’s quite common.
Well, this one is plausible assuming that they did go there. I don’t know what it has to do with the Dead Sea scrolls, though.
Inquiring minds would want to know what language(s) were spoken in Egypt around 1 B.C. Certainly, Engyptian is not spoken in Egypt today (they mostly speak Arabic). Back 2,000 years ago, Greek was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, so you could probably have got on just fine in Egypt by speaking in Greek (just as today you can get on just fine in many parts of the world just speaking in English). Latin would have been a help too, and you could probably find lots of people who spoke Aramaic in Egypt, too.
I said plausible, not required. Egyptian 9whichever variant) was not erased until Arabic was introduced centuries later.
And here we have one of the folks the OP is talking about. There was no need for Jospeh and Mary to speak Egyptian. There had been a large Jewish community in Egypt for centuries, so they could have gotten by in Hebrew. Since Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, there had also been Greek-speaking communities in Egypt’s cities, including the Ptolemaic capital, Alexandria, and Greek was not only the dominat language of the ruling elite in Egypt, it was the lingua franca of the region. In fact, the Septuagint, the first translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek was composed in Alexandria in the second century BC.
After Octavian (who was to become Augustus, the first emperor) beat Marc Antony and Cleropatra at the Battle of Actium and absorbed Egypt into the Roman Empire, Latin was also thrown into the mix of languages.
And the Dead Sea Scrolls were referenced because their exhibition was the occasion for the OP to hear some uneducated Christians airing their ignorance.
Read books, learn about history.
You know, Friar, it’s people like you who make it awfully difficult for us atheists to wholly dislike Christianity. Well said.
No, not really plausibel. As has been explained to you, Greek, not Egyptian, was the major language spoken in the region.
Plausible, damn it!
A reading list for Smiling Bandit:
The complete idiot’s guide to the world of the Bible
Donald P Ryan.
Alexandria : city of the Western mind
Theodore Vrettos.
Empires ascendant : Timeframe 400 BC-200 AD
(part of a Time-Life series without a single author)
Asimov’s Guide to the Bible
Isaac Asimov
Great cities of the ancient world
L. Sprague DeCamp
Lost Christianities
Bart Ehrmann
Roman History
Two JWs once came to my door. When I told them I was an atheist, one of them said, “Did you know that the Bible says the earth was round, whereas everyone before Columbus thought it was flat?”
Rubicon : the last years of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
The complete idiot’s guide to the Roman Empire
Eric Nelson.
Two thousand years ago : the world at the time of Jesus
Charles A Frazee.
So they had never heard of Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, or Aristotle?
Actually, I was in a foul mood, so I told them about Eratosthenes, scratching out a diagram of his calculations in the dirt. No, they hadn’t heard of him.
True, but it’s good to know I didn’t hallucinate reading it here.
I grew up in a church where questioning things was actively encouraged, so you can imagine my joy when I came here and found people who knew a lot more about the Bible than I did, as well as my chagrin the one time I asked Diogenes, “What do you know about the Bible?” I still blush at the memory.
I also remember being appalled when I asked one of our more fervent Biblical-literalist, all non-Christians are going to hell type Fundamentalists what Jesus said to the woman at the well. She replied, “He said, ‘Go and sin no more.’” At that point, I wanted to start whacking my head against a very large, very solid brick wall.
Sampiro, I’m with you. If these folks are going to try and govern my life by their interpretation of the Bible, they could at least try to read and understand it, especially if they’re going to tell me I’m distorting scripture because I disagree with them.
By the way, Homebrew, that sounds like one church it would have been fun to go to!
CJ
I did try to share with one. I told the lady who was confused about Jubilees that it was written by Jewish hillbillies and was hence pronounced “Jew-billies”. She laughed.
An odd thing was the inordinate amount of time people took looking at the scroll fragments- you couldn’t see the actual scroll because people would crowd in around them for five minutes or more and block them off. I wanted to ask them “CAN YOU READ IT?” as I seriously doubt there were that many people versed in Hebrew and Paleo-Hebrew present, but…
I so want to go to Israel after seeing this and other exhibits… next year in Jerusalem.
So…Matthew, Mark, Luke and John didn’t sit and take dictation from Jesus?
:eek:
Well, I’ll be…
…not joining you at the exhibit since my response to these people is to lust after some mechanical means of destruction and wade thru the crowd, shouting, “culling!”.
need smacking head against brick wall smiley here.
I know this seems to be a pile on the religious folks thread, but two points:
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How do you know the folks visiting were religious. Many people who are not active members of a faith may be visiting and asking dumb questions.
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I put the blame as much as the poor history teachers if anything (and I used to be one). I used to work summers as a tour guide at various historical sites, and the people who would travel to these places, and presumably have a sufficient interest in history to visit such a site, would ask questions that would rival or better your examples. No religion (usually) involved.
It seems to me people are just woefully undereducated about history - religious or not. You may as well ask “How can _______ people know so damned little about their country’s history.”