I think I had some Semite on a slice of toast the last time I was in Australia.
OK, I’m in.
Happy Lendervedder. Actually, that’s a nom de plume. I don’t go by that in real life.
I’m 37.
It’s the end of 2012. I don’t know why you’d ask this, though; every post is time-stamped.
By “they” do you mean the Dopers reading this thread? And by “it” do you mean the info I just gave? If so, I’m pretty sure they’ll believe everything I said to be the truth.
Now what’s this got to do with the Bible?
Um; the cross was the Romans killing him, not other Jews. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment.
I can accept that Dex wrote the Old Testament, but Euty is younger so I think he wrote the New Testament.
That is the one of the sillier attempts to “describe” the New Testament.
From the opening line of the link:
At this point, Mr. Duke has pushed is allegations way past the limit of credibility well into the realm of uninformed speculation.
Making Jesus an Essene is the hallmark of New Age silliness that ignores everything we know about the Essenes.
I am not going to do a detailed rebuttal of Duke’s odd claims; they are hardly worth considering. I place them among the myriad speculations that have been floating around since the end of the 19th century that took a particular twist after the 1960s when various people began misreading information published about the Qumran Scrolls.
It is no big deal, aside from having such a loose connection to reality as to be well fit for the fiction section of a bookstore. (One would get as much “historical” information from reading the typical Dan Brown potboiler.)
I will point out that Duke totally mischaracterizes the nature of Apostolic Succession as a result of inventing a history for “Tradition” that has no basis in reality.
This is not to make any claim that we know the actual author of any of the books of the New Testament (other than recognizing that Paul/Saul of Tarsus was the most likely author of seven of the works attributed to him). However, any claim that cites Mr. Duke is simply risible.
Hey, we got a good advance.
Though I wish the royalty checks would show up already.
agreed…if James does that again, please issue him a citation
You’re of course correct - my point was (and I didn’t state it at all) that the (majority if any of) Jews at the time did not recognize him as the Messiah, which led to him being put to the cross - had they recognized him as the messiah, I think the story would have played out very differently.
(conjecture of course)
I’ll grant “differently,” but I am not sure that it would have changed the overall history of the Jewish people that much: see Bar Kokhba.
I liked the part where he cited the fact that Peter was also identified as Simon or Cephas as evidence that the New Testament was made up. (“Names and events are shuffled together so haphazardly that it is impossible to preserve their identity. For example: Peter (one of the twelve Apostles) is referred to as Peter, Simon, and Cephas”)
Duke is apparently unaware that the man’s given name was clearly Simon (or Shimon in the original Aramaic). Simon’s nickname was “Rocky” - which in Aramaic is Cephas and which translates into Latin as Petrus (Peter). This is laughably poor scholarship.
I could only skim parts of it. Silly ideas are one thing, bad writing is another.
From my skimming:
Even this cite says we don’t know.
So, we need a new cite as to who wrote the Net Testament.
[Lionel Hutz]
That’s a kind of scholarship!
[/Lionel Hutz]
I don’t know who wrote the Net Testament. But apparently a surprising number of people have written the Newt Estimate.
Tibor wrote the Old Testiment [Homer Simpson: Always blame the guy who doesn’t speak English.]
Not bad for a Newt.
you can google this, if you wanted.
the first of the OT was written by moses (the Pentateuch) and preserved in the ark of the covenant.
David and Solomon added some, then Hezekiah, etc. most of these have extraordinarily consistent extremely early iterations (century-to-centuries before christ existed).
they have extant documents, the dead sea scrolls, the book of Isaiah from around 1000 ad—which jibe, meaning meticulous care was taken in preservation.
the NT, eeeeh. gets cloudy. there’s no dead sea scroll for the NT, and it wasn’t redacted until something like 397 ad. so do that math.
there’s also some language barriers. no original extant documents exist, only early copies. some differ wildly (well, but then so do the gospels). some things have been lost in copy (maybe they wrote TINT instead of TENT or tenant). some things were lost in translation (hebrew-greek-english). some words straight don’t translate. some words don’t exist. a great example is “homosexual.” it wasn’t a concept, so there was no word. “guys who do guys” typically meant something like “pederast,” so “defiler of boys” mixed in with “effeminate” and all that was just kind of smoothed out to “homosexual” in common christian vernacular, but is that what God said? hrm.
who wrote those books? google.
so. short answer: God. long answer: tons of dudes.
Moses didn’t exist, bro.
fiiiiiiine.
then God did it.
i feel bad for james. ya’ll know he’s just a kid, right?
he seems misguided but genuinely attempting to engage in discussion on this junk. it’s impossible not to want to clobber it, which is fair. but i posted my obligatory, half-ass serious answer–so now ALL HAIL EMPEROR CLOBBERSAURUS!