Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
he's 6-2 like flower is 6-4
Thoughtful Judaism question-
Have the basic texts changed since Jesus' time? Like the Torah, or the Talmud or whatever- did they continue to be written or did they end ancient?
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The man presently possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in our geographical region believes they were written by God using Moses as a pen.
Thinking people and other "cultural elite" believe they were written over the course of centuries and used in various non-standard combinations until the Council of Yavneh (Jamnia) in 90 C.E. (A.D.), twenty years after the destruction of Jerusalem.
The Torah (Pentateuch) itself was much older than that, and probably existed as an oral tradition following the death of Moses until about three hundred years later during the Davidian kingdom. They existed as scraps and conflicting, politically slanted accounts until collected into a single work in 450 B.C.E. The combination of multiple works explains why so many things in the Torah involve weird conflicting repetitions --- two inconsistent Genesis stories (Chapters 1 and 2), for example.
The other books were written more recently, obviously. Maccabees was written in 164 B.C.E. at the earliest, so Maccabees would have been to Jesus as, say, Melville would be to us. Job, on the other hand, is likely the oldest book in the Bible. The oldest part of it could be a story as old as 5,000 years old. It describes a kind of Hebrew piety that probably pre-dates Abraham. Sadly, your President and the Red States tend to think the book was written chronologically, which creates some difficulty, intellectually speaking.
The Straight Dope did a really good summary a few years ago. It's
here.
