Many biblical scholars are Jewish. There is no religious requirement on being a biblical scholar.
Was Jesus soft?
- Thread starter BartenderElite
- Start date
AProudLefty
Black Kitty Ain't Happy
Wait what?
Did you think it was Atheist who spend their lives studying the Bible?
Well, you ARE a Marxist, and it's not because you're particularly bright....
The Torah and Talmud are not referred to as the "Bible" among Jewish communities. Christians term the Old Testament as the "Jewish Bible," which is often used, but it is not Jewish tradition to refer to scripture using the Greek term.
Indeed there is a Mosque on campus. Also a Christian Chapel and a Catholic Chapel. It's a University, not an elementary school.
NakedHunterBiden
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”
lol no such thing. moving on
The term Bible began being attached to the Jewish religious texts with the Septuagint, which was a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek Bible (or what we refer to now as the Greek Old Testament). Bible is a Greek word for book, or collection of books. It happened in the second or third century BCE. We could also use BC for BCE there, which means it happened hundreds of years before Jesus.
There were biblical studies going on in Alexandria centuries before Jesus was even born.
There may be a Muslim center, but not a mosque.
I said the opposite of what you claim. The term Bible was used to refer to the book before the New Testament even existed.
When anybody talks about the Hebrew bible, they are not strictly talking about the Talmud or the Torah.
The Talmud is a compilation of Rabbinic literature and commentaries which includes the Mishnah and the Gemara.
The Torah is just the five books of Moses.
The Hebrew bible is what is commonly referred to as TaNaKh, roughly equivalent to the Old Testament.
There are plenty of reasons Jews in antiquity would have been using Greek. By the time of the Roman empire, a lot of Jews couldn't even read Hebrew. There was a large non-Hebrew speaking Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean region. That is why the Jewish scholars of Alexandria commissioned the Septuagint. Which is written in Greek for the Jewish diaspora.
Hebrew bible is so commonly used in everyday parlance that even Jews instantly recognize it.
There would not be any Buddhist or Islamic scholars at American Universities if there was an ironclad requirement for them to be Buddhist or Muslim. The same with scholars of Christianity. I don't think militant atheists have any credible interest in being a religious historian, but religion is such an interesting subject plenty of people who are agnostic, deistic, or spiritual in some undefined way would find Christianity and Judaism fascinating to study.
Last edited:
They hate Jews, and it absolutely kills them that their religion is taken from the Jewish religion. So they create "alternate facts" that Judaism is not the original source of Christianity. In this alternate universe, Jesus was from Northern Europe.
Jesus was a Jew who taught, and expanded upon, the principles of social justice articulated first by the Hebrew prophets.
It must really bother Christian Identity adherents that the first half of the Christian Bible is all Jewish.
moon
Satire for Sanity
Moses ? There was no ' Moses ' in any bulrushes. There was no Exodus. The Jews were never in Egypt.
' Moses ' appears to be fictional. The Mount Sinai story is myth. These stories at, at best, analogies. Anybody accepting them as fact is a lost sheep.
' This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai. Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people – and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story – now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people’s emergence are radically different from what that story tells. '
Ze’ev Herzog and the historicity of the Bible - Noah Kennedy
Explore Noah Kennedy's discussion with Dr. Ze'ev Herzog on the historicity of biblical stories. Gain insights from a distinguished Israeli archaeologist
noahkennedy.net
moon
Satire for Sanity
You mean ' common sense'. ' Hebrew prophets ' had nothing to do with it. Jewish claims to be the authors of ' common sense ' rank with claims of the existence of Jewish cavemen.
Whether or not you believe Moses was a historical person, the simple fact is that the five books of the Torah are traditionally attributed to Moses.
Incorrect.
I have read a representative sample of ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian scripture, the Greek Homeric epics, Plato, and am familiar with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh.
The Hebrew bible is the first time in literary history that there is a concentrated focus on social justice and the welfare of the poor, the oppressed, the widows, and the orphans expressed as a moral imperative. In fact, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are basically the first examples in world literature that the poor and diseased were even systematically written about in anything other than caricature or pejoratives.
Social and economic justice as a moral imperative was not just "common sense"
moon
Satire for Sanity
I hope that his dubious provenance is noted in the preface. We wouldn't want our kids to think it was fact, now would we.