Yeah someone made a comment on my website yesterday. They told me to get a proper copy of the Bible because mine was "wrong". Not the Bible this time. This time it was my mistake when I was deliberately looking for things to criticise about Ecclesiastes and came across the words from Ecclesiasticus. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows a bit about the Apocrypha. I only know that those books were excluded because some of the people who were compiling the Bible didn't like the contents. Poor babies!

I've reached chapter 30 of Exodus, after a week of car drama, and reading chapter after chapter of God demanding gold and jewels to stroke his little ego while people grovelled before him. Is it just me, or is there something a little off about people who have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and who are being fed a really poor diet of bread and pheasants, without much water, being expected to denote the little they have to dress up a box in gold, and old men in jewel-encrusted finery?

I've finished with my first "draft" of Exodus. If someone would like to read it and critique I'd be most grateful. Skinny did a pretty good job with Genesis, so anyone else who'd like to take a look at what Iv'e said about Exodus, please let me know, I'll upload a pdf for downloading.

I'm now going to tackle the Apocrypha. The laws in Exodus have made me a little weary of "And the Lord said to Moses..." so I need a break reading something I haven't read before.

I have already made a start on Leviticus, it's tedious reading. Hopefully this lot will spark a bit of enthusiasm. I'm going to do it book by book in one volume, as I did with the first Rationalising the Bible, which I'm now preparing to get published on Lulu.com to see how that goes.

Someone on Facebook told me there's a group of humanists in South Africa looking for authors, I'm going to contact them as well, see if I can get some local interest and support for my writing.

Agrippina wrote:I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows a bit about the Apocrypha. I only know that those books were excluded because some of the people who were compiling the Bible didn't like the contents. Poor babies!

I guess you are referring to those books listed as OT Apocrypha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... _Apocrypha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... depigrapha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha

These are in contrast to the NT Apocrypha. Am I correct in understanding that you are working your way through the books of the (Old Testament) Bible? Are you going to do, or have you done, the NT? Just curious.

Anyway the point about the apocrypha (whether new or old) is that for one or multiple reasons, these books were not included as part of the authoritative series of books. If you are rewriting the OT+NT Bible you might out of interest read a few of these because these were often, but not always, the books excluded from the official bibles (of various historical publication runs over the centuries).

At this point the Old Testament Apocrypha. It's more complicated than we imagine. There are the books of the Hebrew Old Testament, the ones with which we are all familiar, then the Greek Orthodox, the Latin Vulgate, and the Protestant Old Testament. Then just to make it even more complicated, within those categories there are the books of the Protestant Apocrypha, and the Roman Catholic Canon, which include 2 Esdras, but not 3&4 Maccabees, and Psalm 151, and both books of Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh, respectively.

Thus when a theist says "holy text" they are talking about their religion's holy text, excluding the books not thought to be inspired by God, but also excluding some of the books from that list which are definitely not inspired by anyone. or have some other reason for not being included in either their Old Testament or their Apocrypha list.

I've done the entire Bible in my first book, and in that I've spoken only about the first two books of the Maccabees in referring to the period of the Greek occupation which isn't covered in mainstream theology. In this one I'm covering only the Old Testament books. I'll do the New Testament ones when I review the New Testament, book-by-book and verse-by-verse. I'm going to be busy working with the Bible for the rest of my life it seems.

I've almost finished reading the two books of Esdras. Very interesting. I can see why Protestants and Jews wouldn't want them included in their Old Testaments. In the first one, the reason the people of Judea are sent back is because someone impressed Cyrus with his wisdom about how strong women are, and how much control they have over the fate of men. In the second book, God appears to be a little gentler with Esdras questioning his motives, why he allows "heathens" to get away with all the sins for which the Israelites are punished. The god of the Jewish OT would've struck him down for daring to question him.

Again, in the Book of Tobit, which Bible Scripture.net describes as a "religious novel" God seems a little less violent, and malevolent as he does in the rest of the OT. It's interesting, and apparently didn't make it into the Jewish canon because of the marriage arrangement in chapter 7 was made by the bride's father, and not the groom's father, it is therefore "halalka" (against Jewish tradition. So it wasn't included in the Tanakh.

ETA: The magic in chapter 6 when Tobias uses the internal organs of a fish to overcome the evildoer who is killing off Sara's husbands, is against Jewish law (Ex 22:18), so that too would be a reason it was not included.

I learn something new every time I read a new part of the Bible.

Disclaimer, in response to a post on the thread about whether Paul was a real person, I felt that I had to explain why I feel no "loss of face" because of becoming more knowledgeable, and respectful, of the Bible, as a result of reading it.

When I wrote the first posts in this thread, they were from the point of view of someone who'd never read the Bible, but who thought that being an atheist was all I needed to dismiss it as "a load of rubbish". Now, seven years (give or take a few months) later, I haven't become a "believer" but I have developed some respect for the collection of books.

My seven-year study of the "Holy Bible" has led me to the following conclusion:

The Bible stories were handed down by oral tradition until people began to write them down, leaving behind papyruses which other people rewrote, and which were read by people who saw the stories as a reason to create a formal dogma around them.

My opinion is that the monotheistic god of the Bible was invented from an combination of various gods of the region, two of whom included JHWH, and El. The reason for monotheism is, in my opinion, that having an all-powerful, all-knowing God who created everything, including every nation on earth (which the people of that time thought was a flat disk under "the heavens". He was more powerful than the gods of all the other nations, and his power was thereby transferred to the people who worshipped him.

Into this society was introduced a real king, David. Saul may have been a real king, or he's a myth, I haven't quite made up my mind about him yet. David, and Solomon, and the subsequent kings of "Israel" were real people, small kings over small domains.

Although they worshipped this powerful god, his worshippers still adhered to some of the ancient traditions, for example child sacrifice.

My opinion is that between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE the religion was in a state of flux, and it was the exile in Babylon that led them to formalise the religion, and their laws, copying some of those from already existing laws in the area.

They included a mythological history, and the laws in their first five books, then over the next 200 to 300 years collected the sayings and poetry of their, and other people around them, and, to give them antiquity, attributed them to their two most important kings, David and Solomon.

They also elevated their priests, and other wise men to the position of prophet, because, in the same way we venerate old people with insight, they saw their wisdom as foretelling the future. In the wake of the Greek invasion, these prophecies gave them hope of a king, like David, who would come to rescue them from the "whoredom" of Greek-style worship, and hedonism.

When the Romans entered the picture, the Israelites became afraid of another exile. Some of them drifted away from the formal temple religion to suggest more simple ways of worshipping God, including having teachers to educate them about the law, without having to give up precious livestock for the enjoyment of the priest. It was into this world that the "Jesus" character was born.

I'm not about to suggest that Jesus was either real, or that he wasn't. It is enough for me that a religion with it's priests and prophets was formed, and that the religion born out of the Diaspora, and the intermittent persecutions of people who refused to pay homage to dead emperors, and to do sacrifice to Roman gods, made the religion formed out of this new belief to become entrenched, especially because it allowed unscrupulous men to amass fortunes for the religion from the wealth handed over because people believed Jesus was coming to fetch them.

This is my summary of what I found from reading the Bible. I have not been converted into believing that anything apart from what can be empirically shown to be true, from carbon-dating and archaeology is true. I do respect, and admire, some of the writing, but I am also still shocked at the violence contained in the collection, and that I can't understand is supported by people who spent almost two millennia torturing other people in an attempt to make them not only believe, but also hand over their wealth.

I no longer wish to "rewrite" the Bible. I do, however, continue to study it. I never ceases to give me insight into the minds of the people who do believe it to be "God-inspired" "truth" whatever that's supposed to mean.

Over the years that I've been reading it, I've also kept a blog going which demonstrates my journey from a dismissive sceptic to a serious biblical scholar.

Please feel free to read any post there, and to comment. I will try to respond to anything that isn't against the rules of this forum. Bear in mind that my opinions have evolved. I have changed my mind, and become more knowledgeable since I wrote the original posts. They do, however, serve as a history of the evolution of ideas from performing a study of the collection of books.

Bookmarking for reference purposes.

You say you're a serious biblical scholar, which is a rare thing in fora like these. Where did you study?

I studied at the University of South Africa until I retired from formal study, which is when I started concentrating on the Bible rather than Ancient History in general. I intended to do this as a thesis, but then bad health and personal issues got in the way, which dragged the work on and on, and finally I just settled to publish it myself as a set of three books rather than submit it for formal recognition.

Edit to add: If you look at this thread, you can see discussion on the publication of my manuscript and my further work on the Bible.

OK. I guess the issue is that you're calling yourself a Bible scholar when you've no academic qualifications in that discipline.

What is your point?

Just what I said, I guess.

Tracer Tong wrote:OK. I guess the issue is that you're calling yourself a Bible scholar when you've no academic qualifications in that discipline.

As opposed to all the believers who claim they know the bible, but actually never read it you mean ?

aban57 wrote:

Tracer Tong wrote:OK. I guess the issue is that you're calling yourself a Bible scholar when you've no academic qualifications in that discipline.

As opposed to all the believers who claim they know the bible, but actually never read it you mean ?

No, they're not Bible scholars either.

Tracer Tong wrote:

aban57 wrote:

Tracer Tong wrote:OK. I guess the issue is that you're calling yourself a Bible scholar when you've no academic qualifications in that discipline.

As opposed to all the believers who claim they know the bible, but actually never read it you mean ?

No, they're not Bible scholars either.

Definitions of scholar :
1. a learned or erudite person, especially one who has profound knowledge of a particular subject.
2. a student; pupil.
3. a student who has been awarded a scholarship.

So according to you, someone who learns on a subject for at least 5 years doesn't correspond to any to the first 2 definitions ?

Tracer Tong wrote:No, they're not Bible scholars either.

Implying, therefore, that someone who has studied the Bible in depth and has written books on the subject is somehow not a scholar because they were not taught by another person on that subject.

So, what is your definition of a Bible scholar?

Alan B wrote:

Tracer Tong wrote:No, they're not Bible scholars either.

Implying, therefore, that someone who has studied the Bible in depth and has written books on the subject is somehow not a scholar because they were not taught by another person on that subject.

So, what is your definition of a Bible scholar?

I'd consider a Bible scholar to be someone who has gained a doctorate in Biblical studies, or else someone with a number of scholarly publications in the field. Agrippina appears to have none of these, nor in fact any level of academic attainment in the discipline. She's welcome to correct me if I've misunderstood, of course.

This isn't to say that I don't find her informal study of the Bible, and her consequent self-publishing of books on the matter, commendable. But then I didn't take issue with this.

That is a very narrow point of view.

There are probably many people throughout history who, without formal training in a particular subject, have set the standards in that subject for other scholars to follow.