Origins of the Judeo-Christian god and religion

That's nonsense. They BEGAN with the calling of Abraham by God. Where on earth are you getting your information?The Bible itself was not written until the time of Moses, 400 years after Abraham, but it tells the story of Abraham and the population of Israelites who were his descendants and outside of that record nothing is known of them.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:08 AM

Well, I can see you are dedicated to your revisionist history, so I'll leave you to it. Sorry I bothered.

Um, so they just sprang into existence spontaneously?I don't understand what you are saying? There have been humans on earth for 10s or 100s of thousands of years. The jewish people are descended from some of these humans. At some point they adopted the jewish faith.I'm getting my information from known facts about the planet earth.Humans have existed for far longer than the jewish faith has.There is certainly archeological evidence to help us learn more about hte jewish people. The bible can also help us learn more about them since it is one of their literary works.It would be interesting to know how long some of the stories in the bible were told before they were written down and from which groups the various stories came from.

Repeat after me SLOWLY.... The bible IS NOT A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT.There are parts that may have some historical accuracy, but much of the contents are just stories and myths.This thread is about where those myths and stories came from and how the jewish faith evolved.Is it revisionist history to think that adam and eve and the garden of eden simply did not exist?I simply accept the facts of human history as we know them.

Get the adamant tone in which you insist on your dogma. As I said, you like your revisionist history. You are so sure of your dogma you are even willing to try to brainwash a person to believe it ("Repeat after me SLOWLY...")?Well, enjoy. It's your thread.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:53 AM

Thing is that his "dogma" as you call it is based on vast amounts of sceintific evidence in multiple fields. Yours isn't.

Revisionist history? Um, no... It's regular history just like the history of every other period. Can historians learn a lot by studying the bible? Sure they can; in the same way they can learn a lot by studying the odyssey or the illiad.I'm not saying the bible is all fables and stories, there is certainly some history in there.... and even the things that are ancient myths can give good insight into the people that wrote them.

and more importantly rick... it's not dogma! I'm sure there are a lot of things we still don't know about the ancient jewish people and probably some things that researchers got wrong. Our knowledge is always uncertain and changing.Heck, maybe they will find evidence for more of the things in the bible some day and we will come to treat other parts as history that we didn't know were history before.I think I came on a little too strong. The bible is certainly not useless when studying these people, but it must be treated like any other form of evidence.This message has been edited by SuperNintendo Chalmers, 05-04-2006 10:03 AM

I don't understand the problem here. I don't want to contribute to this thread any more because my information is obviously outside your realm of interest, but I don't get your problem with this idea. ALL human tribes started somewhere. The Jewish tribe simply started from -- was descended from -- a man named Abraham. That's what they believe to this day, and it's what the Bible says. They STARTED there. What's so unlikely about that? Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac married Rebecca who gave birth to Jacob and Esau. Jacob inherited the birthright, and passed it on to his twelve sons by two wives and their maids, and the twelve sons (including Judah, Benjamin, Joseph, Levi etc) became the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel. {ABE: Jacob is renamed Israel at a point in the story, and it is his name that defines the tribe from then on}. It's a family that became a clan that became a tribe that over their 400 years as slaves in Egypt grew to be a nation of millions {abe: probably a couple million anyway: There's nothing inherently unlikely about any of this.In the Bible many different peoples are identified by the name of a particular ancestor who founded the dynasty as it were, and his name may be the name of a city they grew to become. Whole regions are named after the patriarch of a clan {abe: such as Canaan, Moab, Ammon}. As the clan grows it becomes a tribe or a people. This doesn't happen much today because we are so mobile and don't remain with our original families.In the case of Abraham, the solidarity of the tribe was strengthened by their practice of marrying within the clan too -- his son and grandson went back to Abraham's brother's family {or maybe it was his uncle I forget} to find wives. Some Arabs today trace their tribes back to Abraham's other son, Ishmael, and regard Abraham as their ancestor. What is wrong with their own history of having been descended from this one man Abraham? There is nothing intrinsically unlikely about it.And what is wrong with the Biblical account of their religious belief having started with him too? He felt himself to be called by the one true God in the midst of a polytheistic culture, to leave that culture and start his own in a new land, and he taught his children the worship of the God he was called by, and taught them to protect their belief from outside influences. They never "adopted" a faith at all. It grew with the clan. What would that tell you? They have a very coherent history as recounted in the Bible. Why would any group but their own clan tell the stories?This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 11:52 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:37 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:38 PM

So let's say this abraham existed... He had parents too and I'm sure they held some of beliefs as did his grandparents, great-grandparents,... great-great-great-great-great-great-etc. grandparents.There were civilizations around when this guy supposedly lived and I would assume he was a member of one.So even if Abraham existed his family going way back would have been members of various other cultures which through him evolved into judaism.

Yes and that's one thing the Bible is good at -- you can trace Abraham's genealogy back to Noah's son Shem in Genesis 11:10-32, and even back to Adam. He lived in Ur until God called him, in the area of ancient Sumer. Of course. As I've said many times, they were part of a polytheistic culture in Ur.{ABE: Also, their ancestor Noah and his son Shem had worshipped the true God. That pure religion had been lost to various polytheistic idolatries over time, so that Abraham's family, who no doubt also remembered the God of Noah, had household idols as well.} But this isn't the case. Abraham was called to LEAVE Ur and go to a new land. This he did. His father and other family members moved with him and settled in Haran (last chapters {correction: verses} of Genesis 11). Abraham left them there to go on into the land of Canaan where he lived a tent-dwelling life for many years.His relationship with God was a personal thing. He taught it to his children. It never expanded outside his own descendants. According to the Bible various outsiders did recognize his God as the true God, but outsiders who came to believe in his God usually joined Israel {The book of Ruth is about one outsider's becoming an Israelite) instead of Israel's influencing the other tribes much. In fact this was sort of a problem for Israel as God had commissioned them to represent Him to the nations, and they never did. It became an ingrown tribal religion instead. It didn't go out to the nations beyond the gathering in of some Gentile proselytes until Jesus Christ sent it out through His apostles.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 12:41 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:11 PM

Interesting....So this is the history from the point of view of the bible.Thanks for the post.Of course an intersting subject would be, "What came first? The Bible or the religion?"Thanks for the biblical history.I would love to compare/contrast this with what we know from archeological history, and this would probably be a good way to move the thread forward.Thanks for the post

You're welcome. Please check for some late edits I added for clarification -- I'm bad that way.

No problem and I apologize for being a bit combatitive earlier.I think that both perspectives on the history fo the judeo-christian faith are valuble. Both the secular/archeological history and the biblical history.

how many people do i know? well, at least one. i do.surely, the intelligent-design-iots must too: it's the entirety of their argument. who could believe it, had god not already written it upon our hearts, and in our souls?

quote:

---

2Cr 3:3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

---

added by edit {thanks brenna}:

quote:

---

Psa 19:1-3
The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language,
where their voice is not heard.

---

This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 05-04-2006 04:39 PM

---