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Author | Topic: Biblical contradictions. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Isaiah chapters 40-66 are dated later than Cyrus's freeing of the Jews taken hostage by Nebuchadnezzar. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Please don't forward any lengthy material to the board (we're at 97% used disk space) or to my mailbox (same disk space). Your own discussion accompanying a link to this material on a webpage would be fine. The modern scholarship you're referring to is summarized in this quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Providing a little more detail than the Britannica quote, here are some excerpts from The Books of the Old Testament by Robert H. Pheiffer:
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
It was you who mentioned modern scholarship. I was only providing the Britannica's summary of the views of modern scholarship on Isaiah to fill out the discussion. You talk about the Britannica as if it were a separate and independent source, but Britannica contracts out the articles to Biblical scholars. It isn't really the Britannica you disagree with but the entire field of modern Biblical scholarship. Anyway, I anticipated your reply and already posted an answer above in Message 294. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
In this post I'll address material in your post not already addressed in Message 294.
It was Christians who decided these ambiguous Isaiah passages were prophecies of the Advent. There are two key qualities of successful prophecy: they're either very vague, or they only predict events that have already happened.
The key point to keep in mind is that the prophet Isaiah did not write the book Isaiah. Isaiah was carried down through oral tradition. Once in Babylon the Jews felt it important to preserve their culture in writing and took full advantage of the advanced scribal technology possessed by their captors, and it was in Babylon that Isaiah first took written form. As Babylon was beset of Cyrus more chapters were added to Isaiah, and more again after Babylon fell to Cyrus.
Josephus lived nearly 8 centuries after Isaiah the prophet, and nearly 6½ centuries after the return to Jerusalem. He is silent on Isaiah authorship. His Antiquities of the Jews is a history of the Jews, not a history of the Isaiah scroll. Isaiah was just another source for Josephus.
The Septuagint is a translation of the Torah performed 300 years after the return to Jerusalem. It is not a research work on OT origins.
The details of origin of all the books of the OT is unknown. Whatever was known and by whom did not pass down to us in history.
Mining the Internet, I see. Amazing similarity of expression with this website:
He also mentions that he illustrates this amply in the notes under their occurrences, but his webpage doesn't render well for me and I'm not going to look them up. Perhaps you'd be interested in undertaking the task?
This indicates that they valued the prophecies in Isaiah, particularly because he made so many that could be interpreted as prophecies of Jesus, but it says nothing about the origins of the book of Isaiah.
I'm into discussion, not following links. I'd prefer you present your views and supporting evidence here. Too many times links are fishing expeditions. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
I decided not to respond to this little piece of silliness, but it's nice to see I'm not the only one who noticed. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Keeping things simple, you can divide Biblical scholarship into two schools: liberals and conservatives. Pfeiffer's views are representative of the liberal school. When you say things like "most scholars disagree with him" you should make clear that you're referring primarily to conservative scholars. His views are mainstream in liberal circles. I'm not really interested in arguing whether the modern state of Israel is included in God's covenant. I joined the thread because of the focus on prophecy. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
What lies? All Britannica said was, "According to 6:1, Isaiah received his call 'in the year that King Uzziah died' (742 BC)." Read the rest of Isaiah 6 and you'll see that this is exactly what it says, that Isaiah received his call to prophecy (God says to Isaiah, "Go and tell the people") the year King Uzziah died. If your interpretation includes a different chronology then go ahead and argue it. Unlike you, we won't call views we disagree with "lies". Doctrbill and I called this silly nitpicking because precisely when Isaiah began prophesizing has nothing to do with the issues under discussion. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
You're half right. Both the Hebrews and the Christians missed the truth.
As I already said in Message 299, Isaiah 1-39 was written in Babylon before Cyrus, 40-48 shortly before Cyrus conquered Babylon, and 49-55 shortly after. So obviously Isaiah 1-48 was available for Cyrus to read.
After raising the issue of modern Biblical scholarship yourself, you now deny it even exists, there's just this one weird guy Pfeiffer and maybe a few cohorts? Go figure. Anyway, Pfeiffer's views are representative of liberal Biblical scholarship, a rather large and well-populated field. Other names in the field that I can think of are Crossan, Funk, Hoover, Golb, Eisenman, Wise, Armstrong, Friedman and Spong. Some of the most well known religious denominations are modernist in outlook, like the Methodists, the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.
Are you here to debate or lecture? To this point you've chosen to cast aspersions instead of addressing the specifics of the views of the modern school.
Yes, yes, don't worry, we believe you. The excerpt I cited from Pfeiffer mentioned stylistic differences between Isaiah 1-39 and Deutero-Isaiah. You replied that, "Over 300 words and expressions used in both sections are not used by other prophets of the post-exilic period." But Isaiah was not written in the post-exilic period. It wasn't even written in Israel but in Babylon. You need to address the stylistic differences between Isaiah 1-39 and Deutero-Isaiah noted by the modern school. For instance, I quoted Pfeiffer saying, "The conciseness, variety, and concreteness of Isaiah's poetry contrast sharply with the eloquent verbosity, repetitiousness, and vagueness of Is. 40-66. Isaiah belongs to the golden age of Hebrew literature, Is. 40-66 to its silver age. The difference is that between naive, unconscious art and deliberate striving for majestic eloquence by means of rhetorical devices." Why not address this in some concrete way? When one adds text to holy writ one does not advertise that fact - it diminishes the impact. The discovery of the multiple authorship of Isaiah only dates back a century or two because that's when the modern analytical techniques of high criticism began to be developed. Earlier scholars had no such techniques available and limited themselves to interpreting the meaning. --Percy
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