Abraham

"You know Abraham probably didn't exist, right?"

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? No, actually, I don't know anything about the probability or improbability of Abraham's existence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I see no reason why there couldn't have been a man who lived in Mesopotamia in or around the 18th century BC and heard voices telling him to move to the area which would later become Jerusalem, where, in obedience to the same voices, or voice, he prepared to sacrifice his son, but then changed his mind and sacrificed an animal instead. None of the above strains my credulity in the slightest. It's all entirely possible. As far as how probable or improbable it all is, I don't have nearly enough data to say.

And neither do you.

Claims that Abraham was the first monotheist seem much more farfetched to me than claims that he may have existed.

Of course, when considering the historicity claims of legendary figures, there is always the question of how closely history must fit the legend before one is justified in saying that the figure existed. I don't see how there can be an absolute and objective answer to this question. If someone existed who preached everything in the Sermon on the Mount, but he existed in the 2nd century BC and was named Nathan, is he the historical Jesus, or does he prove that there was no historical Jesus? What if Nathan lived in Syria and died in Damascus? If we find evidence of a 5th century baron in Britain who was married to a Guinevere and befriended to a Lancelot, and ruled over a territory of 5 acres, have we found the historical Arthur, or proven that there was no historical Arthur? What if his wife was named Portia and their friend was named Offa? Where do you draw the line between an historical figure and an historical source of a legendary figure?

I'm only asking these questions, not offering answers to any of them.

No, actually, I will offer an answer: I'm not interested in drawing such lines, but I am intensely interested in increasing our knowledge whenever possible. Finding out what actually happened in times and places where legends began is a process of historical research, and finding out how legends grew and developed is also historical research, and the more explicitly clearly the one investigation can be distinguished from the other, the better.

Back to the story of Abraham and what may have inspired it -- what I find particularly interesting about it is the thought that the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac may have been inspired by a culture's transition from human to animal sacrifice. Many cultures go through such a transition -- most or all cultures if James Frazer was right. Perhaps there was no historical Abraham, and the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which there was no human sacrifice whatsoever, but almost one single instance of it, may have gradually developed as a more comfortable way of remembering a time when human sacrifice was routine. Or perhaps there was a man who was about to sacrifice his son, but stopped and sacrificed an animal instead, and this one man's story was remembered and embellished because that was more comfortable than remembering that human sacrifice once was routine.

"That's Not What I Mean When I Say 'God'."

Traditionally, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God has been an entity who looks like a man with a grey or white beard, lives in the sky and intervenes personally in the lives of people. The Greek god Zeus bears a lot of resemblances to the Abrahamic capital-G God. There's just one letter's difference between "Zeus" and "Deus," Greek for "God."

Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."

So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:

"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")

They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.

It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.

Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.

Level 2

A patient teacher would've gone back to the guy quoted in my last post and kept trying to reason with him. (As opposed to mocking him online or something like that.) Told him that translating the Bible into Languages A, B, C and and so forth was not like a game of Elephant, because in each case, if reputable people were at work, the translator would be working from the original Hebrew and Greek texts; that, if anything, the existence of more translations could help to improve one particular translation. For example, the translator translating the Bible into Language A might also happen to be fluent in Language B -- good translators tend to be multilingual -- and if he were stuck trying to find a good translation for a particular word or passage, the approach taken on the word or passage in the translation into Language B might give him an idea. Other translations are in no way a substitute for working with the source text, but they can now and then be a supplemental resource. For a competent translator, they certainly don't hurt a thing.

Sure, for all I know there might be many very sloppy Bible translations out there. For all I know there may be some translations in Language C made from other modern translations in Language B which were made from still other modern translations in Language A, ("Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!") because the publishers were unscrupulous and the missionaries footing the bill didn't know any better. But the existence of those "monkey-strong" bad translations into Language C in no way prevent people from making good translations into Language C using the same resources used for any good translation, consulting the best ancient Hebrew and Greek texts and disregarding both the bad old manuscripts and the bad new translations.

I could've tried to explain those sorts of things to this guy who as of yesterday was convinced that there was no explaining gravity. But I am not a teacher, and as far as I know, I am not noted for my patience. I know that doing those sorts of educational tasks is very important, but I feel no vocation for it, no passion. What I want are discussion partners who are already up here on Level 2 with me. Commandos, not cannon fodder.

And anyway the whole subject of the textual transmission of the Bible is just a secondary interest of mine, one of the branches off of my more primary interest in ancient history and languages generally. It's just that problems of the text of the Bible come up in conversation much, much more often in conversation than problems of the text of Homer or Sallust. The latter are much more interesting to me personally, but whaddyagonnado. My autistic-spectrum condition led to an autodidactic education, and we autodidacts wander the non-specialized wilderness to some extent. And so I get caught up in these conversations about the Bible with theologians on the one hand, who tend to have a fairly good grasp of the history of the transmission of the Bible, but who often speak with fork-ed tongues, and clueless atheists and hateful sectarians on the other who say things like that the text of the Bible has gone through several thousand steps of re-translation before being given its final and thoroughly corrupt form at the Council of Nicea by Constantine the Great. In AD 400.

Because I am out here in the wilderness, although I have managed to gather, for example, that archaeology has all but ruled out any sort of large-scale Exodus of Israelites from Egypt into Canaan in the 13th century BC and largely contradicts the Biblical account of Joshua's battles, I do not know what experts might currently think of Freud's theorythat Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten -- or Ikhnaten in Freud's and others' transliterations from a few decades ago -- and began more and more to emphasize the worship of Aten, the disc of the sun, at the expense of other deities, and whose memory was partly effaced after his death in reaction to this religious unorthodoxy, may have been both the first monotheist and the basis of the legend of Moses. It seems possible to me that a small group of Akhenaten's followers could have moved from Egypt to Canaan, joined the larger group which were or would become the Israelites, and profoundly influenced their religion.

I mean -- monotheism had to come from somewhere. This is one possible route.

Then again, I am not nearly as prepared to declare Akhenaten a monotheist, the first one or not, as is my sensationalistic bete noir with no damn editorial standards, the History Channel. This is all highly speculative on my part.

Monotheism

As recently as 3,000 years ago, as far as we can tell, most or all peoples all over the world believed that there were a number of different gods and goddesses. (As long as 2,500 years ago or so, it appears that some troublemakers, at least in Greece, had the nerve to say out loud in public that there were no gods at all, that it was all pretty much just a scam to scare people and keep them in line, but that's another story for another blog post.)

Who first came up with the notion of one all-powerful God? The answer seems to depend upon whom one asks. The most popular answer in Western culture seems to be that it was the Jews. This answer may come with a much different date attached to it than a couple of centuries ago, for in the last couple of centuries, Biblical scholars first ceased to think of Abraham as an historical figure, living around 1800 BC, and now most of them have very serious doubts about whether Moses or anyone remotely like him actually existed, around 1200 or 1400 BC. And recent archaeological findings suggest that the Jews may have been polytheistic up until the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC. Still, some scholars who dispute neither the ahistoricity of Abraham and Moses nor the persistence of polytheism until the Babylonian captivity speak as if there were no doubt that it was the Jews who introduced into the world the completely new and original concept of one God.

Others assume that it was Zoroaster, or Zarathustra if you will, who invented monotheism, and that the Jews first encountered the concept during their exile in Babylonia among Zoroastrians. Still others insist that monotheism originated much earlier in Egypt. Sigmund Freud assumed that Moses did exist, and advanced the theory, in the last book he wrote, that Moses was an Egyptian prince who rebelled against his own people and invented Judaism, although monotheism may have been an idea in Egypt before Moses' time. Ancient Egypt was particularly monolithic, the Pharoah particularly absolute in his power, the cult of the monarchy particularly pronounced. So much about ancient Egypt positively screams, "Unity! Oneness! Absolute power, absolute authority!" and so forth. One very unified culture ruled in Egypt for over 3,000 years, while, for example, just to their east in Mesopotamia, many kingdoms and cultures rose and fell. It seems to me that the concept of monotheism fits in very well with the extreme persistence and stability and one-ness of ancient Egypt.

But I certainly don't know that monotheism first arose there.

Some say that the supposedly very polytheistic ancient Greece had very strong monotheistic tendencies, with Zeus being God and the other gods more like what we would call demigods or archangels.

In general I see an amazing amount of hastiness and closedmindedness on the subject of the origins of monotheism. I have nothing against the theory that the Israelites were the first monotheists, or that they adopted monotheism from Egypt, in the reign of Akhenaten from 1353 BC – 1336 BC or 1351– 1334 BC, as Freud argues, with or without an historical Moses; or that they came up with the idea much later; or that Zoroaster was the first monotheist; or that it was some earlier Persian or Mesopotamian; or that montheism first arose in India in the Vedic period; or that it arose simultaneously in several different places --

(Some people, of course, actually believe in capital-G God, the one and only universal and omnipotent Being, and if they're in an oecumenical vein they may argue that He has naturally been discovered, been felt, all over the world, regardless of distinctions of mere culture. Yeah. Whaddya gonna do, some people still believe all of that. I suspect that an especially high percentage of the academics investigating these sorts of questions, the theologians, Biblical scholars, Koranic scholars, Buddhists monks and nuns and so forth believe all of that. I suspect that some Hindu scholars have been talking it all with several grains of salt for a very long time, but I don't know. Perhaps I was given a false impression by a couple of very charming and worldly students of Hinduism.)

-- or still other theories which circulate on the topic. What does bother me is the way in which some proponents of each of these theories behave as though the matter were settled and their specific theory the right one, and don't bother to mention, let alone discuss and consider, any of the other theories. That bothers me, it perturbs me, it even amazes me.