The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

[neilgodfrey]

(Read more carefully, please.)

Sorry, sir. Do you want me to write 50 times "I must read more carefully" and hand it to you by final bell this afternoon? But you do trick me with your word games -- I should have learned that by now.

b) even neilgodfrey yourself/himself elsewhere on this forum expressed some doubt about the first thing,

What did I actually say? Are you denying that the Pentateuch was the religious guideline for the people of Judea and Samaria? Seriously??

Or are you playing word games again and are going to say that's not what you meant by the supposed failure of the program?

What if I claimed, only for the sake of comparison, instead of the REG claim, that Torah was first written in the 240s in Cyprus, and then wrote "In what way can anyone say it did not happen?" Such would be silly (and also did not happen),
and would be oblivious to the fact that the burden of proof is on any who claim that it did happen.

What does any of this have to do with your claim that the Judeans failed to embrace the Pentateuch as REG and everyone else in the whole wide world says they did? Or am I falling sucker again to misreading another word game of yours?

The so-far offered parallelomania is not proof

Which parallelomania are you talking about? The parallelomania that sees parallels between the Bible and Mesopotamian/Hittite/Syrian/Ugaritic literature? I've offered some of those of late. That parallelomania?

----

(As REG said, I don't think anyone can take SG very seriously here --- the above is mostly tongue-in-cheek just for a bit of light hearted fun. God I need it in the company of SG sometimes.)

b) even neilgodfrey yourself/himself

[StephenGoranson]

Above, I (SG) wrote, in part:
"The Plato as interpreted by REG program was that differing views would disappear."

Did differing views disappear?

[neilgodfrey]

Above, I (SG) wrote, in part:
"The Plato as interpreted by REG program was that differing views would disappear."

Did differing views disappear?

Instead of playing along with your disingenuous word games I prefer to return to the original passage from which you select your partial quote and examine the actual context and original meaning of REG's words. He wrote:

Did you not read the last chapter of Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible?—of course you didn’t—in which I noted that Hellenistic Era Judea, out of all the nations of the ancient world, was the only one to adopt Plato’s strategy for creating a new constitution, laws and theocratic form of government, supported by a sacred national literature, and that the Jewish experiment succeeded exactly as Plato envisioned, creating an eternal national legal charter that has survived down through time to the present day.

[StephenGoranson]

It is a straightforward question, concerning Torah:
"Did differing views disappear?"

[StephenGoranson]

_Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible_ by RE Gmirkin, page 270 includes:
"....The recent origin of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible was deliberately obscured by the ruling class elites....These claims [of antiquity] came to be widely accepted at face value within a few short generations...."

Dead Sea Scrolls evidence otherwise.

[neilgodfrey]

It is a straightforward question, concerning Torah:
"Did differing views disappear?"

You got me on that one. Did they? Which ones?

[StephenGoranson]

Early mss show, e.g., differences between those aligned with Samaritan Pentateuch and some others.

[Secret Alias]

And remember the Samaritans had two principles sects - what we might call "orthodoxy" and Dositheanism. Yes "Dositheus" is usually timed to the common Era. But it was clearly a conservative movement.

[neilgodfrey]

Early mss show, e.g., differences between those aligned with Samaritan Pentateuch and some others.

No no -- play fair and don't keep shifting the goal posts - again. You wrote:

Above, I (SG) wrote, in part:
"The Plato as interpreted by REG program was that differing views would disappear."

Did differing views disappear?

Tell me specifically in that context that you have set up "which differing views disappeared". Be specific.

[neilgodfrey]

Of course REG's statement clearly refers to pre-Pentateuchal views -- where they conflicted with the new Torah those old ideas "would disappear".

It is simply a bizarre twisting of REG's words to try to suggest that post-Pentateuchal debates invalidate REG's statement. REG never said that there would be "one view about the Pentateuch and how it should be interpreted" for all time among all who associated themselves with the Pentateuch. That's ridiculous. REG even drew attention to debates about certain ideas WITHIN the Pentateuch.

REG's statement is very clear: ideas extant prior to the Pentateuch that happened to conflict with ideas in the Pentateuch would disappear once the Pentateuch was accepted as the authoritative founding document.

That happened -- whether one associates the Pentateuch with Plato or not.