After reading and becoming familiar with Greco-Roman Epics, I began to think differently about the Hebrew Bible as I noticed shared literary tropes, shared jargon, common place and Gods. I currently view the Bible as a sort of Hebrew Epic written for new Hebrews who worshipped without a Temple.
As the Dark Age approached in the descent from the high point of the Golden Age the ability to maintain vast amounts of knowledge;long discourses, epic poems etc. in the mind plus the decrease in intuitive knowledge waned and literalism was born and what was important was written down as otherwise it would be forgotten as memory waned. The ancients knew of the cycles so they put a lot in stone; symbols that would endure and transmit knowledge across the ages and help those entering a Dark Age after they emerged from it. We are now on the ascending arc at the bottom on the way to a higher Golden Age again, so things will get better.
They needed a container for all of their bifurcating misconceptions and outright fabrications about the universe and their role in it. With the sole purpose of using their divine wisdom created by committee towards the subjugation of those not blessed with the heavenly gift of the desire to dominate by any means.
Denis Macdonald has done incredible work showing the influence of Homer on the gospel writers,, which makes perfect sense given its provenance at the time.
I spent the past winter reading this book. Totally engrossing. What I'm looking forward to is an illustrated, popular book giving the Biblical timeline compared to the writing timeline that actually took place. My own background was learning these Hebrew Bible stories at a small Poststent Bible reading Church. Finally gaining an appreciation of the book's writers is cool.
Such a compelling subject! And an interesting route to take your content as a study in ancient civilizations! I will have to add this book to the reading list. I’m still working on Herodotus and an audio version of 1177bc!
Don't. It's more Liberal nonsense. The Jewish Bible ... prophesied the Jews rejecting the Messiah who is God's Only begotten Son .. the Messiah will die 40 years before the Temple is destroyed .. and .. the Jew's will be cursed for 2 x 1000 years for rejecting God's son. God told us from the very beginning ... Mankind has 7 x 1000 years ... to procreate and in the year 6000 God wil rue Mankind for the last 1000 years. This is why God ...knowing everything had a 6 day creation & the 7th day belongs to him. And there is only Jesus who could have died 40 years before the Temple is destroyed , with the Jews clearly under a curse for their sin, still rejecting Jesus as Messiah ... with Jesus clearly stating Moses wrote the Torah. Read Genesis 1 - 22 .. and remember Issac is not Abraham's "Only begotten Son" and the punishment for sin by Man is simply death (body & soul).. You sin, you must die. Only God can provide the sin sacrifice that will satisfy God's just nature. And keep your eyes open for ... the Angel of God .. who states He is God. Moses was alive around 1400 BC which is roughly when he wrote Genesis & Exodus under inspiration by the Spirit of God. And Abraham existed 1000 years earlier and cam from the same Ur where the oldest written Law is recorded.
Erica, you may be aware that a newer path of study is just beginning to examine the influence of classic and ANE works on the writing of the bible. Scholars have long understood that the new testament (Christian scriptures) were influences by the Hebrew scriptures, but it's only recently in which people are starting to examine the potentially influence of classics on the new testament. This is in part because classics and biblical studies have been quite separate fields, and few people have had the necessary training in both in order to make comparisons. Dr. Dennis R. MacDonald is one of the main proponents of this.
Fantastic talk, +1 for the widening of Moan Inc scope, would even love to hear some Renaissance stories of how they rediscovered the Greek and Roman philosophers and manuscripts etc
Mentioning the flood stories of different cultures brings the question of when and where these floods happened? Did the flood, as told in Gilgamesh, happen the same time Noah's flood happened? Or when Zeus wanted to wipe out humans? What was the location of these floods?
thank for your channel, especially for this interview on a topic I am very keen to learn about but extremely ignorant as yet. your enthusiasm and knowledge make it a joy to watch even for such a poor student (me). I have a question, which possibly demonstrates my ignorance, my understanding is that homer's works were transmitted orally but older stories such as Gilgamesh were written down.
Great interview! If you ever revisit the subject you should interview Professor Bart Ehrman who has written several books on the historical Jesus and early christianity. I’m sure it would be a great talk!
I find myself arguing with Biblical literalists constantly here in the Bible belt. I'm glad to hear that Dr. Wright is just up the road from me in Atlanta. I need to read his book.
Ugh. Don't even try. It's pointless. My FiL is a total literalist Southern Baptist. I just don't even talk this with him. He is totally blinded by his blind faith. No intellectual thinking at all. He is totally immersed in reading nothing but the KJV bible, and as he takes it as literal, you just can't reason with him.
@@LyleFrancisDelp I was raised a conservative Biblical literalist Young Earth Creationist. I had no one to talk to when I was confronted by Biblical scholarship and evolutionary biology at University of Chicago, but I'm still a Christian, but my mind is open. It's possible to find room for science, faith, and scholarship. Sometimes, its best to chose your battles, and choose the right time to voice your opinions for the sake of unity, but I did go ahead and buy Dr. Wright's book.
YES The stories are Jewish based AND when in exile particularly Babylon they were put together so as to show how to remain Jewish even with the Temple in Jerusalem destroyed. I like your mentioning of the other areas in the Lavant that also had writings. NOW the stories are of course way way older and that is the trippy part. Like Goliath and Nephelium and how lengthy a life the ancient ones had.
@@snowrider4495 TRIPPY I don't feel it is totally fictional RATHER to ME it is interesting that Moderns` worship a 13 year old lost child on climate fiction.
As a Docetic Christian Gnostic I’ve always taken the OT to be a mythological story blended with elements of Jewish history. The way in which it paints Yahweh as a tyrannical, megalomaniacal character who is nothing like Jesus explains why early Gnostics like Marcien thought of him as evil, explains their cosmology & the demiurge. The spiritual message that I think Jesus preached remains consistent, given this view of the text. However, the NT should also be taken as largely mythological, with many of the events being literary devices which encode a spiritual message. Live good lives, love one & other, & unite under one God
This is a great discussion on the subject without the usual antagonism between the host and the person being interviewed. Thanks for that! 13:40 or so... "...get the message and forget the text itself." That's where I am. "Do unto others" and the Ten Commandments (or suggestions or advisories - depending on the Biblical scholar) is pretty much the deal. Most of the rest of it (in my opinion) is supposition, embellishment, and extrapolation. I have plenty of friends and relatives who think I am (amicably) crazy, but I think everyone is entitled to their beliefs.
What the heart is full of comes out the mouth ... not necessarily the Truth ... If you wanna get to know a person, listen to and hear what that one speaks about alot
The Bible began c. 769 BCE with the J-document and had been about devotion to one god through one priesthood that was indigenous to Jerusalem. Previously, under the Omri dynasty, the Zadok priesthood had been displaced from intermarrying with the Davidic dynasty. With Ysrael ascending again, displacement had again been feared so the J-document had been written to ensure devotion to the royal priesthood through devotion to one god. It is only after this time that the literary prophets appear. Amos only makes references to material to be found in the J-document while Hosea makes references to material to be found in the JE-document showing the E-document to have been written within 10 years of the J-document (by the priesthood at Gibeon) and to have never had an independent published existence before being combined with the J-document. The J-document itself had been the adaptation of a previous work from Tyre written 100 years earlier. This work had told a story of how the people of Tyre and Ysrael had been two peoples descended from a single family that had once ruled Egypt for four generations. Instead of Abraham and Sarah, this story had featured Baal Hadad and Asherah with Baal impregnating Hagar, the daughter of the Hyksos King Jabin, and forced to flee to Egypt where she gave birth to Jacob. Four generations later, a conflict between two ruling brothers had resulted in one brother named Apopy fleeing by sea under the protection of Baal Hadad with his son Moses and daughter Dinah to Tyre. Dinah had become the ancestor of Queen Jezabel, the daughter of King Ethbaal (the writer of the story) while Moses had journeyed on to Shechem under his new name 'Ysrael' and become the ancestor of King Ahab, the husband of Jezabel. It had been the daughters of Jezabel that had displaced the daughters of the Zadok priesthood in intermarrying with the Davidic dynasty until the Omri dynasty had come to an end.
It’s funny or sad to me how seemingly everyone underestimates or derides the religion of the Olympians of Ancient Greece. Opposed to the “Feep” religions of Christianity and Islam. There was a lot of beauty and depth there, like the Hymn to Ares, short but again quite deep imo.
The Flavian empire taking over from Nero needed a political overhaul. They needed to change the narrative. The Messianic Jews prophesied the coming of a new warrior savior (like David) to save them from Roman oppression. The Flavians remembered the peaceful speaker who created momentum 40 years after his death. That’s how we got the “turn the other cheek” version. It was a political decision.
Great video. I began researching comparative religious experiences at age 14 when I realized that the spiritual “vibe” I got from the Jesus stories wasn’t present in my repressive church. I’ve read several books about how the early Bible was written. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn a completely new aspect here that also applies to fiction writing in general. All my favorite stories have a strong family or group identity dimension. I am writing myself, so I will now apply this powerful idea more consciously!
What an eye-opening interview and book! Thank you so very much, both of you, for addressing questions I’ve long quietly asked. The book, which I’ve seen around, I now know address them rather boldly, brilliantly, and comprehensively. I regret, however, learning that the book lacks notes. For me, books were invented for arguments like those of Dr. Wright, and the internet was invented for interviews like this by MoAn!
@@MoAnIncNext time ask him about Jesus saying YHWH is the devil ( John 8:44). Why don't anybody talk about that? It's either Jesus is a liar, or their father is the devil.
Would you do a video on the Indo-Europeans whose language underlies Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Old Germanic? The American Heritage Dictionary has a couple articles on it and a fascinating appendix of reconstructed I-E roots. Anyone still researching this?
There are many great old books the bible story despite its many mistakes and contradictions is in the top 4 or 5 religious books ..as a historian i cannot invite it to be anything more .
A philosophy of how humanity could should and would best move forward, the ten commandments go back thousands of years, but are still the foundation of all societies around the world, the closer you live by them the easier life will be for everyone, I'm a pantheism so I don't believed in a personal GOD the whole cosmos does what it does for the great good of everything, could be called zeus,brahma ,oden, the force, or God,so are these men of God,prophets , philosopher's ,or teachers.great people and good moral stories, even Greek and norse mythology have a lot to offer 😮
The Lord works in mysterious way's, we've all heard that, but what that often means we learn with hindsight of history is that God had to act for the betterment of mankind in indirect and even hidden ways. Example # 1, imagine you identify yourself as just a faithful scribe of the Old Testament, and somehow your indirectly told, that your part of a process that is part of God's official word for all of mankind spanning millions to billions of people over hundreds of tongues. Imagine the problems that would come with such knowledge, so God in his wisdom kept that future fact hidden for the most part and for good reason.
The Christian “Old”Testament is not the same as the Hebrew Bible. Yes, I know Daniel is in Aramaic The Christian “Old” Testament ends with Malichai while the Hebrew Bible ends Chronicles II. Christians call it the “Old” Testament because Christianity has believed that Judaism has been superseded by the “New” Testament and Christianity has replaced Judaism. It’s the original Replacement Theory. Augustine called Jews “living fossils.” Jews were permitted to live only as long as they lived in a state of wretchedness as en example of what happens to those who reject Jesus, the Jews.
Stop being silly. The TaNaK was put in Chronological order. It is the Catholics & Eastern Orthodox religions which added books to the OT & NT because of false theology. Christians do not need the NT to believe Jesus is the promised Messiah from the Torah and the Son of God from the Torah. Having the Gospels of Jesus .. is cherry & cream on top.
Why? Sustained consumption of psychotropic hallucinogens leading to psychosis among people who then went on to claim superior knowledge of irrational beliefs.
I am loving the richness of Jacob's book. I read Eric Cline and Joshua Bowen's books first by chance, which I think allowed me to read Jacob's in a more fluid fashion.
... so that we can have a common cannon to be read from during the liturgy of the word in the holy sacrifice of the mass throughout the world Jesus prayed that we be one. Thank the Catholic Church.
No comment on the ambition, skill level, philosophy and societal positions of the writers of the bible is disappointing. Why has this Hebrew book outperformed all other literature across the ages, and what did its success achieve for the writers ultimately? Why and how did the real writers hide themselves so well?
thanks be to GOD for speaking to us through who HE chose and visiting us with is TRUTH, way and LIFE, all GLORY to HIM forever, just passing through can't wait
the never-ending dramas that unfold from the greatest story ever told. no wonder it has been called that. people can just up and add much more tales into it at will. and when bored can jump onto other religions and create more fables into them which allows them to be called mythologies. real clever
Reading the Baal cycle (older than the scrolls that became the bible), it's pretty obvious that it's attributing all of the older stories to El. It's plagarized word for word in some places. While there may well be other reasons, one major reason was to push monotheism over polytheism. It's easy enough to picture a group of jealous priests trying to steal away all the other worshippers.
Of course it’s literature.! The first stories were probably written down around 800 BCE as you say. But no manuscripts survive in the Paleo Hebrew/Canaanite script, which leads to many theologists arguing that ‘the Jews’ rewrote or redacted huge swaths of the ‘Torah’ and later parts, so as to deny the divinity of ‘Jesus Christ’, after the Babylonian exile, using a form of Babylonian script. Many claim that as there are no extant Hebrew Bibles predating the time of Jesus, that Talmudic scribes totally re-wrote the original texts (except where they agree with the Greek translation in the Septuagint. The Hebrew Bible, as we know it, was almost certainly compiled as a book of legends, religious and community laws, and history as scribes understood it, as a unifying document, with the various Hebrew tribes already scattered across the old world, long before the Romans arrived. Yet Christianity now picks and chooses the parts they want to believe as ‘the word of God’, in support of their own sacred texts and core beliefs.
That last part, that's spot on. I talk to Christians all the time and not one single one of them agree with the other. It's insanity to me , they know without knowing. Besides 10,000 different denominations, they act like these books filled with errors are from God. There not a single page in any translation that error free of mistranslations, interpolations or words flat out removed. Add to the fact that Jesus said they worship the devil in John 8:44. It's so sickening whether this YHWH devil exists or not.
That's nonsensical. The dead Sea scrolls predate Jesus by up to 200 years Also, if anything, there were portions or words of the Septuagint or other translations that were rewritten by the church father's so as to accord with Mis-quotations or mistranslations in the gospels or works of Paul, such as the translation of the word "almah" as virgin
No one should believe the Christian bible as "the word of God." The only thing that can rightfully make that claim are the original texts, now long lost. What we are left with It is an amalgamation of stories from many times, from many cultures. Full of mistakes, mistranslations, misinterpretations; edited selectively with redactions, censorship, restructuring and outright omissions. Edited by _men,_ not gods....men whose hubris and self-determination require satiation by power , avarice, and greed. Therefore it is _men,_ not religion or gods to blame for all the world's problems. It's also my assertion all religion derives from 1 nexus, but that's a whole other thing.
Any interest I had in listening to this interview was quashed during the introduction. Persistently referring to your audience as “you guys” (13 times in the first 2:30) is unnecessary and displays a certain lack of respect for 50% of your listeners.
You absolutely do not have to listen to the episode or watch it if I’m not your cup of tea. However, I respect my entire audience. Just because I say “you guys” doesn’t indicate that I don’t. The majority of my audience are women - I say “guys” as a gender neutral term. But again, if that’s not for you then that’s completely okay ❤️✨
Interesting video. The interview and the comments appear targeted towards highly educated Biblical scholars. I had to pause and Google word definitions several times. It is probably above my education level.
@@MoAnInc Do you understand that I meant, "highly educated in theology." I've got two college degrees, but not in Christianity. Amazon offers hundreds of "Biblical Dictionaries" because this language is not spoken outside of Christian religious colleges (and sometimes confusing Christian preachers).
nation (n.) c. 1300, nacioun, "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language," from Old French nacion "birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland" (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe," literally "that which has been born," from natus, past participle of nasci "be born" (Old Latin gnasci), from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.
It's a bit simplified and disregards the political structures within the abrahamic culture. The law is to preserve the priestly hood and the families that go with those complexities. In short it's about control .. as humans always thrive to control the environment and others .. so it IS about theology
Tried posting this once and it didn't seem to work. A comparison of Ancient Sanskrit drama with Ancient Greco-Roman drama may work, including whether the idea of plays spread to India via the Greeks with Alexander the Great.
India is also an Ancient Civilization, of course. A comparison of Ancient Sanskrit drama and Ancient Greco-Roman drama might be informative, including whether the idea of writing plays reached idea from Greece via Alexander the Great and his followers. I understand that Sanskrit plays were all, in later Western terms, comedies, as they all had happy endings. Greek drama, and literatures it influenced, may be exceptional in often being centred on tragic heroes who have an inevitable downfall due to a character flaw. I suspect that was due to the centrality of the Iliad and the stories of Achilles and Hector, both doomed tragic heroes, in Ancient Greek culture.
@@DarkLord-iz7vk I would argue India has the oldest literature. The Odyssey has a sort of happy ending. If you count stringing up you bow and murdering like.crazy (arguably for good reason).
There is only 1 reason for the Bible. To explain and understand an abstract concept known long before there was any religion. Before _sapiens sapiens_ even before we developed the anatomical structures that allowed speech. A pure abstraction that led to all religion, the very beginning. An abstraction that was known and practiced by most all cultures at one time or another. So widespread and ubiquitous but impossible to convey without a language to explain it. Its been with us longer than most anything. It is among the earliest known evidence of the human species. It must be written in our DNA somewhere. It's the belief in an _afterlife._ This is the beginning. Way WAY before any religion of any kind. The belief in the afterlife is the progenitor that eventually became religion. The bible and all other religious texts were created to make sense and provide a tangible, physical method to convey an abstract concept that has no exemplars in nature to reference, nothing in reality to point to, cannot be conveyed without language, yet widely known to pre _sapiens_ hominins. We know this because of _grave goods._ Not to be confused with funerary goods, science tells us grave goods is evidence thet those people who practiced it belived in the afterlife. The goods are for their journey. Something they might need or was fond of. All religions come from this 1 nexus, 1 source, 1 beggining, 1 _genesis._
THE BIBLE WAS NEVER WRITTEN;IT'S ALL A GROUP OF STORIES ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN AFRICA FROM DIFFERENT AUTHORS FROM DIFFERENT TIMES AND WERE COMPILED TOGETHER FROM SOME PEOPLE AND THESE STORIES WERE CALLED THE BIBLE BUT THERE IS NO SPECIFIC ONE BOOK CALLED " THE BIBLE "
The oldest part of the bible is Book of Enoch, 12th jubilees or 600 years annu monde since creations, 6,300 years old till at present. Prophet Enoch was the first man to write, second oldest book in bible were book of jubilees by moses the copy of book of genesis also from moses. He wrote his books when he was in the Mount Sinai. Gelgamesh, Sumerian Enki books are all nephilim cannot be trusted, they are the enemies of God Yahuah Elohim.
I most people are aware the Bible did not start as scripture. Paul's letters were not first considered scripture until later. My understanding is that the Bible is just a generalization of Law to the spiritual. First we had written law, so it made sense for them to write down religion.
They have been influenced heavily by religions around them to an extent you can call it a great copycat religion. Sumerians are the first writers in those lands and when you look at their creation stories to great flood, the similarities are heavier than the heaviest metal.
@@NCR-Trooper2 No religion develops in the void. The idea of "copycat" or "plagiarism" is very modern and anachronistic. It is like criticizing them for not being vegans.
The Bible is a development in compiling Scripture. Scripture itself was recognized fairly early and through subsequent processes of transmission and commentary starting with the Torah and then expanding into the prophetic works and the poetry like Psalms. As such it was recognized as Scripture at the time of Jesus. The same process occurred for the New Testament, but much more quickly, as those scriptures were largely in place over the course of about 75 years and were recognized as scriptural almost immediately, certainly by 150 AD for most of them given their wide transmission and dispersal throughout Christian communities within and without the Roman Empire.
The Bible began as God willed it. And the first Christians were all Jews with only the Torah to believe Jesus is the promised Messiah & Son of God ...from the Torah. The Gospels of Jesus ... are only want matters from the NT .. to see what the Son of God is really like.
@@user-bq7jp2tn8u haha. Try again. You’re making a very common and ignorant mistake. You can’t use people that weren’t even born until decades after his supposed death as your primary sources. If I were to claim personal knowledge of the First World War I don’t think you would accept that. There is far more supporting evidence for my position than you may realize.
Bro lately youtube has decided it's constantly going to spam me with Christian propaganda. Figured this was that again, but it's actually just PhD's talking about the actual history of the myth. Thanks for not being another jesus channel
You do realize this would would be completely screwed ... if not for Messianic Jews sharing God Messiah & Torah ... to the pagan Greeks & Romans? No Son of God ... and you're left with Islam, Hinduism, Communism, Fascism and woke Humanist Liberals lol.
@@MoAnInc not about how the bible came to be. That was pure speculation. To have been written by hundreds of authors? That is the height of speculation without understanding the tools he is using to reach that conclusion.
@@DarkLord-iz7vk if he had been objective and stated the actual facts rather than belief that is not supported by the evidence then perhaps I would have been interested. What facts has he stated, given that it seems you have read his book
Looked potentially interesting but with all the flapping of hands and jerking around, shrugging, huffing, puffing and general over-excitement, I found it too distracting to continue watching. Wouldn't it be grand if those presenting academic information (especially) could just get on with it calmly and professionally. Words such as, "it's kind of like" represent an immediate red flag and reduce credibility imo. Perhaps I'm just used to European academics
Flapping of hands and voice to ,.... made me also wonder too much ...the motive for this one became more clearer . And no ring also ...was looking for that Professing themselves to be wise they became fools .
Really very good. Thank you. Erica, best you don't refer to your viewers as "You guys". The use of that phrase marks you as immature. You are wiser than that. Many of your viewers must be women.
Of course I have viewers who are women, I’m not only referring to males when I say that. I use “guys” as a gender neutral term. I don’t see how that marks me as immature. But regardless, thank you so much for watching and enjoying the video!
