Quote:
Originally Posted by Reggie Dunlop
...As to Christianity, isn't it basically a cobbled-together pastiche of assorted Middle East god myths with Greek influences? All sorts of historical holes. It's just plain and simple not only bad science, but bad humanities as well.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pylon
Yeah, I remeber reading an article on this once. Basically the stories in the bible were a giant game of broken telephone that took place over a couple thousand years, and they connected a lot of the dots, with all of these ancient cultures. Damn I wish I could find it.
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This is a horribly simplistic presentation of the development of biblical literature. While it is true that the individual books of scripture were pieced together from a wide range of sources and traditions, one must also recognize that this was rather commonplace in the ancient world. "Literature" in antiquity was not an artform. It functioned to provide important links to the past in an effort to maintain some sort of cultural and tribal continuity. For this reason, stories, poems, parables, songs, laments, laws and genealogies were copied and re-copied for conservation, but they also formed the bases for new literature that was introduced into communities as needs and circumstances changed.