Book Review of the Bible

Doug · Post by **Doug** » Fri Jun 23, 2006 4:35 pm

DOUG
Judith Hayes, the Happy Heretic, reviews the Bible here.

It's amusing, accurate, and worth a look.

Barbara Fitzpatrick · Mon Jun 26, 2006 10:20 am

While I don't have any quarrel whatsoever with the conclusions of the "Happy Heretic", I do have a quibble or two. The likelihood of the actual witnesses of whatever events related in the bible actually being literate is slim to none, which explains much of the 2nd and 3rd hand tellings. And there are folks out there (McClave comes to mind) who refer to themselves in the 3rd person when writing. That Moses couldn't very well decribe his own funeral is more telling than that he may not have written the passages in question due to them referring to Moses in the 3rd person. Moses, having been raised as an Egyption prince, was at least likely to be literate.

Post by **Dardedar** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 8:42 pm

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:That Moses couldn't very well decribe his own funeral is more telling than that he may not have written the passages in question due to them referring to Moses in the 3rd person.

DAR
There are at least a dozen very good lines of evidence showing that Moses did not write the pentatuch. Some require a good deal of unpacking to grasp. Paine touched on many of them in his "Age of Reason."
I thought I had a nice list of them but can't find them right now.

D.

Barbara Fitzpatrick · Post by **Barbara Fitzpatrick** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 8:12 am

I image there are at least a dozen, if not hundreds for saying Moses didn't write the 1st 5 books of the bible. The telling one I grew up with was that the events regarding Moses weren't written at all until a millium or so after the fact. There were certainly no eye witnesses to the 1st chapter of Genesis!