The two stories of "The Flood"

by Doug Mason 13 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Doug Mason

  cyberjesus,

  Sorry, but I don't have a pdf of the book.

  Do you know how to scan your own book as a pdf? I use Acrobat Writer to produce these scans.

  Doug
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  Doug Mason

  Blue Grass,

  Since I try to survive on the Old Age Pension, I sympathise with your pain at the cost of buying the book. But I can assure you that it is great reading, almost like a detective story, as the author provides clues while he make a case for identifying the people responsible for writing the Scripture.

  As I indicate in my post 901 above, I will soon start a thread dealing with the Jewishness of the Gospels. When I do present that thread, I will be referring to books that threaten, challenge and disturb, so I reckon your money will be safe in your pocket.

  Doug
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  Leolaia

  Here is what the Society says about it:

  *** it-1 p. 920 Genesis, Book of ***
  
  If the material attributed to each theoretical source is extricated portion by portion, and sentence by sentence, from the Genesis account and then reassembled, the result is a number of accounts each one of which by itself is illogical and incoherent. If we were to believe that these various sources were used and put together by a later compiler, we would be forced to believe that these incoherent accounts, before being amalgamated, were accepted as historical and were used for centuries by the nation of Israel. But what writer, especially a historian, would even construct such disconnected narratives, and if he did, what nation would accept them as a history of its people?

  There is a pretty big misunderstanding here....the documentary hypothesis does not presume that the original narratives were necessarily incoherent. The classic form of the hypothesis is that there were originally independent accounts, which were then redacted together (sometimes awkwardly) by a later editor. The incoherence results from the redactor picking and choosing what to include and smoothing two (or three) rather different (originally independent) stories into a single narrative. More recent views regard the process of redaction itself interpolating many of the "sources" into the text (i.e. they originally did not have independent status), much like what is found in Greek Daniel or Aramaic/Ethiopic 1 Enoch (which is a composite work resulting from many "hands"). This too does not presume coherence; one could compare, for instance, Bel and the Dragon in Greek Daniel with the parallel stories in ch. 5 and 6, and the very different portrayal of the character Daniel in Susanna that is quite hard to fit with the rest of the book.

  To give a good example of another work produced according to the first scenario, consider Tatian's Diatessaron. This is a gospel harmony that weaves the four gospels into a single narrative. This is parallel to what the documentary hypothesis claims for Genesis. We are lucky to have the four gospels today for comparison. The "sources" for Genesis, if they existed in independent form, are lost. If one were only to have the Diatessaron (if the four gospels had become lost), then it is very difficult to reconstruct the original form and content of each gospel. There is much that Tatian (and others before him such as Justin Martyr who used his own harmony related to the Diatessaron) omitted or altered or massaged in order to get the four gospels harmonized. There would be gaps and incoherences in the reconstructed sources, which simply reflect a lack of complete knowledge of the sources from the available evidence. These would not reflect incoherences in the source material, inasmuch as they result from Tatian's redaction (of course the source material has its own complexities and incoherences, e.g. Matthew should be regarded as a redacted/interpolated version of Mark, and possibly Luke as a redacted version of Matthew). It is clear, for instance from J's genealogies in the primeval history, that the redactor of Genesis omitted much material, possibly because it was parallel to what is in P, or maybe not. But the main point is that, regardless of whether you can reconstruct completely coherent sources for the Diatessaron, it is 100% clear from the literary properties of the Diatessaron that it is a composite work based on sources. One could, for instance, distinguish a "J"ohannine source for the distinctive Johannine material from the various synoptic stories and sayings. So the evidence that Genesis is a composite is not dependent on the ability to reconstruct coherent sources. It stands on its own.
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  BurnTheShips

  Wowsers. It makes a lot of sense.

  BTS