"When Was the Bible Written?" June 1, 2011 Public Edition--Oh, Wow!

by Cadellin 20 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  ProdigalSon

  Thanks for that insightful post...

  It's so sweet to be mentally free of this delusional paranoia.... jehover and his dubbies truly deserve one another....
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  Band on the Run

  So the writer had no personal exposure to what he was criticizing in the normal sense. I don't sense the Bible is put down at all by scholarship. If anything, it is given too much reverence. Very typical.
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  SirNose586

  You know, I remember feeling that "higher criticism" was a bad thing. Funny how it really isn't. Good find, Cadellin.
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  White Dove

  Very interesting.

  The writer was vague on which dictionary he got his info from.

  Oh yeah, the JW's don't need sources as the WTS already did all the research for them, so as to spare them wasted time.
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  the pharmer

  marking
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  wobble

  I remember them doing this back in the sixties, they used to write of "so-called Higher Critics" , showing they had no idea what Criticism in a scholarly way involved, let alone the difference between Higher and Lower Criticism.

  I think now this is a deliberate attempt at mind-control, so that the poor little sheeple won't get influenced by experts who point out that in their estimation there is no such thing as a Bible prophecy that was definately written before the event, and the fact that the Bible has no provenance, we only have late copies of many copies.
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  Chariklo

  Thanks very much for such a useful post.

  But I'm not trying to talk about evolution here, rather a similar rhetorical move located in the June 1 WT. There are two possibilities, both of which are disturbing. Either the writer honestly didn't know the difference between the two definitions of "criticism," or he knew and deliberately chose to manipulate his use of the word. In the first case, if a writer has such a limited knowledge, he shouldn't be writing about this subject in the first place. (Duh!) In the second case--well, it's just plain deceptive. Neither possibility enhances the WT's already shoddy reputation when it comes to intellectual honesty or credibility.

  And that's the apparently ignorant but I suspect in fact devilishly clever approach found over and over again throughout WT writings. Stalin's propaganda and thought control control has nothing on the WT.
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  steve2

  Excellent summary Cadellin. I suspect JW readers will completely swallow the whole árgument', if they can stretch their pea-sized attention spans to read it at all. I shouldn't be surprised by this but sometimes I find myself staggered by the seeming total ignorance of the Watchtower writers. What makes this all the more cringe-making is these articles go through several 'hands' before they are published so it shows how endemic the ignorance is.

  The old maxim is as true today as ever: a little knowledge is dangerous.
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  Leolaia

  The Society however does not shy away from literary criticsm when it concerns books OTHER than the Bible. The 8 August 1998 Awake! article "The Enigma of William Shakespeare", for instance, explores the question of authorship of the Shakespearean corpus utilizing exactly the same methodologies that "Bible critics" have applied to the Bible. The article first explores the intellectual background of the plays and the author's apparent knowledge in medicine, nautical life, and the military, and their familiarity with other literature, such as the Bible. The article then discusses the style and vocabulary of the plays and the problem of Shakespeare's rather modest education. Next the article raises the question of authenticity, noting that no manuscripts are original (with no MS evidence to establish provenance in Stratford-upon-Avon) and that pirated copies appeared even in his lifetime. Finally the article mentions several possible candidates for authorship, such as Francis Bacon and Roger Manners, and the reasons for suspecting them of authorship as well as some of the problems in these hypothetical proposals. The article ends leaving the question open as a "fascinating enigma." This is entirely different from articles the Society has written when the book in question is the Bible. If it had taken the same stance, the article would have positioned itself as defending Shakespeare against doubting "critics" who cannot conceive of the genius of the Bard from Statford-upon-Avon.
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  steve2

  The Society however does not shy away from literary criticsm when it concerns books OTHER than the Bible.

  Well said Leolaia. They have used a similar double standard when making fun of the way members of churches who are portrayed as naively taking the word of their ministers as truth without investigating the matter and then stating that brothers and sisters need to humbly accept food in due season from the GB and not display an independent attitude. So, people in other religions need to question their leaders while JWs need to humbly accept what they're told and wait on Jehovah.

  I've often thought that the JWs are a rleigion that has a double-standard attitude to almost every topic under the sun.