by Doug Mason 2 Replies latest watchtower bible
While the cost of the physical book, "Greek Myth and the Bible" by Bruce Louden is beyond my means, the Kindle version is tempting.
A preview is available at Amazon and a critical review is available at:
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2019/2019-08-03.html
Doug
An excellent link Doug Mason. Bruce Louden has researched territory not often covered and come up with important source myths for Bible text and tales.
I enjoyed the following regarding John the Baptist since it is clear from tales in the Egyptian solar religion that John indeed had a pattern thousands of years earlier in the character of Anup (which does actually translate John) including the timing of his birth, baptising and stories around his death:
The reviewer said, "Louden has given the celebrated account of John’s death a completely new twist by demonstrating convincingly that whoever composed the original version was engaging a traditional tale in most of its details".
And so it was and such is the Bible; a collection of pagan tales made to look like they are divine wisdom.
Thank you Doug for sharing this review of Louden's book with us.
Once I abandoned the mental chains of Watchtower think, I started to grasp the poin that Louden illustrates, i,e, that whenever one culture comes into contact with another culture, there will be an interchange of ideas.
Louden illustrates Jewish writers using Greek (or hellenic) stories in the writing of religious texts that were later collected together to form the OT.
But was Greek culture itself affected by another culture. It has been conjectured by many that the Greeks admired Egyptian wisdom. What do we make of this:
"Just over a year ago an eager team of archaeologists scoured through the mud and groundwater of a slum in Cairo erected on the ruins of the pharaonic city of Heliopolis. There they uncovered a gigantic statue, which they believed represented the pharaoh Ramses the Great. Euphoria soon gave way to slight disappointment when it was discovered that the statue was not of Ramses but a lesser-known seventh century BCE ruler of Egypt, Psamtik I.
While almost forgotten by the modern world, Psamtik was once revered as a decisive ruler who boosted trade and diplomatic relations with Greece. His policies allowed the Hellenes to establish colonies on Egyptian soil for the first time, opening the door to a trading and cultural relationship that would endure for more than three hundred years.
Later Greek and non-Greek Hellenistic historians, such as Herodotus in his Histories, were convinced that this was the spark that ignited an axial shift in Greek culture, which saw philosophy spring forth majestically from Greek soil. To many of them, it was in Heliopolis that the most profound Greek thinkers, such as Pythagoras and Plato, learned the basis of their metaphysics, astronomy, or geometry."
(Quoted from Peter Flegel's article, Does Western Philosophy have Egyptian Roots, published on the web-site Philosophy Now. Link: https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/Does_Western_Philosophy_Have_Egyptian_Roots )
(Its important to remember also, that the Egyptians were most likely the descendants of West Asian migrants)
And what do we make of the remark in Acts that, "Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action." (Acts 7:22 NIV) when we recall that for a few hundred years Palestine, the traditional home of the ancestors of the Jewish people, was part of the Egyptian Empire and controlled by Egypt, just as in Jesus time, Judah etc was part of an Hellenic Empire.
And in the Babylonian captivity were the elite Jewish scholars who the Babylonians carted off to Babylon affected by Babylonian wisdom? When Babylon was defeated by the Persians it is likely that these elite Jewish scholars (man of whom did not return to Jerusalem) absorbed Zoroastrian ideas and incorporated them into documents that later became part of the Bible.
