Posts by Doug Mason

22

True Authorship of New Testament

by QED in

hi everyone.. i'm new here and this is the first time im posting.

about myself: i come from china and have been living in the uk.

5 years ago, i began to attend meetings and study the bible with jw in a chinese congregation, but never baptised.

Doug Mason

QED,

There are several themes you should pursue.

The primitive Christian movement was broadly split into two: with the Peter/James group at Jerusalem, and the Paul group at several other places. (Notice that Paul had to defend himself from the Jewish Christian sect, saying that he was indeed a Hebrew of the Hebrews.) The original movements were initially seen as a Jewish sect.

Read: "St Peter versus St Paul: A Tale of Two Missions", Michael Goulder (Professor of Biblical Studies, Birmingham, England).

Then recognise how the NT was assembled: it took until the 4th century that the dominant Christian sect through the Trinitarian Athanasius came to a decision, aided by the Roman Emperors.

Read:
"Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years:, Philip Jenkins.
"AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State", Charles Freeman
"A New History of Early Christianity", Charles Freeman

It should be apparent that this long process, which included violent disagreements between the various Christian sects, would bias the writings selected for inclusion as the NT scriptures. That is the reason the NT basically comprises Paul's writings. It is possible that the only Petrine source could be the book of James.

The process also resulted in serious mistakes, where writings were included that fraudulently claimed to have been written by Paul.

Read:
"Who wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth", Burton Mack
"The Authentic Letter of Paul: A New Reading of Paul's Rhetoric and Meaning", Dewey (and others).

When you have come to grips with the origins of the NT, then turn your view to the Hebrew Scriptures. Look at the origins of the OG (=LXX) and the MT, and the probable reasons for the large differences between them (and also with the DSS).

Come back to me when you have gone through this so I can then point you to the recent books by Spong (such as "Liberating the Gospels") and by Ehrman (such as "Forged").

Then ask that if the Bible was the Word of God, why did he take a back seat and take no interest in preserving and protecting it. The Bible is a very human book, which means every writing has to be understood through the culture (idioms, understandings, politics, etc) of the community that created and who edited it.

Examine a Bible writing as you would any other piece of literature. Each writer (and editor) was interested in their own immediate community, and was addressing that community with the purpose of having it change its behaviour and attitude.

Enjoy the journey.

Doug

14

539 BCE and an astronomical tablet

by Doug Mason in

page 453 of the wtss book, insight on the scriptures says that the eclipse records for the 7th year of cambyses can be used to calculate 539 bce for the fall of babylon.. to do this, the chronology article refers to j. n. strassmaier, f. x. kugler, t. oppolzer, and o. gingerich.. what did those people actually write?.

how does the wts manage to travel from the 7th year of cambyses to the date of the fall of babylon?.

http://www.jwstudies.com/539_bce_and_an_astronomical_tablet.pdf.

Doug Mason

Thank you for your kind comments.

I expect and hope that others will be able to make use of these pages from Strassmaier etc., now that they are available to them.

Interestingly, the most difficult book to access was that by Gingerich. You can see the cost at Amazon (wow!), and there is only a handful in public libraries in Australia (one here at the State Libarary of Victoria).

If you wish, I can email the original scans that I used, so you can produce your own works using these source materials. You will find my email addrss at my web site: www.jwstudies.com

As you can guess, I was beside myself (two of me, what a horrible thought) as I collected these items. The only book I bought is that by Kugler (quite inexpensive at Amazon).

The relatively recent book by Stephenson was a great help, since he looks at the tablets at the British Museum, just as Strassmaier had.

I have an image in my mind of a dart board located at a certain Brooklyn address, with my name on it. Maybe they have a voodoo doll? If so, I am certain that this study would cause them to throw more darts or insert more pins. It's not working, though, I can assure you.

Regards,

Doug

14

539 BCE and an astronomical tablet

by Doug Mason in

page 453 of the wtss book, insight on the scriptures says that the eclipse records for the 7th year of cambyses can be used to calculate 539 bce for the fall of babylon.. to do this, the chronology article refers to j. n. strassmaier, f. x. kugler, t. oppolzer, and o. gingerich.. what did those people actually write?.

how does the wts manage to travel from the 7th year of cambyses to the date of the fall of babylon?.

http://www.jwstudies.com/539_bce_and_an_astronomical_tablet.pdf.

Doug Mason

Page 453 of the WTS’s book, “Insight on the Scriptures” says that the eclipse records for the 7th year of Cambyses can be used to calculate 539 BCE for the Fall of Babylon.

To do this, the “Chronology” article refers to J. N. Strassmaier, F. X. Kugler, T. Oppolzer, and O. Gingerich.

What did those people actually write?

How does the WTS manage to travel from the 7th year of Cambyses to the date of the Fall of Babylon?

http://www.jwstudies.com/539_BCE_and_an_astronomical_tablet.pdf

Note that the file is over 6 meg in size, so it takes some time to download.

Please let me know of any corrections, errors, and so on.

Thanks,Doug

112

The "patibulum" : a fragile theory !

by TheFrench in

the latin fathers of the church has never described jesus carrying a "patibulum".

indeed, the early christians to represent jesus carrying the "crux", not the "patibulum".

it's a fact.

Doug Mason

Hi Band on the Run,

Are you saying that Mark (the first writer after Paul) was the first to provide a description of those events?

Have you been able to reconcile the differences in detail between the various Gispel accounts of Jesus' fate?

Doug

13

Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS

by Doug Mason in

the wts says that the seventy years started when a group of judeans, including jeremiah, crossed the border into egypt.

this, they say, was required since the land had to be absolutely and totally depopulated, without a human or a beast on the land.. one would thus expect that the wts would end the seventy years when the first captives crossed the border into the province of yehud.

that would mean that once again there were people on the land.. but no, the wts does not do that.

Doug Mason

“And who are more particularly, the great national body of these rising, improving, and we may trust approved Christians?

“Some will claim the Church of one nation, and some another; some will argue for spiritual Israel, whether spread among Teutonic people, or mainly confined to the British Isles and America. And who shall decide amongst them?

“None but the Great Pyramid itself. Advance we, therefore, to the great step of 1813 A. D. (i.e. at 1,813 Pyramid inches from the North, or Christian nativity, beginning) of the Grand Gallery, and inquire there what is signified.

“The step marks there, by that date, the most energetic advances made by Great Britain in its latter-day spread of the Bible, and its latter-day preaching of Christianity to all the world . . .

“What manner of people, then, ought not we of Great Britain now, of Israel in ages past, to be at this juncture of our eventful history; saved above all nations by the providence of God in a manner we have never deserved, and for divine purpose in the future, respecting which nothing but the glorious Scriptures of Inspiration can give us any sufficient or saving idea; a halcyon time, when Ephraim shall be united once more with Judah, and both shall be on the Lord’s side.”

Today, given the prevailing scepticism of modern society concerning the existence of God, it is difficult to appreciate the powerful influence the idea that they were really Israelites in disguise had on Britons of the mid- to late nineteenth century. For very many people this was a plausible explanation for the extraordinary providence shown by God to Victorian Britain.

(“The New Jerusalem”, Adrian Gilbert, pages 359-361)

13

Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS

by Doug Mason in

the wts says that the seventy years started when a group of judeans, including jeremiah, crossed the border into egypt.

this, they say, was required since the land had to be absolutely and totally depopulated, without a human or a beast on the land.. one would thus expect that the wts would end the seventy years when the first captives crossed the border into the province of yehud.

that would mean that once again there were people on the land.. but no, the wts does not do that.

Doug Mason

Another prominent British Israelite was Charles Piazzi Smyth, then the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. He too had attended some of Wilson’s lectures and was convinced of the truth of what he heard because it chimed with another passion of his: pyramidology. The origins of this movement, which for a time ran in parallel with British Israelitism before being virtually taken over by it, go back to the work of John Greaves and his 1638 survey of the pyramids of Giza. As we have seen, from Greaves’s data on the measurements of the King’s Chamber Sir Isaac Newton had been able to work out that the ancient Egyptians must have made use of a particular unit of measure that he called the ‘profane cubit’ but which is now more generally referred to as the ‘royal cubit’. This cubit he worked out as being equivalent to 20.62 British inches, which implied it was 21 Egyptian inches - each Egyptian inch being only slightly shorter than the modern-day British unit. The implication of this discovery was that British units of measure owed their origins not to the Romans but rather to the Egyptians: the ‘fathers’ of geometry.

Newton further proposed that the Egyptians had also used a longer measure of 25 inches, which he called a ‘sacred cubit’. Evidence for this was not as obvious as for the other unit, and from the start it was treated with some scepticism. However, the idea was revived in the 1860s by John Taylor, editor of the London Magazine.Himself a skilled mathematician, he computed that the perimeter of the Great Pyramid was exactly 36,653.76 British inches, which could compute to 36,600 pyramid inches - each pyramid inch being slightly shorter than the British measure. To Taylor this implied that the Great Pyramid had been intended to be a species of calendar, with each 100 inches of its perimeter representing one day. On this analysis a full circuit of the pyramid symbolized 366 days, or approximately a whole year. Though the Royal Society rejected his paper on the subject, Taylor published his results in 1864 in a booklet entitled: The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?Like others of his time, John Taylor was deeply influenced by the Bible and the apparent need to attribute knowledge relating to measures to divine influence. He died the same year that his book was published but his mantle was quickly taken up by Charles Piazzi Smyth, who had been in correspondence with him for some months prior to his death. Shortly afterwards Piazzi Smyth made his own survey of the pyramids, finding further proof that the Great Pyramid was designed not just as a calendar but as an almanac of the ages. He believed that the lengths of its internal corridors, as measured in pyramid inches, mapped out the course of world civilization, with each pyramid inch representing one year. The role of Britain as ‘Israel’ was read into the measures of mute stones, especially the Great Step at the top of the pyramid’s Grand Gallery. Summing up how the Grand Gallery symbolized the Christian era and the ascent of true Christians to the light represented by the messiah, Smyth felt able to write [the following] in all seriousness:

13

Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS

by Doug Mason in

the wts says that the seventy years started when a group of judeans, including jeremiah, crossed the border into egypt.

this, they say, was required since the land had to be absolutely and totally depopulated, without a human or a beast on the land.. one would thus expect that the wts would end the seventy years when the first captives crossed the border into the province of yehud.

that would mean that once again there were people on the land.. but no, the wts does not do that.

Doug Mason

The following posts (if I get it right) are from pages of a book that includes this description of Piazzi Smyth.

Doug

13

Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS

by Doug Mason in

the wts says that the seventy years started when a group of judeans, including jeremiah, crossed the border into egypt.

this, they say, was required since the land had to be absolutely and totally depopulated, without a human or a beast on the land.. one would thus expect that the wts would end the seventy years when the first captives crossed the border into the province of yehud.

that would mean that once again there were people on the land.. but no, the wts does not do that.

Doug Mason

Thank you guys for your support. I find it a most humbling experience.

Billy and Wobble, in the following post in this thread I shall share a passage about Piazzi Smyth.
--------------------
Aristeas, Also the people who wrote after Paul did, such as the "Gospel" writers, were very loose in their reapplication of their Scriptures. As Spong points out, they were expecting their leader to achieve great and wonderful things, but instead the Romans murdered him. How could this be? So they searched their writings for answers and they reinterpreted the passages, such as Isa 53 and Ps 22, to make it appear as if they had some prophetic intent. Much like the WTS does today, in seeing symbolisms and parables in Scripture as if they applied to them.

Are you aware of which NT writings are wrongly attributed to Paul and to Peter?

I have never been a JW but I was an SDA (cousins of the WTS) for about 16 years, so I am fully aware of what it means to belong to such an organisation and the mental stresses caused when leaving one. It took me at least 10 years to free my brain.

If I have not fully answered your question, please let me know.

Doug

112

The "patibulum" : a fragile theory !

by TheFrench in

the latin fathers of the church has never described jesus carrying a "patibulum".

indeed, the early christians to represent jesus carrying the "crux", not the "patibulum".

it's a fact.

Doug Mason

I am interested to know which was the earliest NT writing (chronologically speaking) that describes the trial, persecution and description of Jesus' death, when was it written, and by whom?

Paul was the first writer, and we know which of the writings were actually written by him. He died in the early 60s and the other writers came after him.

So who first described these events? How did they know what happened if they had run away? How did they know what happened during the trial? How do they know what Pilate's wife said? Were any of the eye witnesses still alive when the story of Jesus' last days were written down?

Doug

13

Start and end of the "Seventy Years" according to the WTS

by Doug Mason in

the wts says that the seventy years started when a group of judeans, including jeremiah, crossed the border into egypt.

this, they say, was required since the land had to be absolutely and totally depopulated, without a human or a beast on the land.. one would thus expect that the wts would end the seventy years when the first captives crossed the border into the province of yehud.

that would mean that once again there were people on the land.. but no, the wts does not do that.

Doug Mason

Thanks for your thoughts, aristeas.

I wonder if others can see a shift away from the WTS saying that the Parousia has occurred, or that the WTS was anointed in 1919? Do they no longer say this? If that is so, where is their anchor, their source of authority?

For decades I have felt that the value of looking at the subject of the neo-Babylonian chronology lies in its use as the foundation for determining 1914 and 1919 (the WTS earlier used Lev 26 instead of Dan 4).

Its value also lies in showing how the WTS organisation continually misquotes and misrepresents the authorities it supposedly quotes. Since it is easy to show that the WTS does this, that fact should help break the WTS's mental stranglehold and permit enlightened discussions.

Until and unless that happens, a JW believes the WTS because of whom and what it claims to be (Jehovah's sole channel of communication), rather than because of what it is saying.

When the JW sees that they are being deceived and lied to, that the organisation is waging theological warfare on its own followers, then it is possible to have an open discussion. Certainly no two people will agree on everything, but that should never matter. The WTS does not allow for personal views; I encourage them

I certainly do conduct very deep, serious and personally challenging study into the Biblical writings and I am more than keen to discuss my views.

I am not an eschatologist, nor am I interested in so-called prophetic fulfilment. Rather, my strong interest lies in discovering the immediate context of any writing (religious politics, secular politics, contemporary idiom, and so on), and knowing whether a writing is genuine.

Each Biblical writer was only addressing their immediate community, with the objective of influencing behaviour and attitude within that immediate community. With many of the NT writings, the writer was arguing against opposing views within the Christian community. Much of the NT writings are not what they purport to be; much is wrongly attributed. Most of the so-called NT fulfillments of the OT stretch the bounds of credulity.

Another area of great interest to me is the religious and secular politics that determined which NT writings were canonised. It took centuries before a decision was finally arrived at, and the Roman emperors had a say.

The religious expectation of an imminent divine appearance of Jesus (Yeshua/Joshua) has been taking place in every century since the first, and probably earlier. Even Jesus and Paul expected it to happen in their own time (this generation, then we who are alive, etc.). The expectations in every century of an imminent divine manifestation have had the same outcome -- zero.

I see the Bible as a human book.

But until we are able to break the nexus between the WTS and the JW's brain, such valuable discussions cannot commence. If you know of a better tool than neo-Babylonian chronology, I am more than keen to hear of it.

Doug