On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:32 AM, <williamson51@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
Hi all
Found this interesting page on a main Jewish website, on how Jews are taught today on how the Torah (i.e. the first five books of the Bible) got written.
Extract below, his comments regarding the academic viewpoint
If the whole thing is so plausible, you say, why is it so many of those Biblical criticism dudes won't accept the story? The real question is like this: What would it take to convince those academics? To convince them that:
a) There is a G‑d, responsible for the very ground of existence.
b) This G‑d cares about what's happening in that existence.
c) This G‑d can communicate, and actually does communicate, to human beings all that He would like us to be doing down here.
I propose that all the evidence in the world wouldn't be able to budge those guys one nanometer. Because we are not talking about logic here--we are talking about axioms. And to those academics, it is a foregone conclusion, an axiom, that if not a, then certainly b and c are preposterous.
I don't believe for a moment that any scholar examined the matter objectively, saying, "Let's see, there are two possibilities here: Moses did this because G‑d spoke within him, or people made this up as history went along. Let's examine both and determine which is the more elegant explanation."
Never. When Spinoza (i.e. Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher 1632-1677) began his critique, it was a foregone conclusion that G‑d did not communicate to humankind. G‑d, to Spinoza, is not a being that can care and have concern for His world. Spinoza's G‑d is an object, a passive state of just being. Since Spinoza was the father of biblical criticism, the children could only descend from there.
Julius Wellhausen was fascinated by the idea of history--like every other scholar of his century. History in his day meant Hegel. That's the way everything happened and had to happen: Progressively, through a conflict of social dynamics, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, moving closer and closer to the enlightened modern man. That's the mold of every 19th century thinker, and Torah had to fit into that mold. Tell me that Wellhausen could have accepted anything otherwise.
(Postscript on 5/23/10: Since writing, K.A. Kitchen, one of the foremost scholars of antiquity, published his "On the Reliability of the Old Testament" in which he mercilessly demolishes Wellhausen and his school of biblical critics by presenting the evidence that has since been discovered.)
The fact is, this idea of Moses is so wild, so counter-intuitive, I don't believe anyone could arrive at it through philosophy or logic. Why do we believe it? Because we believe in the Jewish people. That's called Judaism: Belief in Jews. Since we believe in the Jews, we believe in the experience of the Jews, which means we believe in Torah and since we believe in Torah, we believe in G‑d and that G‑d cares.
Blessings Steve