Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

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_Stumpy Pepys
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Stumpy Pepys »

Oh, Symmachus, you and I are on the very same page here. Unfortunately, I am only really well versed in issues of less-ancient history, so I could not speak to the Ugaritic.


I am actually fluent in Ugaritic. Its totally easy. ug, ug ugg ugga ug-uga, ugga-dugga.
_Brackite
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Brackite »

Is John Gee still arguing for the "Missing Papyrus" theory for the Book of Abraham??
"And I've said it before, you want to know what Joseph Smith looked like in Nauvoo, just look at Trump." - Fence Sitter
_aussieguy55
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _aussieguy55 »

Andrew Cook and Chris Smith demolished that argument.
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_Symmachus
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Symmachus »

aussieguy55 wrote:Andrew Cook and Chris Smith demolished that argument.


Demolishing apologetic arguments is much like mowing the lawn.
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_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

aussieguy55 wrote:Andrew Cook and Chris Smith demolished that argument.


I don't know if they did. Mormons and Mopologists keep going back to that old canard. It has more lives than something that has a lot of lives.

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Gadianton
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Gadianton »

Hi there Reverend,

Thanks for the introduction to what is proving to be quite a difficult topic for me to come to grips with. I read yours and Symmachus's posts here several times, and then read Gee's post, and Bokovoy's posts, and I had difficulty sorting through all of this information to find the lynchpin. Perhaps yourself and Symmachus could help me better grasp the arguments here. After all, I am an aging administrator, and in my prime I fear I fell into the category Gee warned about, as a student of comparative Mopologetic literature with little training in how history works.

On Gee's blog he cites two scholars (and true to Mopologist literary form, cites a list of their credentials and classes taught to bolster their credibility) who believe that the Israelites had "annals" kept by court scribes that, if I understand correctly, could then be used by history writers. I'm a little lost on the significance of this. Does the suggestion of "annals" simply mean that there would have been solid, objective source material to work with, therefore, the books of the Bible were constructed from reliable sources? Am I correct to say that none of these referenced "annals" are extant, and the nature thereof wholly speculative?
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_Symmachus
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Symmachus »

The argument as I understand is about whether or not Biblical writers were under the impression that their stories were rooted in historical reality and whether historical reality was of interest to them. Bokovoy asserts that that sort of historicist thinking is anachronistic: whether or not they believed the events occurred, their aim is not to offer their best reconstruction of what happened (history) but to tell a moral tale. Therefore, Latter-day Saints should feel justified, even encouraged, to read the Book of Mormon as a work of religious instruction rather than a historical text.

Gee counters this by essentially arguing that the vague references in the Bible to putative Israelite annals and the practices of other Near Eastern scribe-annalists are evidence that the Biblical writers were working from primary documents in order to construct what happened in the past (I pointed out in another post, though, that if you read those references in context, they are actually evidence for Bokovoy's argument). They were therefore historicist-minded readers, and therefore Latter-day Saints should feel justified, even encouraged, to read the Book of Mormon from a similarly historicist point-of-view.

The nature of these annals is speculative, you're right, but there existence doesn't really have much bearing on the issue in any case.

Using Gee's line of reasoning (if you can forgive the use of analogy), we could argue that, because the USSR had nuclear submarines and Tom Clancy said that he read reports about them, the The Hunt for Red October must therefore be a work of history, that Tom Clancy must have believed he was writing a work of history, and that we can use that work of history to understand actual events in the Cold War rather than just the attitudes of one particular sector of one side in that suicidal disagreement.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."

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_Brackite
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Brackite »

aussieguy55 wrote:Andrew Cook and Chris Smith demolished that argument.


Yes, they have demolished that argument, but John Gee can ignore them and continue to argue for the "Missing Papyrus" theory for the Book of Abraham.
"And I've said it before, you want to know what Joseph Smith looked like in Nauvoo, just look at Trump." - Fence Sitter
_Gadianton
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Gadianton »

Hi Symmachus,

I enjoyed your analogy and comments. Well, I've done a bit of reading here and there over the last couple of days hoping to clarify the perspectives and I suppose I'm a little out of my depth here as the picture isn't clearing up as I'd hoped. I've read a little by a chap called John Van Seters and also some from a chap by the name of Thomas Thomson (both names came up in random searches), both of whom summarize various positions on Israelite historiography in books they've written (that may be dated I suppose).

I'm confused on several points and I'm not sure even where to begin with questions. In short, I find controversy over the existence and nature of annals and perhaps, in Gee's favor, there do seem to be writers out there who assert the existence of annals as source material just as Gee says, but I have not stumbled upon a theory yet that has Israelite scribes doing objective historiography based on these alleged annals as source material, even from what I gather is the believing camp. Perhaps your analogy correctly speaks to inconsequence of the annals given this if I understood correctly.

Gee's attribution to critics that Israel wasn't sophisticated enough for annals also eludes me. If I understood Van Seters correctly, then the keeping of annals isn't particularly innovative (even if by positivist standards the keeping of annals might represent a landmark of intellectual honesty) but Israel was special for alone (amongst neighbors) inventing historiography. In fact, if I understood, then there seems to be a near consensus between conservative and secular prone writers that Israel was special in this way -- special in terms of advancement and not for being behind the curve.

I suppose I can't fully connect your own views or David's to these little excerpts I've been reading and I certainly don't have the lay of the land sorted out, but I'm having trouble finding Gee on the map at all.
Last edited by Guest on Sat Jan 24, 2015 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Kishkumen
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Re: Gee's Latest Volley on Hebrew Bible

Post by _Kishkumen »

Greetings, Dean Robbers:

What were the Jewish annals? What kind of information did they contain? How much detail was found therein? Were events falsified?

In Rome, the pontifex maximus essentially kept a list of the magistrates, victories, omens, and bad happenings for the year, and he published a summary on white boards posted outside the Regia (the supreme pontiff's residence) in the Forum. Cato the Elder derided the records for their trivial and superstitious content:

It is disagreeable to write what stands on the tablet at the house of the pontifex maximus - how often grain was costly, how often darkness or something else blocked the light of the moon or of the sun.


So, at least for the Romans, there was not a lot in early annals by way of narrative, if there was any narrative. I think there is reason to doubt that there was. And even Cato recognized that the information thereon could be manipulated or mythological, in certain cases. No Roman historian worth his salt would accept the Annales Maximi as completely reliable or even as historiography, for that matter. What do we have to recommend or even test the Jewish annals? The evidence seems to be more in the way of testimonia--reference to the fact that they existed and contained this or that information--not fragments, which are quotations of the original texts of the Jewish annals themselves.

That is a problem.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
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