Talk:On the Reliability of the Old Testament

See Talk:The Making of the Pentateuch for reasoning behind see also. --Firefly322 (talk) 07:51, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Cocky words

That Kitchen has demonstrated that the mainstream academic view is wrong are cocky words. Who can demonstrate that the mainstream academic view was wrong? Well, only the subsequent mainstream academic view itself.

@Eternal Spirit 123: Also, the problem with your edits is WP:GEVAL. While there are many evangelical scholars who agree with your POV, they are not mainstream Bible scholars. What is a mainstream Bible scholar?

Modern Bible scholarship/scholars (MBS) assumes that:

• The Bible is a collection of books like any others: created and put together by normal (i.e. fallible) human beings; • The Bible is often inconsistent because it derives from sources (written and oral) that do not always agree; individual biblical books grow over time, are multilayered; • The Bible is to be interpreted in its context: ✦ Individual biblical books take shape in historical contexts; the Bible is a document of its time; ✦ Biblical verses are to be interpreted in context; ✦ The "original" or contextual meaning is to be prized above all others; • The Bible is an ideologically-driven text (collection of texts). It is not "objective" or neutral about any of the topics that it treats. Its historical books are not "historical" in our sense. ✦ "hermeneutics of suspicion"; ✦ Consequently MBS often reject the alleged "facts" of the Bible (e.g. was Abraham a real person? Did the Israelites leave Egypt in a mighty Exodus? Was Solomon the king of a mighty empire?); ✦ MBS do not assess its moral or theological truth claims, and if they do, they do so from a humanist perspective; ★ The Bible contains many ideas/laws that we moderns find offensive;

• The authority of the Bible is for MBS a historical artifact; it does derive from any ontological status as the revealed word of God;

— Beardsley Ruml, Shaye J.D. Cohen's Lecture Notes: INTRO TO THE HEBREW BIBLE @ Harvard (BAS website) (78 pages)

Quoted by tgeorgescu (talk) 04:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Tgeorgescu Do you think Kitchen uses circular arguments? looks like you haven't read his book because he is a listed in the world of top Egyptologists including James K. Hoffmeier and I never said Mainstream Scholarship is wrong but just said he criticized it(On the Reliability of the old testament page 224-230) the same goes for New Testament studies, Bart Ehrman is not to be taken seriously in theology. Eternal Spirit 123 (talk) 11:36, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Tgeorgescu offensive? where did your modern values come from? Eternal Spirit 123 (talk) 11:37, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

where did your modern values come from? WP:NOTAFORUM.

At [1] there is a report upon Hoffmeier's speech during the 'Archeology and the Bible' conference at University of Liverpool, stating that Hoffmeier (among other speakers) tried to show that the scholarly consensus upon the historicity of the Exodus must be false. Well, that's and oblique way of admitting that there is a scholarly consensus and that Hoffmeier disagrees with the scholarly consensus. Q.e.d. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:07, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

A year before that, Kitchen was there, arguing that the scholarly consensus must be false. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:26, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160722024905/https://www.thesphinx.co.uk/2013/05/archaeology-and-the-bible-at-liverpool/

"Kenneth Kitchen, one of our greatest current Archaeologists" Kenneth Kitchen is not remotely reliable when it comes to Biblical history. The man has a serious bias: "Kitchen is an evangelical Christian, and has published frequently defending the historicity of the Old Testament. He is an outspoken critic of the documentary hypothesis, publishing various articles and books upholding his viewpoint, arguing from several kinds of evidence for his views showing that the depictions in the Bible of various historical eras and societies are consistent with historical data." In other words, Wikipedia:Fringe theories applies. In general evangelical pseudo-scholars should be distinguished from reliable, secular sources. Dimadick (talk) 13:01, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

I think Kitchen comes up so often in these sorts of discussions because he's a serious, credible scholar on Egypt but super-maximalist on ancient Israel and the Bible. It's like a trained rocket scientist opposing evolution -- the rhetorical gambit used is to transfer credibility from one field onto another one. That and his avoidance of full-blown Young-Earth-Creationism can create an impression that his works on the Bible are somehow mainstream. Alephb (talk) 19:24, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Well, the IP seems to think that the historical method is the most pestilential doctrine ever vomited out of the jaws of hell. Sorry, we cannot turn back the clock several centuries! Hoffmeier and Kitchen don't say "the Exodus has been proven true", but "it has not been proven false". Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:19, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

True; I misspoke. There is no evidence proving the Exodus true, so "It has not been proven false" is all they can say while retaining any scholarly credibility. A. Parrot (talk) 19:54, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

About Ehrman: he is not a theologian, he is a historian. Different academic fields, with quite different rules and quite different shared assumptions. 95% of what Ehrman publishes for broad audiences was created or at least supported by Christian Bible professors. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:49, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Tgeorgescu: I don't agree with the quotes that you have put there. Scholars such as Kitchen (1998, 2003), Hoffmeier (1999, 2005), Bietak (2015, 2022) and Falk (2018) all agree that there was an historical exodus event and you cannot just dismiss their stances by saying that they are marginal scholars or apologists: Those guys are all very qualified Egyptologist with ample academic credentials, and they don't limit to say that "the Exodus has not been proven false", but they also argue that the details of the narrative more closely fit the second millennium BCE rather than later periods, which means that it is unlikely that the story could be a later invention. Potatín5 (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Potatín5: Yup, many MBS would grant the point there is a nugget of historical truth behind the story of the Exodus. But their point is: very different from what the Bible tells it happened. As Joel S. Baden argued: there are at least four Exodus stories in the Pentateuch, in one of those they came from Egypt, in another they did not come from Egypt, one with 40 years wandering through the desert, one without it, and so on. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:05, 1 July 2023 (UTC)