Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Biblia" in Romanian language version.
PROFESSOR ZE'EV HERZOG, ARCHAEOLOGY, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY: Yes, I claim that archaeology is undergoing a tremendous revolution and my purpose in presenting the ideas to the general public were to explain that biblical archaeology is not anymore the ruling paradigm in archaeology and that archaeology became an independent discipline with its own conclusions and own observations which indeed present us a picture of a reality of ancient Israel quite different from the one which is described in the biblical stories.
Un aspect mai puțin cunoscut este faptul că Biserica Ortodoxă a interzis laicilor să citească Biblia în cadrul unui sinod care a primit acceptul tuturor celor patru scaune patriarhale de atunci. În faimoasa Mărturisire de credință a patriarhului Dositei II Nottara al Ierusalimului, aprobată de Sinodul de la Ierusalim din 1672, la prima întrebare li se interzice celor fără instruire teologică specială (deci laicilor) să citească Biblia.17 Cu siguranță motivul acestei interdicții a fost teama de răstălmăcirea învățăturii de credință, mai ales că în secolul anterior izbucnise în apus Reforma, iar efectele ei erau în creștere.17 I.N. Karmires, Ta dogmatika kai symbolika mnēmeia tēs orthodoxou katholikēs Ekklēsias, vol. 2, p. 768.
The New Testament contains twenty-seven books, written in Greek, by fifteen or sixteen different authors, who were addressing other Christian individuals or communities between the years 50 and 120 C.E. (see box 1.4). As we will see, it is difficult to know whether any of these books was written by Jesus' own disciples.
Wayne Grudem provides this helpful definition of inerrancy:
If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It's a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don't even know what the words are! This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don't have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn't perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.
The first question was whether Moses could really have been the author of the Five Books of Moses, since the last book, Deuteronomy, described in great detail the precise time and circumstances of Moses' own death. Other incongruities soon became apparent: the biblical text was filled with liter¬ary asides, explaining the ancient names of certain places and frequently noting that the evidences of famous biblical events were still visible "to this day." These factors convinced some seventeenth century scholars that the Bible's first five books, at least, had been shaped, expanded, and embel-lished by later, anonymous editors and revisers over the centuries.
By the late eighteenth century and even more so in the nineteenth, many critical biblical scholars had begun to doubt that Moses had any hand in the writing of the Bible whatsoever; they had come to believe that the Bible was the work of later writers exclusively. These scholars pointed to what appeared to be different versions of the same stories within the books of the Pentateuch, suggesting that the biblical text was the product of several recognizable hands. A careful reading of the book of Genesis, for example, revealed two conflicting versions of the creation (1:1—2:3 and 2:4-25), two quite different genealogies of Adam's offspring (4:17-26 and 5:1-28), and two spliced and rearranged flood stories (6:5-9:17). In addi¬tion, there were dozens more doublets and sometimes even triplets of the same events in the narratives of the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exo¬dus from Egypt, and the giving of the Law.
On the relationship between the results of his work and the task of Christian theology, Wrede writes that how the 'systematic theologian gets on with its results and deals with them—that is his own affair. Like every other real science, New Testament Theology's has its goal simply in itself, and is totally indifferent to all dogma and Systematic Theology' (1973: 69).16 In the 1920s H. Gunkel would summarize the arguments against Biblical Theology in Old Testament study thus: 'The recently experienced phenomenon of biblical theology being replaced by the history of Israelite religion is to be explained from the fact that the spirit of historical investigation has now taken the place of a traditional doctrine of inspiration' (1927-31: 1090-91; as quoted by Childs 1992a: 6).
To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews call ‘midrash.’ Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.
I am distinguishing two related but different problems here. The contents of the classic books have become particularly difficult to defend in modern times, and the professors who teach them do not care to defend them, are not interested in their truth. One can most clearly see the latter in the case of the Bible. To include it in the humanities is already a blasphemy, a denial of its own claims. There it is almost inevitably treated in one of two ways: It is subjected to modern "scientific" analysis, called the Higher Criticism, where it is dismantled, to show how "sacred" books are put together, and they are not what they claim to be. It is useful as a mosaic in which one finds the footprints of many dead civilizations. Or else the Bible is used in courses of comparative religion as one expression of the need for the "sacred" and as a contribution to the very modern, very scientific study of the structure of "myths". (Here one can join up with the anthropologists and really be alive.) A teacher who treated the Bible naively, taking at its word, or Word, would be accused of scientific incompetence and lack of sophistication. Moreover, he might rock the boat and start the religious wars all over again, as well as a quarrel within the university between reason and revelation, which would upset comfortable arrangements and wind up by being humiliating to the humanities. Here one sees the traces of the Enlightenment's political project, which wanted precisely to render the Bible, and other old books, undangerous. This project is one of the underlying causes of the impotence of the humanities. The best that can be done, it appears, is to teach "The Bible as Literature," as opposed to "as Revelation," which it claims to be. In this way it can be read somewhat independently of deforming scholarly apparatus, as we read, for example, Pride and Prejudice. Thus the few professors who feel that there is something wrong with the other approaches tend to their consciences.
Un aspect mai puțin cunoscut este faptul că Biserica Ortodoxă a interzis laicilor să citească Biblia în cadrul unui sinod care a primit acceptul tuturor celor patru scaune patriarhale de atunci. În faimoasa Mărturisire de credință a patriarhului Dositei II Nottara al Ierusalimului, aprobată de Sinodul de la Ierusalim din 1672, la prima întrebare li se interzice celor fără instruire teologică specială (deci laicilor) să citească Biblia.17 Cu siguranță motivul acestei interdicții a fost teama de răstălmăcirea învățăturii de credință, mai ales că în secolul anterior izbucnise în apus Reforma, iar efectele ei erau în creștere.17 I.N. Karmires, Ta dogmatika kai symbolika mnēmeia tēs orthodoxou katholikēs Ekklēsias, vol. 2, p. 768.
critical archaeology — which has become an independent professional discipline with its own conclusions and its observations — presents us with a picture of a reality of ancient Palestine completely different from the one that is described in the Hebrew Bible; Holy Land archaeology is no longer using the Hebrew Bible as a reference point or an historical source; the traditional biblical archaeology is no longer the ruling paradigm in Holy Land archaeology; for the critical archaeologists the Bible is read like other ancient texts: as literature which may may contain historical information (Herzog, 2001: 72-93; 1999: 6-8).
PROFESSOR ZE'EV HERZOG, ARCHAEOLOGY, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY: Yes, I claim that archaeology is undergoing a tremendous revolution and my purpose in presenting the ideas to the general public were to explain that biblical archaeology is not anymore the ruling paradigm in archaeology and that archaeology became an independent discipline with its own conclusions and own observations which indeed present us a picture of a reality of ancient Israel quite different from the one which is described in the biblical stories.
Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
