Here I discussed oddities of Scripture and promised a follow-on post. That was 2 years ago. In that time I wrote a Part II on a specific issue, but now I’ve been reading the interesting material at this site…
…and while I disagree on using the “Book of Mormon” as another witness to God’s Word, I do think there’s something to the author’s idea that what is preserved in the Scripture by two “witnesses” is on a surer footing than anything else vociferously claimed as “God’s Words”. After all God didn’t speak the Words to a prophetic stenographer to record directly, except in some very limited cases – i.e. the books of the Prophets. Instead, in the case of the Torah for example, what we have are an edited mass of documents that were first propagated as a unified body of work in the time of Ezra/Nehemiah.
But what were the sources used by the Redactor, as Ezra is usually dubbed, when he united them as one document? That’s been a scholarly question of great contention since the 18th Century and a vast range of intellectual fashions have informed, and biased, the debate. But let’s look at one approach… taking the text seriously. I’m not saying every mythological fantasy should be validated, but as a first hypothesis when investigating a text, maybe we should assume it might be accurate. One physicist, Colin Humphreys, did this when investigating the Exodus account for himself and produced a coherent reconstruction of the events of the life of Moses.
Miracles of Exodus …a good review at “Physics Today”, by another physicist/priest-trainee.
Miracles of Exodus sneak-peek …courtesy of Google Books.
Miracles of Exodus, a discussion …Troy Brooks looks a little deeper at the book.
Colin Humphreys Interview …a radio interview with Colin Humphreys on the findings of his book.
The Exodus Route advocated by Humphreys
Plus, as a Christian, Humphreys is naturally interested in the events of Jesus’s life. He speculates that the “star of Bethlehem” was actually a comet recorded by the Chinese in 5 BC…
…so what am I claiming? God spoke through the people of the Bible, but working within the limitations of His ‘materials’ – the Bronze, Iron and Greco-Roman Hebrew/Jewish people. There’s nothing obviously beyond the times of any of the books of the ‘Bible’ and no modern insights to hint at a Cosmic Intelligence (maybe) but there is a surprising unity to such a disparate work. Many voices, often at odds with each other, but One Voice harmonises them all.
More later…