The End of Biblical Religions ?
The Bible
ceased to be a sacred book
Mauro Biglino,
translator of Biblical Hebrew, maintains that when the Bible is stripped
bare, it loses its sacred character, and on the contrary, it is a great deception. He says:
Once stripped
bare, the Bible is extremely different from how it was always told: it does not
contain a spiritual God, omnipotent, and omniscient, it does not contain
eternity. No apples, no wriggling tempting snakes. No winged angel. Not even
the Red Sea: the people of the Exodus are limited to looking at a simple straw.
(Bibbia Nuda, and La Bibbia is not a sacred book. Il Grande inganno) (A great
deceit). Mauro Biglino, (2017).
Biglino is one
of the many authors who have recently dedicated themselves to disarming the
sacredness of the biblical text. With due reason, what he maintains is
consistent with the archaeological discoveries.
My
relationship with the Bible
began during the 1960s. While
I was studying and listening to the radio, I heard the news that Nobel laureate
William Faulkner had been awarded another Pulitzer Prize in the United States.
His central message, the radio said, was that the man would not only last, but
would also prevail. The radio added that this idea came from the Bible. “I
believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not
because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has
a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” In other
words, Faulkner believed that man would not only last, but would prevail.
I thought that
if the Bible contained those ideas, it was a book that I should own.
Within months I was able to buy it, at the cost of almost going to jail (the
police suspected my insistent look around the window of a bookstore, there were
so many editions!) A month later I bought one and tried to read it. It seemed
incoherent to me, a series of brutalities and contradictions. Later, a
colleague from the university
told me that the Bible must be read with the spiritual depth of awareness, because the literal sense is often barbaric. Wars, deaths, incest, betrayals,
murders, crucifixions, some blessings, etc. Searching for meaning beyond words
had an appeal. With that search I was improving and expanding the reading. I
used the text as something magical, something unique, often metaphorical, symbolic and metaphysical.
I learned to
reiterate the words of the text, because they gave me authority and importance
before others. I preached the book, I took it to prisons, I gave it away. I
knew how to repeat the words of the text with passion, which I got to know very
well; internally, I was proud of it. I wrote some inspired articles
based on the Bible. Although I often
found aspects of certain texts that did not “sound
good to me” or did not make sense. For example: the duty to fulfill the
commandments in one chapter and violate them in the next. When I read academic
questions proposing the end of biblical studies, they were a wake-up call
sowing rational doubts in me.
Recently, when doing a piece of research,
I discovered another way to read the text: through archaeological/geological
investigations. The analysis of stones and soils through the carbon 14 system
allows precise dating of events and times. That removes doubts and much vagueness. Indeed, the Bible is
not a history book, it uses data from history to create historical fictions.
Words are easily manipulated, and they
often create their own
reality, independent of truth. The Bible looks like a history book, but it is
not. Most of the text takes the form of a historical account; even the
psalms or prophecies seem like historical accounts. Many religions have
established themselves by using the
Bible as a true and sacred text, but the latest studies indicate that it is
not.
Practically
all books are copies of earlier Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, etc. texts.
Hebrew specialists do not speak of plagiarism but of "shared literary
traditions" in form and content. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife
is the "Egyptian story of two brothers." Some proverbs (22-23) are
true copies of the teachings of Amen-em-Opet. (The Bible as Literature), the
Bible as a book of laws and precepts is poor compared to the legal systems of
the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, let us only remember the
Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, (1750 BC).
on biblical
sites and their dating carried out by the archeology departments of Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem University and those of Archaeological Institutes and Cultural
Assets. They have produced relevant reports, especially archaeologist Israel
Finkelstein with his colleague Neil A. Silberman. His videos can be seen on
Internet. They tell us that there are no records of the Patriarchs, they are
fictional characters, nor did they find evidence that the Exodus took place.
Something I
had suspected for a long time. The reason? In more than three thousand years, a
sword, pottery remains, bones, food remains, etc. had not been found. No trace
of the passage of hundreds of thousands of people leaving Egypt, crossing the
Red Sea, who spent forty years wandering in the desert, without water and
without food. One or two miracles are believable, but thousands every day?
Huummm… if every day they produced miracles they are no longer miracles they
are the trivial routine. Science demands proof, verification, but: the dilemma
for believers is that there is no proof of biblical claims.
So, to believe
or not to believe? It was this fact that made the professor of history at the
University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, affirm that the biblical writers
were all fanciful/illusionary. Prof. Finkelstein, as director of the archeology
department of the Tel Aviv University was more cautious. He said that these writers did not
take into account the real situation of the times they described, neither the
political nor the geographical conditions. In other words, they wrote without
foundation. At the time of the Exodus all of Palestine was a province of Egypt.
That being the case, the Jews could not escape Pharaoh's army and be safe on
the other side, because all of Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula were part of
the Egyptian empire. On the Sinai Peninsula was the mighty fortress of Ramses
II with his soldiers. Could they escape into the hands of those soldiers of
Pharaoh? Considering reality, it doesn't make any sense. The Egyptians kept
careful records of the events of the kingdom. How is there no record of a group
of hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing? Nor is the name of the pharaoh who
oppressed them mentioned. The reason is that those writers did not know.
The Dutch
Sephardic philosopher Baruch
Spinoza (1632-1677) in
the 17th century had already criticized aspects of the Bible, such as the fact
that after Moses died, he ordered Joshua, upon entering the land promised to
Abram to destroy all kingdoms, kill men, women, and children, take as
just the treasures. Today this would be monstrous. Unfortunately, no
destruction of fortresses or walls like that of Jericho has been found, nor
cities reduced to zero, nor burned stones. Neither bones nor goods of the dead.
They found no records in Moab, Edom, Ammon, and other kingdoms, being conquered
by slaves fleeing from Egypt. There are no proofs of those conquests. At this point we must ask, is the Bible a
collection of myths, allegories, and fantasy stories? That is the affirmation
that emerges from Professor Harari, since the biblical writers were
“fantasists”. Jorge Luis Borges argued that the Bible should be considered part
of fantastic literature.
The way to
save the text has been "allegorizing", that is, giving it an
allegorical interpretation that the authors never thought of. For example, The
Song of Songs, which is a love poem celebrating physical union, has been
read as an allegory of the union not of a man and a woman, but of the church
and The lover and the beloved also interpreted as the relationship between
Yahweh and Israel. Is there an explanation?
Yes, a very
reasonable one: many of the texts of the Old Testament (Hebraic Bible) were written
in Babylon, during the slavery imposed by King Nebuchadnezzar. The Jews watched
for decades, as the Babylonians keep records of the important events of the
kingdom, floods, plagues, wars, etc. At that time there was no Internet or
large bookstores that they had access to. Considering that their stories would
be lost over time, they began to write the memories, but enlarging them for
posterity. Exaggeration is an ancient literary weapon to impress readers.
Gabel,
Wheeler, and York, the authors of “The Bible as Literature” An
Introduction, say about Genesis: The object of the text is recognizable: a
series of cosmic events, but that no human being witnessed or lived. It makes
no sense to ask if the universe was created in seven days, or if light could
exist without any objects emitting light, or that the sun is created after the
earth. For the authors, the answers lead nowhere. But for the priests it was
perfect in that way and in that the way it had to be accepted. In other words,
it is a priestly imposition.
The Bible is
an anthology that uses hyperbole, that is, exaggeration in order to impress
readers. Also, poetry, story, history, etc. Of the patriarchs there are no
records, it is not even known if they really existed. Some consider them to be
fictional characters. Many accounts are taken from earlier writings, the
universal flood is contained in a number of Mesopotamian texts (Sumerian,
Assyrian, Babylonian, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, and others). Some psalms
are true copies of earlier Egyptian texts. The character "Moses" has
many antecedents as a fictional character, but the real historical antecedent
of the boy thrown in a basket over the Euphrates River was Sargon of Akkad,
considered the first emperor in history, who conquered all the Sumerian kingdoms
up to Ur, city from which the Bible attributes the origin of Abram.
Why attribute
to Ur, (of the Chaldeans?), the origin of the people of Israel? For a matter of
prestige, say the archaeologists. In reality, it was the model to follow with
the temple (ziggurat) as the center of society, and the Enzi (high priest) the
highest religious, political and military authority. In Sumer the temple
centralized its religious
activity with its sacrifices, the registration of contracts and the filing of
tablets, the teaching of cuneiform writing, and arts and crafts workshops.
Additionally, they developed
the wheel and irrigation canals, weapons manufacturing, large constructions,
fortified cities, the social organization with the ziggurats as the center of
worship, with the powerful priestly class. This system that was in place for
thousands of years finally collapsed.
The book of
Daniel was written 300 years after the events related. There never was a Daniel
and his friends in the court of the king of Assyria. In this way we better
understand what Jorge Luis Borges said, "the Bible is a text of fantastic
literature." Others will say that they are “fake news”. Several
philosophers denied the Bible, and therefore suffered the consequences: exile,
persecution, etc. Mainly Spinoza and Leibniz, criticized the inconsistencies of
the text. Luther himself made strong objections to the book, stating that the
only valid parts were those that referred to the Spirit.
Since for
centuries it was the only religious text, the possibility of other texts from
the Middle East was not considered. This lasted until the middle of the 19th
century. Mainly because of the
ignorance of texts in other languages, when they began to discover how to
interpret the other languages of the Middle East, everything began to change. There
are thousands of texts to translate, there are hundreds of thousands of tablets
to transcribe, only the Egyptian texts are extremely numerous, and many of them were ignored
considering that they were just drawings, until it was discovered that they are
a language. For example, one of the psalms is considered to be a verbatim copy
of an earlier Egyptian text.
The discovery of ignorance
During
Napoleon's campaign in Egypt (1799) in a village called Rosetta, the
expeditionary found a small stone that would be the key to the knowledge of
ancient texts. This stone
contained a text in three languages: the first was Egyptian hieroglyphics, the
second was in Demotic Egyptian, which is the same language, but in italics, the
third was in ancient Greek. Sure, linguists knew Greek, but they never thought
hieroglyphs were a language. The mission of deciphering the texts fell to the
French linguist Jean-François Champollion. All three texts were the same decree
of King Ptolemy V, Epiphanes. That grain diorite stele was the key to my
ignorance and possibly to many more. Ignorance of unawareness. The inscription
was from 196 BC, the so-called inter-testamental period. The Egyptians
considered language an invention of the god Thoth to allow them to communicate
ideas, feelings and norms.
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient
granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued in Memphis in 196 BC. C. in
the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three different scripts:
the upper text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle part in demotic script and
the lower part in ancient Greek. For almost two thousand years the only text in
circulation (that spoke of antiquity) was the Bible. Nobody could think that it
was a drop in an ocean of ignored texts. The investigations of Bible societies
founded by Protestant groups in America and Europe were never intentional to
discover other texts, but to search for those that ratify the Bible, the others
were set aside or simply destroyed. They were German scholars who began with
literary criticism of the Bible, questioning many mythological aspects.
The King James
Version held that the age of the earth began 4004 years before Christ. When
geological studies were published (Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology,
1830-33), taking the age of the earth to millions of years, to think that the
creation of the world took place in a week beginning in 4004 before
Christ, was meaningless. The myth of the universal deluge, with small variations,
was part of various texts of Sumerian-Mesopotamian literature. Area that
includes two large rivers that, with excess rain, then overflowing, produced
extensive fields of water and for quite some time.
The thesis by which Héctor Avalos proposes the
elimination of biblical studies maintains:
Modern
academic studies have shown that the Bible is the product of cultures whose
values and beliefs
about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are not held to be relevant,
even by most Christians and Jews. (The
End of Biblical Studies, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2007).
What value
(moral or legal) does the story of Moses looking to the right and left and not
seeing anyone kill an Egyptian who was punishing a Hebrew and buries him in the
sand? (Exodus 2:11-12) Today it would be considered intentional murder, without
extenuation, with a possible death penalty in the electric chair. Or the great
King David who had Bathsheba brought to his rooms, whom he impregnates, and in
order to cover the adultery, he had Uriah, her husband, killed (Samuel 11: 1 to
12: 25). What great moral example is it for our days? It was the strength of
the prophets for or against the people that shaped the Jewish character in a
certain way. The prophets represent a moral force to confront the powerful in
the name of a higher principle.
Regarding the New
Testament, the writer Corrado Augias asks the professor emeritus of the
University of Torino, Giovanni Savorano:
“From the
historical and material point of view of its writing, what are the Gospels? Who
wrote them? When? He replied:
We are in
Italy, if we were in another country the answer I am about to give you would be
different. Italy is a Catholic country. Rome is the seat of the papacy, the
Gospels are inevitably conditioned of this presence being texts that in a
certain way were fixed by the Catholic Church as sacred texts, that is,
divinely inspired!
A translation
professor told me that if someone saw the original texts of the Bible they
would be remarkably surprised, they are really crude. It was the successive
translations through the centuries that embellished with new terms and
alternative meanings, to make them acceptable to the expressions of the time,
until today. Without forgetting that the biblical messages were exclusively for
the tribes of Israel. It was necessary to transform them into a universal
message applicable to peoples and completely
different continents. It is a wonder that a group of tribes that almost all the
time fought each other, has risen to such prominence in the world. Undoubtedly,
the Hebrew Bible or the
Torah was an anchor that kept them together and more than that, it was the
attitude of reading, which gave rise to a culture, relating daily life to a
book.
Many concepts
are completely at odds with the established ideas today especially those related
to human rights and care for the environment. They do not resonate in the
present collective consciousness. Therefore, "multiplying" and
“subduing the earth" (including plants and animals) are considered by many
to be the cause of humanity's environmental problems. It is these aspects that
for centuries were inspired, today they are miserable. The messages of prophets
like Isaiah to do good, help the downtrodden, be fair to orphans, and help
widows were rarely fully carried out Not even among the same tribes. Given the
overwhelming amount of information disproving the Bible, those of us who
believed in it, what choice do we have? The moment arrives when we must face
the dilemma of continuing with our beliefs or the truth that science proposes
to us. Each person must decide for himself
or herself. In my case, I consider a new beginning is necessary. God was the
product of the creative imagination, as it is for art and science. It was the
attempt to give meaning to human existence and its mysteries, as the same
reality that enveloped the sapiens transcended their life to "that"
that transcended they called it God, although the Chinese Lao Tsè called it
"Tao".
In each age
not only religious but philosophers and scientists gave answers to the
transcendent. At this time when science has given answers to many mysteries, we
cannot return to the same. Let's say that the metaphysical answer to the
transcendent never satisfied completely. That is why Judaism prohibited naming
the sacred name of the deity, and in Islam representations of it cannot be
made. This is to make it clear that the idea of God escapes definitions or common
material visions.
The second
aspect of every text is when readers turns the work into something of their
own, with their interpretation, with the anointing with which they read it and
the emotion that it transmits. It is the reader who, with his/her
intention, can turn the text into something profane or something sacred and inspiring. The Bible will remain
an interesting book but no more sacred.
We return to
the beginning, to the pre-religious period, but we cannot drift or return to
animism, that is, to find the spirit in every stone, in every tree, or in the
rivers, or in every wild animal. The spirit either we find in ourselves or we
will not find it anywhere. We must find in our conscience the root of the
essential, the sacredness of the vital spirit, the source of harmony and
well-being. The beginning of existence on which to ground our experiences. Nor
should we fall into the idea of forming a religion with each
experience, whether it is of an important character or not. Each being is his
own religion with which he/she will fulfill his own destiny.
All of us at
some point have had some sensation or experience of the ineffable, of a
presence that we do not know what it is. In my case I had three. One of them
was so beautiful that I experienced it for several days. And then the memory for
months in a state of hallelujah, in subtle and profound ecstasy: it was feeling
part of the whole universe and the whole universe was my being. I could touch
every star tour every planet and its satellites. There was no part of the
cosmos that was not part of me. Everything was beautiful and harmonious. I
think that like many of the spiritual experiences it was non-transferable. How
do you stop transferring the infinite, the eternal, the incommunicable that
elevates and transforms us? The most accurate is the music of silence. Another
experience was a healing of vitiligo which at that time (I worked at the
Chrysler car factory) was incurable. In the face of adversity, I maintained the
security of the omnipotent spirit in us that could transform me, if a circumstance
had caused me an illness, the spirit (as the principle of my existence) could
remake me again, because existence possesses regenerative love, the element
that unites opposite parts to redeem and bless. Everything is in our being from
the very origin, if something exists it is because it has the elements of
harmony that make it exist. As I said: each being is its own religion of pure
behavior, uncontaminated behavior, a clean soul, a healthy mind, with which
each being will fulfill his own destiny. Nothing relevant is out there,
everything is in our being, our infinite being here and now.
©Pietro Grieco / August 4/2022
Bibliography:
Karen Armstrong, A History of God,
Ballantine Books, New York, 1994.
Avalos,
Hector. The End of Biblical Studies, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New
York, 2007.
Corrado Augias,
Giovanni Filoramo, Il Grande Romanzo Dei Vangeli, Giulio Einaudi spa. Turin, 2021.
John B. Gaber,
Charles B. Wheeler, Anthony D. York, “The Bible as Literature, An
Introduction” Oxford University Press, New York, 2000.
La Bibbia di
Gerusalemme, Centro Editoriale Dehoniano, Bologna/Trento, 2020.
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