| PAGE Book | LOC Kindle | CHAPTER 17 |
| 97 | 2525 | The contradictions are there to remind us not to get hooked on the surface meaning of the text but look for its deeper, analogical meanings: Lane Fox, Robin: The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, Viking, London 1991, p. 38; Barton, John: A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, Penguin Random House, London 2020, pp. 339-350. See also Boyd, Gregory: Inspired Imperfection: How the Bible’s Problems Enhance Its Divine Authority, Fortress Press, 2020. |
| 97 | 2530 | The second response has a very long history: In the 3rd Century CE, the theologian Origen of Alexandria said of the story of the Garden of Eden, ‘who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?’ Barton, A History of the Bible, p 341, MacCulloch, Diarmaid: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Kindle Edition). Penguin Books 2010, Loc 3357. |
| 99 | 2570 | Page 70 – Jews and Christians always believed Moses wrote these books: Finkelstein, Israel and Silberman, Neil Asher: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. Touchstone, New York 2002, pp. 10-13; Friedman, Richard Elliott: Who Wrote the Bible? Jonathan Cape, London 1988, pp. 17-24. |
| 99 | 2578 | Spinoza ended up excommunicated by the Jews of Amsterdam for this and other heresies: Armstrong, Karen: The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Harper Collins, London 2001 pp. 22-3. |
| 99 | 2579 | In 1697, an eighteen-year-old Edinburgh student by the name of Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for pretty much the same thing: Graham, Michael: The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead. Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2008. |
| 99 | 2595 | One of the most important contributions was made by Jean Astruc, physician to the king of France: Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible? p. 52; Romer, John: Testament: The Bible and History, Michael O’Mara Books, London 1988, pp. 337-8. |
| 99 | 2601 | In 1883, a German scholar named Julius Wellhausen synthesised these findings into a theory that still dominates the subject to this day: Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible? pp. 24-27. |
| 100 | 2611 | My tutor at university taught us how to spot a passage from P in less than a week: I believe this comes from Richard Elliott Friedman, but I have been unable to track it down. |
| 100 | 2615 | Most non-conservative scholars regard Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis as a major breakthrough: Friedman: op cit, pp. 27-29. |
| 100 | 2623 | You can find the proper version in a brilliant book called Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliot Friedman: Friedman: op cit, pp. 53-61. |
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Paul Clark 