>.
>
>GRYPHON:
>I agree and see your point. However, there has to be some contradiction
>somewhere that can't be explained away. There has to be something that
>can only be attributed to "human error" or "translational error."
>Unfortunately, I'm completely unable to know any such references,
>however, I'm convinced that they exist somewhere.
Well, Roger has been silent since I asked him about where the book of Esther starts up,( as well as having stopped trying to explain Genesis ), I'll reveal the trap he apparently smelled.
Esther 1:1-4 (with ellipses)
"It was in the days of Ahasuerus, the Ahasuerus whose empire streched form India to Ethiopia and comprised one hundred and twenty-seven provinces. . .in the third year of his reign, he gave a banquet at his court for all his administrators and ministers, chiefs of the army of Persia and Media, nobles and bovernors of provinces . . . the festivities went on for a long time, a hundred and eithty days."
The translation is form the Jerusalem Bible.
Now Roger has correctly identified Ahasuerus as Xerses I. No one else had an empire of the shaped and extent described. but consieder:
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"Xerxes I (Persian Khshayarsha) (circa 519-465 bc), king of Persia (486-465 bc), the son of Darius I and Atossa (flourished 6th century bc), daughter of Cyrus the Great. Ascending the throne upon the death of his father, he subdued a rebellion in Egypt, and then spent three years preparing a great fleet and army to punish the Greeks for aiding the Ionian cities in 498 bc and for their victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 bc. The Greek historian Herodotus gives as the combined strength of Xerxes' land and naval forces the incredible total of 2,641,610 warriors. Xerxes is said to have crossed the Hellespont by a bridge of boats more than a kilometer in length and to have cut a canal through the isthmus of Mount Athos. During the spring of 480 bc he marched with his forces through Thrace, Thessaly, and Locris."
Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
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Now even allowing that Herodotus was overestimanting Xerxes army, the clear sign is that it was huge by the standards of the time.
And just before Xerxes went into action he stopped and partied for six months?
It is hard enough to feed 2,000,000 people today. Even if Xerxex had but a tenth of that massed in one place, the logistics of feeding 200,000 men camped far from home and waiting for action, let alone partien for six months, boggles the mind. And there is no such record of any such event at any time in Xerxes reign. As a matter of fact, out side of the Bible, there is no record of any event, or person, that occurs in Esther.
Yet the description of Ahasuerus leaves no reasonable doubt but that he and Xerxes are one in the same.
The conclusion is that Esther is a work of historical fiction.
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Although the events of the Book of Esther show little correlation with those of the actual reign of Xerxes I, the story does reveal considerable knowledge of Persian customs, and it may be based on the deliverance of Jews from a local persecution in Persia. In its present form, however, it is essentially a secular historical romance, expressing a strong concern for Jewish patriotism and national survival. God is not mentioned, and religious practices are scarcely mentioned.
Recent scholarship indicates that the Book of Esther was composed in the 2d century bc. Because of its vindictive tone and secular character, early Jewish commentators were reluctant to include it in the Hebrew canon, but it was finally accepted in response to popular demand and because it offered an account of the origin of the feast of Purim. The Greek version of the Book of Esther contains 107 additional verses that are not found in the Hebrew original. They were composed in Greek, probably during the 1st century bc, with the apparent intention of giving the story a more religious character and greater relevance to the contemporary situation of the Jewish people. In Protestant Bibles, these passages are included as a separate book in the Old Testament Apocrypha. In most editions of the Bible used by Roman Catholics they are included with the original version of the book.
"Esther," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
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So what does it take? The events in Genesis are not physically possible. The events in Esther could not have happened, and hundreds if not thousands of major and minor discrepancies in parrallel accounts of events, non-existence of prophecies, and on and on.
A simple obvious redactor's error is Luke 24:10. Start at verse one, and trace the pronouns carefully through verse eleven.
When you do that (do it!) it is obvious that verse ten is a later insertion to inject Mary of Magdala (in particular) in to the dicovery account.
ttfn
mike in ca