• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Bible: Its Own History As A Book

rynner2

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Messages
54,631
lupinwick said:
IMO the truthfulness has always been in dispute.

Even assuming that the key texts are complete and not tampered with you still have the problem that they are translations and you have the inherent bias of the translator....
Sifting through the scores of different English versions of the New Testament, one is poignantly reminded of how translation, particularly of archaic language, is subject to personal interpretation. It is therefore vitally important that we get as close to the original source as possible. The oldest surviving complete text of the New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, dating back to the middle of the fourth century. The oldest fragments, the Bodmer and Beatty Papyri and Papyrus 52, date back to the second century but only contain bits of the Gospel of John......
http://www.maplenet.net/~trowbridge/NT_Hist.htm

Given that the current form of the NT was devised 1600+ years ago (or so) and has not really changed it present a world view from that time (Pauls misogyny etc). Although the committee is apparently a misconception and the testament grew organically over time.
The rival to the Bible
By Roger Bolton

What is probably the oldest known bible is being digitised, reuniting its scattered parts for the first time since its discovery 160 years ago. It is markedly different from its modern equivalent. What's left out?

The world's oldest surviving Bible is in bits.

For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found - or stolen, as the monks say - in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.

Now these different parts are to be united online and, from next July, anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access will be able to view the complete text and read a translation.

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today's bible.

The Codex, probably the oldest Bible we have, also has books which are missing from the Authorised Version that most Christians are familiar with today - and it does not have crucial verses relating to the Resurrection.

Anti-Semitic writings

The fact this book has survived at all is a miracle. Before its discovery in the early 19th Century by the Indiana Jones of his day, it remained hidden in St Catherine's Monastery since at least the 4th Century.

It survived because the desert air is ideal for preservation and because the monastery, on a Christian island in a Muslim sea, remained untouched, its walls unconquered.

Today, 30 mainly Greek Orthodox monks, dedicated to prayer, worship there, helped as in ages past by the Muslim Bedouin. For this place is holy to three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam; a land where you can still see the Burning Bush where God spoke to Moses.

The monastery itself has the greatest library of early manuscripts outside the Vatican - some 33,000, and a collection of icons second to none.

Not surprisingly, it is now a World Heritage Site and has been called a veritable Ark, bringing spiritual treasures safely through the turbulent centuries. In many peoples' eyes the greatest treasure is the Codex, written in the time of the first Christian Emperor Constantine.

When the different parts are digitally united next year in a £1m project, anyone will be able to compare and contrast the Codex and the modern Bible.

Firstly, the Codex contains two extra books in the New Testament.

One is the little-known Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome in the 2nd Century - the other, the Epistle of Barnabas. This goes out of its way to claim that it was the Jews, not the Romans, who killed Jesus, and is full of anti-Semitic kindling ready to be lit. "His blood be upon us," Barnabas has the Jews cry.

Discrepancies

Had this remained in subsequent versions, "the suffering of Jews in the subsequent centuries would, if possible, have been even worse", says the distinguished New Testament scholar Professor Bart Ehrman.

And although many of the other alterations and differences are minor, these may take some explaining for those who believe every word comes from God.

Faced with differing texts, which is the truly authentic one?

Mr Ehrman was a born again Bible-believing Evangelical until he read the original Greek texts and noticed some discrepancies.

The Bible we now use can't be the inerrant word of God, he says, since what we have are the sometimes mistaken words copied by fallible scribes.

"When people ask me if the Bible is the word of God I answer 'which Bible?'"

The Codex - and other early manuscripts - do not mention the ascension of Jesus into heaven, and omit key references to the Resurrection, which the Archbishop of Canterbury has said is essential for Christian belief.

Other differences concern how Jesus behaved. In one passage of the Codex, Jesus is said to be "angry" as he healed a leper, whereas the modern text records him as healing with "compassion".

Also missing is the story of the woman taken in adultery and about to be stoned - until Jesus rebuked the Pharisees (a Jewish sect), inviting anyone without sin to cast the first stone.

Nor are there words of forgiveness from the cross. Jesus does not say "Father forgive them for they know not what they do".

Fundamentalists, who believe every word in the Bible is true, may find these differences unsettling.

But the picture is complicated. Some argue that another early Bible, the Codex Vaticanus, is in fact older. And there are other earlier texts of almost all the books in the bible, though none pulled together into a single volume.

Many Christians have long accepted that, while the Bible is the authoritative word of God, it is not inerrant. Human hands always make mistakes.

"It should be regarded as a living text, something constantly changing as generation and generation tries to understand the mind of God," says David Parker, a Christian working on digitising the Codex.

Others may take it as more evidence that the Bible is the word of man, not God.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7651105.stm
 
Historic Bible pages put online

About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet.

Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript.

Fragments of the 4th Century document - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

Experts say it is "a window into the development of early Christianity".

Dr Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library, said the wide availability of the document presented many research opportunities.

"The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," he said.

"This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.

"The availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago."

The original version contained about 1,460 pages - each measuring 40cm by 35cm, he added.

To British Library is marking the online launch of the manuscript with an exhibition - which includes a range of historic items and artefacts linked to the document.

For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.

It is thought to have survived because the desert air was ideal for preservation and because the monastery, on a Christian island in a Muslim sea, remained untouched, its walls unconquered.

The institutions' pain-staking work can now be seen at www.codexsinaiticus.org.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8135415.stm
 
Fragment of world's oldest bible 'discovered in Egyptian monastery'
A fragment of the world's oldest Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus, has been uncovered hidden underneath the binding of an 18th-century book in an Egyptian monastery.
By Andrew Hough
Published: 9:22AM BST 02 Sep 2009

The discovery was made by a British-based Greek academic, Nikolas Sarris, who is studying for his PhD in Britain, after he noticed a previously unseen section of the bible.

The 30 year-old student conservator, who has been involved in the British library’s project to digitise the Codex, said he almost instantly noticed the distinct Greek lettering as he was recently researching in the library of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt.

The Codex Sinaiticus, which appears to date from about AD350, is handwritten in Greek on animal skin and is the earliest known version of the Bible.

Leaves from the tome are divided between four institutions, including St Catherine's Monastery and the British Library, which has the largest section of the ancient Bible since the Soviet Union sold its collection to Britain in 1933.

Last year The British Library put The Book of Psalms and St Mark's Gospel online, and now the remaining pages have been made free for public use for the first time.

Along with the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus is considered the oldest known Bible in the world.

Originally more than 1,460 pages long and measuring 16in by 14in, it was written by a number of hands around the time of Constantine the Great.

Mr Sarris said it was an exciting moment when he realised what he had discovered.

“Although it is not my area of expertise, I had helped with the online project so the Codex had been heavily imprinted in my memory,” he told said from the Greek island of Patmos.

“I began checking the height of the letters and the columns and quickly realised we were looking at an unseen part of the Codex.”

Mr Sarris said he then emailed Father Justin, the monastery's librarian, to suggest a closer look at the book binding.

"Even if there is a one-in-a-million possibility that it could be a Sinaiticus fragment that has escaped our attention, I thought it would be best to say it rather than dismiss it,” he told The Independent.

Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Father Justin said the monastery would use scanners to look more closely at how much of the fragment existed under the newer book binding.

"Modern technology should allow us to examine the binding in a non-invasive manner," he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... stery.html
 
Sinaiticus is really the smoking-gun.

Vaticanus at the very least derives from it or is a later alternate version. Sinaiticus without doubt is a primary original source.

It contains 2 books excised from the NT and 7 not found in the OT.

Also one can see many corrections, additions and excisions made in varying hands over the course of nearly 800 years.

And the original contains no mention of a resurrection. It clearly ends at Mark 16:8. - in fact the last words of this original are 'the Gospel according to Mark' which is clearly the end point of the original author.

The 12 verses claiming the resurrection (ie to Mark 16:20) are not present - not are they in Vaticanus actually - and were without doubt added much later.

There are many, many other equally blatant and fraudulent additions evident.

What is interesting though is the fundie reaction. Check out this comedy gold for the lamest apologetics possible:

http://www.workmenforchrist.org/Bible/History/Sinaiticus.html

The Sinaiticus is one of two manuscripts which are the one's called by many "the oldest manuscripts." The other, is the Vaticanus. This is a prime example of "oldest is not always best."

Oldest is not always best!!!!!

Sadly, when reading the Sinaiticus, one will find many mistakes which are neglected and ignored by those who love it. It contains extra-biblical books such as "Epistle of Barnabas," "Didache," and "Shepherd of Hermas." Tischendorf actually is said to have rescued the manuscript from the trash at the monastery! This sheds some doubt on the manuscript, why would such a "valuable" manuscript be in the trash? Obviously someone in the monastery saw it, deemed it garbage, and put it with the rest of the trash.


So the original MS contains 'mistakes' because it contradicts later additions!!!!!

:lol: :lol: :roll:

The rest of the article is hysterical in all meaning of the word....
 
ha ha ha. i'm going to email this to an old lecturer of mine (Biblical and Patristic Studies expert). It'll be good for a laugh if nothing else.
 
im just getting interested in the formation of the Bible as a Book, i want to try and understand how the Bible was put together, when and by who. Now im sure this is a hell of a subject and will span its whole 2000 year life. I would imagine that it would also be a different story for each Christian country.
I want to know how and why the Books were chosen, and the same for how (if) the Bible has been re-written / edited for contempory times.


as im just starting im looking for some advice on good books on the subject, ideally i want something to read that is neither for or against religion. i dont want to be reading a Christian propaganda book and conversly i dont want to be told that its all aload of old rubbish and with spurious internet based FACTS.

The current issue of FT has a good review of Jesus, Interrupted. This looks like a good book with a good review in FT.

Anyone else have an idea on good books that i should read on this?


Thanks
for any help on this

Stu
 
Testament by John Rohmer, is a fairly readable introduction to the subject. Probably out of print, but you may be able to find a copy in the library or pick it up second hand.
 
You might want to try out Robin Lane Fox "The Unauthorized Version. Truth and Fiction in the Bible". there's some cheap copies available through amazon.
 
Mal_Content said:
You might want to try out Robin Lane Fox "The Unauthorized Version. Truth and Fiction in the Bible". there's some cheap copies available through amazon.

i made a note of this book yesterday, ill put it on my list for Santa. Assuming ive been a good boy this year.

Stu
 
Timble's suggestion is seconded, though you might find it quicker under Romer.

It was the book of a tv series which does not appear to have made it onto DVD.

It turns up quite regularly in Oxfam shops and is lavishly illustrated. Much better than your average tv tie-in.

Less easy to find is The Great Code, the last major work of Northrop Frye. :)
 
I'd second...third...whatever, Robin Lane Fox's, The Unauthorised Version.

Also you could do worse than take time out from reading to watch Robert Beckford's documentary, Who Wrote the Bible? which was on Channel Four (UK) in 2004, and which I've just found is now available on Google Videos.

Initially I didn't get on with Beckford's style at all, and I almost switched off after a few of the opening comments, which just seemed a bit naive and silly - but he grew on me, as did the programme. Beckford is an academic but also a Christian and approaches the subject as a questioning believer, not a Fundamentalist - they, predictably, hated the documentary.
 
Spookdaddy said:
I'd second...third...whatever, Robin Lane Fox's, The Unauthorised Version.

Also you could do worse than take time out from reading to watch Robert Beckford's documentary, Who Wrote the Bible? which was on Channel Four (UK) in 2004, and which I've just found is now available on Google Videos.

Initially I didn't get on with Beckford's style at all, and I almost switched off after a few of the opening comments, which just seemed a bit naive and silly - but he grew on me, as did the programme. Beckford is an academic but also a Christian and approaches the subject as a questioning believer, not a Fundamentalist - they, predictably, hated the documentary.



i watched that Doc last night so thanks for that. I thougth it was really good, not sure how i missed it when it was on but there you go. Channel four do some good stuff, cant imagine that the bbc would have commisioned somthing like that though.

ill order the book that a few of you have sugested, thanks.

Stu
 
The rise and fall of the Bible illuminates the text's unexpected history
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-fal ... ected.html
February 7th, 2011 in Other Sciences / Other

Christians have a buying penchant for Bibles, but Case Western Reserve University religious studies professor Timothy Beal finds "the Word" gets lost between popular culture appeals and value add-ons that tell people how to think and interpret what’s in the Bible.

The Bible has been an all-time bestseller since Gutenberg’s presses rolled out the first mass copies, but it remains highly misunderstood, Beal says. As the author of the forthcoming The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Beal dispels Biblical myths and reveals the book’s evolutionary history.

One long-held myth, he says, is that the Bible has always been the same and goes back to one ultimate source or original. The notion is perpetuated with images of Jesus reading from an open book in the synagogue, but Beal points out that the Bible evolved from early scrolls of stories, handwritten three centuries before selected writings were bound in a rectangular bound manuscript, called a codex. One of the first Bibles in book form was the Vulgate Bible, which appeared in the early 5th century under the guidance of Saint Jerome.

Bibles now come in all shapes and sizes, but Beal demonstrates that the writings that appear between those dimpled leather covers and gilded edges—or packaged between dating tips for teens in Biblezines—show one constant: They all reflect the times in which they were published by echoing political and cultural norms.
Current times reflect that change, too, as the digital age heralds a new day for the Bible.

“It is the twilight of print culture and of the book as the dominant medium for literature,” he says. “This means that there will also be an end of a certain way of thinking about and reading the Bible.”

Along with the rise of digital media, Christian consumerism has a role in pushing the Bible further from its original form with graphic versions and magazine forms that are popular among younger readers.

“Christians often talk about the Bible as a rock, but it’s really more like a river; there is change all the way back to its beginnings,” Beal said.

Even the word “bible” has a fluid etymological history. In Greek, ta biblia referred to “the books,” and Jerome used the Latin term bibliotheca, or “library.“

“I like to think of the Bible in this way as a collection of writings – not a book of answers but a library of questions,” Beal said.

One point that is clear regardless of translation or version, Beal says, is that the Bible is a fascinating place to begin questions about life and to find inspiration on the moral and philosophical issues most humans face every day.

Provided by Case Western Reserve University
 
1. Ancient Bibles

Series combining stories, interviews, illustrations and archive to reveal the beauty of books examines two magnificent bibles from the 4th and 12th centuries.

The British Library in London is home to 14 million books, on shelves that stretch over 600km. Extraordinary vessels of ideas and knowledge, they testify to the love affair we have with books. This series explores the enduring appeal and importance of books from a 4th century bible to present day paperbacks.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the world's oldest surviving bible. Made around 350 AD, it is a unique insight into early Christians and their effort to find a single version of the biblical text that everyone could accept - a bible fit for the Roman Empire. 800 years later, an illuminated bible rich in gold and lapis lazuli and produced in Winchester, recalls a time when bibles were at the centre of the Church's struggle with the State for ultimate authority.

Both of these bibles are works of art and remarkable achievements in book technology. They are also annotations on the political era in which they were created, providing fascinating commentary on the life of Jesus and the murder of Thomas Becket.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... nt_Bibles/
 
Anyone read:

David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of Western Civilization by Israel Finkelstein (Author), Neil Asher Silberman (Author)
--
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel by Israel Finkelstein (Author), Neil Asher Silberman (Author)
--
101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History by Gary Greenberg (Author)
--
The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Elliott Friedman (Author)
--
 
I found 'The Bible: a biography' by Karen Armstrong interesting. It's got a lot about early how early Jewish scholars worked, and the mystical approaches they took to text.
 
http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Firs ... 0670021261

I made it halfway through this very thorough and even-handed treatment of biblical history, "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years," by Diarmaid MacCullough. So that's about 1500 years for me, I guess.. it was one of five library books I had out and I ran out of time and interest.
 
An Israeli algorithm sheds light on the Bible
June 30th, 2011 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-isr ... bible.html

This undated file photo made available by the Yad Ben Zvi Institute on Nov. 8, 2007, shows a piece of an ancient parchment believed to be part of the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex. Software developed by an Israeli team of scholars led by Moshe Koppel, of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. (AP Photo/Yad Ben Zvi Institute, File)


Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.

The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications - from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.

For millions of Jews and Christians, it's a tenet of their faith that God is the author of the core text of the Hebrew Bible - the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses. But since the advent of modern biblical scholarship, academic researchers have believed the text was written by a number of different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles and the different names they used for God.

Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the "priestly" author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The rest is "non-priestly." Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.

When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the "priestly" and "non-priestly." It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent - effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.

"We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method," the Israeli team announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The team includes a computer science doctoral student, Navot Akiva, and a father-son duo: Nachum Dershowitz, a Tel Aviv University computer scientist, and his son, Idan Dershowitz, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the "priestly" author, but the software indicated it was not.

Similarly, the book of Isaiah is largely thought to have been written by two distinct authors, with the second author taking over after Chapter 39. The software's results agreed that the book might have two authors, but suggested the second author's section actually began six chapters earlier, in Chapter 33.

The differences "have the potential to generate fruitful discussion among scholars," said Michael Segal of Hebrew University's Bible Department, who was not involved in the project.

Over the past decade, computer programs have increasingly been assisting Bible scholars in searching and comparing texts, but the novelty of the new software seems to be in its ability to take criteria developed by scholars and apply them through a technological tool more powerful in many respects than the human mind, Segal said.

Before applying the software to the Pentateuch and other books of the Bible, the researchers first needed a more objective test to prove the algorithm could correctly distinguish one author from another.

So they randomly jumbled the Hebrew Bible's books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah into one text and ran the software. It sorted the mixed-up text into its component parts "almost perfectly," the researchers announced.

The program recognizes repeated word selections, like uses of the Hebrew equivalents of "if," "and" and "but," and notices synonyms: In some places, for example, the Bible gives the word for "staff" as "makel," while in others it uses "mateh" for the same object. The program then separates the text into strands it believes to be the work of different people.

Other researchers have looked at linguistic fingerprints in less sacred texts as a way of identifying unknown writers. In the 1990s, the Vassar English professor Donald Foster famously identified the journalist Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the book "Primary Colors" by looking at minor details like punctuation.

In 2003, Koppel was part of a research team that developed software that could successfully tell, four times out of five, if the author of a text was male or female. Women, the researchers found, are far more likely to use personal pronouns like "she" and "he," while men prefer determiners like "that" and "this" - women, in other words, talk about people, while men prefer to talk about things. That success sparked debate about how gender shapes the way we think and communicate.

Research of this kind has potential applications for law enforcement, allowing authorities to catch imposters or to match anonymous texts with possible authors by identifying linguistic tics. Because the analysis can also help identify gender and age, it might also allow advertisers to better target customers.

The new software might be used to investigate Shakespeare's plays and settle lingering questions of authorship or co-authorship, mused Graeme Hirst, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Toronto. Or it could be applied to modern texts: "It would be interesting to see if in more cases we can tease apart who wrote what," Hirst said.

The algorithm might also lead to the creation of a style checker for documents prepared by multiple authors or committees, helping iron out awkward style variations and creating a uniform text, Hirst suggested.

What the algorithm won't answer, say the researchers who created it, is the question of whether the Bible is human or divine. Three of the four scholars, including Koppel, are religious Jews who subscribe in some form to the belief that the Torah was dictated to Moses in its entirety by a single author: God.

For academic scholars, the existence of different stylistic threads in the Bible indicates human authorship.

But the research team says in their paper they aren't addressing "how or why such distinct threads exist."

"Those for whom it is a matter of faith that the Pentateuch is not a composition of multiple writers can view the distinction investigated here as that of multiple styles," they said.

In other words, there's no reason why God could not write a book in different voices.

"No amount of research is going to resolve that issue," said Koppel.
 
I find this series of articles from the Straight Dope both clear and interesting.

Part 1 – Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses?
Part 2 – Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various histories in the Old Testament (such as Judges, Kings, etc.)? (This section will also include a brief essay on the problems inherent in dating ancient events.)
Part 3 – Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) and the wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) in the Old Testament?
Part 4 – Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various New Testament Books?
Part 5 – Who decided which books should be included and which excluded from the Bible(s)? Why are there differences in the Bibles for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews?

Note, however, that they don't discuss the Codex Sinaiticus by name, which is a bit disappointing.
 
@eburacum

It is hard for me to read these academic inspections of the Bible.
As a Jew, I am used to discussing it within our tradition.

"Inconsistencies" and duplications are explained; as intentional, to draw attention to certain subjects.
The text is looked at through the view of four main levels of understanding, each one going into a more mystical explanation.
The environment in Biblical times is regarded as genuinely different from today...the temperature, humidity, usually better crop yields, relative lack of disease, lifespan of humans etc.

Whilst I do not doubt the hard work that has gone into these academic studies, I regard them as superfluous, because I view the text through a very different lens.
 
I'm sure the climate was quite different in those days. North Africa, for instance, was known as the breadbasket of Rome, and was quite fertile.

And quite a few of the scholars who have produced these academic interpretations also subscribe to the mystical interpretations as well, apparently - holding two different views of the material simultaneously. They don't consider either viewpoint superfluous, as far as I can tell.
 
Back
Top