Platonic Sources of Genesis

[Anonymous No.21258006]

The Garden of Eden was a re-telling of Plato's Atlantis myth from Timaeus-Critias. The Nephilim came from the marriage of Posiden and the mortal Cleito in Critias. The destruction of Atlantis by Zeus in Critias for moral reasons became the Noahide flood which added a moral gloss to existant flood myths. Russell Gmirkin explains all:
https://youtu.be/SZvzyaCocss?t=3797

[Anonymous No.21258070]

The Hebrew Pentateuch was written in 273BC in Alexandria using the resources of the library of Alexandria at the same time as the Greek Septuagint was produced by the same group. It was a deliberate effort to follows Plato's instructions in the Republic and Laws to create a state myth to organise and control the Jewish polity, and transformed the Jews from disparate Canaanite polytheists, into Platonic monotheists with a concrete and distinct identity.
>Manetho & Exodus, Berossus & Genesis: Hellenistic History of The Hebrew Bible - Russell Gmirkin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDGBxoCG6BA
>How Old Is The Hebrew Bible - Russell Gmirkin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQqv9oQCww
>How old is the Hebrew Bible? - Part 2 Russell Gmirkin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bd8MU4G6bU

[Anonymous No.21258112]

The character of Pre-Hellenistic Judaism is known through the Elephantine papyri (~450-400BC), a collection of texts from a Jewish outpost in upper Egypt that build their own polythestic temple to Yahweh and other Canaanite gods, consulted the temple in Jerusalem on correct practices, and held a proto-Passover fast. But "unacquainted with authoritative Mosaic writings or written laws":
>The Elephantine papyri of ca. 450-400 bce give provide strong contemporary evidence for the character of Judaism as practiced late into the Persian Era. These archives of letters (and ostraca) from the Jewish military colony of Elephantine, an Egyptian southern border fortress located just below the First Cataract of the Nile, attest to a thriving Judaism in Egypt with their own temple but no Aaronic priesthood, a Judaism without scriptures, a Judaism which accommodated polytheism, a Judaism with no knowledge of Abraham, Moses, or any other figure known from the Pentateuch or Hebrew Bible (as shown by the absence of these famous figures from the many Jewish names found in the archives). The Jews of Elephantine celebrated a purely agricultural Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread (TAD A4.1) with no associated traditions regarding Moses or Exodus.

>They possessed a seven day week, but no sabbath of rest, as shown by one ostraca that enjoined an employee to offload a boat full of vegetables on the sabbath on pain of death (TAD D7.16.1-5). These Jews deferred to the authority of Jewish priests from Jerusalem, with whom they consulted on religious matters, but biblical writings never come into play: only what Wellhausen called Oral Torah, authoritative priestly rulings that did not involve written legal codes. The Samarian papyri of Wadi Daliyeh, dating from ca. 375 to 335 bce, at the dawn of the Hellenistic Era, give a similar, though more limited picture: famous names from the Pentateuch are similarly absent.

>Contrast with the heavy representation of Pentateuchal names in the second century inscriptions from Mount Gerizim or the book of 1 Maccabees, during later times when the biblical text was mined for children’s names. It seems apparent that Judaism prior to the Hellenistic Era, what I would describe as pre-biblical Judaism, was unacquainted with authoritative Mosaic writings or written laws.

https://vridar.org/tag/gmirkin-plato-and-creation-of-hebrew-bible/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca

[Anonymous No.21258172]

The Hellenistic dating of the Pentateuch is demonstrated by it's reliance on Hellenistic works
>literary dependence of Gen 1-11 on Berossus’s Babyloniaca (278 BCE)
>literary dependence of the Exodus story on Manetho’s Aegyptiaca (ca. 285-280 BCE)
Both of which were availiable to the Septuagint authors at the library off Alexandria in 273BC.

Moses began as a fictional Egyptian boast in Manetho, that he was an Egyptian colonist amongst other Egyptian colonist who went out from Egypt and founded the civilisations of the world. Jewish writer repurposed the story to create their own national myth for an envisaged Platonic theocratic state. Akin to Romans claiming descent from fleeing Trojans borrowed from Homer.

Berossus’s Babyloniaca provided a collaction and summary of Near Eastern creation myths that could be repurposed and synthesised alongside Timaeus & Critias to produce a new mythic history of the world.

>"Gmirkin Model" and Septuagint Priority (3m57s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awg52anmTb8
https://vridar.org/2012/12/27/the-books-of-moses-unknown-300-years-before-christ/
https://vridar.org/2012/12/30/why-the-books-of-moses-should-be-dated-270-bce-clue-rabbits/

[Anonymous No.21258173]

It's always the same with this genre of research. If you squint and ignore how the stories aren't actually similar at all, Christianity/Judaism actually borrows a lot from pagan religions.

[Anonymous No.21258226]

>Platonic Sources of Genesis
Philo of Alexandria

[Anonymous No.21258233]

>>21258173
Ease up on the anti-Asian rhetoric, Lindsay Ellis

[Anonymous No.21258354]

>>21258226
Philo is writing nearly 300 years after the Septuagint (and in Gmirkin's telling, also the Hebrew Pentateuch) was written on Platonic inspiration. The reason later Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have had such ease synchronising with Platonism is because the foundational texts of Judaism were written in 273BC as Platonic texts, literally state myths as instructed by the Republic and Laws, that gloss Timaeus and Critias.

After the Greek conquest of the Levant under Alexander introduced Greek philosophy and Plato's dialogues Jewish intellectuals at the great library of Alexandria re-invented Judaism along Platonic lines from an inchoate polytheistic Canaanite temple cults to the central-temple theocratic monotheist form that would form the basis of Jewish identity and the Maccabean revolt.

[Anonymous No.21258645]

>>21258354
That's so many leaps of fancy when one could point to greater commonalities and likelier influences in Canaanite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Phoenician mythology.

Unless Gilgamesh was magically invented after Platonism too.

[Anonymous No.21258665]

>>21258006
>The Garden of Eden was a re-telling of Plato's Atlantis myth from Timaeus-Critias
No it isn't, and anyone arguing that hasn't read Timaeus-Critias

[Anonymous No.21259040]

>>21258665
Wrong, Genesis tracks and copies the Platonic dialogue.
https://vridar.org/2022/11/11/in-six-days-genesis-1-as-science-biblical-creation-accounts-platos-timaeus-5b/

[Anonymous No.21259143]

>>21259040
You are probably the most retarded person I’ve seen on this board, I will pray for your soul and for your smooth ass brain

[Anonymous No.21259147]

>>21258006
>The Nephilim came from the marriage of Posiden
Poseidon is a chthonic-terrestrial god though, this would not make sense.

[Anonymous No.21259188]

>>21259143
It's all laid out for you above. Read the books, watch the authors interviews. Plato demanded the populace have myths to keep them controlled and obedient to the philosophers. If you're content with the myths, then you've self selected your status as mental pleb.

[Anonymous No.21259196]

>>21259147
The marriage of the god Posiden and the mortal Cleito provide the model for Genesis turn to the Nephilim gods marrying mortal beauties and birthing a generation of giants, tracking the Timaeus-Critias dialogue of creation.

[Anonymous No.21259337]

I'm sceptical but I'll put Gmirkin's book on my to read list. If it is true, we can finally conclude that the Bible fundamentally is Platonic, which would be pretty cool to hear as a Christian Platonist. Though for now I'm still standing by Ezra as the Pentateuch's redactor/final author. Or the scribal circles the literary figure of Ezra represents anyway.

[Anonymous No.21259646]

>>21258006
The global deluge, half-god giants, and gigantomachy are all universal elements in ancient myth. You could just as easily claim that Genesis was a re-telling of Gilgamesh, but the truth is when source A makes the same claim as source B and C, that is corroboration rather than a reason to believe that source A, B, or C is false.

[Anonymous No.21260031]

>>21259188
No he didn't, the Noble Lie is for the *elites*, the guardian and auxiliary classes who are chosen for their strength of memory and who are aimed at on account of them being most likely to take advantage of the class of moneymakers.

[Anonymous No.21260058]

>>21259040
Boy, that sure doesn't show the Garden of Eden story parallel supposedly in Timaeus-Critias

[Anonymous No.21261250]

>>21259646
>>21258645
There's no interent in the ancient world. "Sources" aren't just books at hand for anyone to use over thousands of years in different languages, some buried on clay tablets. You're taking an anarchronistic view on how actual sources could become availiable to others in the ancient world. The Babylonian sources get complied into a Greek history by Berossus’s Babyloniaca in 278BC, now anyone can include Babylonian flood myths, Gilgamesh stories etc. into their own mythic histories by visiting a Greek library; before that no ones digging up clay tablets in the desert to read a language they can't understand.

The reason the myths can influence eachother is because under Greek hegemony all the locals subject people get taught Greek, their primary myths get translated in Greek by the Greek historical model, those histories then get published and deposited in Alexandria and other libraries to be read at large.

Now any secondary historian writing his own peoples history can include other peoples histories and mytha into his own. Which is what happened when the Jewish philsophers wrote the Septuagint in 273BC. They could author, for the first time, a mythic history of their own peopele, with all the regional myths and histories availiable in Greek to use from thr Alexandria library.

[Anonymous No.21261269]

>>21259337
The Elephantine papyri rules out an early existence of the Pentateuch>>21258112
. The Ezra myth only has currency because of the texts own claims.

In the Elephantine papyri there are over 140 Jewish names mentioned, not one is from the Pentateuch. Imagine going to Brooklyn today, or 1st century Alexandria, and not meeting a single Moses, Abraham, or Aaron?

[Anonymous No.21261274]

>>21260058
Keeping reading little boyo.

[Anonymous No.21261276]

>>21260031
Like the priestly class of Rabbis are?

[Anonymous No.21261388]

>>21258172
>>21258112
>>21258070
Good effort posts, anon.

[Anonymous No.21262534]

>>21259147
Poseidon fathers a race of giants with the mortal Cleito on Atlantis in Plato's Critias.

[Anonymous No.21263705]

>>21260058
See
https://www.academia.edu/28285061/Plato_and_the_Creation_of_the_Hebrew_Bible_Detailed_Abstract_

[Anonymous No.21263740]

Another work on the topic
>'Argonauts of the Desert' presents a revolutionary new commentary on the Bible and its origins, arguing that most biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature. From Genesis to Kings, the books of the Bible may have been written by a single author, a Hellenized Judean scholar who used Plato's ideal state in The Laws as a primary source. As such, biblical Israel is a recreation of that twelve tribes State and the stories surrounding the birth, life and death of that State were inspired by Greek epics. Each chapter presents the biblical material and compares this to the Greek or Roman equivalents, discussing similarities and differences.

Gmirkin disagrees with the single author theory of Wajdenbaum, but otherwise follows much of his reasoning.

[Anonymous No.21264046]

>>21261269
Lol you know Plato wrote Timaeus-Critias during the last half of the fourth century, right? In order to prove the Torah et al weree shaped in accordance with Timaeus-Critias, you have to show 1) that those two dialogues became *very* well known outside of Athens in a short period of time when Plato's school was still new and not as big as it would become and 2) that a group of Greek reading and possibly speaking Jews in Egypt could have made that influence felt in Judea.

>>21261276
Lol rabbis != sadducees and didn't exist as rabbis until the Roman period.

[Anonymous No.21264098]

>>21264046
what about the pharisees? I believe the oldest sect, the essenes, actually did possess a high priest caste, the chief of which was responsible for wearing the chiefly breastplate and divining gods will through it’s stones, this is all verbatim though.

[Anonymous No.21264139]

>>21264098
Pharisees were indeed the precursors to the rabbis, but they were distinct from the priestly Sadducees. At least w/r/t >>21261276 then, there's confusion, strictly speaking.

As to the Essenes, I'm unsure of their status, especially in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The original hypothesis that everyone takes to be the only one, was that Qumran was an Essene community, and this was assumed by Catholic scholars who had in mind their own monastic traditions. But there's slightly more of an edge now in thinking the scrolls were someone's private library hidden away at a pot factory; the scrolls in fact seem to be a hodgepodge of surprisingly different schools of thought, some Essenic, but plenty not so. With this in mind, it becomes a little trickier to figure how prominent or not the Essenes were, and whether or not their tradition was older than those of the Sadducees and Pharisees.

[Anonymous No.21264148]

>>21264139
thanks anon, nonetheless, fascinating op

[Anonymous No.21264318]

>The restored New Testament, the Hellenic fragments, freed from the pseudo-Jewish interpolations, harmonized, and done into English verse and prose with introductory analyses, and commentaries, giving interpretation according to ancient philosophy and psychology and new literal translation of the Synoptic Gospels, with introduction and commentaries
by Pryse, James M. (James Morgan), b. 1859
https://archive.org/details/restorednewtesta00pry/page/n9/mode/2up

[Anonymous No.21265048]

OP is so retarded it's unbelievable. I've been waiting for a delivery that should arrive in a few minutes. I'm going to just stare outside now.

[Anonymous No.21265114]

>>21258006
Timaeos is the most boring plato dialogue by a couple stadia

[Anonymous No.21265836]

>>21264046
Yeah the Hebrew Pentateuch was written in 273BC at the library of Alexandria under Hellenic inspiration with Greek sources at hand, at the same time as the Greek Septuagint "translation" was produced. That's what the thread is about. Not sure how you missed that ITT, here's the 4m QRD version in video form:
>"Gmirkin Model" and Septuagint Priority (3m57s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awg52anmTb8

[Anonymous No.21265868]

>>21264046
>that a group of Greek reading and possibly speaking Jews in Egypt could have made that influence felt in Judea.
Yeah they're all part of the Greek Ptolemaic Empire and anyone literate is speaking Greek (and heading to the capital of Alexandria to influence peddle). Most important Jews have Greek names in the period prior to the Maccabean revolt, and only with that revolt was a monotheistic Judaic religous identity established on the semi-Hellenised Canaanite polytheist Jewish population who sacrificed to Yahweh amongst other gods, as the Elephantine papyri preserve.

[Anonymous No.21265877]

>>21264046
The Pharasses are the rabbis of the Temple period who performed the same Platonic function in the Maccabean revolt and its aftermarth, as the rabbis do now, in the way you describe here>>21260031

[Anonymous No.21265900]

>>21264139
Committing a defintion fallacy between the concept of priestly as a present faction and the social priest function. The reason the Sadduces became more "priestly" in the Roman period is because of a failed Pharisee revolt that was crushed by a late Hellenic Jewish king which pushed them out of royal favour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Jannaeus#War_with_Demetrius_III_and_conclusion_of_the_Civil_War

[Anonymous No.21266797]

>>21264046

[Anonymous No.21267052]

>>21265836
I don't think you know anything about, say, Greek, or signs of the differing quality of the different texts of the Septuagint, or any of the signs which demonstrate the work is a translation of a semetic language. You and the "scholars" you cite have no evidence, just assertion and weak comparisons that play down differences and hype up even the most remote similarities.

>>21265868
>Yeah they're all part of the Greek Ptolemaic Empire and anyone literate is speaking Greek (and heading to the capital of Alexandria to influence peddle).
Lol review the Elephantine Jewish texts re: the temple, asserted to be old *by that time*. The Jewish community there wasn't there to dick suck the Greeks that later took over. And duh, of course various Jews right before the Maccabean revolt had Greek names, *they were conquered by the Greeks and that happens*.

>>21265877
The early rabbis by the Bar Kokhba rebellion are a later development from the pharisees, not the same simply. Which is irrelevant; you asserted stupidly that the rabbis were the priests, which is false, because the Sadducees were the priests, being the surviving Levites. You also asserted this had anything to do with the Noble Lie of the Republic, but you're so hopelessly confused that you evidently don't know what point to make, and you have weak grasp of even the material you're promoting that you can't make any sustained detailed statement or argument about it.

>>21265900
Lol and again, the Sadducees were from the Jewish equivalent of a "gens" devoted to priestly responsibilities. Your link doesn't say any of what you assert in substance (i.e., that the Sadducees come into priestly power specifically on account of a failed Pharisee rebellion; so it's your inference based on whatever you hope makes your made up point). And no, no "definition fallacy" was committed because the role of priest meant was exactly what it means: those in charge of formal religious observation, in general, and particularly during festivals, directing temple services and maintaining it, and directing sacrifice, offerings, etc. I said the Sadducees were the priests instead of the Pharisees, *because that was the literal role of the Sadducees*. If anyone commits a fallacy by definition, it's the dumbass appealing to the non-literal meaning of "priest" to make their non-sequitur point.

[Anonymous No.21267449]

>>21267052
You're simply strawmanning, inventing a false argument in your mind to knock down. Be less of a philistine and learn from your betters, Russell Gmirkin, rather than hiding behind ignorant glibness. Read and learn rather than default to dumb agon.

[Anonymous No.21267878]

Moses as an invention of Manetho, which the Jews borrowed and repurposed in 273BC (much like the Romans repurposed Aeneas from Homer and made him their mythical founder):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mrRSrknF4c

[Anonymous No.21267911]

>>21267449
>N...nuh uh! You didn't refute me! You...you didn't refute me!