readoldthings

On Tuesday we began to discuss the ideas of Russ Gmirkin, a scholar who believes that the Hebrew Bible was actually compiled around the year 270 B.C. by Jewish scholars at Alexandria, following a program for national re-vitalization derived from Plato's Republic and Laws.

Today I want to begin to carry the conversation forward in two directions. First, I want to talk a little more about the reasons that I don't trust Gmirkin or other academics on this topic. And then I want to speculate about whether Gmirkin is not only right, but whether the same thing happened again 300 years later in the creation of Christianity.

A Hermeneutic of Suspicion

First I'd like to talk about why I think Gmirkin may be wrong, and as I do this you're going to notice something, which is that I'm not going to present any evidence that he is wrong. There are two reasons for this. The first and most important is simply that to actually challenge Gmirkin's thesis would require a research project as extensive as Gmirkin's own, and the results would be a book, not a blog post. Such an undertaking would be a very worthy contribution to the conversation and I commend anyone who wants to undertake it-- but since I want to talk about this on Tuesday, October the 12th of the year 2023 and not sometime in the early '30s, I'm obviously not going to begin it today.

The second reason is that I want to make the point that it's okay to challenge academics, professors, doctors, and people with PhDs. This is an age of meaningless, authoritarian slogans like "Follow the Science!" And it's an age in which people mistake intelligence for the ability to repeat the opinions of college professors and journalists, and stupidity for the unwillingness to repeat those opinions. I want everyone reading this to know that if a public figure says something that doesn't sound right to you, you have ever right to challenge them.

And so in this case I want to give three reasons for applying what I'll call a "hermeneutic of suspicion" to claims like those of Mr. Gmirkin.

The Lindy Effect

This is a term coined by Nassim Taleb in his early book The Black Swan. If all the rest of Nassim Taleb's ideas are forgotten but the concept of the Lindy Effect remains, he will have nevertheless made a great contribution to the collective human mind.

The Lindy Effect tells us that for most cultural phenomena, if you want to know how much longer it will last, look at how long it has gone on. This is easy to see if you look at pop music, where fads are very brief and so very noticeable. What is everyone's favorite song this year? That's the one no one is going to want to listen to next year.

But the Lindy Effect applies at larger scales, too, to include long-term cultural, political and even religious trends. Above all, if a phenomenon looks like the Next Big Thing, and if it looks like it's going to endure and change things forever-- well, oddly enough, it's the moment you notice it and start thinkin g of it that way that it's probably reached its peak.

It's hard for Millennials and nearly impossible for Zoomers to realize this, but the cheesy music, bad architcture, and ugly modern art that now defines the Roman Catholic Church were once the cutting edge of cool. The guitar mass, which is now universally understood as the lamest thing on Earth, was once taken very seriously and seen as a sign that a particular church was moving in the right direction. In fact it isn't too much to say that, forty or fifty years ago, the guitar mass had exactly the status that the Traditional Latin Mass does today-- it was edgy and hip, a way to live one's faith and push back against an authority grown stale. Who would grant it that status now?

Lindy phenomena can be observed at every scale. Because I'm old, I've had to google which songs are at the top of the charts in the United States today. Apparently they include a tune called "Paint the Town Red" by something called "Doja Cat," "Snooze" by SZA, and "Cruel Summer" by Taylor Swift, the latter presumably being a cover of a song I didn't like 35 years ago. The Lindy Effect tells us that these songs will be near hte top of the charts a month from now, but will be largely forgotten in 2025. On the other hand, the humble cockroach first appears in the fossil record around 300 million years ago, and as such it may be expected to endure for another 300 million years. Not all phenomena are Lindy phenomena. If you know that a certain technology is 80 years old, you can expect it to endure for 80 more years. On the other hand, if you that know a human being is 80 years old, you probably can't expect him to endure for 8 more years.

The Hellenistic Origins theory of the Bible emerged in 1993, and was given a major boost by Gmirkin's first major work on the topic in 2006. If it is a Lindy-type phenomenon, we can expect it to hang around through the 2050s before being supplanted by the next, next big thing. What will that be? We can't know, anymore than we can know what song will replace "Paint the Town Red" at the top of the charts. But we can know that something will, and that when it does, the Hellenistic theory will appear obviously wrong in the same way that "Paint the Town Red" will sound embarrasingly old.

But is it a Lindy phenomenon?

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

If you haven't read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, now is the time to change that. Kuhn is one of those very rare thinkers who have turned the lens of sociology and anthropology onto the academic establishment, rather than treating it as a privileged position immune to study. Kuhn looked at hte standard view of the scientific process, which saw it as a gradual, cumulative effort by which our knowledge of hte universe is slowly increased by disinterested men in laboratory coats, and he showed that it was all wrong. Science grows not incrementally but suddenly, in teh form of revolutions, and those revolutions have a structure which can be analyzed in the same way that a political theorist might analyze the way that political revolutions occur. Moreover, the effect of a scientific revolution isn't, or isn't necessarily, a quantitative "increase in knowledge." What happens instead is that a model or "paradigm" which is produced, which provides answers to certain longstanding questions while leaving room for additional research. At first, that "additional research" confirms the paradigm, but after a while new discoveries fail to further the paradigm and, in fact, problems with the paradigm emerges. This produces a frantic reaction on the part of the Establishment-- by which I mean nothing other than "elderly professors whose careers are based upon the old model and who therefore have financial, social, and emotional incentives to defend it." But time progresses, more problems with the old model appear and-- crucially-- more and more of the old professors die off. A new paradigm is usshered in with great fanfare as the final answer to all of the old questions. And the cycle repeats itself.

The example that Kuhn gives in the start of his book comes from the field of Optics:

Today's physics textbooks teach students that light is photons, i.e. quantum-mechanical entities that exhibit some characteristics of waves and some of particles.... That characterization of light is, however, scarcely half a century old. Before it was developed by Planck, Einstein, and others early in this century, physics texts taught that light was transverse wae motion, a conception rooted in a paradigm that derived ultimately from the optical writings of Young and Fresnel in the 19th century. Nor was the wave theory the first to be embraced by almost all practitioners of optical science. During the 18th century the paradigm for this field was provided by Newton's Opticks, which taught that light was material corpuscles. At that time p hysticists sought evidence, as the early wave theorists had not, of the pressure exerted by light particles impinging on solid bodies.

Exactly the same kinds of paradigm shifts occur in other academic fields, including those which can't be strictly characterized as "sciences," such as history and archaeology. To give an example rather more personal to me, when I was studying anthropology in college, I was taught that the first humans in North America were the Clovis People, who wandered through an ice-free corridor in Candaa wielding a particularly deadly type of spear technology, the Clovis Point, around 13,000 years ago. The Clovis culture then quickly wiped out most of the large mammals in North America and then disappeared. "Clovis First" was a serious dogma among archaeologists, and one could be laughed at at best, characterized as "insane" (literally) and have one's career destroyed at worst, for daring to question it.

You won't be surprised to discover that it isn't true. By the early 2000s, evidence had started to mount that Clovis First was wrong. Sites like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Western Pennsylvania and Monte Verde in Chile had been conclusively dated to thousands of years before Clovis. By the time I graduated college, archaeologists had begun to grudgingly accept that another culture existed at least 2,000 years prior to the appearance of the Clovis People. But not much earlier than that.

And now that model is being thrown off in its turn. As of this month, a new study has confirmed that a set of footprints in the American Southwest date to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. The old paradigm will be discarded, a new one enforced, until it is discarded in its turn.

Now, the Clovis Point was initially discovered in 1926. Prior to this, the academic Establishment insisted that human habitation of the Americas was 2,000 years old, at most. And even this was rather grudging; during the 19th century some had insisted that American Indians may only have been here for a few centuries prior to European contact.

That there was an agenda behind the late dating for North American settlement ought to be obvious. If the native population had only just gotten here, that made it rather easier for Euro-Americans to justify displacing them. Of course, there are also agendas involved in the early dates, and in establishing just who the earliest settlers were. . American Indian tribal governments have regularly worked to prevent anthropologists from looking at ancient remains, because scientific testing might (and often does, or seems to) confirm that today's Indians displaced previous populations as they have been displaced in their turn.

And so we have three issues. First, the structure of scientific revolutions appears to be very robust-- that is to say, it does accurately describe the way that science advances. Second, changes in the content of scientific knowledge are not driven exclusively by a disinterested desire for knowledge, but are always shaped and influenced by other political and cultural dynamics.

And third, I think we can say with certainty that the further one gets from the material sciences, and especially when we are talking about a cultural "hot button" like when the Americas were settled, or who the original settlers were or-- say-- who wrote the Bible, the more likely it is that a given paradigm is going to be influenced by cultural or political factors.

And so we have as much reason to doubt the Hellenistic Paradigm as we have reason to believe that the Quantum Mechanical paradigm of the structure of light will eventually be supplanted. Moreover, we have as much reason to suspect the motives behind the Hellenistic Paradigm as we have reason to suspect the motives behind late dates for Indian settlement of the Americas.

Reasoning from the Evidence

There is a third problem, which relates to the entire field of history especially as it extends further backward into the past and borders on archaeology. And this is simply that in most cases, most of the evidence simply does not exist.

Imagine archaeologists in a thousand years digging up the remains of your house. Could they reconstruct it, based on what they found?

Suppose only 3% of it still existed. In that case, it's possible that they could come up with a vague approximation of your house provided that A. that 3% was randomly distributed, so that it was 3% of your kitchen, 3% of your bedroom, 3% of your bookshelf, etc, and B. they had a good idea of other houses from the same historical period.

But now suppose they discovered 3% of your house, but that that 3% consisted of one corner of your living room. Could they reconstruct your house? Now it's much less likely. In fact, they couldn't even say for certain that they had discovered part of a house. If the 3% was a corner of your kitchen, it might well be part of a restaurant, or the breakroom of an office building. If the 3% was just a bathroom, it could literally be part of any imaginable building.

Now, suppose someone discovered the 3% of your house that is a bathroom, and insisted based on the evidence that they had discovered a public restroom. Suppose someone else challenged them, suggesting that, actually, that bathroom could easily have been part of a house. Based on the evidence, who has the stronger positoin? The first one is claiming to have discovered a bathroom, and can present a bathroom as evidence; the second is claiming to have discovered a house, and presents a bathroom as evidence. It's very likely that the first claim will appear stronger-- and of course, it is wrong.

We're in much the same position when we try to reconstruct the distant past-- except that we have far less than 3% of the evidence. Actually it can be somethign of a shock to realize just how much of history we almost certainly don't know about. The existence of the Sumerian civilization was discovered by accident, and only in the 19th century. George Washington had no idea that there was such as thing as a Sumerian. Gobekli Tepe, which is currently believed to be the oldest site of monumental architecture in the world, was discovered in the 1960s and only begun to be excavated in 1993. The site is nearly 12,000 years old. When I was born nobody knew about it, and nobody had any idea that anyone could have built such a thing 12,000 years ago. Moreover, you would risk mockery and derision for suggesting it. How many Sumers are still undiscovered, and how many Gobekli Tepes will never be discovered, because they've long since been destroyed? It's not just that we don't know. It's that 1. We can't know, but 2. We can reasonably guess that the number is greater than zero. Probably much greater.

A schoolchild in Washington's Virginia who answered the question, "What was the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia?" with "Babylon," would be giving the correct answer. And they would be wrong. Another schoolchild in the year of my birth who answered the question, "What is the oldest architectural site in the world" might point to Neolithic burial mounds in Europe. They would also be giving the correct answer, and they would also be wrong.

Conclusion

As promised, I have not raised a single problem with Gmirkin's thesis. What I have raised, I believe, are reasons to treat new claims about the antiquity of the Bible and its composition with a great deal of suspicion. That doesn't mean Gmirkin is wrong in his view that the Pentateuch was composed in B.C. 270 by Jewish Platonists at Alexandria. He may yet be right. And if you want to know the truth, my own biases are such that I hope that he is right, and I plan to explore that more in posts to come.

But if something seems off about the idea, and you're not sure what, you're perfectly justified in ignoring it. Chances are very good that, 50 years from now, everyone will be ignoring it. Of course, by then they'll be onto something else-- if current trends hold, sometime in the early 2100s the Bible will finally be discovered to have been written in a small town in New Hampshire sometime late last Thursday. And you'll be justified in ignoring that, too.

Maybe I should have mentioned that we'd be closed for Columbus Day. But I suppose I'm a creature of an older world, one in which heroes were not despised as being subject to the same evils as the rest of us, but honored for achieving greatness despite being subject to the same evils as the rest of us.

In any case, what I want to talk about today is something quite different.

A few months ago I became aware of a scholar named Russel Gmirkin, and his theories on the origin of the Bible. These pertain directly to this blog and to what has become its main focus. In this post I want to briefly outline Gmirkin's ideas, my take on them, and why I felt it was important to open the discussion today. This post is necessarily going to skim the surface of some very deep waters. I'd ask readers familiar with these ideas to be patient, as I'll need to introduce them in a rather simplified form and it will take some time to fill them out.

Who Wrote the Pentateuch?

In the standard interpretation, the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible, were written over several centuries, starting around 1000 B.C. and winding up no later than 450 B.C. This interpretation itself is revisionist. Traditionally, these books were believed to have been written by Moses himself sometime shortly after the exodus from Egypt. Some people still believe this. The sorts of circles that believe in "Biblical inerrancy," profession of Mosaic authorship is a kind of test of faith. I don't personally understand this form of Christianity, and every encounter I've ever had with it has left me shaking my head and wondering what the appeal could possibly be. And so I won't say much more of it. The 1000-500 B.C. interpretation was the one that I learned, and I was unaware until this past Summer that it had been challenged in a serious way. But challenged it has been.

One of the major themes, or perhaps the major theme, I've been developing on this blog has been the application of the ideas found in Plato and his successors to the spiritual traditions into which I've personally been initaited, be it Roman Catholicism or Revival Druidry. The ease with which this can be done shouldn't surprise us. The parallels between the ideas of Plato and those found in the Bible were obvious to the ancients. As the books of the Pentateuch were ascribed to Moses, who had lived a thousand years before Plato, it seemed obvious that Plato and other Greek philosophers had studied with Jewish teachers and been influenced by the Mosaic writings. This is discussed by various Church Fathers, including Origen, who mentions in his Contra Celsum that Pythagoras and Plato had both been influenced by Moses; Eusebius, who wrote, "What is Plato but Moses writing in Attic Greek?"; and others. It was this idea that allowed Philo of Alexandria to contribute to the development of Middle Platonism, despite being a Jew and not a pagan.

But what if the chain of influence actually went in the other direction? Apparently, no one thought of this until 1993, when a scholar named Niels Peter Lemche noted that external evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch only appears in the record after the Third Century B.C. Following Lemche, Gmirkin undertook to date the Pentateuch based on available evidence, and concluded that it was in fact written by Jewish scholars in Alexandria around the year 270 B.C.

Caveats

Now, "No one noticed it until smart people like us finally evolved 2,000 years later" is an enormous red flag, and it's the sort of thing that we find all over historical scholarship, archaeology, and, above all, anything having to do with the origins of Christianity. Gmirkin's works are only available at academic prices, and so in order to figure out what he has to say, it's necessary for most of us without access to university libraries to follow the old workaround of reading the introductions and summaries on Amazon and listening to as many podcast interviews with the author as we can. If you do this, you'll find that Gmirkin's interviewers regularly reveal themselves to be totally insincere, more interested in pushing "New Atheist" propaganda than seriously thinking about these issues. Podcasts like "MythVision" on YouTube combine occasionally interesting scholarship with an obvious agenda and a deeply unpleasant attitude. In many of these interviews, one is reminded very much of the work of Morton Smith, whose book Jesus the Magician combines a very interesting discussion of ancient magic with obvious anti-Christian bigotry and the constant oozings of Smith's own deeply unpleasant personality.

And so the first caveat in approaching Gmirkin's work is that he is working in a field with an agenda, and that it isn't too much to call that agenda is the "deconstruction" and destruction of traditional Western culture, and Christianity above all.

The second caveat is simply to always bear in mind the problem of fraud and dishonesty in the academy. It's simply the case that, at this moment in time, much of what comes out of the academy is nonsense and deliberate lies. I don't know Mr. Gmirkin and I won't libel him here. He seems sincere. But I simply don't trust professors on principle, and I don't recommend that you do either.

Back to Gmirkin

All that said, the evidence that Gmirkin has gathered is compelling. And to be quite honest with you, the most compelling evidence of all is simply to read Plato, already being acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It becomes clear that either Plato was indeed influenced by Moses, as both ancient authorities and modern scholars like Margaret Barker (a very interesting woman, deserving a post of her own at some point) believe, or that Gmirkin and his school is right.

Both the theological and moral innovations attributed to Christianity and Judaism are equally present in the works of Plato.

In Plato's Crito, Socrates, in prison awaiting execution, is given the chance to escape. His friends have bribed the guards; there is a ship waiting. Won't he come to safety? Socrates refuses, teaching that one must never return injustice for injustice. In this he anticipates both the moral core and the narrative climax of the New Testament.

In I Alcibiades, we learn that to follow the rule of the passions is to be identical with a slave. In Theaetetus, we learn that our goal should be to become like God. In the Republic, we are taught to see this world as a cave of shadows, and the real world as a spiritual reality brought into being by the Idea of the Good, which is an image or Son of the Good Itself. We are also taught that God can only be seen as good and unchangeable; an ideal society would abandon the teaching of Homer and Hesiod because they portray the gods and heroes as evil and given to change. In the Timaeus, we learn of the Demiurge, a good deity who created the universe and who gave the rule of the material world to his offspring, the secondary gods. In the Laws, we are given the constitution of an ideal society. This society venerates its traditional gods with temples and festivals, but looks to the One God above all. In Laws we are given a definition of love: "To will the good of another"; this is the definition preserved in the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. We are given a law for marriage: A man should have one wife, and if he is caught with anyone else, including another man or a slave, he should be punished with a loss of citizenship. Again and again, the moral teachings of Christianity are anticipated by Plato.

Wild Speculations

For some time I've been wondering whether Christianity were not deliberately created by Platonist philosophers in late Antiquity, rather than evolving naturally out of Judaism as we've been told. I had been considering this, and whether I should talk about it, before I encountered Gmirkin. I was planning on writing a post entitled "Wild Speculations," which would go over the evidence, and conclude by saying, "I don't think that this is true. But I think that htere is a 10% chance it is true." Gmirkin's work would seem to bolster the case. And so I still don't know that I think it's true, but now I think that there is a 20% chance it is true.

But here is where Gmirkin's take and mine differ. In his iterviews, Gmirkin portrays Plato as a kind of great historical supervillain, a "dark genius" (actual quote) secretly manipulating us all from behind the scenes.

He never stops to ask what seems to be the obvious question:

What if Platonism is true?

It never seems to occur to him to notice that the world into which Plato was born was one in which people were regularly sacrificed to the gods, in which killing babies was perfectly normal, genocide was the standard way of war, and in which "goodness" and "brute, physical strength" were more or less identical. Into that world Plato introduced the idea that justice is not the same as taking what one wants, happiness is not identical with pleasure, and the sort of courage that leads to success in war is the least of the virtues. Plato's world was emphatically not ours.

And so my view is that, if this theory is correct, then we have Plato and his followers to thank for the fact that we live in a world in which most of us don't believe that we ought to regularly ought to barbecue human beings or leave babies to be devoured by wolves, and in which we have some knowledge, however partial, of the existence of the God of the Universe, and not merely the particular gods of the Earth. Raise a statue to the Divine Plato, pour out some beer in his name, because it may be ultimately due to him that you won't have to worry about being speared and hung from a tree in honor of Odin or eaten at a feast of Huitzilipochtli.

Something Is Moving

The reason that I felt compelled to post this today is that I logged onto JMG's blog this morning and saw that there was a lengthy discussion of Gmirkin and the possibilities he has raised there yesterday. These sorts of things happen very often-- I write something, or I come up with an idea, and then I find that other people with whom I share a connection are talking about the same thing at the same time or just before or just after, but unconnected with me. These sorts of synchronicities are the traces of forces moving in the higher worlds, like ripples in the water.

In the last few years, Plato has exploded; I see people talking about him everywhere, when I never used to. And now the conversation, guided by unseen hands, has moved in this direction. In the unseen world, something is moving, and it's telling me that we need to talk about this now. But why? That's what I want to explore this week.