A House of Cards Built on Faith: Without a Historical “Old Testament” How Can Judaism, Christianity and Islam Have Any Credibility?

People who accept religion (especially those in the Judao-Christian-Islamic belief systems) do so emotionally (as if they have found absolute truth) only to be made into doctrinal mental slaves. Without context, the Biblical Scriptures they deemed to be their foundation of authority, they tend to mentally focus all their energy on theology while their scholars continually assure them there was (at least one time) a pure uncorrupted text (or texts) generally known as the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) as we find expressed in this typical Doctrinal Statement on The Scripture:

“We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are verbally and plenarily inspired of God, are inerrant in the original writings, and are the infallible authority in all matters of faith and conduct (II Timothy 3:16).” (Emphases mine)

For the believer, this statement sounds very orthodox . . . that this dogma supports the very foundation of their faith. However, when the facts are reviewed (as I have done below) it’s little more than well intended theological bullshit.

In the rest of this post, I want to present statistical facts that are totally ignored (and for good reason) by Judao-Christian-Islamic apologists, university and seminary professors of religion which do not and must not end up in minds of the ministers they produced. I’ll now put the facts before you and simply ask you to draw an objective conclusion.

This lists of ancient textual finds is by no means exhaustive, but exposes an ignored reality by showing the Bible’s "Old Testament" as a theological fake by claiming to record (at least) 4,000 years Before the Common Era (BCE) of prose, poetry and wisdom by ancient men who never existed.

Here are the historical statistics based on texts we have with us today and all having been written before 200 BCE proving the existence of ancient nations and their religious beliefs which, unlike the Bible, facts don’t lie:

Sumerian Texts: 40,000 lines of text. (1)

Akkadian Texts: Over 200,000 Texts and Fragments (2)

Egyptian Texts: Several 1,000 lines of just Pyramid texts with other texts written in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic being far too many to count. (3)

Hittite Texts: 30,000 Tablets and fragments discovered just at Boghazkoy. (4)

Ebla Texts: 6,632 Texts written in Eblaitic (1,757 complete or nearly complete tablets and 4,875 fragments) (5)

Ugaritic Texts: 1,948 Texts published so far (6)

Aramaic Texts: 100 Papyri texts found at Elephantine (7)

Paleo-Hebrew Biblical Texts: 0 Totally nothing found before 200 BCE to support any of the 23,145 Old Testament verses! (Little wonder faith is so important.) (8)

Believers of these three famous monotheistic religions need to (as a professor once told our religion class) “Put his in your pipe and smoke it!” (Reality burns worse than Hell!)

Notes:

1) (A recent survey estimates the number of lines so far recovered at approximately 40,000;) William W. Hallo, “Sumerian Literature” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6 (ed. David N. Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992). p. 234.

2) “Akkadian is first attested in proper names in Sumerian texts (ca. 2800 BCE). From ca. 2500 BCE one finds texts fully written in Akkadian. Hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering many subjects, e.g. -economy (business, administrative records, purchase and rentals) . . ” Oxford University Language Center (On line)

3) (The amount of literature we have today composed in Hieroglyphics, hieratic and Demotic are far too vast to count. Just a sample of this vast scale of Egyptian texts are give by Miriam Lichtheim in her three volumes of Ancient Egyptian Literature

4) Gregory McMahon, “Hittite Text and Literature” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (ed. David N. Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992). p. 229.

5) Robert D. Biggs, “Ebla Texts” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2 (ed. David N. Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992). p. 263.

6) Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz and Joaquin Sanmartin, eds., The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts From Ugrait, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU; 2nd enlarged edition, Munster, Ugarit-Verlag, 1995), p. ix.

7) Joseph Naveh, “Aramaic Script” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1 (ed. David N. Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1992). p. 343.

8) For an introduction to this problem see my post:

As a Forged Document of the Second Temple Period, the Bible’s Historically Based Theology is Worthless