How long until the "Old Testament" is regularly published with the title "Israelite

[Nikki S]

Mythology"?
Paperback Writer, I can't tell if you're joking or not. No, no mythological character said anything to anybody at Mt. Sinai.
According to the stats, the ENTIRE WORLD had only 250 million people in 950 CE, much less 2000 BCE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Milestones
I doubt there were any more than a few hundred thousand Israelites at most, and the Tanakh regularly exagerates numbers. (For example, people are constantly killing hundreds of thousands of goats/sheep/cattle in one giant day of sacrifice. If they had really done that, they wouldn't have had any livestock left.)
Time to get real. The Yaweh character is about as far from a universe-creating supreme being as can be imagined. It's obvious the Israelites thought he lived in the SKY, hence being threatened by the Tower of Babel.
If you think Yaweh spoke from Mount Sinai, then you must think that Poseidon aided the Greeks at the battle of Troy and the Hindu god Krishna spoke to Arjuna. No? Why not? There is no difference; one story is the same as the other.

[Monica]

I doubt the major monotheistic religions will last more than another century or two. As people become more sophisticated, they will have less tolerance for fables taught as fact.

H.L. Mencken wrote a famous piece about a funeral for all the dead gods of the past, all of whom had the same sort of power now commonly attributed to Yahweh or Allah or whoever, and yet now all dead and completely unworshipped. Mankind will move past current religions. The question is whether we will move on from the infancy of our species and reject religion altogether, or find new stories.


For those who don't believe me, keep in mind that we already believe that 90% of what is in the Bible is hogwash, and the percentage is even higher if we throw in the surrounding beliefs that were taken for granted by those who originally wrote and read the Bible and those who developed its early interpretive schools. We no longer believe in demons and divine retribution through weather and other antiquated silly notions. We no longer believe in the old creation myths or the various other mythological elements of the Bible any more than we believe in Gilgamesh or Enlil, or for that matter other gods mentioned in the Bible, like Ashtoreh or Baal or Moloch.

It's only a matter of time before we treat Yahweh like just another ancient tribal god, sort of like he was treated thousands of years ago.

[Sister of the blue eyes]

I think Paperback may have been being sarcastic.

In answer to your question - I hope never.

[Robert S]

And the New Testament published with the title of Roman-Judaized and Paganized Mythology?

[bert]

When warring against the Lord God, you cannot win! Oh, and you should also know that when persecuted the church grows even larger!! The gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church. He has decreed it!
You would do well to remember that since the beginning of Christianity this has been attempted. Actually it started at Christ's birth. King Herod murdered all the male babies in an attempt to keep Christ from fulfilling His destiny. Didn't work.
The Roman emperor Diocletian had has soldiers destroy every copy of scriptures they could find early in the first century, in an attempt to stop the spread of Christianity.
Julian the Apostate was another emperor who tried to wipe out Christianity. None of which succeeded.
David Hume, a famous Scottish philosopher (famous skeptic) believed he had undermined faith in religion. He thought that he had destroyed the foundations of the Bible and that religion would soon become an ancient artifact. Ironicaly his house in Edinburgh became the headquarters of the Scottish Bible Society soon after his death! Tens of thousands of copies of the "hated" book were published there.
The last couple centuries have produced the so called "higher critics" of the Bible, that since the beginning of the 19th century would try to use the Bible against itself. They tried to prove that the Bible was an unreliable, unhistorical, and mythological book. At the same time archaeologists were coming to very different conclusions. Many of them began as unbelievers, skeptics who were convinced by people like Professor Sayce Petri Sir William Ramsey and D.J. Wiseman. When literally holding in their hands the cold facts of history, they finally concluded that the Bible was indeed a remarkable book. The more facts they uncovered from the ground, the more convinced they became that the Scriptures were indeed the Word of God, accurate in all it's details. By means of archaeology the supernatural accuracy of the Bible has been overwhelmingly demonstrated in recent times.
As Christians we are not called to a blind faith butto a faith in a Word that has been examined more than any other book in the history of the world. Every word, syllable, and accent of the book has been scrutinized by hostile critics for centuries. The Word of God still stands and still holds true, that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Jesus said," Heaven and earth will pass away, but my Words will by no means pass away"(Mark 13:31)
May all your thoughts be taken captive by the Holy Spirit of God. Amen

[Darth Eugene Vader]

Not going to happen.

[emesshalom]

Since the Old Testament is a false and totally misleading Christian creation, it can never be called 'Israelite Mythology'. It can only be called 'Christian Misconceptions and Lies about Judaism and the Jews'.