"a man in his
seventies talks to an audience
about the truth of the Bible
about the truth of the Bible
and dismounting mummy masks,
wearing a pink shirt, tight blue jeans,
red All Stars, and a belt with the symbol of Superman".
Roberta Mazza, 'Papyri: It is a wild, wild life…' Faces and Voices May 7, 2014.
There is a You Tube video of mummy-mask-destroying (see here too) evangelist Josh McDowell made on the occasion of a talk he gave (Wednesday, April 23, 2014) in Wheaton Bible Church. The topic is "Is the Bible Reliable?". It says "Sorry, comments have been disabled by the owner of this video" which is a shame as I am sure a lot of people would have a few comments and questions.Mr McDowell is an enthusiastic and accomplished public speaker (though if you watch a number of his videos, some of his techniques become a little grating) and here is no exception. Here he is addressing "his" Jewish Torah scroll that he bought somewhere ["I own it and I can do what I want with it", he says it's worth 3.8 million dollars]. Where does it come from? He says it's from a "place called Lotz on the Polish-German borderland". That's a bit of a puzzle, as far as I know there is no such place. He says its from a "very poor village, probably on the German side" and it's earlier 15th century (07.50). Sadly the guy does not know his history, he says the 15th century scroll survived (08:00) the Black Death (the famous fifteenth century epidemic usually dated by more conventional scholars to the mid 14th century). The scroll survived the Holocaust and he bought it (09:20) in 2013. I am hoping that what this guy is not mispronouncing is the word Łódź which most certainly was not "in Germany" until the expansion of the Gross Deutsches Reich under Adolf Hitler.
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| Where is this "Lotz"? |
Come on Mr McDowell, give us the full collecting history of this scroll, the current name of the place it came from, what export documents you have for it.
McDowell's main message is that ritually proscribed Jewish scribal care was so great that the scrolls we have today are the "very same message that God gave to Moses" when he wrote the Torah. I am not sure that mainstream scholarship believes the text of the Pentateuch as we have it was actually put together BY Moses. The oldest fragment of the Torah seems to be the fragment of text on the Ketef Hinnon amulet. The dating has been claimed as "proof that the Five Books of Moses were in existence during the First Temple period", but - due to the nature of the discovery - the dating really is rather uncertain.
In any case what McDowell describes throughout the central part of his talk is the Masoretic niqqud in the form it reached in the 13th and 14th centuries. He skips over the fact that this was a textural tradition separate from that represented by earlier manuscrips (such as from the caves around Qumran), which rather begs the question just what it is he is arguing and feels he has "proven". or is this all a show, a big ego trip for the old man? (And perhaps a lucrative one - where did he get the money from to buy those scrolls and mummy masks for trashing?).
That aside, the question here is the use of an artefact for modern ideological purposes. A reputedly old and valuable manuscript left "somewhere" in central Europe at "some time", reputedly ended up in Jerusalem, and then "somehow" finds its way to the US to be spread out on a church table where pastors can spill their drinks on it and Mr McDowell can do his show. Oh yeas, he gets the details of Egyptian mummy mask making wrong too, despite having himself been responsible for trashing a few. He say he's stopped for now though, he's got enough manuscripts for his teaching and collector's bragging his show and tells.
McDowell's main message is that ritually proscribed Jewish scribal care was so great that the scrolls we have today are the "very same message that God gave to Moses" when he wrote the Torah. I am not sure that mainstream scholarship believes the text of the Pentateuch as we have it was actually put together BY Moses. The oldest fragment of the Torah seems to be the fragment of text on the Ketef Hinnon amulet. The dating has been claimed as "proof that the Five Books of Moses were in existence during the First Temple period", but - due to the nature of the discovery - the dating really is rather uncertain.
In any case what McDowell describes throughout the central part of his talk is the Masoretic niqqud in the form it reached in the 13th and 14th centuries. He skips over the fact that this was a textural tradition separate from that represented by earlier manuscrips (such as from the caves around Qumran), which rather begs the question just what it is he is arguing and feels he has "proven". or is this all a show, a big ego trip for the old man? (And perhaps a lucrative one - where did he get the money from to buy those scrolls and mummy masks for trashing?).
That aside, the question here is the use of an artefact for modern ideological purposes. A reputedly old and valuable manuscript left "somewhere" in central Europe at "some time", reputedly ended up in Jerusalem, and then "somehow" finds its way to the US to be spread out on a church table where pastors can spill their drinks on it and Mr McDowell can do his show. Oh yeas, he gets the details of Egyptian mummy mask making wrong too, despite having himself been responsible for trashing a few. He say he's stopped for now though, he's got enough manuscripts for his teaching and collector's bragging his show and tells.
UPDATE
Oh no... it turns out (when I was looking for something else) that this Torah was indeed from the Polish city Łódź. Mr McDowell, can you say "woodge"? That's (more or less) how to pronounce Łódź, not "Lotz". It is also nowhere near the Polish German border.
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