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Old October 16th, 2012 #4
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Join Date: Aug 2010
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Thanks for these articles on the Ancients and Jews, and for your site.

I'd like to offer that this "Ancient Israel Lobby" eventually gave rise to Christianity, and that it didn't begin with the Romans. It goes back at least as far as the Greek conquest; they gave both the Romans and the Jews the needed intellectual tools. The Jews used these tools to produce historiographies and ethno-propaganda in line with their beliefs about their purported superiority and ancientness aimed at their goyische occupiers, as you rightly point out. I'd also like to observe that some Biblical Minimalist scholars argue that what we know as "Bible Stories," which includes Exodus, were created after Alexander conquered them.

But only a few hundred years later, by the Roman period, Josephus can defend the "Slaves in Egypt" tale as if it were given and historical with an ancient pedigree. But there's every possibility that it is a fiction, one that itself arose as Jewish propaganda within the Greek milieu. Some argue that the Patriarch stories, which are essentially Greek Romances, were invented for the "translation" of the Septuagint; when Ptolemny II Philadelphius (allegedly) requested a copy of the Jewish scriptures for the Library at Alexandria, much of the "Books of Moses" were concocted and not simply "translated."

By the time Josephus is contra Apion, the pseudo-history of the Jews, with respect to their supposed Egyptian origins, has effectively already triumphed; the odious Josephus, and Hellenized Jewish intellectuals like him, are taking the game Jews just like themselves had played against the Greeks a couple of centuries earlier to the next level, building new propagandistic fictions on top of the old ones.