The Dumplin' Dumbash Page

On Jewish Exegesis

Getting someone like Dumplin' Dumbash to understand contextual exegesis is like getting a naked native to understand industrial thermodynamics. You may as well talk to a wall; it will learn faster and be more apt to understand what you’re talking about. In his July 20 entry, Dumplin’ begins by missing a very salient point:

As a preview of today's episode, here’s Holding lecturing "Dumplin' Dumbash" on how name-calling means you're a loser.

Not quite, Dumbash. The lecture is about how ALL you do is call names when you're short on actual argument. You have no arguments to speak of – your best tactic is just to call names (like "Bronze Age," "superstitious," "unbelieving") whereas here, we call you dumb after proving you are. At any rate, Dumplin' has apparently now decided to make an address to Tekton a weekly feature, which is good news for all of us who depend on Dumplin' for quality comedy material, such as this in which Dumplin' babies his way through our correction of his understanding of NT exegetical use of the OT. (Look up the word "exegetical" if you need to, Dumplin'. At your Bible college it was probably considered to be a practice of the devil.) I made the points that most NT use of the OT was not in the sense of predictive prophecy, but used in terms of probabilities and patterns. Dumplin', putting his fundy diaper on before he begins his red-faced squallin', spouts the following as a reply:

First, it establishes that the things the NT writers called "fulfillments" were not actually fulfilling any predictions. This, according to Holding, is not supposed to count as misusing the Scriptures, but it’s certainly going to mislead the vast majority of Bible readers who, unlike Holding, have not had the benefit of a vast theological education and a huge theological library.

Well isn't that special. So the "problem" is this: The ignorant will be "misled". How terrible. I guess they’ll have to get up off their rear ends and become...what was that word? "Disciples"? Oh my. What TV show will they have to give up to do that, do you suppose?

Secondly, when you hear some evangelist or apologist claiming that we can know that the Bible is true and that Jesus is the Messiah because he single-handedly fulfilled umpteen OT prophecies about his life, according to Holding we can know that the truth is nothing of the sort. Not only did Jesus not "fulfill" any OT predictions about his life, the OT passages cited don’t even make any predictions to begin with. Now that’s my kind of apologetics!

Yawn...what? Oh yes. What this means is that again, ignorant people like Dumbash will have a hissy fit because they can't stomach reality. But no, it's not quite as he puts it: There's still validation in this system, because Jesus DID have to re-enact all of those passages to be accepted as Messiah. And that’s hardly a bedtime reading hobby, Dumbash.

From here, Dumbash deals with all of one paragraph of Miller’s huge item on the subject, which he makes no attempt to answer other than bigotedly describing atomistic exegesis as "quote mining" (sorry, but as my link on Helms shows, it’s far more complex) and appealing to the example of Paul in Gal. 3 as a supposed abuse. Then he spits, and that’s his "answer" to Miller. To me he says, in the standard naked native format:

Sadly, Holding chooses not to explain why the present needs "validation," nor how exactly comparing the present to the past does anything to validate it.

Sadly, Dumbash is still to ignorant to understand the Helms article, which answers this. Dumbash whines further about how "people....who build entire ministries out of finding 'resemblances' between modern events and things described in various Bible passages," but sorry, Dumbash, the Branch Davidians and no other group were doing "probabilities" but reading the Bible (as you do, in your fundy state) in terms of predictive prophecy. In any event, you might be worth talking to about this if you actually read – and answer – the Helms article rather than whining about my typo in the link I gave. Try here instead.

And then there’s that abuse of Einstein Dumbash tried, which he tries to defuse by claiming that Miller says that "specificity is one of the last things anybody could claim as a requirement for the exegesis of Old Testament prophecies." But he does a dipsy doodle to arrive at this conclusion, as he cites from Miller:

Goppelt [TYPOS:29,30] relates a story from Mek. Exod 17.11: 'Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (ca. A.D. 100) interprets the holding high of Moses’ hands in Exod 17:11 as symbolic of holding fast in the future to the teaching given through Moses.' And in the same document, at Exod 15.27, Eleazer continues: 'And they encamped there by the water.' This teaches that the Israelites busied themselves with the words of the Torah, which were given to them at Marah.'

Um, excuse me, Dumplin', but you forgot to check the paragraph just above this, which says:

The point here is simply to get some feel for the 'weirdness index' of the various strands of 1st century Judaism, with which to compare the NT authors. This will admittedly be subjective in the extreme, but perhaps it will help level-set our understanding of 1st-century 'acceptable' exegetical praxis. The method is simply to pick a sample or two of what might be considered 'creative' use of the OT from each of our sectors of Jewry.

In short, Dumplin' picked this sample from a section in which Miller was showing a most extreme example; and further made the point that NT exegesis was much more conservative, Dumplin' can’t have that, so he lies by putting this off as though it were a typical and normal example. Oops.

Bottom line, Dumbash: "why wouldn’t it" is not an answer to why you can’t get Einstein out of Shaekspeare. You need to do your exegesis by the rules. You are right in this though: "I can’t see any significant validation there, but then maybe I’m just dumb." Yes, you are dumb, Dumplin'. At least you admit to your bonehead error of putting Jesus in the Bronze Age….now it’s time to admit your ignorance of Jewish exegesis, and that your fundy version of Christianity is the real problem – not our version.

Other than this, in the comments.

A Useful Idiot name "B8ovin" doesn’t like that I call Dumbash "Dumbash" and says he can’t take what I say seriously because of it. That’s OK. Part of the idea is to get rid of shallow people like him anyway, because their concern for truth is subjugated to their concern for their pissan sensitivities.

A Useful Idiot named Arthur asks Dumbash what the "patronage model" is, which is like asking Billy Ray Cyrus a question about nucleotides. Arthur will never find out; he apparently thinks Googling is the way to discover such matters (he just wants a "short answer"). How truly Atlantic magazine has recently asked whether Google is making us stupid. Dumbash has no answer, of course, but he won a Screwball for this reply:

I suspect it’s not in Mr. Holding’s best interests to be too specific about what “the patronage model” is. It’s apparently supposed to be some kind of scholarly excuse for why God does not show up in real life, possibly incorporating an excuse for why it’s ok to take people’s word for it when they claim that He did show up in real life. By avoiding any detailed explanation of patronage, Holding can continue to mock us and accuse us of being ignorant. If he spells out what it is, then he opens it up to critical examination. Sneering is much safer.

Not doing homework and remaining ignorant is "safer" than that, Dumbash. I have material on patronage all over the site, as well as recommendations for reading (all of it without pictures for you to color, sorry). But I’ll let you "Google" it or whatever so we can maybe get some more comedy out of you. Over at Tweb we love this sort of show.

Useful Idiot "Ric" thinks I am "out of my league" with Dumbash, which will win his a Screwball too. Dumbash replies that I don’t link to his stuff, which is correct – it is against my policy to link to trailer park scholarship. He claims that this keeps readers from seeing things in context, but doesn’t seem to have a specific example of how some decontextualized comment was used to harm or misrepresent his case. In any event, he of all people knows that all anyone has to do...is "Google it" to see the original. Duh ah...