I’d assume most if not all the core ideas of religion as a whole were arrived at before the dawn of recorded history.  Religion had been around in some form for thousands of years before that.  

I’ve long thought Elzie Segar was referencing YHWH when he has Popeye say “I Yam What I Yam.”  😐

This strikes me as not dissimilar to later arguments as to whether YHWH and Allah were one and the same.

And just about as pointless.  Once you’re talking about The One and Only God, creator of all things, you’re talking about the same entity, and the names assigned to this concept don’t mean anything.  

The question is did El Elyon evolve into YHWH, and it seems very likely this is the case, but hard to prove.  

I’m sure you know, much of the Old Testament is not about Jews vs. polytheist gentiles but Jews vs. other Jews who still worship other gods.  We only have the monotheist side of the argument, but monotheism, we know, didn’t happen all at once, but over a very long period of time.  

We know far more about early Christianity than proto-Judaism.  And what we know from the study of early Christianity is that once the faith began to propagate, it very quickly spawned a wide variety of sub-cults within the larger cult.  Going back to the first and second centuries, one finds great diversity of belief.  Then over time one side won out, became the orthodox position, and diversity diminished, though there were still outliers.  There’s no reason to think it happened otherwise with Judaism.  Or any other religion.  

Okay, now you’re losing me.  160 years or not at all?  No expert would agree, and you’re clearly not one.  (Because no real expert posts here).  No offense, fellow kibitzer, but that’s the God’s honest truth.  Might as well agree with Mel Gibson that there hasn’t been a real Pope since Pius XII.  

I said ‘proto-Judaism’ in any event.  What we now call Christianity bears a marginal resemblance to what the early Christians believed.  What is your point?  Mine is that if we went back to the beginning, we wouldn’t find one idea of God, but many.  

I know a bit about how Judaism (as we now call it, and of course ‘ism’ is a suffix that didn’t exist in Hebrew or Aramaic) changed after the temple’s destruction, became closer to what exists today (still pretty darned different).  But obviously the survivors of that destruction were of the same faith as those who came before, just as Protestants were still Christians after they broke from Rome.  

I do not accept your argument, not that you made one.  🙂

FocusMyView said
I am agreeing with Shaye Cohen at putting the date at 160 BC. Mason with putting the date after the revolts of the first two centuries BC.   

I am far from confident you are accurately relating their positions.

But it’s not the main subject of the thread.  Obviously we can’t say Jesus was a Jew if there weren’t any until after he was dead.  Modern Judaism did not exist, no.  Neither did modern Christianity for a very long time after Jesus was gone.  Everything is a process of becoming.  That is relevant to this thread.  Ideas develop over long periods of time.  There is no moment where you can say “Yes, this is the precise moment people stopped giving God a name!”  If you’re looking for that, you’ll look forever.  Anyway, Yahweh is a name, whether they spell it out or not.  So is Allah.  Christians use both Yahweh and Jehovah at times.

I think it’s less about being afraid to say the name than wanting to preserve a sense of reverence and mystery. 

Well, that certainly didn’t begin with Aristotle.   We’ll never know where it began.  Plato came before Aristotle, and he referred to ‘The Divine’, which amounts to the same thing.  He also had the concept of Ideal Forms the imperfect forms in our world are striving towards. 

You seem to be overlooking India as a source of religious ideas–because they remained largely polytheistic?  I think that’s overlooking that they had a very distinct idea of a higher godhead over the named gods.  Bit of a needle in a haystack, I’ll grant you.  Shall we argue about when Hinduism began now?  😉

I assume you have access to Wikipedia too, FMV.  Like I said, not an expert. Also, not clear which region you mean? 🙂

Point of order–all Muslims call God by a name, and they don’t have to abbreviate it.  But the same Muslims are vehemently anti-polytheistic, and not only don’t allow visual depictions of God, but even of Muhammad, who they believe was a man, and they do not pray to him, even in an intermiediary sense, as Christians pray to saints.  

Islam is directly derived from Jewish and Christian texts, though probably the polytheism Muhammad abolished from the Arabian peninsula was not unlike that which the OT authors repeatedly condemned and is surely an underlying influence, if only by opposition.  And as I mentioned, most Christians will use Jehovah and Yahweh.  

It doesn’t seem to me that the not calling God by a name directly is all that central to monotheism, when the overwhelming majority of monotheists in the world do precisely that.