The antiquity of the law

[bn2bnude]

...
While I don't disagree with you that his claims are not expressly in scripture, I think "beyond reason" is heavy handed.

It is not his claims I fault, it is the level of eisegesis he went to to make them.

A good Bible scholar will often use other sources such as tradition both from Christian and Jewish side.

-- Use tradition to try to understand the context in which something is said. .... I have not problem with that.
-- Use traditions that are nothing but unsupported speculation or outright fables, I hardly consider that to be GOOD BIBLE SCHOLARSHIP.
-- The use of cultural traditions to modify what the Bible says or supposedly "really means" is the sort of thing most common to academic social scientists who are often atheists or other unbelievers such as practitioners of other religions.

So, we have then, a whole lot of Christian "tradition" to get rid of... A couple off the top of my head...

Creation Ex Nihilo -- Creation out of nothing. Not found in Genesis. Found, however, in 2 Maccabees. More of a Greek concept than a Jewish one.

Hell as a place of torture forever - Also a concept found, not expressly, in the Protestant cannon but it is found in the Catholic cannon. I believe the Book of Enoch.

If you compare Jewish and Greek thinking, a lot of what we believe to be "True Christianity" comes from the culture around us. This get's illustrated well in the book "Pagan Christianity".

[Petros]

Ex nihilo only works if we postulate that there is a place where God is not, or that there is a place where God is that is not heaven. If God and heaven are coextensive, then the universe must be [and may be even are they not] an enclave, a habitat constructed in heaven as we build a cage for our guinea pigs or canaries.