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Gratings, David.

"The Bhagavad Gita transends history. It is a lovely book. I recommend that you read it"

Golly, Mr. Science! You mean it's both true, and not true. Holey Moley! How did you get so smart?

I read it when you were learning how to ride your BigWheel.

"There are some scholarly historians who say that the Bible contains historical errors."

You changed the terms of the discussion. There are historians and researchers, and historians as interpreters -- that is, dealing with primary and with secondary evidence. As the Holy Book says -- oh, I mean the REAL Holy Book ... the ONLY Holy Book ... you know, the Bible? Ahem. As I was saying, as God's Holy Word states, a man seems honest, until his neighbor speaks.

"If you compare Luke to Herodotus you are insulting Luke."

An authoritative-sounding opinion. I let my statement stand. He was careful to report rumor as rumor. This is integrity. He's called the Father of Lies, and the Father of History. The former displays an unsubtle and incomprehending grasp of the work.

Herodotus's "accuracy was due to his painstaking research and interviews with many of the eyewitnesses, both Greek and Persian, of the events that he narrated." [Terry Buckley, Aspects of Greek History, 750-323 B.C.: A Source-Based Approach. London and New York: Routledge, 1996; p. 161/]

"I hope that you are not suggesting that the Gilgamesh Epic and Babylonian creation account were borrowed by the pagans from Moses. Or do you have some other explanation for the similarities?"

It's called "euhemerism." Real historical events become corrupted as legend and myth. Many but not all of the flood myths are based on local catastrophic floods. The Deucalion and Ogyges floods of the Greeks are related to the Thera catastrophe, for example. Many of the native American myths are remembered from the breaking of ice dams remnant of the glaciation period. Northern Asia was overwhelmed by the flooding of the Artic Ocean by a meteor strike -- hence the presence of whole ecosystems preserved in the permafrost. Etc. Gilgamesh (correlative with Horus, btw) was a real king of Erech (Uruq, from which we get Iraq) dating from the period of the pre-dynastic tombs of Ur -- son of Dumuzi/ Tammuz/ Nimrod/ Osiris/ Narmer. The preserved kinglists and other cuneiform records are clear and in agreement. His liaison with Ishtar and his meeting with a flood patriarch mean whatever they mean.

I will not trouble you with the problems and scandals of the chronology of Egyptology. Enough to say that all of ancient history is keyed to the Dynastic system of dating devised by Manetho. If the dynasties should by some incredible chance be misarranged, then the dating of, say, Hammurabi is highly variable. In fact, the dating of Hammurabi IS highly variable, there being three different standard dates for him which differ by three centuries. The point is that our earliest record of the Epic of Gilgamesh is from Hammurabi’s era – and Hammurabi’s era is dependant on Egyptian chronology, and I will not go into detail here since it is off-topic. But it’s really a neato subject.

“Interpreting the constellations as the gospel is merely a revelation of your own imagination and creativity. Nothing else.”

A dogmatic assertion. You didn’t read the links. Not MY imagination at all.

“Are you familiar with the Pseudepigrapha?”

Intimately

“There are plenty of New Testament ideas which were borrowed from the Jewish Pseudepigrapha.”

“Borrowed”? Could it be that both take as their origin some third source? But of course your “plenty” is not merely suspect, but wrong.

“The authors of the New Testament were aware of the extracanonical books.”

You did say “Nag Hammadi,” not “Jewish pseudepigraphae.” Of course you refer to the Book of Enoch -- and Jude doesn’t quote it, rather they both quote an extant oral prophesy, similar to ‘Who hangs upon a tree is cursed.’

J