What did Jesus believe about Genesis?
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rmwilliamsll
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Assyrian said:
Mat 13:10 And the disciples came and said to Him, "Why do You speak to them in parables?"
Mat 13:11 Jesus answered them, "To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.
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GeorgeE said:
Gen 3:7
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. 8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
The first religious act was Adam and Eve is when they learned they were naked placed a covering of fig leaves over their nakedness.Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. 8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
You see only God can cover us and he even God did cover them latter.
A garment is what we believe spiritual speaking.
Cool of the day if you look what the word cool means in the Hebrew
Gen 3:7-8
OT: Strong’s 7307
ruwach (roo'-akh); from OT:7306; wind; by resemblance breath, i.e. a sensible (or even violent) exhalation; figuratively, life, anger, unsubstantiality; by extension, a region of the sky; by resemblance spirit, but only of a rational being (including its expression and functions):
Jesus was the second Adam; or son born from God.
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chaoschristian
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GeorgeE said:
I would contend that Genesis is the foundation for a particular theological view that accepts 'The Bible' as a cohesive unit expessing some for of systemic or unifying theology across more than a millenium of writings authored by different people at different times for different purposes to different audiences.
The Bible is an artificial construct created centuries after Christ's ministry of Earth ended, and I often wonder if its particular format is actually an impedement to seeking an understanding on such questions, such as "What did Jesus believe about Genesis?"
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Assyrian
Basically pulling an Obama (Thanks Calminian!)
If wearing clothes is a religious act, then atheists and born again Christians who reject man made religion, should really walk around naked (or perhaps in consecrated animal skins). But you do have a good understanding of Genesis, of how God is actually talking to us through the account. In another post you talk of the OT containing the message about Christ 'concealed'. Basically you are reading Genesis as an allegory. Cool.
1Cor 15:45 Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.
Jesus is the last Adam in the sense that there have only been two 'men' in the history of the earth, Adam was 'the first man' and Jesus was 'the second man' and 'last Adam'. Not true in a historical sense, but true figuratively. The were more than just two men born, and more Adams too, that word means 'man'. But Adam in Genesis and Christ thorough his redeemed body sum up the human race, fallen and redeemed, figuratively.
Assyrian
Do you actually believe that? Let me rephrase it. Do you believe Adam was the Son of God, the first Jesus? If you do, I would think it raises real problems for a belief in the Trinity.
1Cor 15:45 Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.
Jesus is the last Adam in the sense that there have only been two 'men' in the history of the earth, Adam was 'the first man' and Jesus was 'the second man' and 'last Adam'. Not true in a historical sense, but true figuratively. The were more than just two men born, and more Adams too, that word means 'man'. But Adam in Genesis and Christ thorough his redeemed body sum up the human race, fallen and redeemed, figuratively.
Assyrian
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Scholar in training
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I would be interested to know what scholars hold this opinion; not even unprofessional groups like the Jesus Seminar would say that "the Bible" was created centuries after Jesus' life on earth. Whether or not we can know what Jesus thought about Genesis is a valid question, but such a late date for "the Bible" (presumably, you mean the Gospels, not the entire Bible) is not valid because there is no basis for that idea.chaoschristian said:
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Willtor
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Scholar in training said:
He's not talking about the contents of the Bible. He's talking about the Bible, itself, as a codex of Scripture. When people think of the Christian Scriptures, they think of a codex we call the Bible. It was not always so. Early on, they were individual Scriptural documents.
CC is talking about the impact that the form of Scripture (as we have it) has on popular Christian society.
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Assyrian
Basically pulling an Obama (Thanks Calminian!)
The Tanach in Jesus time would have consisted of all the books we know of as the OT, but in a different order. It began with Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch and ended in 2nd Chronicles (hence Jesus reference to 'all the prophets from Abel (Gen) to Zechariah (2Chron). This seems to have been set down at the Jewish council of Jamina in AD 90 but they simply recognised the accepted canon. Our Genesis to Malachi layout came later.
So references to 'the OT ends in a curse (Mal 4:6) but the NT ends in a blessing (Rev 22:21)' is bogus, but Genesis being 'foundational' has some merit. It still doesn't say Genesis is literal, no more than Revelation being the bible's conclusion makes it literal.
Assyrian
So references to 'the OT ends in a curse (Mal 4:6) but the NT ends in a blessing (Rev 22:21)' is bogus, but Genesis being 'foundational' has some merit. It still doesn't say Genesis is literal, no more than Revelation being the bible's conclusion makes it literal.
Assyrian
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chaoschristian
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Willtor said:
Well said.
And it is interesting to note that the formula Bible=contents as opposed to Bible=form is so ingrained that the first reaction is a defense of the validity of the contents.
It reminds in part of what the little old lady said at church, "When Jesus read the Bible he used the KJV."
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chaoschristian
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Scholar in training said:
As Willtor pointed out, I'm not addressing the contents, I'm addressing the format.
Scripture as we know it in the format called 'The Bible' did not exist until Constantine commissioned its creation. It's not important why he did it or how involved he was in the process, what is important is that because of him the format of scripture changed and with that change came great influence as to how scripture was viewed.
The canonization process, the order of the books, the later additions of numbering chapters and verse and adding section headings are all artificial processes that willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly impose meaning where before there was different or none.
The mythos of Christianity is shaped by the shape of our scripture. I think it is important to recognize that.
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Assyrian said:
The Tenach Today
Torah - The Law
Neviim - The Prophets
Megilot
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Assyrian said:
Actually, it came earlier. It is the order used in the Septuagint which dates to more than a century before the birth of Jesus. Of course, the Septuagint also included such books as Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiaticus and Baruch, as well as sections of Esther and Daniel that are found today only in Catholic/Orthodox bibles.
Many of these were composed in Greek or existed only in a Greek version, and the more restricted Jewish canon of Jamnia excluded them on that basis, among others. At the time, the church saw no reason to stop using the Septuagint as its OT. That decision was made during the Reformation, and applied only in Protestant churches. Even Protestants, however, kept the Septuagint order.
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First of all if Gods glory covered you I don think you would be naked in a carnal sense. What were they clothed with before they found out they were naked?Assyrian said:
About it being an allegory; yes I believe that is true. But I also very much believe that Genesis did happen literally. Much of the Old Testament are full of hidden things of God or as you said allegory.
No Adam was not the first Jesus; He was the first Adam. Who was Adams Father; God created Adam; He did not come from a women. I agree totally with your last paragraph.
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Assyrian
Basically pulling an Obama (Thanks Calminian!)
Sorry you are quite right. I didn't mean to suggest the Jews ever changed the order in their bible, just that our OT is in a different order to the Tanach Jesus and the disciples used.PrincetonGuy said:
Did the LXX have an order before it was bound together in a codex? Even if we look at earliest codexes we have from the 4th and 5th centuries, the order of the books varies significantly.gluadys said:
Codex Vaticanus (4th Cent) has the poetical books in the middle and ends with Ezekiel and additions to Daniel.
Codex Sinaiticus (4th Cent) is missing Ezekiel and Daniel but ends with the poetical books, the last being Job.
Codex Alexandrinus (5th cent) ends with the poetical books, but has Job immediately after Psalms, and ends with the Psalms of Solomon.
I don't think there is any evidence the apocrypha were considered scripture before Christian writers got their hands on the collection of Jewish scrolls, which included both translations of the Hebrew scripture as well as religious writings in Greek, and started quoting Greek texts as though they were scripture, or before these scrolls were gathered together into a codex.
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Assyrian
Basically pulling an Obama (Thanks Calminian!)
Yes I have heard that interpretation before, but I suspect it owes more to a long tradition of religious prudery rather than anything Genesis tells us. Remember we have a description of Adam and Eve's dress code in a passage where God is giving us his view on marriage. It says they were naked and were not ashamed, not that they were clothed in glory and not ashamed...GeorgeE said:
Some things in the bible are literal, but have an allegorical meaning. In others the primary meaning is the allegorical as we see in Daniel's visions or the parables. So for example in Gen 3 we see a snake which in the story is never considered as anything other than a literal talking snake. Yet when we read about the snake in the rest of the bible it is interpreted as Satan rather than a literal reptile. It is not interpreted as literal+allegorical, but only as an allegorical meaning. In the promise of a redeemer, the snake is told the redeemer would crush its head. Now while this obviously has an allegorical fulfilment on the cross, there is no literal fulfilment. Jesus never stepped on a snake's head, not that we read of in the NT anyway. So if the Genesis account was literal with an allegorical meaning, we should definitely expect a literal fulfilment to the very first promise of a redeemer. But God fulfilled the prophecy as though the only meaning to it was figurative.
Cool. I would say though, that God created Adam whether Adam was specially made from clay, was formed through a long process of evolution, or was simply the name God gave the human race, which is what adam means, 'man'.
Assyrian
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Assyrian said:
Good point. I wonder if synagogues had lists of scrolls as early churches did of NT writings.
Of course, since the first Christians were Jews, they "had their hands" on collections of Jewish scrolls from the beginning of the church. If, at the time, the apocrypha were being read in synagogues as scripture, they would be recognized as scripture by the church as well.
I think it far more likely, as in the case of the NT, that canonization involved the exclusion of certain books rather than a later inclusion of the apocrypha.
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Willtor
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gluadys said:
Indeed. There were a variety of texts that had readership at least as wide as the canonic texts. I was amazed to find Polycarp citing Tobit (on a Tobit passage with which I disagree!). Even within our canon, Jude cites Enoch. How's that for early affirmation? Not that I'm advocating Enoch as an addition to canon. But I do advocate its perusal by the laity for context.
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Assyrian
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I don't think we have any examples of early Jewish Christians quoting from the apocrypha (Except for Jude, personally I think it would be cool to have he book of Enoch in our canon).gluadys said:
Tobit is fun too in a Frank Peretti sort of way.
It was only later long after the split between Christianity and Judaism that you had EC writer begin to quote the apocrypha, it is much harder to say when writers were quoting the apocrypha as scripture. In the fourth/fifth century the early church's great Hebrew scholar Jerome, who had learned his Hebrew from Rabbis, rejected the authority of the apocrypha, but Jerome was generally regarded as a bit to cosy with the Jews.
It depends on your perspective. If you were in a church that never used Hebrews or 2Peter, you would probably regard the process as inclusion. Certainly from Jerome's point of view, he regarded the apocrypha as something being included that shouldn't have been.
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Willtor
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Assyrian said:
I don't don't think it should be included. Enoch is sort of the opposite of Genesis. The latter is primarily theological and touches on cosmology only incidentally. The former is primarily cosmological and touches on theology only incidentally. The lack of a solid line between the two (theology and cosmology) is indicative of the lack of understanding of any such line. However, I think it is enough to say that it is good context for Scripture, but not Scripture, itself.
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Assyrian said:
Well, strictly speaking, the Christian OT canon was not fully set until the Reformation. It was the Protestant questioning of the apocrypha which led to the affirmation of their scriptural authority by the Council of Trent.
I don't think there is any official recognition of their status earlier than that, so it is difficult to determine whether citations from the apocrypha amount to citations from scripture.
Of course, non-Protestants also affirm that they have always been accounted part of scripture in the church, Jerome notwithstanding. But that leaves us with the problem of verifying oral tradition.
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