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Micaiah said:I find it ironical that you should be challenging people to define myth when you had so much trouble yourself.
artybloke said:What's wrong with that? I enjoy telling tall tales too. I'm a poet.
mixin machine said:When recording history there is no room for story telling!!!
Why fabricate the geneolgies?
Why add embelishment to an already truely amazing story?
gluadys said:I do not agree that myth means the end of truth. That is only one definition of myth. Other definitions of myth are consistent with myth being true.
rmwilliamsll said:only to a modern western mind. this conception of history is a cultural issue. history as we conceive of it now is only a few hundred years old.
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mixin machine said:Quote:
Why fabricate the geneolgies?
Why add embelishment to an already truely amazing story?
So do you believe the genealogies are are lie?
mixin machine said:So your saying that the flood myth is true.
Or the flood account is true.
So the ancients did not use genealogies to count the passage of time? Yet YEC opponents, and Global Flood opponents are sure that Chinese empires, and Egyptian Dynasties can be calculated to discount the biblical chronology. The pagan chronologies are to be taken seriously, but the biblical ones are not? hmmmmm. I see. Thanks.rmwilliamsll said:why use such loaded words as a lie?
lies are meant to deceive, to be deliberately misleading.
the genealogies have a purpose, that purpose is not the same as we have when we trace a family tree. we are striving for maximum accuracy.
the genealogies in both the NT and OT have at least several important reasons for their existence.
the OT relies on the genealogies to prove authority, both kingly and priestly.
from at least 1890 and Wm Green it has been obvious that the genealogies are manipulated to prove a point. Why the special significance of 7 in Gen 5 or of 14 in Matt 1? because the numbers prove something to the original readers.
the purposes of the genealogies are not modern nor are they western notions of a newspaperman's account of history-who what where why how. to understand them we need to understand how they were used in that context, not ours. it does the Scriptures a disservice to force them into our boxes, rather than to use good hermeneutical principles to interpret them.
are they a lie if they are not exact and accurate like i would build a modern family tree? of course not. the significance of the ages and numbers in Genesis genealogies are probably lost to us. for numbers had near magical meaning to the Hebrews that we simply have de-sacralized and lost completely. numbers are just abstractions to us, not to them. are there millions of years hidden in the genealogies of Genesis? probably not. that is why i date Adam to less than 10k, roughly the beginning of recorded history on Mespotamia. i believe that does justice to Genesis.
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At what point does the Bible begin to present historical fact? The sons of Adam mentioned by Name in Hebrews and by Jesus are not literal? How about Noah, mentioned by Jesus and Peter? Was Joseph literal? Was Israel in Egypt? Was there an Israel? Did Abraham Lincoln exist? Julius Caesar? Richard Nixon?gluadys said:I mean that it is true as story and true in its teaching, but it is not a historical fact.
Floodnut said:At what point does the Bible begin to present historical fact? The sons of Adam mentioned by Name in Hebrews and by Jesus are not literal? How about Noah, mentioned by Jesus and Peter? Was Joseph literal? Was Israel in Egypt? Was there an Israel? Did Abraham Lincoln exist? Julius Caesar? Richard Nixon?
Where does it start and stop?
Quite an interesting response. Is your definition of legend an unverified story or a romanticized myth? Why wouldn't people then not attempt to separate history from legend?gluadys said:...So, although we can't have a scientific certainty about the existence of Abraham as we do about Hezekiah, the probability that he was a real person is fairly high and there is no need to cast doubt on it. But it is also clear that many of the stories about him have more legend than history in them.
This is how it goes all through the bible. People then simply did not attempt to separate history from legend as we do today. To them they were one and the same.
When recording history there is no room for story telling!!!
Why would God tell a story that had a real man as the main character but tell the story in such a manner as to cast doubt onto the authenticity of the actual events of the story?
vossler said:Quite an interesting response. Is your definition of legend an unverified story or a romanticized myth?
Why wouldn't people then not attempt to separate history from legend?
Why would God tell a story that had a real man as the main character but tell the story in such a manner as to cast doubt onto the authenticity of the actual events of the story? Could you please explain what the benefit to such an approach might be? Thanks!
gluadys said:Because they were more into story-telling than into objective history. The concept of objective history was not invented yet.
Critias said:I think you are judging history with a modern view point by stating if the ancients didn't record history as we do today it isn't history.
Secondly, we do have objective historical accounts of transactions being made in the ancient world. So the concept of "objective history" was being put to use then as well.
As I said, I think you are stating "objective history" with a modern view point and if it isn't satisfied "modernly" it isn't history.
Is the objective here to put the Bible on the same shelf of equality with other myths that have no value or historical truth to them? Is the Bible just another piece of literature, no more valuable than a book by Homer?
artybloke said:The writers of Genesis were not recording history. They were telling stories.
I'm no historian so I won't pretend to know something I don't, but I don't think people today are all that different from people back then. In other words, all of us want to know where we came from and I have a hard time believing that the people from biblical times felt objective history wasn't any different than mythological. Don't you think they were told a tall tale or two?gluadys said:Because they were more into story-telling than into objective history. The concept of objective history was not invented yet.
Why would it cast doubt on the authenticity of the actual events to the people who first told and retold the stories? It is only moderns who like objective, only-the-facts history with no admixture of legend who are upset by this way of telling history--even though they accept a lot of history themselves that is told in this way. How many people think they know the history of Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, or William Wallace because they have seen a movie about them?
Yes, when I was but a child stories were fun and easy to remember and I didn't care in the least whether they were true or not. As an adult, however, that if far from the truth. I learn much better from history than I ever would from mythology. What's wrong with the telling of history in an informative easy to understand manner? It tells the story while still holding fast to the truth. It would seem to me that would be the preferable way and therefore God's way.glaudys said:And that is the benefit of such an approach. Stories are fun and easy to remember. So if one of God's purposes is to have his teachings remembered from generation to generation among a largely illiterate people, one of the best ways of preserving his message is to embed it in stories.
Although we regularly refer to Ancient writers such as Herodotus, called "The father of History" or Tacitus (c. 56c. 117) as "historians", their works openly mixed oratory, poetry and literature in a way which is incompatible with the contemporary concern for impartiality and objectivity.
The job of the historian has been a significant one for thousands of years to the extent that the definition of history has frequently been simply recorded history. Many of the historians of the past have been called upon to write histories either to furnish a king or a ruling class with a lineage thereby offering it legitimacy or to give a people a cultural heritage and sense of identity. This meant that the works of these historians openly mixed oratory, poetry and literature in a way which is incompatible with the contemporary concern for impartiality and objectivity.
Herodotus, 5th century BC, who is known as "The father of History" for being one of the earliest nameable historians of whose work survive was certainly not free from the faults of early history. He had a particular liking for the tales of the strange and unusual of dubious veracity and in constructing a gripping story despite the available facts. Despite this The Histories of Herodotus display some of the techniques of more modern historians. Interviews with witnesses or more distantly connected oral histories, studying of sources and the weighing of differing accounts with Herodotus pronouncing on the one he regarded as more likely are all features of his work.
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