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Did God Really Say

lifepsyop

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Other peoples had their foundation-myths - why shouldn’t the Israelites/Jews ?

Why would Israel require an origin mythology if the God of the universe is working directly in their midst and giving them divine revelation? What motivates you to think they were myths? Can God not have revealed an accurate testimony of his works? Isn't this the whole premise of the Gospels? That God has moved and worked upon the earth?




The Reality of the Resurrection of Christ is not the invented reality of a myth; nor is it the limited reality of human existence on Earth. It is a super-natural Reality, inaccessible to human seeking, that can come only from God: IOW, it is in the strictest sense a miracle. It is an unmediated, unique, unrepeatable Act of God, which (unlike anything in history) has no causes, parallels, or precedents in history. It can seem to be historical, because it took place within a world that is affected by human history; yet it is not a result of anything in that world, but has its sole cause in God alone.

The resurrection is certainly the most important for our salvation, but this is the exact same reasoning you could give for all of God's miraculous works on the earth. You could describe the parting of the Red Sea in the same language. Why mythologize any of the accounts of God's miracles on the earth?



God is not an historical character - the God-man Jesus Christ is an historical character, only because He is fully human. The standard of reality, is not man, or human history, but God.

What do you base this on? My Bible is full of God doing things in history and he loves to be praised for it.



Because the reality of the Blood of Christ is not dependent upon the reality of the blood of the lambs in Exodus. A literary comparison of two things, need not imply that both are equally real or unreal. Christ was a lamb only in a non-proper, figurative, specifically metaphorical sense. He did not bleat, gambol in the grass, or become a mutton chop, as a real lamb often does, because He is not a lamb in the real, proper, non-metaphorical sense. Nothing can be demonstrated by basing arguments on metaphors, because metaphors describe things, not as they are, but in a non-proper, figurative, sense.

There are far more alternatives than history, myth or allegory - for the Bible is made up of many different kinds of literature. Some overlap with (a kind of) history, & others do not. The prophecy of Obadiah, & the lament attributed to Jeremiah, both have the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC as their background.


The Bible is both historical and allegorical. There is no need to choose one or the other. The historical events themselves are the pictures that show meaning. The Genesis flood is a picture of worldwide wrath with salvation of a righteous remnant. David slaying Goliath is a picture of the weakness of God overpowering the strength and might of the world. God proves himself and the reliability of his word over and over again. It would be a mistake to say their allegorical value somehow negates their historical reality. Nothing in the Bible would lead one that conclusion, it is only world philosophy and science falsely called that demand history be stripped from scripture. I think you're really missing out when you fail to give God the glory for doing what he said he did, even what he directed his people to actually praise him for doing. These are the works of God that brought forth the Messiah. It was all part of one glorious plan, praise him for it.




It would be absurd to argue that, because the LOTR refers to objects of familiar kinds such as roads, swords, travellers, mountains, rings & forests, it must therefore be intended as a genuinely historical narrative. Invented tales often mention familiar types of object - that is called verisimilitude, & is a literary technique for making the fiction plausible to the hearers or readers.

The Bible's history spans a vast number of specific real world geographical locations along ancient nations and kingdoms. It even presents the very origin of nations on earth. No section of it is suggested to be a fantastical setting, and is presented alongside a continuous genealogy up to and throughout Israel's lineage leading to Jesus. Ancient Israelites and Jews of antiquity believed it was real history. Did they simply lack the wonderful enlightenment of us moderns?

It seems like a fair question to ask, if someone doesn't believe in God's past wrath on the world, are they really taking seriously his future wrath?
 
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lifepsyop

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There are many acts of Divine judgement in works of mythology. Yet they are fictions. That a judgement is attributed to gods, or even to the True God, does not mean that the judgement actually occurred. In Book 1 of the Iliad, the god Apollo sends a devastating plague upon the Greeks encamped before Troy, in answer to the prayer of his priest Chryses, whose daughter Chryseis has been taken captive by the Greeks. The return of Chryseis to her father ends the plague and appeases the wrath of the god - & begins the animosity that is the main subject of the poem.

A judgement by a god or God, if it takes the form of an externally visible event, comes as an historical event: such as war, disease, famine, flood, plague or whatever. And there is no external means of distinguishing a Divine judgement from any other event. Anything in history can be regarded as a judgement - anything at all. The events referred to as judgements do not come with that label attached, so their significance - assuming that one regards them as having some significance - has to be guessed at.

Belief in the reality of God’s judgement does not require fictions to sustain it. I believe in it because it is repeatedly taught in the NT. And as Christ is the Universal Messiah-King, it makes perfect sense that He should judge all the nations on Earth; for judgement is a royal function. It is one of the ways in which kings show that they are legitimate & upright rulers who enjoy God’s favour.
To mythologise something, is to make it a myth. To recognise that a text relating a myth is doing so, is not making something non-mythical a myth, but recognising its genuinely mythical status. If there is mythical material in the Bible - and there is - then saying so is a proper recognition of the character of parts of the Bible. If the Bible contains mythical material, the reader should accept that, and go from that recognition of what the Bible in fact contains, to a more accurate understanding both of that material, and of what it doing in the Bible. If every part of Scripture has God for its Author, then God is saying something through the mythological material, as much as through anything else in the Bible. That something is mythological, in no way makes it meaningless or useless.

Greek mythology is full of specific names. Telemachus was the son of Odysseus, who was the son of Laertes, whose wife was Anticleia, who was the daughter of Autolycus, who was the son either of Daedalion or of the god Hermes, who was the son of Zeus. Cadmus, Pelops, Herakles, & many other characters, all have genealogies and geographical associations: Cadmus with Thebes, Pelops with Pisa in Elis, Herakles with Tiryns. Having a detailed genealogy, complete with geographic details, is (obviously) compatible with being a real historical person - but is equally compatible with being entirely fictitious.

The Gospels give us a Christ Whose knowledge is not infinite, but Who asks questions, and is capable of growing in knowledge. If He was “like us in all things - sin alone excepted”, that makes very good sense.

ISTM that, as He did not come to be an Answer Man on all matters of Scripture, its interpretation, and of Theology, it is unobjectionable to suggest that there were limits to His understanding of the Bible. I don’t think it is irreverent to say that. After all, no-one argues that because He was God Incarnate, He must therefore have been a greater composer than Mozart, a greater sculptor than Michelangelo, a greater polymath than Aristotle or Leonardo, a greater poet than Homer or Vergil, a greater athlete than Usain Bolt, a greater painter than Raphael or Rembrandt, and so on. IOW, people implicitly admit that He was in some respects subject to limitations.

That that He never undertook activity X, does not mean that others cannot undertake X, and do it supremely well. That He never wrote a history of the Ancient Near East, or drilled an oil-well, or taught Mathematics, does not make it impertinent for mere mortals to do so.

I think it was a consequence of the reality of the Incarnation, that there was a great deal about the OT He had no means of knowing, because nobody else could have known it, that has been learnt since then. If others could excel in activities which He never undertook, I don’t see why scholars of the Bible and its background cannot know more of it than He did.

If His knowledge was limited, so that men with greater material opportunities for learning than He had, came to know things He did not know, I think that is evidence of Divine Humility, not a flaw. Unless He knew absolutely everything that can ever be known, His knowledge must necessarily have been limited. The Gospels do not suggest that He was omniscient - they do emphasise His Teaching Authority, and by implication, His Wisdom. The Jesus of the Gospels is credibly human - not an infallible & omniscient superman with no human limitations. If He is admitted to have had other limitations before His Resurrection - why cannot His knowledge, even of the Bible, have had limitations ? It can even be argued that a Christ Who - before His Resurrection - is omniscient & infallible, is not the Christ through Whose human weakness God shows forth His Strength. Such a Christ is too Glorious, too early, & too unlike those whom He came to save.

In reading your responses, it strikes me how you seem to hold the 'non-historicity' of the Old Testament as some sort of axiomatic foundational truth that everything else must fold around. No matter how much it reads as history, it cannot be history. No matter how much Jesus and the apostles appear to uphold the reality of the OT scriptures, the answer must always be that they are uneducated, confused, (or perhaps secretly regard scripture as allegory but never even suggest so in any of their communications.)

My question is, Why? Why is it so important to you for the OT to *not* be history?

Why such resistance to believe that God did what the scriptures say he did?


Praise him for his mighty deeds;
Praise him according to his excellent greatness!

- Psalm 150:2


Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
- John 6:49-50
 
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