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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