Do you think that the story of Adam and Eve literally happened?

[Tom 1]

The difficulty comes in why Jesus spoke of them as real people. Also, if it never happened there is no meaning.

No, and no. If you give it some thought you’ll see why.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

No, and no. If you give it some thought you’ll see why.

I’ve given it a lot more thought than you have. That’s why I see what you do not.

Let’s test it. Why do you sayJesus spoke of the events with Adam and Eve as real?

 

[Dorothy Mae]

That’s the thing - the examples of literal interpretation I have seen sometimes involve a person getting what is meant, but then, for some other reason, adding ‘oh but it is also literally true’.
Where it can be established that a literal interpretation was not meant, then the result is generally a mish mash of meanings that include some literal elements and some stuff about what the purpose of the story was.

What events in the Bible do you think are established as not ever happening to real people? Please include how this is established, thanks.

 

[Tom 1]

I’ve given it a lot more thought than you have. That’s why I see what you do not.

Sure, maybe? You can explain what you mean if you like. This idea that Jesus must have been ‘lying’ if he invented situations to illustrate a story is a non-starter. If that is lying then pretty much anyone who has ever taught anyone about anything is a liar, anyone who uses figurative language (as we all do, all the time) is a liar, and to prevent lying you’d need to go way back in time to somehow prevent the development of our ability to make symbolic connections, in which case we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. Do you think that Jesus would only say ‘there was a man who went on a journey...’ and so on if he was referring to an actual person? It’s worth reflecting on what would have been left of Jesus’ message if he had been an obsessive semantic legalist bent on removing the use of metaphor and allegory from his teachings.

 

[public hermit]

One can believe in the historicity of the Genesis account and not grasp the meaning conveyed. Another can grasp the meaning conveyed and yet not believe its historicity. Which one has the best part of the one who believes both its historicity and grasps the meaning conveyed? The later, for sure. Believing the historicity does one no good if that is all one has. Moreover, having both is not necessary. I would say, when it comes to the Genesis account, only the meaning is necessary.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

Sure, maybe? You can explain what you mean if you like. This idea that Jesus must have been ‘lying’ if he invented situations to illustrate a story is a non-starter.

It needs to be established Jesus was merely wanting to illustrate something. The parables, for example, are that clearly and it’s not hard to imagine they really happen either.

If that is lying then pretty much anyone who has ever taught anyone about anything is a liar, anyone who uses figurative language (as we all do, all the time) is a liar, and to prevent lying you’d need to go way back in time to somehow prevent the development of our ability to make symbolic connections, in which case we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. Do you think that Jesus would only say ‘there was a man who went on a journey...’ and so on if he was referring to an actual person?

But men really do go in journeys and they really do get attacked. Still happens. People lose coins. Sheep wander off. People celebrate events and invite others.

It’s worth reflecting on what would have been left of Jesus’ message if he had been an obsessive semantic legalist bent on removing the use of metaphor and allegory from his teachings.

Might as well ask how we’d communicate if metaphors were verboten. What is to be gained? As I said, women really do lose coins. Sheep wander off. Fathers welcome wayward sons.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

One can believe in the historicity of the Genesis account and not grasp the meaning conveyed. Another can grasp the meaning conveyed and yet not believe its historicity. Which one has the best part of the one who believes both its historicity and grasps the meaning conveyed? The later, for sure. Believing the historicity does one no good if that is all one has. Moreover, having both is not necessary. I would say, when it comes to the Genesis account, only the meaning is necessary.

What is the meaning that was supposed to be conveyed in your opinion? I’m curious.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

Tom, I’m still waiting. What events in the bible are established (in the Bible) as never intended to talk about real people?

 

[Tom 1]

Tom, I’m still waiting. What events in the bible are established (in the Bible) as never intended to talk about real people?

Hi, I'll answer your posts in order but I don't want to get sucked into spending ages on it, sorry, stuff to do.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

Hi, I'll answer your posts in order but I don't want to get sucked into spending ages on it, sorry, stuff to do.

Shouldn’t take long. How many events in the Bible can there be that are firmly established in the Bible as never happening? I think I called your bluff.

 

[Tom 1]

Let’s test it. Why do you sayJesus spoke of the events with Adam and Eve as real?

As below:

But men really do go in journeys and they really do get attacked. Still happens. People lose coins. Sheep wander off. People celebrate events and invite others.

There were also first people. Later people needed some way of framing their understanding of their place in the world. It's all there in the text - why 'man' and 'mother of all' (or some similar variant), why not 'Bob' and 'Jean' or somesuch? Why the symbolic naming of other creatures, the carefully specific mentions of man's duties, the allegories of belonging, unity, disunity, responsiblity and so on? Read as intended, it provides much more useful lessons that the notion of 'original sin' and all that.

 

[Tom 1]

Shouldn’t take long.

Lol! That's a good one.

 

[JackRT]

Tom, I’m still waiting. What events in the bible are established (in the Bible) as never intended to talk about real people?

Are you asking which Biblical stories are truth stories and which are true stories? To begin with, the parables are truth stories but there are also "parables" that are written much larger. I would identify the Books of Job, of Ruth, of Jonah and the Song of Solomon. These were written to address serious ethical/moral problems in society.

 

[Tom 1]

Shouldn’t take long. How many events in the Bible can there be that are firmly established in the Bible as never happening? I think I called your bluff.

Well, you appear to have taken my 'where it can be established...' to mean something other than what I meant, if you mean can it be proved beyond doubt then of course no, that would be literally impossible, but there are certainly things that can safely be taken to be allegorical, or non-literal at least, on the basis of the evidence in the text itself.
On a bit of a tangent, but relevant I think, is the authorship of the Torah. It is an article of faith for some, for reasons I don't personally understand - perhaps because this came out of the Jewish tradition? - that Moses wrote the Torah. However there is clear evidence of different styles, indicating multiple authors. In the same way as you can read say Mark Twain and Bulgakov and identify differences in style, scholars of Hebrew can see the styles of different authors in the writing of the Torah (as we have it).
Another issue is the use of numbers - 40 for example, used to indicate 'a long time'. The Israelites were in the desert for 40 years - were they? In ancient writings numbers were used freely (in the Sumerian king list kings ruled for 10s of thousands of years) or symbolically, often. Clearly the writers of the OT didnt have the same relationship either with numbers, or dates, or accurate reporting for the sake of accurate reporting as we do, in the modern world. They thought about the whole business very differently, as is evident in the text.
Anyway I realise this kind of thing requires a paradigm shift in thinking, and I don't have the time to put into going through the layers of it, but there is plenty out there you can read about this kind of approach to study of the bible, you might find it interesting.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

As below:



There were also first people. Later people needed some way of framing their understanding of their place in the world. It's all there in the text - why 'man' and 'mother of all' (or some similar variant), why not 'Bob' and 'Jean' or somesuch? Why the symbolic naming of other creatures, the carefully specific mentions of man's duties, the allegories of belonging, unity, disunity, responsiblity and so on? Read as intended, it provides much more useful lessons that the notion of 'original sin' and all that.

What symbolic naming of other creatures? In order for a story to teach it has to be telling us something we don’t otherwise know. Mans duty to work is know without the story. Societal unity, disunity, and responsibility is not taught from that story at all. And it is learned in life. None of those points are taught in the story. These things don’t need to be taught in the Bible. They are known in life.

What it teaches is WHY we have to do those things and if those people never lived, it cannot teach us that. It’s lessons depend entirely on it being real, as Jesus knew it to be.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

Lol! That's a good one.

Why? It didn’t take long.

 

[Tom 1]

What symbolic naming of other creatures? In order for a story to teach it has to be telling us something we don’t otherwise know. Mans duty to work is know without the story. Societal unity, disunity, and responsibility is not taught from that story at all. And it is learned in life. None of those points are taught in the story. These things don’t need to be taught in the Bible. They are known in life.

What it teaches is WHY we have to do those things and if those people never lived, it cannot teach us that. It’s lessons depend entirely on it being real, as Jesus knew it to be.

Well, that's how you see it. Obviously I disagree. Not a problem for me, you're free to take the text however you like to.

 

[Tom 1]

Why? It didn’t take long.

Explaining the whole idea would involve paraphrasing several books . I don't have time to do that and I'm guessing you would rather read the originals.

 

[Jadis40]

An event happened, one person decides to write of it sooner, another decides to write it down later. Does this mean the person who wrote it down later is copying the first? Not at all, especially not if it was directed by God to write down the correct story. The very fact that civilizations across the globe have flood stories points back to it being true. People split at the Tower of babble, they took the stories with them as all stories go people changed, embellished or got parts wrong until the society made the story into what it is. The Bible, on the other hand, is God-breathed. It is not a meer tale written down, but a written record of us to what God has done, is doing and will do. If one piece of scripture is a fairy tale then why would the rest be true?
2 Timothy 3:16-17
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
All scripture is God-breathed including Genesis. The events in the Bible were written down under God's directive as the scripture is the word of God or don't you believe that?

Next, you have no idea of what we believe as yet once again 6,000 years comes trotting out as if this is what all YE creationists cling to. Those of us who believe in creation, the global flood and 6-day creation believe anywhere from 6 to 50 thousand years so you might want to update your 'knowledge' of us. Not everyone follows Usser.

As to 4.6 billion, that comes directly from secular science which is man's attempt to understand the world. Word of man or word of God? I know which one I will believe.

I know the 4.6 billion years comes from secular science, and I accept it as fact. I don't treat the bible as a science book. The Bible tells us who, secular science does a pretty good job of answering how.

So do I take creation as being a literal 6 day week? No.
Do I believe that the universe with all those other galaxies came in to existence though the Big Bang? Yes, because scientists have discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Is there evidence in the earth itself that this planet is older than the 50,000 years you mentioned? Yes. YECs cannot satisfactory answer when in time the late heavy bombardment happened, nor a lot of other things. I don't treat ICR or Answers in Genesis as being legitimate sources of information.

Do I take Adam and Eve as being the first ever humans on the planet? No. I believe in what science has revealed, in that there have been various hominid species that have existed at various points in time in the long history of this planet. Cro-Magnon, Neanderthals, Denisovans.

Do I believe in a global flood? No, and the reading of the text doesn't mean it was planet wide.
Do I believe that dinosaurs and man lived on the earth at the same time? No.

Do I believe that the Tower of Babel is factual? No. There are a handful of language isolates (Sumerian among them) that exist across the world.

Like I said in my prior post, I go where the evidence leads. And that means a universe that's 13+ billion years old, and earth that is 4.6 billion years old, and a planet that never experienced a global flood.

 

[Dorothy Mae]

Well, you appear to have taken my 'where it can be established...' to mean something other than what I meant, if you mean can it be proved beyond doubt then of course no, that would be literally impossible, but there are certainly things that can safely be taken to be allegorical, or non-literal at least, on the basis of the evidence in the text itself.
On a bit of a tangent, but relevant I think, is the authorship of the Torah. It is an article of faith for some, for reasons I don't personally understand - perhaps because this came out of the Jewish tradition? - that Moses wrote the Torah. However there is clear evidence of different styles, indicating multiple authors. In the same way as you can read say Mark Twain and Bulgakov and identify differences in style, scholars of Hebrew can see the styles of different authors in the writing of the Torah (as we have it).
Another issue is the use of numbers - 40 for example, used to indicate 'a long time'. The Israelites were in the desert for 40 years - were they? In ancient writings numbers were used freely (in the Sumerian king list kings ruled for 10s of thousands of years) or symbolically, often. Clearly the writers of the OT didnt have the same relationship either with numbers, or dates, or accurate reporting for the sake of accurate reporting as we do, in the modern world. They thought about the whole business very differently, as is evident in the text.
Anyway I realise this kind of thing requires a paradigm shift in thinking, and I don't have the time to put into going through the layers of it, but there is plenty out there you can read about this kind of approach to study of the bible, you might find it interesting.

The author is immaterial to the accounts in those first 5 books.

And you used the word “established” which means established. If you mean suggested or implied or wished for then use those words.

We were discussed the contents of the accounts, not extraneous matters.