How can you be half and half?

alexiscurious said:

Can't see anything that relates to the topic of this thread. Sorry.

All I see is more war, innocent children being struck down by God, and God taking people's wives and making them sleep around in public.

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so you read 2 Sam 12 1-6? Nathan's store - i.e. he story Nathan tells?

Right, now assume for a moment that the back story - David, Nathan, Bathsheba, Uriah, etc is all fact.

Did the events in Nathan's story happen?

alexiscurious said:

I don't think that the authors would spend time forming these long ass genealogies and making references to real people and places if it's all just made up.

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if you don't bother to first understand what the purposes genealogies serve in ancient literature how on each could you make that call?

your constant use of the word "just" is also an alarm bell. The most powerful, truth telling, literature is not a collection of facts but literature that reveals something vitally important. Something that may not be reducible to fact at all.

From your cited article, to illustrate its shallowness:

Are any of these chapters parables?
No, because when Jesus told a parable He either said it was a parable, or He introduced it with a simile, so making it plain to the hearers that it was a parable, as on the many occasions when He said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like … .’ No such claim is made or style used by the author of Genesis 1–11.

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a. different authors don't have to use identical conventions.
b. Nathan didn't tell David he was about to tell him a parabolic story
c. The article is factually incorrect - Jesus did tell parables without explicitly marking them as such.

alexiscurious said:

The quote in my original post seems to contradict this statement.

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Your quote presumes that the only things God wants to convey reduce to some kind of trivia - small, straightforward, facts.

The most important things in the world to learn about aren't those kinds of things - and modern western culture is the first culture in the world that not to find that blazingly obvious. And the first to think that using stories to teach should only be for young children.

alexiscurious said:

What makes me think that most of the books in the OT are intended to be read as historical?

Well, the main reason is I've been taught in a Christian school for the past 10 years that this is the only way to read some of these books.

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So, you're in 10th grade? You're 15?

alexiscurious said:

But now you are telling me all my teachers are morons who can understand so much about the books but they can't even identify if the author intended for it to be historical?

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Ouch. Generally I would hope a Christian education might be a good thing. I've seen cases where it is. I certainly take exception with the teachers giving you these ideas, yes. They have hung your Faith out to dry, leaving you at a dead end. You have some of that teen-age rebellion stuff in you still? You're going to need some of that, I think.

The hope I hold out for you is that while you no doubt currently see Faith as an impossibility, or as a total illogical improbability at the very best, it is actually a solid Rock. Everything the Bible purports it to be. Shield, strong tower, all that good stuff.

Between now and then you will have to suffer a little while; that's direct Scripture. You're tough, right?

Once you see the intent of Scripture, and different sections of it, it is AMAZING!! It fits together far better than you can imagine, and all becomes incredibly strong. It all has a purpose, and within that purpose its all true. We call this rightly dividing the word. You can place that passage, right?

But you're going to have to get a bit more sophisticated than Ken Ham. One of the most amazing things about Scripture is how sophisticated these ancients were.

alexiscurious said:

Also I just briefly read over some of what this site has to say about genesis and it makes some very good points about why the only way it can be taken is historically:

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As a whole, the Bible is a SPIRITUAL book. It tells us about how we can have a relationship with God. You must see it through that lens. And the focus is always on Christ, which will hopefully already make sense to you because He is the very embodiment of man in relationship with God.

Please notice that this has little or nothing in common with it being a science text book, or even a history lesson. On that point, realize that the Jews recited their entire Scripture every year, and a man was thought to know nothing until he was a grand-father. Does that sound like all there is to it is history to you?

For that matter, try to find a Rabbi teaching Genesis as literal. I don't think you can do it. If you do, you won't find any agreeing with him. OT is JEWISH; shouldn't the way they teach it count for something?

alexiscurious said:

I don't think that the authors would spend time forming these long ass genealogies and making references to real people and places if it's all just made up. Another reason is the quote by a christian here in my first post.

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And yet in the NT we read that we shouldn't concern ourselves with these genealogies. Why is that? Don't get me wrong, if you study deep enough into the language they do all have some value, but ya gots to dig deeper here. Salvation isn't where you're looking, and the way you're going about it your Faith is being torn apart. Doesn't that tell you something's wrong?

alexiscurious said:

1-6 is the story Nathan made up to show David how stupid he is

But him composing the story in his brain, him explaining it to David... all happen in reality?

What are you trying to prove?

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(Remember for a moment we are thinking through a hypothetical where the back-story is factual)

Nathan's story describes a real event, but it doesn't do it in a factual way. He tells the real event through a parabolic story, that brings out for David the seriousness and injustice of what he has done. The parabolic telling gets across to David an important truth that a factual account would not have conveyed.

It's a unique instance where the bible directly shows us how parabolic stories work and why God would choose such literary genres.

alexiscurious said:

Well shame on them for not doing their homework!

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And hopefully the lesson you've learned is that just because something looks convincing it doesn't mean that it's sound.

I'd still like for you to answer this question though:
So what makes the book about Jesus any more factual than the book about the Israelites exiting out of Egypt?

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The factual-ness either is or isn't.
I presume what you really mean is "why should I think the Gospels to be more factual than Exodus"?

alexiscurious said:

I'd still like for you to answer this question though:
So what makes the book about Jesus any more factual than the book about the Israelites exiting out of Egypt?

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This is a wonderful tack, let's follow this a bit:

in the OT, God's Glory is hidden. Deliberately.

In the NT, God's Glory is revealed.

In the old, we were beholden to menial practices; can't gather sticks on Saturday, bloody sacrifices, and etc etc ETC ad nauseum. In the New, Christ has become our sacrifice, and has fulfilled all the menial aspects, setting us free to partake of the same new Life He received with His Resurrection.

The contrast far exceeds the comparison, although the New is built upon the Old, using it as a foundation.

Now, in the fulfillment of time and of all things, we don't really care which things were historic fact yet to be discovered and which were myth with moral, because we can both see and partake of the actual point, what God intended all along. Please grasp the sheer weightiness of this! I ask a lot of you here, and you do have considerable time to implement this. We all do.

Back to menial things, yes it is exciting when archaeology actually finds something showing this or that passage might be historically true, when our best scholarship previously thought there was no way; but ultimately that is NOT what our Faith rests on! We depend on God Himself, His amazing intellect to orchestrate all these things together in such a way that boggles our mind, and we depend on His own Power to make it possible for us to take part in His plan, even though it kinda looks like we should be able to figure it all out and do it on our own.

You have in front of you a wondrous journey of exploration. Please don't reduce it to just tab A in slot B. Life is far more interesting than that!

alexiscurious said:

I'll say it again, I'm not questioning that fake stories can communicate an important truth. I'm pointing my finger at the authors of the Bible for desperately trying to convince us that something is historical when so many people here seem to agree that it is not.

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Is it not possible that you're misreading the clues to genre because what you've got to go on are what your culture has taught you to look for, not what the original audience would be looking for?

alexiscurious said:

Yes, answer pls

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If I told you two stories:
The first beginning "once upon a time, in a land far away..."
And the second beginning "last Thursday we..."

Which would you think the more factual?

alexiscurious said:

I'm not questioning that fake stories can communicate an important truth.

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Well, good ... I guess? But let's refine this a bit. If a particular section of Scripture is not designed primarily to teach us historical fact, that doesn't make it a "fake" story. A fact is the older books may have never been written down for generations, instead preserved as oral histories. And that's ok, it really wasn't subject to the telephone game the way unbelievers insist. The point of the stories as intended by God is preserved intact. The historical aspects may have been varietized, redacted, or otherwise changed in inconsequential ways. And trying to hear it the way the original audience did is a study unto itself. Hermeneutics, I think they call that. So you have LOTS to learn yet, which you should realize is a good thing.

alexiscurious said:

I'm pointing my finger at the authors of the Bible for desperately trying to convince us that something is historical

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Were they? Or is that your current teachers doing that? And you have cognitive dissonance because it doesn't add up that way?

LOTS of Christian academics forsake the Faith because of what they're taught in school. This tells me that lots of schools do a lousy job of teaching Christianity. Great teachers are rare, and administrators mostly mess everything up. What you need to do is sit at the feet of the Master. HE is real - regardless of what anyone thinks of this or that part of Scripture.