(October 24, 2015 at 2:09 am)Jörmungandr Wrote:(October 23, 2015 at 11:02 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: It's a matter of whether someone can provide a better account of any given text's meaning than someone else. Opinions can indead vary but some opinions are better than others. To argue against that idea, like some radical deconstructivist, is just silly on your part.
We're not talking "any given text," we're talking about the bible here, supposedly a document which channels the truth of God. Now there are numerous truths involved in that question. First, the book contains wholly fictitious events like the Exodus and the global flood. It's well acknowledged that some of the books in the New Testament are patent forgeries, yet this fact is somehow not supposed to affect the integrity of the text. And it's clear that the process of choosing what to keep in and what to leave out was an ideologically and politically driven enterprise conducted by men without any real expertise in evaluating texts for authenticity.
The hypothesis that some sort of standard of realism can be used to decipher the "meaning" of this text was thrown under the bus some time ago. Comparing the opinions about the meaning of the text to a historical reconstruction of the life of a well-documented U.S. president is ludicrous. You don't have justified opinions; you have a cascade of ad hoc suppositions about how to reconcile obviously fantastical bullshit with seeming historical accounts. It's worse than radical deconstructionism. It's pesharim and cognitive dissonance raised to a fine art. "Interpreters" quibble about the meaning of Hebrew and Greek words while the elephant in the room is the fact that no measure of realism need apply. It's already been ruled out of court by the very act of accepting it whole as a sacred text. You may not like the advances in biblical criticism that the last three hundred years has wrought, but to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend you can roll back the march of progress with "the right interpretive stance" is sheer folly.
That's your opinion.
