(June 1, 2021 at 8:57 am)Belacqua Wrote:(June 1, 2021 at 8:49 am)Brian37 Wrote: The move to hiding behind "allegory" or "metaphor" is recent in theist apology.
This is not true.
Paul interpreted the Old Testament as allegory. Jesus spoke in parables. Augustine wrote a whole book on non-literal Genesis.
You can make any argument you want, but the readers literally took the fantastic claims as real.
Even today there are people who still believe that the earth was made in 6 days, and people who still believe that the biblical flood happened. People to this day still believe there was a character named Jesus who was the product of a virgin birth. There are people to this day that still believe that Jesus magically survived his execution. It was much more the case back then.
Augustine was not one of the writers of the bible in any case. He lived way after the fact.
