RE: The Bible
March 31, 2012 at 2:36 pm
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2012 at 2:59 pm by Undeceived.)
(March 31, 2012 at 11:11 am)cdabamsworth Wrote: If you interpret some of the Bible literally and some of it as metaphor, you're cherry-picking, and historians will laugh at you for making a judgment of what happened / didn't happen according to guesswork rather than evidence.Christians can determine what is metaphor and what is not by using historical context and seeing where else the phrase comes up in the Bible. We know Jesus literally claimed to be God because he said "I AM" or "YHWH," which led to the sort of reaction you'd expect from the pharisees (try to kill him). We know the bride and the beast with seven horns in Revelation is probably metaphor because the bride is used symbolically by Jesus and Paul refers to Satan as the beast. In the NT, Jesus tells his disciples when he's telling a parable and says "I tell you the truth" when he's not. The missionary trips described of Paul are told with such detail as to not be assumed metaphor. The same goes for the Exodus. So the critical points of Christianity--law and gospel--are undeniably literal. A Christian knows more than enough to obtain salvation--Jesus spells it out in John 3:16. You bring up the Creation story. There is some controversy over that even among Christians, but one thing is clear--God displayed his power by creating the heavens and earth and every living thing. It doesn't even leave a metaphorical door open for evolution. As a Christian, it doesn't help spiritually to imagine the Bible as metaphor; it might as well be literal. Using historical context and knowledge of Hebrew narrative form, 99% of the Bible is probably literal, most of the 1% being descriptions of the end times (which cannot be described concretely anyway). The Psalms and Proverbs are not literal stories, but they are real art used by David to describe his true feelings about God. Metaphorical stories (such as Jesus' parables) are known to be very concise to get the point across in as little scroll space as possible. To make a larger story like Sodom and Gomorrah metaphor would be to use massive space on a very small moral lesson. In short, why create an entire story with the appearance of truth if you intended it only to instruct? You, being some kind of believing Jew, would not want to mislead later generations, yet you wrote it with details you would only include if you intended to fool somebody--and only somebody in the future. Today, Christian authorities spend years studying Biblical history to determine the best ways to interpret every verse. The validity of scripture is important to them. That makes them more trustworthy than a cherry-picking atheist who assumes the Bible is myth and changes his stance on how it could be wrong. The historical documents called the Gospels literally say Jesus died, resurrected, and fulfilled OT prophecies. Where is the metaphor in that?
