[Serious] The Story

[Neo-Scholastic]

@Belacqua, yeah, more people seem to be interested in politics than theology lately.

[The Grand Nudger]

Were they ever different things? Food for thought.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Yes, indeed, I have a more esoteric perspective in part because growing up congregationalist we were not committed to a literal reading of Scripture the way say Southern Baptists were. That was the 70's though and it seemed like the more fundamentalist people started forming this wierd Christian sub-culture. Anyway.

I may fall more under the literal category, though I think fundamentalism has more to do with behavior. I think the Bible should be read the way any other piece of writing should—to understand what the author is attempting to communicate. What's interesting about the Bible is that the thing many authors are attempting to communicate is often a vision or divine experience. These are events that linger at the boundary of what the author can understand or recognize. So, it's interesting to peel back the metaphors and similes and try to decipher or imagine what it is that they claim to have seen or experienced.

I've had to take my fair share of classes on perception and recognition. And it's interesting to read how Daniel, for example, saw a man with a face like lightning. You get the sense that his brain is overloading, sifting through his memories and experience, attempting to ground the visual perception to anything recognizable until his brain settles on lightning. The experience is perhaps similar to encountering a branch on the road, and for a split second your brain sees a snake. It's not that the branch looks similar to a snake, the branch becomes a snake. You see scales, eyes, a head, a body, and with a blink of an eye your perceptual system gains coherence and you see a branch and nothing else. 

To tie this in with my original post, I think the same thing can be done with narrative. We've learned a lot about how the brain processes events and transforms them into stories. So, it's interesting to read Genesis or the Gospels and pay attention to how the story is being told and get a sense for what the author has seen or heard or is attempting to make sense of.

[HappySkeptic]

I may fall more under the literal category, though I think fundamentalism has more to do with behavior. I think the Bible should be read the way any other piece of writing should—to understand what the author is attempting to communicate. What's interesting about the Bible is that the thing many authors are attempting to communicate is often a vision or divine experience. These are events that linger at the boundary of what the author can understand or recognize. So, it's interesting to peel back the metaphors and similes and try to decipher or imagine what it is that they claim to have seen or experienced.

Why should I care what someone saw in a dream or a (possibly drug or fever-induced) vision?  Likewise, why is something that an old author is trying to "communicate" with me more important than something any author is trying to say?

I put vererated or classic literature in an "interesting" category.  Maybe I'll get something valuable from it, or maybe I won't.

[The Grand Nudger]

Daniel seems like an odd example for the initial assumption you describe, though? There was no daniel to have an experience that needs to be explained by neurology.

Do you ever wonder if making initial assumptions like those causes you to miss a great deal of the content of the narratives?

[Vicki Q]

-and yet...jewish people remain in the world, and don't appear to agree that this is what their establishment myths or legends are referring to.  

Thank you for your reply.

The Self-Glorification Hymn from the Dead Sea Scrolls asserts, from the first-person narrative, a messianic human who has been exalted into heaven with a status above the angels. This figure rhetorically asks "Who bears all griefs as I do? And who suffers evil like me? Who has been despised on my account?" to imply that he has been despised unlike anyone before, modelling himself on the suffering servant from Isaiah's servant songs.

"The Messiah --what is his name?...The Rabbis say, The Leper Scholar, as it is said, `surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God and afflicted...'"–Babylonian Talmud: (Sanhedrin 98b)

It was unsuccessful until the romanizers hit it.    ..............?  The first proto-christians in rome...as we're both aware I'm sure, were apprehended as ignorant yokels who believed in shit like zombie god-man and cannibalism....and any remaining attempt to aggressively proselytize on behalf of judaism proper (ala the pharisees jewish universalism)would just be rebellion, because that's pretty much how the roman public saw jewish people and judaism.  Having recently been in open rebellion, and all.  

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, although I think I get enough to point out that the Romans were unable to distinguish between Judaism and Xianity for a long time.

The arc of the narratives creation...<snip>...political dispute.

I'm still not seeing any actual evidence that the first Xians tacked Judaism onto their Xian beliefs, as you seem to be suggesting.
What were their Xian beliefs, without Judaism anyway?

I suspect that you, (in common with most Xians!), are heavily underplaying the role of Judaism in the NT. The centrality of the Kingdom of God, the role of Israel in sorting out humanity's problems, the Holy Spirit as a takeaway Temple, these and other vital Jewish concepts are are core elements to The Story as told by the first Xians.

In miscalling what happened “appropriation”, you don't provide evidence for an alternative version of History. Please explain what you think happened, and then please give me historical evidence for why we should believe it.

Xianity was a split from Judaism, which happened because those closest to Jesus had an immensely powerful set of experiences that convinced them that the Jewish Messiah had inaugurated the Kingdom of God.. That is far and away the best explanation of the beliefs of the Early Xians.

[Vicki Q]

The interesting thing about stories is that they're fictional.

When we refer to events in our reality, we don't call them stories, after all.

Sometimes we do:

Boris

[Jehanne]

Daniel seems like an odd example for the initial assumption you describe, though? There was no daniel to have an experience that needs to be explained by neurology.

Do you ever wonder if making initial assumptions like those causes you to miss a great deal of the content of the narratives?

Not to mention the fact that the Book of Daniel was a post hoc forgery.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Daniel seems like an odd example for the initial assumption you describe, though?  There was no daniel to have an experience that needs to be explained by neurology.

Do you ever wonder if making initial assumptions like those causes you to miss a great deal of the content of the narratives?

One of the interesting things about narrative is that it comes embedded within a point of view. And even if you don't think Daniel existed, the story is still being told from his point of view. When people tell personal stories in real life they usually construct two landscapes, one of actions which focuses on what the protagonist did, and one of consciousness which focuses on what the narrator feels and believes. Daniel, in this chapter, is clearly filled with that internal landscape: he describes to us how it felt to have that experience, how his muscles weakened, how he felt fear, how he fell to the ground.

Another thing that often characterizes narratives of personal experience, is that they tend to revolve around unexpected or troubling events. They are attempts to resolve the discrepancy between what was expected and what transpired. Those are usually the stories worth telling. And there are many ways a narrator lets the reader know what their troubling event was. In Daniel's case this is communicated by his response to it. We know he was personally distressed by the event because he lets us know it was distressing. Or rather, he shows us how his body responded (e.g. unable to speak, unable to breathe) and we infer distress from that.

That mirrors a lot of how people tell their personal stories.

Now, am I missing more content than that? No, because I don't believe there is more content that the author is wanting to communicate. That isn't to say it's not interesting to see all the places people take biblical stories and their interpretations. However, I see those interpretations more as a window into the reader than the author. And I like to keep the two separate.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well..there's certainly a hell of alot of content that the author of daniel used those sorts of narratives to tell us. Daniel is the product of the maccabean revolt.