Good to know. So what about the symbolic implications of man’s authority over woman? Doesn’t that still (even symbolically) lead to man’s domination over woman?
The hydrophobic ones, duh!
…oh… wait…
There is no contradiction. It’s just the same tale, told two different ways.
[1:27] So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
[2:21] So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
[2:22] And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
In the first G-d creates Man & Woman. In the second, it’s told how He creates Woman.
Also read:
So which of the stories is held to be true for most Christians? There are important implications in each different story, and I’m trying to get at the root of some issues regarding male domination and regarding domination of the earth.
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I am under the impression that most Christians are either unaware of the multiplicity of original sources of the Bible or else have been exposed to it but reject it as an untrue claim. A good portion of them believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, which is a phrase that can range in interpretation to mean anything from “God dictated it line by line” to “The various people who wrote it as well as the later people who selected which bits would be incorporated into the volume we now call the ‘Bible’ were inspired by God to write and/or make editing choices in accordance with God’s wishes”. I would think people who believed along the latter lines would be OK with the notion that Biblical scholarship reveals different original documents melded into one a long long time ago and would say that whoever did the redacting and editing was also divinely inspired to do so in accordance with God’s wishes. But I can’t say that I’ve been told that, specifically, by anyone who identifies as a Christian.
Naah. Well, more accurately, their Mesopotamian/Egyptian/Other antecedents may well date back to the Bronze Age. But the Levant was Iron Age from around 2000 BCE, and the Old Testament was first written 1400 years after that…they’re not the same myths, is what I’m saying.
I get that they were written around then, but it’s thought that they go back a thousand years before, right?
If the genesis (heh) of the myths are from the bronze age, I’d say that it’s fairly reasonable to call them that, since the point of calling them bronze age myths is to characterize them as primitive.
Well, exactly - the aim (all in the cause of objective rationality, obviously) is name-calling rather than historical rigour.
But aren’t many of the myths from the bible pretty clearly derived from those antecedents, such as the garden of eden, Noah’s flood, etc. from the Epic of Gilgamesh?
You’re off about a 1000 years, but yeah 700-600 BC would be the early iron age.
:smack:
What is the problem?
You’re right, 1300 BCE - 1000 BCE or so, serves me right for not looking it up.
Either way, the point stands - the myths in the Old Testament were recorded in the Iron Age, they’re Iron Age myths just like Jack and The Beanstalk is an English fairy story even if its antecedents are Stone Aged
The antecedents are that old, the Hebrew versions of them, we can only date to the Exile period or the period just before.
They’re both true, and neither of them are, for differing values of “true.”
Speaking as a liberal mainline Christian, neither creation story is an accurate account of how the world and we humans who populate it came to be. There was a big bang, the earth cooled, and humans evolved. In that sense, non-fundamentalist Christians (which made up most of Christianity prior to the late nineteenth century) will have no problem stating that the creation story is not factually true - see the Catholic take helpfully posted upthread.
On the other hand, things can be true or contain truth without being factual or historical. Christians believe that both the Jewish Scriptures and the New Testament were written by people inspired by God and attempting to understand God’s relationship with humankind. The various stories in Genesis are myths, but they help us understand what the ancient Jews thought about God and mankind’s special status with God. We can find truth about God revealed in those myths and others as we trace the evolution of our understanding of God throughout the bible.
So, the fact that there are contradictory creation stories in Genesis is not something that has to be “explained away” any more than the fact that both stories contradict the scientific record does. That literally doesn’t matter because that’s not the purpose or point of the narrative.
By the way, OP, you say:
Can you provide chapter and verse? God is not quoted in the NT very often, and I certainly don’t remember hims saying this. I do remember the Apostle Paul, I think, stating that he did not permit women to be in authority over men, but I don’t remember his exact rationale.
Closest I can see is
[QUOTE=God @ Genesis 3:16]
16To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
[/QUOTE]
I have yet to find anything closer to the assertion by the OP.
Oh I know that you can look at the Genesis story and say that she was created second, and argue that she sinned first (although that has been debated: after all, she was tricked by the serpent). And that her husband will rule over her. But I’m asking for a NT cite where “God” says that’s the reason women should not have authority.
Okay, I did the OP’s work for him. 1 Timothy 2:12-14:
- Not said by God. Said by the author of 1 Timothy, traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul but usually considered pseudo-Pauline.
- Not a command. “This is what I do, and here’s why.”
- Written in the context of a first century paternalistic society. Not the only trace of misogyny in Paul’s writings, reflective of that particular time and place, which must be considered in the interpretation of the passage.
More to the point, not attributed by the author to God, but to himself. This is his policy; he never says that it’s God’s. Elsewhere (1 Cor 7) Paul (if we assume that it is Paul) distinguishes explicitly between what he says, and what he says Jesus said, so Paul’s assertion of this policy does not imply a divine commandment to emulate him.