Literal Translation or Nice Anecdotes?

Great Debates
1

After reading the Goliath thread and a few others around this site it brought to mind a question that has puzzled me for a long time.

Is the Bible intended to be taken literally (word-for-word) or is it meant to be a moral/theological guide filled with anecdotal stories?

What is your opinion?

What would the Pope (as far as you can guess) say?

It really chaps my hide to hear someone say that of course the world wasn’t really created in 7 days…that’s just a bit of creative license taken by the Bible’s writers. Yet in their next breath they can say that all homosexuals should be killed because the Bible says so.

Which is it? Who gets to choose? Is there something fundamentally wrong saying you’re Catholic yet pick and choose only those parts of the religion you happen to agree with? How much of a religion do you have to buy in to before you can describe yourself as reasonably being a member of that faith? 51%? 75%?

2

Jeff_42:

I understand your dismay regarding the arbitrary selection of tenets which people glean from the Bible. I’ve never understood that myself. Whether or not the Bible is to be taken literally or not is highly dependent on the particular sect of the religion to which one ascribes. The horde of fundies out there will cry blasphemy if anyone deviates from the Bible, Torah, Koran or other scripture. I personally think the unquestioning mind is narrow – just think what physics would be like today if everyone treated the Principia as a hallowed text and thereby offered no skepticism. Aside from not believing in god nor the miracles of Jesus, it is precisely the dichotomy of which you speak which made me a reformed Catholic.

3

I asked about this over at the LBMB a week or so ago when they were discussing snake handlers. Most of these people said that those who handle snakes are nuts, and that Jesus didn’t mean that literally.

However, these are the same people who say that the world was created 6,000 years ago, because the Bible says so and it would let us know if it were using metaphor.

I’m sorry, but Jesus pretty clearly says that he who believes will take up serpents and drink the deadly thing–not that he can, but that he shall. Seems like picking and choosing to me.

Dr. J

4

“After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree.”
– Revelation 7:1
Well, there you have it! Not only is the Earth flat, it’s square. The bible says so.

5

A couple of things…
I had a Jesuit for a religion teacher in high school. While the Jesuits are often referred to as “God’s Soldiers” or “The Soldiers of Christ”, I’ve always thought that didn’t quite do them justice. Those guys are not just soldiers, they’re freakin’ Marines.
Brother Giblin said once that if you had an unquestioning faith, you were useless to God. That God was not interested in robots. Then someone asked if that was an oxymoron.
“How can you have faith that asks questions? Isn’t faith just that – faith?”
“No,” Brother Giblin said. “You need to have a faith that can reason as well as believe. Let me ask you, do you believe Moses parted the Red Sea, just like in that Charleton Heston film? That is, a thousand feet high, split down the middle, just like that?”
“I guess,” the kid said.
“Can you reason that that’s how it happened?”
“Not really.”
“All right. But you need to be able to hold the two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. That’s not only faith, it’s genius.”
“Waitaminute,” another kid said. "Are you saying we need to use our reason to justify our faith? Use fathe "
“No. Believe what your reason tells you. Believe, too, what your faith tells you. Learning that the one need not eliminate the other, or cancel it out, makes you valuable to God.”
What does this mean? Well, for my part, I haven’t been to confession since. Or church, really. But I still believe/reason/have faith in a God that resembles the one in the New Testament. Sort of.
Another teacher – a regular old priest – said inm another class that THAT (picking and choosing what to believe like that) wasn’t religion, but “me-ligion.”
But he wore a toupee. And the word around school was, you didn’t want to be alone with him. Know what I’m saying?

6

And the answer to the OT is …

yes.

There are very few things in the Bible that can be used, or were intended, as historical fact. The gospel of Mathiew starts out tracing Jesus’ lineage back to David. This is obviously meant to be taken at face value. The obvious flip-side of that are Jesus’ parables - obviously nice stories intended to teach. Moses has some basis in verifiable fact, but there would be no way of independently verifying the jews were worshiping a golden calf when Moses came down from the mountain.

The basics of the bible - Thou Shalt Not Kill, Thou Shalt Not Covet, love your neighbor like yourself, etc. - are easy. It’s the interpretation of the rest that causes problems.

7

Um, actually no. This is being written sans New Testament in front of me, but two Gospels trace Jesus’ lineage back to David (for the life of me, I can’t remember the other one besides Matthew). The problem is - they aren’t the same. Different names, different number of generations. Even worse, one traces the lineage from David to Mary (fine), and the other traces the lineage from David to JOSEPH - who was only Jesus’ foster father (see Immac Concep). The real purpose of including the lineages (and this argument would be a lot stronger if I actually had the Bible in front of me, or could recall the intended audiences for the various Gospels)was to establish Jesus’ authenticity to the differing audiences for the various testaments. Can’t remember the audiences right now, but one obviously believed in matrilineal descent, and the other patrilineal.

8

SUA: almost but not quite right.It is Luke that gives an entirely differnt descent for Jesus. Matthew & Luke clearly contradict one another, here. I really do not understand why they wanted to trace the descent bsck to David, as Jesus (assuming we believe He was the Messiah) was not the son of Joseph, but the Son of God. Luke makes several errors in his geneolgy, prob as he was a gentile.

And Luke is not tracing the descent back from Mary, either.
Mary is a cousin of Elizibeth (mother of John the Baptist), who was a Levite, so Mary was of the tribe of Levi. somewhere, Jesus makes allusions to the fact that the Messiah CAN’T be from David, and alludes it is from Levi.

9

You know, “the four corners of the world” passed into metaphor long ago meaning basically “far and wide” or “from the furthest reaches.” I had been so used to the metaphor that I tend to forget that the ancients may have used the phrase literally.

10

To say what the Bible was “meant” for is a bit hard, as the interpretations of this - and the interpretations of the book itself - have always been a matter of personal aesthetic, usually dictated by the times one lived in.

However, the completely literal translations of the Bible is a relatively new thing. As modernity comes along, it threatens people of faith, and their reaction has ALWAYS been to get more religion. This is not new. But only in modern times has fundamentalist movements taken on such literal translations.

This is not limited to Protestantism in America, however. The parallels between that, the fundamentalist Islamic movement in countries such as Egypt and Iraq, and the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel who block off roads to keep everyone - including non-Jews - from being out after sundown, and even throwing things at ambulances that are out then.

I suggest you pick up a book called The Battle For God by Karen Armstrong. It speaks of this in great detail, and shows how, as far as fundamentalist movements go, the more things change, the more they want them to stay the same.

I noted this in another thread once, but it bears repeting: The irony of the fundamentalist movement in the US is that if everyone looked at the Bible this literally when Jesus was alive and the New Testament was being formed, nobody would have become a Christian at all! Jesus’s presence went against several things that were the “inerrant, unchanging words of God,” and He even did away with Levitical Law!

Imagine what your local fundie would do if the same thing happened today - Guy comes along, does some tricks, and a whole new book is added on, some of which is inconsistant with the other books, and some things are totally changed - how many Southern Baptists would convert?

Yer pal,
Satan

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11

I didn’t realize that the literal translation of the Bible was a relatively new phenomenon. Interesting…

How far can a person ‘choose’ their own interpretation of their chosen religion and can still be considered a member of that religion?

My wife is Catholic. I was raised Presbyterian but consider myself Agnostic. We do not have children yet but my wife is VERY insistent that if we ever have any they be raised Catholic. She claims her wishes win because I’m not really that religious anyway so what do I care (needless to say I’m not fond of this argument but then again I don’t have a church I’d call my own to send my kids to either).

Since then, I have come to question my wife’s committment to Catholicism. She absolutely abhors some of the Catholic Church’s ‘official’ stance on many issues. She does not believe in Papal infallibility and strongly disagrees with many of the encyclicals recently issued by the current Pope. She does not really buy the bit about the bread and wine literally changing into the body and blood of Christ (a very fundamental tenet of Catholic belief as I understand it).

I made the mistake of suggesting to her that she can hardly consider herself Catholic. If anything she’s closer to many protestant religions. How can a person call themself Catholic if they only pick and choose those items that they like about a religion? That’s far too convenient in my book.

For the record, I understand that some interpretation has to happen in any religion. Picking and choosing what to believe in as, to some extent, unavoidable. Except for some extremists most people (including the Pope) would say that the entire Bible is not meant to be taken literally. Heck…much of the Church’s power is based on the fact that people go to Priests and Ministers to have them tell them what the Bible is really saying (same probably goes for Muslims and most other religions as well).

What am I missing here?

12

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this what George Orwell called “doublethink”?

13

JFTR. We don’t know what side of the Mary’s family Elizabeth came from. For that matter, we don’t even know if she was a cousin. The KJV and the Worldwide english (a paraphrase) versions use the word cousin. All the versions, NASB, NIV, RSV, YLT (Young’s Literal Translation), and Darby, use either the word kinswoman or relative.

Tinker

14

I should note that the reference is Luke 1:36

Tinker

Sig - line deleted. Didn’t realize the upgrades made it automatic. It was originally intended to be a reminder to myself.

15

I thought “Immaculate Conception” referred to Mary’s conception, and not that of Jesus? The papists were having some trouble explaining how the son of God could have been born of a sinning human female, so they declared that Mary was immaculate of original sin.

16

Satan:

I’m not sure if the charge of throwing stones at ambulances comes from a genuine occurrence, or if it’s an exaggeration of what actually happened. I can certainly tell you that no Orthodox Jew, “ultra” or otherwise, thinks it is forbidden for life-saving actions to be taken on the Sabbath.

I will admit that there have been extremists who have blocked access to cars and thrown stones at them. These people are generally treated as jokes amongst other Orthodox Jews. On the other hand, the Jerusalem city government of Teddy Kollek and the leftist Israeli governments have been extremely insenitive and even hostile to concerns for the culture and lifestyle of Orthodox Jews, and sometimes this results in violent resistance. I’m not excusing such behavior, but few people hear both sides of the story.

17

And not even the most helpful of hijacks, but really damn funny:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3616/mistranslated_myths.html

18

[QUOTE]
**

This is, in fact, the doctrine. Most non-Catholics (and I suspect a lot of name only Catholics) confuse Immaculate Conception to mena the Virgin Birth.

19

At the risk of posting to SDMB without immediate proof to hand… :slight_smile:

I thought the point was that the Messiah was to be a priest-king and would trace his lineage back to both David and Levi… effectively bringing the kingly and priestly functions under one hat.

20

Tinker: Cousin or kinswoman, makes no diff, in any case they are both Levites, as a Hebrew Jew of that period would only refer to one of their tribe as “kin”. Yes, I use the old KJV, as it has been around a while, and most have a copy. The language is great also.

Appoly: You may have a point here, and they might be indicating Jesus is of both lines, David from father, Levi from Mother.

It is Matt 22;42-45 where Jesus seems to indicate he is not of the line of David, in fact seems to say the Messiah CAN"T be of the line of david.