:dubious: Yew gonn burrrn, baw.
Doesn’t this completely debase the word “truth”? People can construct any number of contradictory allegories, metaphors, etc. interpretations of the same passage and all of them are equally a “religious truth.”
I think that’s why this comment is accurate.
Flat Earthers start with the flat earth assumption. They construct various geometries that “prove” the earth is flat. However such geometries are constructed post hoc to do just that and when you try to survey or navigate on the surface of the earth using them, they don’t work. It seems to me this is the equivalent of “allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic. parabollic. etc.” Those propounding these “religious truths” start with the assumption that God exists and the Bible accurately describes Him and His characteristics, then define any contradictions out of existence by allegory, metaphor, symbols. parables. etc.
You’re kidding, of course, but in my parents’ and sisters’ churhc, they’d say pretty much exactly the same thing: either it’s all true or none of it’s true. I used to try to explain “false dichotomy” to them but I gave up.
I mentioned this in conversation the other day, but I didn’t have a cite. I assume you have a few in your hip pocket.
The current canonical book on this subject is The Bible Unearthed, by two Israeli archaeologists named Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman. You can find a decent review here.
Here’s an article detailing some of the conclusions of Finkelstein and Silberman as well as Egyptologist, Donald Redford about the Exodus.
To give a very brief summary of the evidence, ANE archaeologists have discounted the literal historicity of the the Deuteronomic histories for some time now (with some division over what the historical roots of the story might be) based on the archaeological evidence which indicates that the Israelites emerged from indigenous Canaanite tribes within Palestine around the 10th Century BCE. No trace of evidence has ever been found that they ever left or were ever enslaved in Egypt (they were supposedly in Egypt for 400 years, so it would be all but impossible not to leave some archaeological indication of their presence. It would be equivalent to an inability to find any evidence that Africans had ever been enslaved in the US). There is no linguistic influence on the Hebrew language which appears to have diverged directly from Canaanite. No trace of human presence has ever been found in the Sinai for anything near the period in question, even at Kadesh-Barnea, an oasis where the Israelites supposedly spent 38 of their 40 years in the wilderness. Archaeologists have been able to find the remnants of transient campsites for very small nomadic groups, but they haven’t been able to find a single piece of evidence for more than a million people living at one oasis for 38 years.
There was also no evidence for any influx of Israelites into Canaan and no Israelite destruction of Canaanite cities. The fortified city of Jericho, for instance, had already long been a ruin by the alleged time of Joshua.
Thanks guys.
I have been under the impression that Deuteronomy is to be regarded as a work of fiction devised to strengthen the hand of the Jahvists. Those who advanced the idea of a single God of everything and everyone, Jahvists, were in constant conflict with those who supported many gods, one for each of the various aspects of living. When the young king Josiah was elevated to the throne the Jahvists saw a chance to secure their position and the book of Deuteronomy, which purports to be a series of speeches advancing the Jahvists position by the great hero Moses, was fortuitously found in the Temple. And from that time on Jahvism was the dominant religion of Israel.
That is the current prevailing theory, yes. It also secured the Temple as the center of Yawist worship and helped to cement the political power of Jerusalem.
This statement assumes a certain definition for the word “Truth”. That may seem at first blush like a semantic point, but I think it goes to the heart of the matter. Ultimately, there are philosophical issues lying behind the idea of “Truth”.
IMHO, philosophy can be broadly categorized into three general areas: (1) Metaphysics, which attempts to determing the untimate nature of reality, (2) Epistemology, which concetrates on questions of knowledge and perception, and (3) Aesthetics/Ethics, which focuses on methods of evaluating things. I think systems of philosophy tend to emphasize one of these branches more than the other two, almost to the point where one could say the foundation of a particular philosophical -ism is to be found in one of the three. Ancient Greek philosophy, for example, started in metaphysics–Plato’s theory of forms and Aristotle’s own Metaphysics are clear examples–and answers to related questions in Epistemology (“What is truth?”) and ethics (“What is the right thing to do?”) are driven by the answers found in their metaphysics (I’m not claiming that every ancient Greek arrived at the same answers to these questions, only that they tended to address metaphysical questions first and used those results to tackle questions from other branches).
Religious philosophy, on the other hand, seems to be grounded in Epistemology; “How can we know things” and “what is truth?” is premised before other questions about, say, reality and ethics are answered. The clear example I’m thinking of here is Scholasticism; glibly, this philosophical system took as a given there was a truth present in sacred texts and there was a method by which we could attain this truth. Although that idea of truth-finding was applied specifically to religious questions, the ultimate goal of Scholasticism was to reconcile Greek philosophy with this “truth”, and as such the focus is more on a method of inquiry than specific metaphysical (or even ethical) conclusions.
The value of the Scientific Method has shown the severe deficiencies of the Scholastic method, but the framework is still pretty much unchallenged in religious contexts. In short, “Truth” in a religious context is defined differently than in a context devoted to the primacy of observable reality. The criticism that such truth can be constructed any-which-way is somewhat invalid because it presupposes the primacy of a uniform standard of metaphysical reality, one against which truth–ever subservient to reality–should be measured. Not taking sides here, just explaining the mindsets and the problems they contain.
Incidentally, many modern philosophies–I’m thinking Existentialism here–seem to be grounded first and foremost in Ethics; they first tackle the question of “What is right behavior?” before attempting to apply what they’ve learned to questions of Truth and Reality.
In addition to what CJJ said, I would add that on occasion a theological or moral point can be made through the device of storytelling in which the literal historicity of the story is irrelevant. An obvious example would be the parables employed by Jesus. The lesson of the Good Samaritan can be understood and makes no difference at all if any Good Samaritan actually existed and they would actually be completely missing the point to even argue about it. The message of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (“Whatever you have done to the least among you, you have done to me”) is also very clear and the audience is clearly not expected to take the story literally.
For the OT, I would say that the stories of Job and Jonah are also extended parables not meant to be taken literally but intended to impart other “truthful” messages.
The question of how anyone can know these messages are true is, of course, a question of faith in the authority of the Bible, not empirical verifiability, but I was trying to explain how people can believe the Bible contains truth without believing it has to be literal history. I was not trying to say that they could prove it.
To be fair, some religious systems adjust their interpretation of truth based on findings from science. The Catholic Church is one good example. They are careful in not going too far, but I think they acknowledge the primacy of reality as determined by science over a literal reading of the Bible.
Somehow, since the “old testament” was not one book in Jesus’ time, it should be clear that he had no trouble ignoring big chunks of it. Is he quoted talking about Noah and Lot?
Not a chance.
Both of those stories are from Genesis, the first book of the Torah, the basic textual foundation of the Jewish faith – so Jesus almost certainly knew them if he knew any Scripture at all. Perhaps the occasion to mention them simply never arose.
That’s because the RCC has always held that doctrine comes from the Church as well as the Bible, therefore is always subject to reinterpretation. But Protestants have a harder time there, Protestantism being founded on the assumption that the Bible is it.
I understand that truth can be an elusive concept. For example, to borrow from Prof. Homer Smith writing in Man And His Gods, it is true that the moon is a small, flat, luminous disc in the night sky. It is also true that the moon is a large, very dark, spherical object 238000 miles away from earth. These two descriptions of the moon are not directly contradictory and can be harmonized through a knowledge of optics and how depth perception works. However, it is not true that the moon is made of green cheese and this can be demonstrated by going to the moon and bringing back piece of it. This brings us to so-called religious truth, which I’m not sure that I yet quite understand.
This isn’t quite what I understand “religious truth” to mean as we are speaking of it. I understand that parables, like Aesop’s Fables, are a way of illustrating a general principle. It isn’t necessary to believe the details of the story are true in order to see the truth of the general principle being illustrated. In the case of the Good Samaritan, it seems to me that the general principle illustrated is that it is more important for us to care for those who have fallen into misfortune than it is for us to strictly observe a set of religious or ethic boundries.
However the kind of religious truth I refer to is different. For example, it is true that certain dietary laws must be followed in order to stay in God’s good graces. However, it is also true that if those dietary laws are not followed that’s also OK with God. These two “truths” are directly contradictory and I can not think of a reasonable interpretation of “truth” that will resolve the contradiction.
As to philosophy and and their failure to strictly define what they are talking about, I think that might be a good explanations for why they haven’t reached a firm decision on anything for several thousand years.
Finkelstein and Silberman, BTW, theorize that the whole story of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan was invented at some point as a piece of Israelite/Judahite nationalist propaganda – in an age when “right of conquest” was deemed to confer a more legitimate claim to territory than ancient or indigenous occupation.
Well, to use your example, the necessity of dietary laws as maintaining the Jewish identity, held “true” for the Israelites for whom they were written, and still hold true for many modern Jews. The Wikipedia article on the reasons for various dietary laws is pretty interesting, particularly this part:
Why isn’t following dietary laws merely obeying the law? I think the truth here is that you should obey the law. But is the law that certain foods are an abomination because God disapproves true in the abstract? Or is the claim that God doesn’t consider those same foods an abomination true?
This is sort of what I’m trying to get at. I think that to use “true” in this fashion robs it of meaning. After all, it is true to one suffering from paranoia that the world is out to get him. And it is true to some schitzophrenics that the voices told them to kill their mother and father.
It’s really only a question of whether you believe in the authority of the New Testament. If you do, then the dietary laws were rendered moot by the crucifixion. If you believe in the authority of only the Hebrew Bible, then the laws still obtain (albeit, only to Jews).