Getting back to the question in the OP for a second … it’s really pretty psychologically consistent with the way the disciples react all through the gospels. They don’t really believe anything extraordinary’s going to happen until after it happens. This comes up time and time again. And that’s pretty human, TBH. Part of the point about the choosing of the disciples was that they were mostly just ordinary guys with nothing special about them, and they spend most of their time going “holy crap what just happened THERE!”
So. They spend three years following round after this amazing dude watching him do incredible things, occasionally participating in doing incredible things with him, and at the end of it all even he is not a match for the Roman empire. They haven’t read the book all the way to the last chapter, they don’t know what’s coming next. They’re scared off their collective nuts. What they’re clearly thinking at that point is “well if even Jesus couldn’t square off against the Romans then what chance have I got?” They run like rabbits and they don’t come back till the women - who either had more guts than they, or felt they weren’t in as much danger - tell them there’s something worth coming back for.
Total nitpick, and I agree with everything else you said…but did the people who wrote the earliest books of the Bible…or the Assyrians (or others?) who wrote the books that Genesis borrows from…know the world was round? I was under the impression that this discovery was relatively recent.
At what point did the Egyptians know the world was round? Their cosmography, at least in the earliest times, seems to partake of a fixed sky and a sun-boat that travels underground.
I had thought it was the Hellenes who demonstrated the world’s sphericity, although others, including anyone on a seaport, might easily have made the key observations.
It may well be true - it probably is - that the cultures that produced these texts thought, or assumed, that the world was flat.
But the OP asks about Christians. The roundness of the world has been known since before the time of Christ. Christians have always engaged with these scriptures in the knowledge that the world is round, not flat. And opponents of Christianity have known this too. Neither of them ever thought - except as noted below - that the unreliability of the Bible on this matter was an objection to Christianity.
It’s only in the nineteenth century that you get - ironically enough - rationalist sceptics inventing and then embracing the myth that the church formerly taught the world was flat. And they do this because, mired as they are in the modern mindset, they cannot wrap their heads around the idea that the authority of scripture could possibly mean anything to anyone other than its 100% factual reliability. They are biblical literalists, in other words.
Now you’re the one excluding the middle. Even wikipedia’s article on Biblical literalism says, “Literalism does not deny that parables, metaphors and allegory exist in the Bible, but rather relies on contextual interpretations based on the author’s intention.”
But that’s really beside the point, because when you insist it’s a modern phenomenon, you’re narrowing down the definition of literalism to a specific reactionary movement by people who have seriously examined the scriptures. You can’t seriously claim that the vast, vast majority of Christians, at least until the 19th century, didn’t believe in a literal six day creation, or a worldwide flood, or all the miracles of Jesus, along with historical howlers like the Slaughter or the Census. You can’t seriously claim that even today, let alone for most of the last 2000 years, the typical Christian analyzes all of that into some combination of allegory, metaphor, and higher truth. You have to know that it’s much more likely that they are simply unaware of the contradictions a literal interpretation raises, or when they are, they uncritically accept lame explanations like Luke’s genealogy being of Mary rather than Joseph, or the link Hector gave to a harmonization that retained most of the contradictions.
I don’t pretend to know what you think; I’m just assuming your intelligence. If I’m wrong about anything I said above about what you claim or know, please correct me.
Maybe it was kind of a “how dead are you?” kind of thing. You can raise some people - who died…peaceably, let’s say - but you can’t, or don’t want to, raise somebody whose body had undergone the kind of damage Jesus’ body had undergone. Like at the end of The Monkey’s Paw.
Or, maybe Matthew was prone to exaggeration. Only in John’s gospel does even Jesus himself raise somebody from the dead. His lieutenants? Forget it.
I would like a cite on that. Not on your psychoanalysis of skeptics, which seems pretty condescending and arrogant, but on any important agnostic’s attack on the Bible being based largely on a claim that it teaches the earth is flat.
Seems like a straw man to me. I’ve listed many examples of Biblical contradictions and scientific or historical absurdities in this thread, any of which would suit the purpose better. I would think that with things like the Flood and the six-day creation, which undoubtedly were believed as literal events by most Christians for most of the last two millennia, skeptics wouldn’t need to bring up things like a flat earth.
The great deist Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, a two-part attack on (organized) religion in general and Christianity in particular, around the turn of the 19th century. He goes through the Bible book by book, pointing out all sorts of contradictions and absurdities (highly recommended, although he gets some things wrong). He mentions a flat earth only twice, and both times, it’s just used as an example of mistaken beliefs that used to be widespread. He never attributes it to the Bible.
If anyone did, it was probably because he mistakenly believed, as many people still do today, that people thought the earth was flat until Columbus proved it was round. Your assumption that everybody knew about Eratosthenes is on a par with the pictures this thread has painted of some Middle Age peasant shoveling pig shit, while pondering the layers of metaphor and allegory in the Matthew and Luke.
No, I’m not saying that. I suspect that for much of history people accepted, e.g. the creation story and the flood as historical, simply because they had no better evidence suggesting otherwise. But where they did have better evidence - e.g. the roundness of the earth - they had no problems accepting that over scripture.
It’s not, in other words, that they didn’t accept the historicity of the creation account, etc. It’s that they weren’t invested in accepting it; it wasn’t the foundation on which their faith was built. They weren’t biblical literalists in the modern sense, in the sense of understanding the authority of scripture and its substantial or total historicity as being basically the same thing.
The quote with which you opens says that even modern biblical literalists concede that the bible contains parables, metaphor, allegory, etc. Are you suggesting that pre-modern Christians didn’t even accept this? 'Cause I’m not seeing any evidence of that.
I accept that lots of people may not have been particularly scripturally literate, and so may not have been aware of tensions or inconsistencies or contradictions. If they became aware of them, a couple of reactions were possible - rationalise the inconsistency away, as with your example of the genealogies; understand them as symbolic or metaphorical, and we have abundant evidence of people doing this; or - the option I suggest you are overlooking - simply not be bothered too much about what the correct explanation is, since they don’t share your (characteristically modern) focus on historicity as a touchstone for inspiration/authenticity.
As for today, I absolutely do think that the the typical Christian is aware of at least some contradictions or improbabilities in scripture, and is most likely to explain that to his own satisfaction by acknowledging that scripture is not history or journalism, and employs other genres of literature which make use of symbolism, metaphor, etc. The people who can’t do this are the ones we identify as fundamentalist biblical literalists and, in the countries I have lived in, those are a pretty small minority of Christians. If that’s not your experience, perhaps you and I are simply meeting different Christians?
In post #26, that wasn’t an atheist message board on an atheist website that discussed the events in Matthew 26: 51-53 as if they actually happened, and not as if they were allegory or parable-it was a Roman Catholic message board on www.catholic.com treating the events as if they were real and trying to make it fit into the timeline and match up with the other books.
According to The United Church Of God, it was a real event, not an allegory or parable.
Likewise, Jehovah’s Witnesses on this website treat it as a real event.
My claim was not that anybody’s attack on the bible was “largely based on a claim that it teaches that the earth is flat”. It was that there were sceptics who asserted that the church taught that the world was flat. Andrew Dickson Whitehas been cited to me by a contemporary sceptic who still believed that the church taught that the world was flat. White is, I think, also responsible for propagating the sceptical myth that the church opposed cremation on the grounds that it would make resurrection impossible. Before White, William Drapercited the church’s supposed teaching of a flat earth as “evidence” of the church’s hostility to science.
I don’t assume that everybody knew about Erasthenes. Most people probably neither knew nor cared; they were too busy shovellling shit. Anybody who cared to know, howver, could know that the world was round, and certainly anybody who was literate and privileged enough to be in a position to read scripture was likely to have known this, or to have found it out if the question interested him. Augustine comments on the tension between the scriptural description of the earth and the geographic reality, so the tension was known not only to Augustine but to everyone who read him. It was hardly a secret, then.
You were doing very well until your last paragraph. Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter to Christians at all. In my experience, when a Christian notices seeming inconsistencies for the first time, he goes to an older friend or family member, who calmly explains the principles of Bible study, and then all is well again.
On the contrary, the “inconsistencies” matter a great deal indeed to the atheists. They expend a great deal of time and effort to find them, and then say essentially “Look at what I found! Hur, hur, hur! Where is your precious God NOW?”
For people who claim to disbelieve in God, they certainly go to great lengths to find anything, no matter how small, ridiculous, or illogical, to “prove” that they are right.
Ah! Yes, definitely. I was thinking only of the much more ancient times, in which Genesis was written (or borrowed.) My apologies for losing the context.
Of course, even today, there are still some (very, very few) Christians who argue the world is flat. There is also their slightly more numerous cousins, the Biblical Astronomers, aka Tychonians, who argue the earth does not rotate. Both of these sects are tiny, of course, in comparison to the Absolute Biblical Literalists who rely so heavily on re-interpreting, explaining, excusing, and re-imagining scripture.
Oh for crying out loud! I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole here. Just a few weeks ago, I gave conclusive proof that Biblical literalism is NOT a modern idea.
As a further example, the translators of the KJV were extremely scrupulous about preserving the text. When they had to add words in order to make the translation make sense, they put the added words in italics (which at the time was a means of de-emphasizing something), so that the reader could tell at a glance the actual words that were in the original.
Contrast that to the mindset of modern translators, who in far too many cases, view the Word of God as merely a piece of literature to be edited according to modern standards. (And even copyrighted! – A practice that is dangerously close to blasphemy.)
That is what is meant by “matters.” It forces them to go outside the Bible, to some third party who will make up a face-saving explanation, in order to rescue something that any rational person would understand doesn’t need rescuing.
I’m sorry, but what? What sect do you belong to where Biblical questions are referred to “older friends or family members” instead of church officials and the literature they support? Why would an “older friend or family member” be a good source of information…unless you belong to one of those sects that do not associate with outsiders, pretty much guaranteeing that any “older friends” and close relatives belong to the same sect you do?
How shall I put this delicately? If you’re trying to argue that a particular position is not characteristically literalist, citing a JW website is probably not your best strategy; the JW’s are notably literalist in their approach to scripture.
I take your point about catholicsanswers.com. What this goes to show, I suggest, is that there are biblical literalists in the Catholic church, and catholicanswers.com is the kind of place where you will find them.
The more usual approach to this (and other) text is not to ask whether the event actually happened as described, but rather what it means - the meaning of the event for us generally not depending on whether it happened or not. Here, for example, is Matt 27 in the New American Bible, issued by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, complete with footnotes. The footnotes to these verses note that the rending of the Temple veil appears in Luke and Matthew but the resurrection of the dead in Matthew only, and discusses what each might mean - i.e. why the evangelist would put it in - and you’ll note that the meanings offered don’t depend at all on whetyher the events actually happened or not which, in the mainstream Catholic hermeneutic, is not an especially pressing question. You can consider that it happened, or you can consider that it didn’t, but regardless of whether it did or not the important question is why the evangelist mentions it.
I can see that nothing gets past you. Yes, our “claim” to disbelieve in God is bogus, as you have conclusively proven with your devastatingly accurate quote of a typical atheist, who sounds just like Edward G. Robinson.
Can I draw a comparison with the pre-millenial dispensationalists and futurists? In them, you have a group of people obsessed with the idea that the plain text can never just be a product of its time and originally addressed to the people of its time. Instead, everything has to somehow be coded–sometimes in a way that only makes sense in English, and not in the original Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic–to refer to events in the far future for the text, or invariably the near future for the Lindseys and LeHayes of the world. When everything is a code, when nothing can be internally inconsistent, and especially when everything has to be literally true, there can be no discussion about what something actually means or meant at the time it was written.
To me, looking for inconsistencies in the text and playing gotcha is rather pointless. it only works, at best, as a response to the literalists and they won’t respond well.