What is “the Law”?
I dunno, but if you fight it, it’ll win.
In this context, Torah, the commandments found in the first five books of the Bible, deemed by Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians to be the literal commandments of God (in the Christians’ case tempered by the abrogation of dietary and ceremonial law by Jesus).
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”
We are Devo.
I’ve understood the literalist position to be based (at least in part) on:
-The argument that Jesus is reported as appearing to take the OT, including Genesis, literally
-2 Tim 3:16 - “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”
Literally, that means the Law will always be in effect and says nothing to justify a literal interpretation.
Again, this literally says nothing about the literalness of the Bible.
Except that:
- II Timothy is attributed to Paul, and is not reporting Jesus’s words or instructions.
- II Timothy (and its sister Pastorals I Timothy and Titus) are believed by textual critics not to be the work of Paul himself but a second century writer impersonating him.
- Whoever wroote II Timothy did not write the sentence you quote, as in the original Greek it is not a sentence, but a couple of phrases in apposition to the reference to the (Hebrew) Scriptures Timothy had learned in childhood in the previous verse. In short, that “sentence” is an artifact of translation, Miles Coverdale or King James’s men having decided that English readers could not handle a long Pauline four-verse sentence about where Timothy might find resources for evangelizing and instead broke that off, supplying the two "is"es to turn it into an independent sentence. It is no more Paul defining something about “all Scripture” in the modern sence, i.e., the modern Bible, than are Sarah Palin’s opinions the universally-accepted standard of Americanism.
Frankly, though I know Mangetout was explaining the perspective of others, people using that verse in isolation to “prove the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible” pisses me off royally.
I will toss this back at you, as you are an Israeli Jew and, I assume, a person more familiar with the Torah than a suburban-Chicago Lutheran. Are they all to be taken literally? Where’s the metaphorical/literal cutoff? How can you tell?
The Qur’an supposedly encourages critical reading much more than it does the inverse, but I can’t provide cites for this. I remember reading an interview with a progressive muslim, who’d been discussing with an imam, asking where the Qur’an said you should take it litteraly. He’d answered that it did in lots of places, but asked to provide a cite, he’d spent half an hour looking, before he got two assistants to help him, and after another hour or so, they came up with something quite unrelated.
The Buddah also says something against taking anyone’s word on its own virtue, and I think it’s even the opening lines of some book, but I can’t remember which one. If anyone does, I’d love a reminder, as I’ve been looking (lazily) for it for a while.
Your explanation is possible but what I find inconsistent is that this microscopic analysis of literalism does not happen to the same degree with Herodotus and Thucydides writings which also took place two thousand years before 1700 Enlightenment.
Again, I’m not saying historians and scholars do not scrutinize Herodotus Histories and Thucydides Peloponnesian War – they do… but nowhere to the same degree as the Bible regarding literal vs metaphorical interpretations.
IMHO there is a difference between fact which of from man, and truth which is of God. God’s Word is literally truth, but man does not understand what truth is (Pilot asked Jesus “what is truth?”, Pilot is a man who dealt with facts), man understands facts, and he is full of facts that define his reality, most of which are lies.
When we come to God seeking Him, in the process He teaches us the difference between truth and fact. Until we learn what truth is we can not understand the scriptures as literal because we don’t understand the language it is written in. And by language I’m not talking about Hebrew or Greek but the language that speaks to the heart, not the head. It is a language that only God can teach us.
True, they scrutinize Herodotus for lies, untruths, shadings, things that were just made up, things that were politically correct at the time, bigotry (unknowing) and bigotry (knowing).
Yes, but not the same type of “literal vs metaphorical” scrutiny.
I think this puts kanicbird firmly in the camp of non-literalist.
I’m not sure what your question or point is.
Historians recognize that Herodotus, Thucydides, and others wrote from particular perspectives and simply take that into account when either relying on them or quoting them. (See, for example, Victor Hanson’s observations about Thucydides in his recent A War Like No Other.) While Cicero applied the title “Father of History” to Herodotus, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, he also picked up the epithet “Father of Lies.”
On the other hand, Christian apologists in the literalist tradition, (and, to a lesser extent, Jewish apologists working in a similar framework), have a specific need to view the works literally that historians, literary critics, and religious apologists who do not share that viewpoint do not have. The issue of whether the bible must be literally true does not arise on its own, but in reaction to the claims of those who have decided that they must present it as literally true.
Consider the words of Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century in his long “literal” exegesis of the book of Genesis (.pdf). He gives very lengthy “explanations” of what it “really” means, but in the middle of that discourse, (in Chapter 19), he also notes
That is not the assertion of a person who holds that every word must be literally true.
I’m saying that if I use your explanation, then the default way to read Herodotus and Thucydides is to read them metaphorically instead of literally because they are written 2000 years before the Enlightenment… unless…
… you create an “exception” to the ancient writings rule by adding this human judgment. To me, this reasoning is circular.
Interesting coincidence, I just finished this book last night.
I understand that but I’m saying that I can’t use your “framework” for when to read and ancient piece of writing metaphorically vs literally without self-referential circular reasoning.
So should we read ancient Hammurabi Code of law metaphorically vs literally and why? Does the word “death” carved into the stone tablets mean death or black color or silence of sound or does it just simply mean cessation of life as we normally would interpret?
I guess I’m looking for a consistent reason that does not require self-serving human judgment.
Nothing in the Bible really even acknowledges that there IS a Bible as such. The Bible is not one book, but a library of books which were mostly written independently of each other. The authors did not know they were writing part of a larger “Bible.” They each thought they were writing their own individual book.
So the Bible doesn’t actually say anything about “the Bible” as a whole at all.
It might be clearer to say, instead of an either/or option for “literal” vs. “metaphorical”, that mankind has always written in a variety of genres, that truth may be conveyed through each, and that holding the Bible up as “literally true in all details, or else unreliable” is a product of the modern literalist movement within fundamentalism.
Plutarch drew lessons from the lives of famous Greeks and Romans; writers from Xenophon to Gildas wrote history in a mode that pointedly included moral points. Storytellers from the Neolithic to Disney took liberties with fact in the service of telling a vivid story with one or more points (“morals”) to it. Myth and legend were not seen as fictional, false – they were seen as means of explaining the culture of a people and how it understood the universe around it by reference to its past.
The first century writer putting a speech in the mouth of a major character in his narrative did not intend that people take that as a vrbatim transcript of what he actually said at that time and place, any more than a news reporter using an indirect quotation (“Sen. Kennedy said that…”) expects his readers to take his paraphrase as a precise quotation of what words were said.
Even Biblical literalists recognize that figures of speech, tropes, stories, poetry, etc., are found in the Bible. They simply hold that any part of it which is not “obviously” (to them) figurative must be understood as literal reportage. And in this, they fail to take into account that aspirations to give literal objective reports are very much a modern invention.