Regarding the Bible, what was the earliest that (presumable educated) people began making the distinction in evaluating the contents of the Bible, between probable myths & metaphors, and historically accurate information? In other words at what point in history was the first instance of the Bible not being considered 100 historically “true” by most educated people?
For probably the past couple thousand years, there have been “educated people” who took some parts of the Bible literally but not others. For example, in the time of St. Augustine around 400 CE, many educated people knew the arguments in favor of a spherical earth and heavens, but many people interpreted the Bible as claiming that the earth was flat. Augustine didn’t totally buy the sphericity arguments, but acknowledged that if they were demonstrated, the Biblical interpretation would have to be reconciled with them:
I would be surprised if some earlier Jewish scholars, familiar with Greek astronomical models, hadn’t also considered the issue of interpreting such Biblical statements “metaphorically”, though I haven’t got any cites for that.
But you say you want to know the specific historical point at which “most” “educated” people acknowledged the use of metaphor in the Bible…errrff, that’s a bit thorny. Are you counting the recognition of passages that were probably originally intended as metaphor? Like the parables of Jesus, or the verse in Proverbs about the adulterous woman who “eats, and wipes her mouth”? I mean, it’s unlikely that anyone ever seriously thought that Jesus was recounting a literal history of a particular owner of a vineyard, or that the Proverbs verse was condemning the adulteress literally for sneaky eating habits.
If what you’re after is a specific cosmological/historical claim in the Bible that was originally taken literally by all believers, and only later became generally reinterpreted as metaphor, well, as I said, it’s tricky. But I’m gonna nominate the Biblical statements implying a flat earth, and hypothesize that “most educated people” had come to interpret them metaphorically, i.e., not contradicting geosphericity, by no later than, oh, 1400. There, that’s my bet.
Even the Catholic Church has now come round to this way of thinking Times
The issue of which books were “canon” and should be included typically involves at least in part the issue of whether the book in question desribed actual events.
The earliest such debate that I am aware of concerned the Book of Esther. This Wikipedia article discusses some of the issues, but note that it is weighted towards modern debate. Clearly the issue of its historicity goes back at least 2000 years.
In short, Esther was included because of the comforting symbolism of the story it gave the Jewish people. If you lived 2000 years ago and were at all educated about Middle Eastern history you knew it was fiction.
A critical examination of the Bible as authentic history- particulary as it pertained to claims of miracles- had its origins in the Enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There was a movement of “rationalists” who really began to try to figure out what could be historically confirmed and what could not. The rationalists were mostly Deists who somewhat accepted the stories as being historical but as having a “natural” explanation. Jesus wasn’t really walking on water but he was walking on some rocks just under the surface- the loaves and the fishes was a lesson in sharing, etc.) This Deist/rationalist movement had a significant influence on some of the founders of the US, including Thomas Jefferson, who was inspired to complile his own version of the Gospels with the miracles deleted.
There was a German named David Strauss who rejected the rationalist, naturalistic explanations of miracles as being contrived and reaching and as being in direct contradiction to a plain reading of the texts, which clearly intended to describe supernatural events. In 1835 he wrote a book called The Life of Jesus, in which he argued that the stories were pure mythology intended to make spiritual points. His book was, unsurprisingly, quite controversal but ultimately was a scholarly milestone and had a large influence on subsequent Biblical criticism.
I don’t get it. Where does the article say that the Book of Esther was considered fictional as long ago as that? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t talk about any criticism of the book’s historicity (except perhaps for the Septuagint additions) before the time of Luther. What have I missed?