Perhaps the greatest achievement of Christianity is the uncanny ability to get people to believe some parts of the Bible are metaphorical (e.g., Genesis does not really say the Universe was made in 6 days) while they believe other parts are literally true (e.g., Jesus really did turn water into wine). It’s entirely arbitrary.
But I’m being dishonest. Christianity actually has no methodology. It has no way of determining how one thing is true and another is false. How could it? Theology is the best claim any religion can have, but even then it only works if everyone agrees on some basic premise (e.g., God exists). And even then there’s no way to be sure what to believe; theology is an arrogant form of literary criticism. Anyone who has bothered to make any interpretation of any novel with any amount of symbolism knows that without direct knowledge of what the author meant, it’s all a crap shoot. Some interpretations may be more sophisticated than others, but none can be certain. The Bible, another book written by people (in this case, the few literate members of an otherwise illiterate society), is no different. It contains no methodology, no defined ways of knowing. It can’t inform anyone of anything except by faith.
And that’s not really being informed, is it?
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: theology, Thought of the day |
For the Sake of Science 
You nailed that exactly correct, Michael. I attended a lecture by a famous current best selling author of fiction a week ago (Dennis Lehane) and people were asking the motivation or genesis of certain scenes (several of his books became movies). The author was amused by several of the questions and responded with “now I wish I had thought of that, but no”. When asked why a certain character had a certain first name that fit so well, the author responded that a certain tune was running through his head that day. This shows how even modern fiction can be so widely misinterpreted by modern educated people. The interpretation of fiction in the bibles gives crap shooting favorable odds.
You can say whatever you want but many parts of the bible are considered historical fact (or at least in line with how events were typically recorded at the time, many embellishments by the victors and so on).
There are a great deal of discoveries that have been made using the bible as a starting point.
Some parts are fact, some parts are not and some parts have not been proven either way. It’s not all subjective choices made over whats real and whats not.
Just the opposite, there is almost no evidence that anything in any of them (OT, NT, Koran) is true and lately there has been evidence by serious scholars that proves that scenes did NOT happen.
Yes, they are called apologetics and they are usually good for a laugh or three.
Archeological discoveries I don’t really think those fall into the category of apologetics.
Almost every text written more than a few hundred years ago has a very embellished view of what happened. That doesn’t mean it should be discounted as nonsense and totally inaccurate historically. History is written by the victor after all.
You mean like this archeological find?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100622/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_archaeology
Meaningless. This just means that it was fabricated somewhere 80 years after it allegedly happened and before ~350 years after it allegedly. Too bad that there is no record of it happening at the time in Jerusalem even though there were scribes and historians recording everything that actually DID happen.
Oh ok, everything in the bible is made up. You’ve certainly found proof of that.
I guess the historians such as Josephus and Pliny were corrupted somehow.
Josephus: born after the alleged happenings.
Pliny: both elder and younger lived in Rome. Elder was a young child on the date of the alleged death and resurrection. Younger was born after the alleged happenings.
Lets see, The Christians in Rome today still get most things wrong on things that happen elsewhere. They tried denying priest pedophilia and deny that condoms are useful against AIDS in Africa. They want to make Mother Teresa a saint for her work of encouraging poverty, disease and education. We wont talk about Nazi Ratzi.
Historians seldom live in the time they chronicle.
Still on about the priests? Still safer in church than schools, lets work on pedophilia.
They don’t deny they are useful against AIDS, I’ve never heard that. They have a philosophical opposition to them.
Mother Teresa did a lot of great things. I think you’re nuts on this point.
The pope before he was the pope, was conscripted into the Hitler youth and than drafted into the German air force than trained with the infantry before deserting. Even if he had joined of his own free will that doesn’t make him a nazi anymore than serving in the Army under Obama makes you a democrat.
The bible has no more conflicts with what archeology has provided us than any other work of the time. The Bible is didactic literature; it wants to teach, not just to describe. We try to make the Bible something it is not, and that’s doing an injustice to the biblical writers. They were good historians, and they could tell it the way it was when they wanted to, but their objective was almost always something far beyond that.
Modern scholars have shown that things like 40 years in the desert never happened since it would have left evidence of that many people living in that area.
Hardly historians. Their purpose was to control others, especially the uneducated (almost everyone at that time). There are scare stories and incredibly ridiculous promises of afterlife rewards. How anyone with an IQ over 60 can believe in the sun being stopped, resurrection, walking on water, manna from heaven, one day’s oil lasting 8 days, rising in a chariot to heave, etc. is truly amazing to see how gullible people can be.
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Your still trying to make the bible something it is not. Try looking at some of the chronicles of Alexander the Great. You want to see some embellishment you’ll find it. The things we can’t confirm through archeology are still considered rooted in fact, we just don’t know how much.
Modern scholars like whom? Its safe to assume there were not as many people as the bible says and that they may not have been there for 40 years. You also have to remember that none of the land marks that were there in that time exist today. Mountains included, since their names will have changed. Makes it a very tricky business.
Archeology has a large amount of assuming, no one can say with a great deal of certainty what happened and most don’t try. They are theories that will never be proven.
Many people think it has to be history or nothing. But there is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, what did the biblical writers think they were doing? Writing objective history? No. That’s a modern discipline. They were telling stories. They wanted you to know what these purported events mean. No archeologists can tell anyone what it means, and most don’t try.
Scholars like Bart Ehrman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
…who was devoutly religious (evangelical Christian) until he studied the NT. His 20+ books are brilliant in how they pick apart early Christianity.
it is nearly impossible to find traces of large Bedouin encampments in the Sinai Desert from 200-300 years ago. So would one expect the remains of large encampments after 3,000 years?
There are a number of well known cases where we have explicit written records of peoples existing but have absolutely no archaeological evidence for them:
1. Edom and Seir in the late bronze age – referred to in numerous Egyptian documents.
2. Arabs in Neo-Assyrian times – referred to in numerous royal records of Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon, Esarhaddon, etc.
3. The early Nabataeans- referred to by Diodorus of Sicily and Hieronymous of Cardia.
4. The Sinai Saracens of the Byzantine period – referred to by Ammonius, Egeria, Nilus,Procopius, et.al.
5. Bedouin of the Medieval period- referred to in Bedouin historical sources.
6. Bedouin tribes in the first part of the 20th century – known from modern sources.
The point here is that, especially in the latter relatively recent case, a lack of remains does not necessarily prove that something did not happen. Likely it just means there may not be anything left or possibly we aren’t using the right techniques or looking in the right place