Bible

[Anonymous No.17686109]

Did most Christians throughout history believe the strange stories in the old testament were real? If they always believed them to be allegorical, then how did they figure out what was allegorical and what actually happened?

[Anonymous No.17686123]

Speaking of the Bible I legit got filtered by Numbers. Should I slog through it or just skip ahead to the new testament?

[Anonymous No.17686156]

>>17686109
If you're a 'simple believer's, it's true. Once you start questioning, the handwaving starts
>>17686123
You can skip all chapters who are just archives of facts numbers etc

[Anonymous No.17686183]

>>17686123
Read the Books of the Prophets and then read the Four Gospels and Acts; after that, you can go wherever you want

[Anonymous No.17686246]

>>17686109
if you're not autistic, you can tell where their is and isn't literary flourish

[Anonymous No.17686256]

>>17686109
most of it is pretty implicit and allegorical. and from modtly non materialists not much is too out there. most of it is attributing fate and phenomenon too god.

David slew goliath, Job was hit by pestilence and misfortune, the isreals lost because they lacked in faith and were vain, etc.

the more out there tales are usually visions or were from a “mythical” time like moses.

i could definitely see people believing these things more intuitively rather than in terms of straight physicality.

[Anonymous No.17686445]

>>17686123
All Scripture is inspired, but not all of it is equally as important. You can tell which books were most important to the Jews by:
1) How many copies of the ancient manuscripts we have (like for example which books the Qumran community had the most of)
and
2) How many times the books were quoted in the New Testament

When we do that, we find out that by far the most important books are:
Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms

If you know those OT books, you'll have a good theological foundation.

[Anonymous No.17686652]

>>17686109
>what was allegorical and what actually happened?
Christ points out when He's speaking figuratively and when He's speaking literally most of the time.

[Anonymous No.17686679]

>>17686256
reddit

[Anonymous No.17686683]

>>17686445
>Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms
Thanks for the list anon

[Anonymous No.17686699]

>>17686652
That's when He's very obviously speaking in parables. What Christ does it explain it to the apostles what he meant afterwards.
I meant things like putting every single animal on the planet inside of an impossibly large wooden ship, the earth being only 6000 years old, etc.

[Anonymous No.17686712]

>>17686699
>> the earth being only 6000 years old
it never says that in the bible you disgusting disengenous faggot, either you are retarded and have never read the book you are discussing or you are a liar.

[Anonymous No.17686732]

>>17686712
I think they get that number from adding up everyone’s ages from Adam to Jesus

[Anonymous No.17686747]

>>17686712
>>17686732
What this guy said, you can get an estimate from the genealogy of Adam and his progeny's abnormally long lifespans.

[Anonymous No.17686756]

>>17686732
>>17686747
and that's stupid

[Anonymous No.17686760]

>>17686652
>old testament
>christ
Come on, you can do better

[Anonymous No.17686765]

>>17686760
Jesus talked about Jonah and adam and eve as if they were real, because they were.

[Anonymous No.17686771]

>>17686712
in a twist of fate, it turns out that you are the one who has never read the book that he is discussing

[Anonymous No.17686783]

>>17686771
find me the verse where it says "the earth is 6000 years old" doing some pilpul and adding shit together is not the same thing

[Anonymous No.17686788]

>>17686109
Not necessarily. Augustine, for example, was not a literalist (at least not for Genesis), so we have grounds to believe that not all christians throughout history were. That being said, I'd imagine that the vast majority WERE literalists, especially during the medieval period when the church was at a zenith of it's power and were the only central source capable of disseminating biblical knowledge

[Anonymous No.17686795]

>>17686109
there is not a single element of the bible that is not clear allegory or clearly literal. This is only a problem in the modern day because of braindead athiests, materialists and crypto athiests the latter of whom claim they believe in the resurrection and other major miracles but doubt god can make a donkey talk or that snakes used to have legs.

[Anonymous No.17686804]

>>17686732
>>17686747
Anglicans started doing that a few hundred years ago. But historically most people didn't interpret it that way because it was generally understood that people only mention their cool ancestors when talking about their genealogy.

[Anonymous No.17686824]

>>17686783
What kind of stupid shit is this?
>Alice bought 4 cookies on Monday, 3 cookies on Tuesday, and 2 cookies on Wednesday.
>"WHERE DOES IT SAY ALICE BOUGHT 9 COOKIES REEEEEE"

[Anonymous No.17686838]

>>17686783
>>17686712
I wanna hear you give your take on Noah's Ark next. Tell me about how they never listed every single animal by name and description and so there's no verse where all the animals board the ark.

[Anonymous No.17686839]

>Did most Christians throughout history believe the strange stories in the old testament were real?
Yes and no. On an everyday level, the Bible was like the Christian world's Iliad. It was a source of folk stories and mythology, many of which are just interesting and fun. Theologians also believed in it, but they had differing views on allegory. There are probably books on this that you could find easily enough with a Google Books search and then just read the introductory chapter or something.

If you're interested in allegorical approaches to the Bible, look into Origen, and also Philo, who had a similar role for Hellenistic Judaism and probably a great influence on Christians as well. But Origen at least is one of the major early figures who argued for a multi-layered interpretation and exegesis of the Bible as a living text, so that not everything had a simple and direct meaning, and many things had multiple meanings. Sometimes this is described as a saturated concept or saturated symbol.

>then how did they figure out what was allegorical and what actually happened?
You might be interested in the history of biblical criticism. The religious conflicts of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation caused a massive growth of biblical hermeneutics and exegetical methods and schools for the obvious reason that conflicting interpretations were in the air and people had to develop techniques and arguments more sophisticated than their opponents'. This culminated in the 19th century with the heyday of classic critical analysis of the Bible, the era when scholars figured out the composite and mutually dependent nature of the Gospels, when Wellhausen was positing his so-called Documentary Hypothesis (check this out on Wikipedia). The consequences of this critical period included a general crisis of faith among Christians who no could no longer easily believe in the simplicity and unity of the Bible, and also much of modern oriental studies, because people began to see the biblical stories as part of a larger tapestry of "panbabylonic" myths and culture. Then the Ugaritic corpus was discovered, along with the Nag Hammadi and Essene texts (Dead Sea Scrolls).

Check out the book The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Or check out the introduction to Renan's Life of Jesus.

[Anonymous No.17686855]

>>17686838
bet you think it was 2 of every animal, says in the bible it was 7, read the bible.

[Anonymous No.17686918]

>>17686855
Come on mate

[Anonymous No.17686927]

>>17686855
>ok so a man rose from the dead which is something medical science might never achieve.
>but you are also saying some guy built a floating petting zoo? Thats just a bridge too far my man. I can't believe in this made up shit.

[Anonymous No.17686929]

>>17686918
Genesis 7:2

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE KILL YOURSELF

[Anonymous No.17686956]

>>17686929
Calm down anon.

[Anonymous No.17688013]

Its all real but since labcoats dont deserve heaven, God set up a wild goose chase with all the meaningless science shit lying around in the dirt and stuff.

>then why dont miracles happen anymore?

Well to be saved requires a leap of faith (in Jesus) which sorts the wheat from the chaff. God wants you to be united with him out of your own free will. If he gave direct proof then there would be no point to all our suffering and trials. Back in the day when miracles happened, everyone believed in the supernatural anyway so it didnt take away from the test. Nowadays if something like that happened it would defeat the purpose

[Anonymous No.17688041]

>>17686929
>>17686855
Show me the passage where it says 7 of every animal? You showed me a passage referencing 7 pairs (that's 14 by the way, but everybody ITT knows you think arithmetic is heresy lmao) for clean animals and a pair of every unclean animal.

[Anonymous No.17688171]

When you have in your hands a poem, you cannot intend to interpret it the same way as if it were a handbook. The same happens with myths, they're a different subset of literature and so they require a special method of interpretation. In the book of Genesis, there are narrations of mythical nature, such as the Creation, the Fall, Noah's Ark, etc. But some others are not, like Abraham's covenant with God, the Exodus, or the Revolt of Maccabees. Those are historical, they mention locations, people involved, countries we know of, etc.

[Anonymous No.17688211]

>>17686445
Actually the Qur'an is a better avenue of discerning the validity of the OT and Injeel books.

[Anonymous No.17688231]

>>17686747
This leads to an even better question. Who fathered Cain's wife and the people of the land of Nod if it wasn't Adam and Eve?

[Anonymous No.17688264]

>>17686109
They were generally taken to be historically true but they also had allegorical meaning for Christians, usually interpreted as presaging events in the New Testament. For example, the Exodus was believed as a literal event vut it also presaged the flight of Joseph and Mary to Egypt.

[Anonymous No.17688273]

>>17686109
Allegorical, biblical literalism is a pretty new and particularly an American Protestant phenomenon.

[Anonymous No.17688369]

>>17688273
To add to this Jews were interpreting their texts allegorically before Jesus and Christianity. Greek pagans also did the same. There was a church father (idr his name) that wrote and exegesis that kind of chided Christians for interpreting Genesis literally.

[Anonymous No.17689175]

>>17688369
St Augustine?

[Anonymous No.17690170]

Bump

[Anonymous No.17690487]

>>17688013
miracles and signs still happen, but there's no reason to dish them out to those who have heard the truth and have been afforded the luxury of education to inspect it for themselves. Check out some of the missionaries in parts of the world that are in poverty and have never heard the gospel, it's like the book of Acts all over again

[Anonymous No.17690494]

>>17688211
>imagine following a divine book that mistakes Gnostic texts with Christian theology