The Bible

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Aces_Full

500+ Posts
I guess this is really a question for the Christians here. Do you believe the stories in the Bible are real? Or a parable meant to teach some type of lesson?

Such as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (with Satan the talking snake), Noah's Ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, etc?

Do you believe these stories to have actually occurred? Just curious what the majority of Christians believe these days.
 
So you believe all the animals of the world lined up 2 x 2 on a boat and floated around while the rest of the earth was covered with water?
 
This seems to be more of a Quack's board discussion than West Mall.

I don't believe the literal versions of many Bible stories, and I'm about as Christian as the average Sunday morning goer. I've gotten in "trouble" with other Christians for saying so as well. While I do think there's much truth and reasonable advice in the Bible, I think many of the parables are just that: parables. Jesus used parables to get his point across, so it's not unreasonable to think that the Old Testament is chock full of parable rather than actual happenings.

The ones you mentioned (Eden, Ark, Moses) are just convenient ways to get a point across: that listening for God's will should take a high priority in your life. Probably the highest. Since it's nearly impossible to decipher God's will, a bunch of Jewish authors thought it would be better to put it into metaphorical stories. And they weren't the first ancients to do this either. The Sumerians did the same exact thing (Ark stories, Eden, etc.) with different character names. And the Sumerians were about as polytheistic as you could get.

Another good example is the "Massacre of the Innocents" from the book of Matthew. There is absolutely no record of any Roman era governor ordering the massacre of infants/children in his province, or even a general rounding up and killing a handful of kids. There are umpteen Greco-Roman historians like Josephus who would have included info about it. But Matthew (or whatever his Hebrew name was) included it in the Bible to convince law-abiding Jews that Herod was probably the worst dude ever and fulfilled the Isaiah scriptures about Rachel weeping for dead children. It was convenient and made the story have a Hollywood impact.

I think the only "real" miracles were most likely the ones Jesus performed, otherwise, there probably wouldn't be Christianity today. Many cults have had similar foundings, but none of them stuck or became religions with 1.5 billion adherents.
 
Horn11 is of course right that such parables have existed for a long long time and that they were used for instructional reasons as well. Not just Sumerians. Stories of that kind are there in other cultures too, perhaps even older - including in the two big epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana from India (the first being the largest epic in the world - and now considered probably even 6 to 10+ thousands years old). In fact I grew up in India, being told and taught that these were stories to make a point and nothing more (the westerners who came to India were really quick to call them "myths" too). Such as a huge river called Saraswati to have existed somewhere in India, that a city ruled by God/Lord Krishna to have gone under water, and that God/Lord Rama had built an embankment in the sea all the way to island Sri Lanka from India.

It's only in the last 3-4 decades that much actual evidence emerged that a river, ostensibly the world largest, had indeed dried up at the India-Pakistan border (there is still underground water movement there) and a huge city was discovered underwater off the coast just about matching where the epics said it was. An embankment like formation (unclear man-made or not, but awfully smooth in alignment for it to be a natural formation) is there between India and Sri Lanka too. But did Krishna actually lift a whole mountain on his finger, and did Lord/God Hanuman actually jump from India to Sri Lanka like in the epics? Who knows! I now take it as indication that some (or a fair level of) truth does exist behind some of the events mentioned in the religious epics that were called "myths", but may be not all.

I'm not saying anything about how Bible should be viewed, as I 'm not qualified to do that. I'm just talking about how I view the Hindu epics, which also use such stories to make a point (actually a whole set of logical principles) about life and the world. As for the unnatural and unbelievable things mentioned, nobody can say if they happened or not, unless you were alive when God's will made such things happen ("God's will" itself having its own meaning in Hinduism). But not all aspects of the stories and parables are meaningless or made up, either.
 
I do believe that they are literal unless there is something the text to suggest otherwise aside from a skeptic saying "that couldn't have happened." Pretty much every argument against the literal interpretation seems to center around implausibility or impossibility - but when you believe in a God with actual power and ability to affect nature and life, then I'm not sure why it's so difficult to comprehend that power actually being used. If God doesn't have the power to cause miraculous events, then I'm not really sure why anyone would see much value in a book based on long series of lies.

In reply to:
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"If God doesn't have the power to cause miraculous events, then I'm not really sure why anyone would see much value in a book based on long series of lies."

I didn't say it was lies, I said it was parables. I'm sure the authors of the Bible didn't intend to mislead people with vain stories. They wanted a way to convince people that God's will was #1, and the way they wrote it was both beautiful and sometimes metaphorical.

"I've never understood how some people use this as an argument against the Bible's authenticity."

I didn't say that... in fact, I more than agree with the idea that the Bible is authentic in terms of how/where/when it was written and for what purpose. But the fact that other religions use similar stories in their narratives speaks to the authenticity of their religions, instead of pointing towards Christianity or Old Testament Judaism as the ultimate end.

"This is a common way to discredit scripture - we don't have proof that it happened and therefore it didn't..... That's not really proof that it never happened."

And this is what kind of gets me about the people who argue for literal Biblical interpretations. The whole "we have it in writing and you don't" thing. There are probably thousands of other historical references like this as well, religious or not. Some Greek historian in 380 BC would say something about an Archon and it would get written in stone forever, regardless of how true, biased, or one-sided that information was. I guess I'll just state that if you can't believe that something would be written without actually happening, then that's a pretty large impasse to overcome in terms of agreement. I've heard many different variations defending the Massacre story, including that Bethlehem couldn't have had more than 1000 people and children aged 0-2 would have only made up about 10 kids, but none of the other gospels or any other historical document from that time period referenced it. AND there's a lot of primary sources about Herod's cruelty, including the ones you mentioned later in your post. If we're supposed to accept that Matthew knew something that everyone else didn't, it seems to be a stretch. And this isn't like Moses or information from 2000 years before Christ, this is during an era of pretty decent record keeping.

"Luke was an eyewitness to Paul's miracles - was he also a liar or was Paul just a really good magician?"

I think Paul was the right place at the right time to deliver the message about Christ's redeeming grace. He was a former hater turned convert who spoke multiple languages. He's the kind of guy you want on your team, so it's rational to believe and write that he was doing all the right things. The miracles performed in the book of Acts seem to be things that could happen in 2014 AD as well, like healing sick people and removing demons. I don't think those are necessarily miracles in the "doesn't happen any more" sense. I think stuff like that happens all the time. And I think stuff like that happens all the time today because of Christ's love, and sometimes because of explainable things like medical knowledge.
 
when Noah left the Ark,, he told the animals to go forth and multiply, except the snakes, who were adders.
 
ProdigalHorn gave a detailed and thoughtful reply in support of the Bible. To add my own 2 cents and in reply to the original poster, yes, I believe the stories in the Bible are real. There are certainly books of the Bible that are poetry (e.g. Song of Solomon), musical/remembrance in nature (e.g. Psalms), instructive (Proverbs, letters of Paul), etc. but the Old Testament Bible (Genesis, Exodus, etc.) and New Testament Bible (Matthew, Luke, Acts, etc.) is presented as real history.

The Bible gives answers as to who the first humans were (Adam and Eve), how/why the world is full of evil today (and why we are are all contributors to the problem), how the nation/people of Israel came into existence (and why they have faced persecution from ancient through modern times), and gives a multi-generational set of prophecies pertaining to a coming/future (as of the time of their writing in the centuries before Christ the) Messiah. The most important story of the Bible, of course, is the virgin birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Neither Jesus' virgin birth nor his resurrection could have occurred naturally, yet the Bible asserts both events to be true and real.

The story of Noah's flood (and Ark) is/was also a real historical event. It's ironic that secular scientists (at NASA and elsewhere) are eager to find evidence that Mars was once flooded with water, yet they ignore the proposition that the Earth (which is 70% covered with water) was ever covered by a global flood.

In Luke 17:24-29, Jesus himself cited Noah's flood and the destruction of Sodom as evidences of God's future judgement and his own return. From this passage, it is clear that Jesus' Jewish disciples believed in the historicity of these events, or else Jesus' comparison would have been non-sensical.
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I believe the Bible is an amazingly accurate rendition of ancient history and of the life and mission of the early church. It is a human creation, unworthy of worship, but certainly to be honored and venerated.

I don't see it as written by a perfect God, who understands astronomy, physics and psychology unlike the ancient scholars who wrote the Bible. Some of the early stories were handed down word of mouth, accurately portraying God's relationship with man, but perhaps no longer completely factual down to the literal detail.
My worship is of God and Christ, thus I don't give the letters of Paul the same weight as say words written in stone by God on Mt. Sinai. or that came from the mouth of Jesus.
 
Crockett I won't go down the road here because it's West Mall and we're already wayyyy off the board's intent, but I'd love to understand a little more about your perspective on Paul, Jesus and the Law. It sounds as if you feel that they should be pitted one against the other, and I would argue that they all fit together quite well. If you want to start one on Quack's, I'm glad to join in.
 
Burnt Orange Bevo, what is a self described Christian? As opposed to what? No matter what a Christian believes about the bible, they receive salvation from Christ, right? Whether they agree with you or not??
 
I personally speculate about how the human mind and political structure impacted the various chapters of the Bible. We start with 40 different authors put forth testaments in different languages and in different times spanning nearly 1,500 years. We then have to consider the diaspora of the Christian faith in the aftermath of Jesus's execution and the subsequent rivalries between different power centres ultimately resulting in Roman pre-eminence. Then sprinkle in the very human behaviors (lust, greed, hate, envy, etc.) polluting Papal office. Take into account then the intrigue driving offshoot Christian denominations and the mixing and mingling of church and state through the 17th, 18th, and 19th Century.

I agree that God ultimately inspired the message of the Bible but he also allows mankind free will and we have usually used that free will to make dumb choices and go against his teachings, so I don't find it illogical that mankind screwed up his word and message just like we screwed up so many other things.
 
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