Did Church fathers and Jesus see the Bible as metaphor?

by leavingwt 22 Replies latest jw friends

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  leavingwt

  Does anyone here believe that Jesus viewed Genesis as being a metaphor? What about Paul? If they believed it to be a historical account about real people, what are the implications? As a JW, I wasn't allowed to publicly entertain such questions.

  In other words, whether you think Genesis was allegorical or not, Paul, the architect of much of modern Christianity, clearly thought it was historical.

  . . .

  If you accept Jesus as God (or part of the Holy Trinity) then you are forced to hold him to a higher standard of historical knowledge than either Paul or Augustine.

  So what does Jesus say about the historicity question? For the most part, very little, but what he does say is telling. In the gospel of Luke, for instance, he mentions Abel, the son of Adam and Eve, in historical terms:

  “So the people of this time will be punished for the murder of all the prophets killed since the creation of the world, from the murder of Abel to the murder of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the holy place” (Luke 11:50-51).”

  Despite some desperate attempts at apologetic explanations for these words, it remains clear that many in the early church, including Jesus, thought that Genesis was based on historical events and real individuals.

  At Pastor Keller’s BioLogos post, the idea that Jesus was wrong about history is troubling a few people in the comment section. Commenter KevinR sums up the implications nicely:

  “The point should be clear – if you do not belief in a literal Genesis 1 and Adam and Eve, you are calling Jesus a person who does not know history. This would be a really strange phenomenom for someone who was there in the beginning, and through whom (sic) everthing was made. If that is the case then Jesus cannot be God either and thus is unable to be your Saviour.”

  This is the essential dilemma faced by BioLogos. Modern science doesn’t just show that creationism is wrong about history. It shows that Jesus was wrong too.

  http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/guest-post-did-church-fathers-and-jesus-see-the-bible-as-metaphor/
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  OnTheWayOut

  Jesus, as represented in the accepted 4 gospels, does fully accept the Genesis/Exodus account as fully historic.

  Those that realize that science has debunked most of the Genesis/Exodus account, but cannot let go of Lord Jesus, will simply say that Jesus is misunderstood by the metaphors/inaccurate account of the 4 gospels.
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  slimboyfat

  Paul used the Genesis account to justify men having authority over women, after all "the woman was made for the sake of the man, not the man for the woman". So either he believed the Genesis account or he was knowingly basing the subjection of women to men upon a false premise.
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  Phizzy

  I doubt that Paul approached scripture as the Bible Literalist today does. He had learned at the Rabbinic schools, and they were not in to viewing their scripture as history or literal truth at all, they would often change the stories when they used them as teaching for their own day.

  See Leolaias thread on Midrash.

  The Jesus of the Gospels it as been argued may have referred to Noah much as we may say "in Gullivers day when he travelled....". about a fictional figure. That argument is poor in the extreme I think, but something similar to the Rabbinic method could have been going on with Jesus.

  Of course, we have no way of knowing what the Historical Jesus said about anything, the Gospels are works of fiction as fantastical as Gullivers Travels.
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  leavingwt

  Side question: What does it really mean to be a 'Bible-believing' Christian? In recent news, Kirk Cameron expressed that he didn't understand why people were surprised by his views on homosexuality, because he is a 'Bible-believing' Christian.
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  Londo111

  "These things are an allegory: the women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, which gives birth to slave children; this is Hagar. "--Galatians 4:24

  "The Law is a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the real things themselves."--Hebrews 10:1

  "Whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction so that we could have hope through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures."--Romans 15:4

  I don't believe Paul, Philo, Origen, even Augustine took everything literally, especially the Creation accounts. These were viewed as allegorical, prophetical, or as parables from which moral lessons can be derived.
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  slimboyfat

  I have never heard anyone ever say "in Gulliver's day when he travelled..." People don't talk about fictional stories that way.
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  Origen loved to allegorize different OT texts to make them more meaningful/appealing to some types of people. He raised some pretty good points on why the Genesis creation account shouldn't be considered actually historical. He was later than Jesus' time though.

  Really hard question to answer about the Historical Jesus. If he was significantly like the Essenes in how he viewed the OT texts, then he'd read more into the texts than just the "historical/factual" surface we get on first reading. Philo who was around the same time as Jesus also viewed alot of the OT as allegory.

  Personally I think the superficial reading is exactly what was meant to be read in many of those OT texts like Genesis.
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  slimboyfat

  I may be wrong but I think early church fathers believed in allegorical interpretations of scripture in addition to the plain meaning, not instead of it.

  There is a fashion among modern liberal believers to say that real Christians never took the Bible literally anyway and therefore evolution is no problem and liberal interpretations of the historical narratives are no problem. But do they really mean to suggest that believers never took the biblical explanation of human origins for a truthful account? For all the sophistry of the liberal rewriting of doctrinal history I find that proposition singularly implausible.
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  I Want to Believe

  slimboyfat: I have never heard anyone ever say "in Gulliver's day when he travelled..." People don't talk about fictional stories that way.

  But they do, just not in those words:

  "This is just like when Neo took the red pill and his eyes were opened."

  "After being away at college I agree with Dorothy, 'There's no Place Like Home.'"

  Frequently these are brought up (like the old Chris Farley sketch): "Remember when..." even though those in the conversation know that the incident in question was fictional, they never spell it out to the other. Just reading the conversation would you assume they thought it was real?