“In the story Jesus was taken to a high place. He was shown the surrounding area. Right… only so many interpretations.”
The text doesnt say Christ physically saw all the kingdoms…it simoly says, he was taken up to ak exceedingly high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the earth. We assume that means physically saw them, however, its highly unlikely even by flat earth standards…because:
The known world in christs day already extended far beyond the middle east…they knew of the far east for example.
its always been a physical impossibility to see that far.
Thst means clearly that satan had to have been able to present these too christ in a non physical sense…the high mountain simply provded a means of allowing that space (high altitude) to be utilised for that purpose.
We cant read into the text.
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SkovandOfMitaze
(One 8 ounce steak used as much water as 6,000 ai searches. )
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Or it was just hyperbolic. A story. Took the dude up on a mountain….. showed him the area of the Roman Empire which was their whole world basically, and he saw a few miles in the direction in front of him if Roman occupation and said all this is yours…
Well, sort of, because the concept involved is a piece of ANE thought: high mountains were special places and conceptually it was possible to see more than was physically possible.
These are eschatological images that had a whole literary history in Israel’s prophetic tradition. Bible Project has some good stuff on how to understand them within the frames that were being invoked.
I interpret the temptation of Christ as recounting a vision Jesus had after fasting for 40 days in the wilderness, not as a travelogue. The Gospels recount history, but they do so according to the literary conventions of the time, which allowed for figurative and symbolic language. So some scholars think the whole part about Jesus fleeing to Egypt is not historical as much as it is symbolic and the part about people coming out of their graves when Jesus died (Matthew 27:52–53) is Jewish apocaplypic imagery, not factual information, and the repetition of 2s in some of the Matthew narratives compared to other synoptic accounts reflects stylistic choices not a failure at counting correctly. None of this bothers me because it should be a given that literature needs to be interpreted according to the conventions that produced it to understand what it’s communicating. The idea that we can be confident in our faith if the Bible holds up to all the rigorous fact-checking sessions we impose on it and if and only if all perceived discrepancies are “handled” is a fun game for fundies and atheists to play, but it’s not my approach to inspiration or authority or truth. I don’t believe Jesus is Lord because I fact-checked an ancient document. You shouldn’t either, it’s not a good basis for faith.
It’s important to remember that Jesus’ references to “the Law and the Prophets” is a kind of metonymy that invokes covenant faithfulness. Covenant faithfulness is a hugely important construct, but it wasn’t so much about literally following the rules as it was what united the faithful people of God into a community who represented God well and established the kind of peaceful just rule God intended on earth. Jesus “fulfilled the Law” because his death and resurrection initiated a new kind of covenant, where covenant faithfulness and unifying power to form a community marked as God’s children shifted from Torah observance to “identity in Christ.” This is a huge topic that many Bible scholars have done a lot of work on, and there are so many images and symbols that do a lot of work trying to explain it. Jesus was the truly faithful covenant son of God. That is super meaningful in the context of Jewish history and eschatology.
I also think it’s important to remember that when the Law was originally given, it wasn’t given into a social and cultural vaccum to teach people absolute truths about reality. It was God regulating the practices of the community within their cultural frames so they could worship him in ways that brought more justice and flourishing. They already had beliefs and practices about clean and unclean and blood cleansing sin and sacred and profane spaces. They already had beliefs and practices around war, polygamy, harems, slavery, and women as chattel. This helps explain some of the harder passages like commands for rapists to marry the women they took as war booty. It wasn’t God’s idea, ex nihlo, it was a way of regulating the culture to make it less horrible than it was, so that as a community they would be an example of a more just community than the cultures around them. I think if God could accommodate Israel’s cultural norms and call David, a rapist with a harem, an exemplary man, then God can probably accommodate constructs in our culture around the validity of same-sex relationships or gender fluidity. The gospel challenges whatever culture it permeates to be more just, more loving, more peaceful, more kind, more representative of God’s kingdom, it doesn’t go in and wholesale replace people’s constructs and enculturation with “a biblical worldview.” So, I don’t know, I bet God is less concerned about people in modern Western cultures using they/them pronouns or having a same-sex partner than he is about people who claim to represent him being agents of injustice and hate.
Hugs to you. I’ll still like you and think you have interesting thoughts, if and when you care to discuss anything, from whatever perspective you land in. Sorry you are feeling burdened.
Alrighty. I’ve gotten a lot of different responses that I like. However, one nagging thought that occurs to me is that someone who puts a large demand of burden on the Bible (such as the person that started this whole thought process in the first place) would say “you are just making excuses, but the Bible clearly says this!”
I think it comes down to whatever perspective came to me first. Had I seen this perspective first, I likely would have seen that opposing viewpoint and thought “oh they are just reading too much into this poetry.” However, since I saw the criticism first, it seems that my mind had latched onto this as the primary view that I should take (which I do not enjoy but I guess that’s just how my mind works).
So in addition to exploring particular topics, you also need to look at the underlying topic of hermeneutics. This is a technical term for the way literature is read and interpreted.
I’m suspicious of anyone who says that the Bible message is “clear”. In reality it takes work, and the more important the Bible is to us, the more work we should put in. Personally I consider the Bible to be a life authority, so naturally I want to interpret it as faithfully and humbly as I can.
So this is not about making excuses. It’s about treating the reading and interpreting process with respect.
Note also that this is not special pleading. A lawyer with integrity will interpret statute and case law carefully, because that’s the foundation of all that is important to him. A good classical historian will work just as hard when reading and interpreting the works of the Greek and Roman authors.
(I think that we in 2026 are in danger of forgetting this because we take for granted the work of faithful scholars from the past. We only have to consider the very fact of multiple good quality English translations of the Bible.)
We all read the Bible the way we were taught, it’s normal. There is a good book called Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight that goes through the typical ways Evangelicals approach the Bible and what each approach misses or tends to twist. (Like treating it like a source for inspirational calendars and looking for pretty verses to pull out of context and memorize, or treating it like Paul’s letters explain everything else in the other books, or treating it like a collection of data points for the construction of a systematic theology) It was really helpful for me because sometimes it’s so unconscious you don’t even realize you are doing it.
We worked hard on this CQ when we were writing the Integrate curriculum unit about the interpreting the Bible: It puts a lot of info about hermeneutics into one place and was reviewed and approved by John Walton himself.
It was a visionary experience after a long period of fasting.
Exactly. The gospel writers weren’t doing journalism.
Modern law recognizes the equal rights of everyone in society. It doesn’t matter whether you or I or anyone thinks they are breaking “God’s law” in the way they live their lives. The desire to impose an Evangelical interpretation of “God’s law” on everyone is the backbone of Christian Nationalism and the reason why we find ourselves in the mess we are experiencing today.
I can’t help but give an example from personal experience.
When I worked for Dallas County before gay marriage was legal, my assistant principal was a gay man in his 50s who had lived with his partner for more than 20 years. His partner suffered a stroke and was declared brain dead at the hospital. My principal could make zero decisions with the doctors because he wasn’t legally related. Dallas County policy gave him a half day off to attend his “roommate’s” funeral on Monday. I listened to him sob audibly through the walls and his shut door for two days before I went in and told him to go see his primary physician and get a note to miss work. It was as much for our benefit as for his. Truly, truly heartbreaking.
It is impossible to state “what X says” unless one knows the language X is in, which includes the literary form. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone claiming “the Bible clearly says…” who wasn’t reading the Bible not as what it is but as their worldview (usually MSWV) changes it.
My father was a Missouri Synod Lutheran Pastor in San Francisco during the AIDS/HIV epidemic from roughly 1981 into the 1990s. He ministered, with compassion, to the afflicted as well as to his own mixed Deaf and Hearing congregation and to other pastors from outside of the city and state during those years.
I’m sorry for your loss. I’m really glad that things have changed since then, and here’s to hoping that these extremist groups that want to overturn some of this progress “get caught in the traps they laid,” so to speak, in the courts.
I suppose adding the factor of social media user with an axe to grind isn’t going to help either?
I wish there were more places like Biologos where thoughtful discussion on the Bible could occur directly between atheists and Christians. Not to jump the gun, but I’m sure many thoughtful atheists would probably agree with this point. However, that doesn’t generate traffic or engagement for the algorithm so I’ll never see these people in the forefront, especially with social media .
“…I also noticed that when the Devil went to tempt Jesus, he brought him to the top of a mountain to see the whole world, which we now know is a sphere. Meaning, you cannot simply see the entire planet from a single mountain…”
You sort of answered your own question on this one. We consider Earth to be a sphere. But people in biblical times didn’t know that. So, you have to interpret what was written in a biblical context that existed when it was written.
Bringing to the second thought. People of biblical times had a different perspective on just how big the Earth was. The farthest away their knowledge could have possibly taken them may have been just The Orient. Strictly speaking, then, the devil could have shown Jesus the entire of the world (at least all the world they knew about).
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