You just can’t help yourself. One word! FCOL Scripture never relies on one word! You delve too deep and take too much inference from the minutia. Scripture is not about the minutia, or the verses, even the chapters or books.
Richard
I’m not so sure.
The older creation account presents God as clumsy, not knowing what is going on and the purveyor of an incomplete creation that He must fix. He does so in a very ignorant manner, by parading all the animals in front of Adam one by one to see if he can find him a suitable mate. Does he not know a kangaroo is an unsuitable partner for Adam? I can see the whole heavenly court laughing at this poor deity.
You can certainly parse them into God is transcendent and God is immanent but there is more than that when I look at the details which disagree on almost everything. The newer creation account presents God in the opposite manner. God isn’t clumsy or ignorant, God’s creation is good, not incomplete and in need of fixing. Not to mention in Genesis 1, God creates many humans, not a couple.
I don’t think its that obvious these are supplemental narratives inspired by God. They look more like library of Jewish texts as there are multiple floods, multiple, multiple genealogies, multiple stories of Joseph and on and on with many doublets and triplets.
Gen 2-3 has led to the nonsense of original sin. Im okay with replacing it with Gen 1 and calling it a day. Isn’t Gen 1 the creation account Jesus referenced anyways?
How do you say it was older and passed down orally for centuries but then say the accounts are independent? I see no reason to suppose the author of Genesis 1 was unfamiliar with the 2nd creation account. I admit I have no solid evidence in the other direction but it looks like a correction and the older account survived. I highly doubt the authors of Genesis 1 meant it to supplement the narrative in Genesis 2.4 -3 if they knew of it. But given the popularity of the older version, whoever put the Pentateuch together erred on the side of being comprehensive over consistent, as they did in so many other parts.
Vinnie
I don’t buy this popular harmonization attempt. The commentaries I read which offer their own translations of Genesis never seem to go this way. I always see it from people trying to harmonize the literal details of the two creation stories.
I also want to point out this is also just a modern harmonization attempt in my eyes.
“What mattered was the point of the stories. The P account answers important questions like why we have a sabbath. The J account answers important questions like “why do we die?” They are, in fact, both then needed as they answer different questions.”
Gen 1 is interested in correcting polytheistic myths as well. The problem is Gen 2.4 on gets why we die wrong. It gets why we toil with the ground wrong. It gets why there are pains in childbirth wrong. It gets the enmity between humans and snakes wrong. Etiological in nature for sure, but completely supplanted by modern science in almost every detail. I can’t see how these are not the points of these stories.
This is also not true. As best I can tell. Josephus and Philo read them literally as well and they are not modern authors.
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Since science doesn’t say that at all, your question is silly.
The odd thing is that Luke does not say it was Malta, he wrote that it was Melita – which is where the deadliest viper in Europe lives in large numbers. How anyone got “Malta” from “Μελίτη”, which in Latin letters is “Melitay”, has got to be weird.
So it isn’t a lie according to anything, it’s a total screw-up by translators. Jerome rendered it as “Militene”, which is not the Latin for Malta, so he can’t be blamed. The KJV has it right, which should have had weight with all later English translations just as many other terms do. The American Standard version also got it right, along with a couple of others, so this probably isn’t a case of picking a place name you know that kind of sounds like the original name and using that (which is all too common) since if the KJV folks got it right then people knew back then that it wasn’t Malta and as late as the ASV it was still known as not being Malta. That modern translations such as the NIV and the NASB get it wrong when the vowels are not at all compatible with the original word – a_a in place of a_i_e – is a travesty.
The problem isn’t anything with science, it’s one of translation and geography – I say geography because Luke says they were in the Adriatic Sea when the shipwreck happened; there is no way anyone whose ship was in trouble in the Adriatic would end up at Malta, the main reason being that once they were in the Adriatic the currents would have tended to keep them in that sea, and Melita is the first island in a chain that the currents would have carried them to.
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Where does it say it’s teaching science?
According to scientific materialism they must be!
If they weren’t meant to be scientific then there is no foundation for trying to make them speak science.
A piece of writing cannot be in error scientifically unless it was meant to tell about science.
No, it can’t – claiming it can explain any Biblical events is a category error. Trying is both bad science and bad theology. Science gives us the Big Bang, evolution, geology, and archaeology, but those cannot be used to explain anything in the Bible because nothing in the Bible is a scientific proposition.
“World wide” in the terms of Genesis was either the world known to Noah or the entire earth-disk under the solid dome that kept the waters above up there.
In terms of commenting on Genesis, all science can say is, “Yes, the earth and such had beginnings, and they exist”. That’s barely a skirmish; making it a battle is pointless, so yes, that’s a battle that doesn’t need to be won because it is an artificial battle.
Depends on how you mean “how” – “By God’s command” matters, and that’s all Genesis tells us anyway.
A small part of the church, from time to time, anyway.
It doesn’t even follow from the text that they were consecutive days; the Hebrew says “a first day”, “a second day”, etc. – only the sixth day gets the definite article, and that’s because there are no more days to talk about; the topic is done.
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It’s universal in the sense of creation itself being undone. Local vs global is a modern construct and has nothing to do with the original story.
My memory is suggesting the answer is “yes” but the desk for vocabulary is poorly staffed today. I know there are several that mean “god-filled”, and a couple that boil down to "filled with wonder/wondrous things. Then there’s one that is what many evangelicals think θεόπνευστος really means – θεοφόρητος, “God-bearing/possessed”, similar to πνευματοφόρος, “spirit-bearing/possessed”. I’m thinking ἐνθειάζω, which would be something like “in-god-ed” is used, plus ἐπίπνους, “breathed (up)on” where agency may or may not be indicated.
So yeah, there are other words that can get translated as “inspired” besides “θεόπνευστος”. I’m thinking that ἐνθειάζω is much more common that θεόπνευστος, the latter being pretty rare (Plutarch being the only example I can think of besides the Timothy instance).
I call that a bit of a stretch. The term πνευστος by itself is “breathed” or “blown”, so this could be rendered “God-blown”, which could shed a bit of light here since being blown by something doesn’t indicate a certain course but rather a certain direction – which in turn fits with the use of “inerrant” I know of in the Fathers to refer to going unerringly, e.g. of a spear thrown and moving unerringly to the target. In similar words the noun portion at the start is indicative of source of the action that follows. So the point of the word is that God is the source, and in contrast to other options which suggest deity taking charge the action is not portrayed as rigidly or strictly governed.
Maybe. If the author worked the way Paul did, his category “scripture” was less bounded than our use of the term; Paul quoted from known Greek translations that get grouped as “Septuagint”, but also from lesser-known ones as well as apparently freely translating from the Hebrew when it suited him. In that case “scripture” could mean the Tanakh from whichever source seems useful.
That he instructed people to pass on copies of his letters in at least one instance suggests he regarded those letters as having authority, specifically apostolic authority.
My understanding is it means God breathed. That’s the best translation I have seen based on my lack of knowledge of Koine Greek in various academic commentaries. But the thought train on how I ended up where I did goes like this:
God breathed. —> Breath of life —> Life giving.
God’s breath is the breath of life. This harks back to the beginning. It’s why I think “life giving” works better than “inspired.” But I could be very wrong. But I would add also to think about the “life giving water” in the Gospel of John. Same idea. Scripture is God breathed and life giving. I don’t have any expertise in Greek so I can’t rule out “inspiration” but my opinion is for the other option and there is another word that means inspiration that could have been used.
Yes, one word, because sentences are built out of words and mean what those words say. Over and over in the scriptures the meaning of statements come down to one word, and sometimes the meaning of the statement is drastically different depending on that word – which is evidenced by the very theological nature of more than a few variant readings.
That reduces it to feelings, which removes any possibility of actually learning anything – one may as well get stoned and high and go with stream-of-consciousness from hallucinations.
You’re choosing to read that into the account – it’s one side of that word (which Richard thinks is pointless, but which totally changes the way God is portrayed).
The chart shows the thinking of someone regarding the two accounts as history, which they aren’t – historical narrative didn’t exist when they were written. “Man created first” is inaccurate since verse 5 assumes the Earth is already physically complete; “animals created after” depends on that one verb; and in the left-hand chart “woman created simultaneously” is reading into the text more than is said. For that matter, “Creation takes one day” is also inaccurate as the use of “day” in the two accounts differs.
He referenced both.
Because they come from different sources. The Garden version is story, the opening one is not. The Garden version is more Sumerian, the other is more Egyptian. The sources are different, which makes them independent.
That doesn’t make them dependent. There’s nothing in the opening one that suggests intent to even address the Garden version.
“Supplement”? I’m not even sure that category applies. The genres are different, the messages are different yet not contradictory.
I don’t see it as relevant to the first account, I see it as a matter of consistency in the second account. God is competent enough to make a man, competent enough to have a way to water the ground (BTW, the word rendered as “mist” can also be translated “spring(s)”, which given the Sumerian connection is actually more likely), competent enough to plant a Garden, competent enough to choose the best trees (which in an ANE garden is a sign of the divine), yet He stumbles over the issue of an assistant to His caretaker? It doesn’t really fit.
You don’t really treat it as ancient literature, do you? I don’t see how it’s any harmonization attempt because it doesn’t harmonize anything I can see. It’s the difference between temple-style rhetoric and campfire-style storytelling. Harmonizers don’t want those differences because they demonstrate that these are two independent accounts, not one.
That’s reading it the way YECers do.
They are imagery illustrating the messages. There’s no intent to teach science, so “completely supplanted by modern science” is meaningless unless you’re a YECer.
To understand a text, we need to interpret it. An apparent contradiction may be a contradiction or not, depending on how correctly we catch the meaning of the original message. We may misunderstand the words of Jesus or the message originating from someone else. Therefore, I would be cautious to claim that some parts of biblical scriptures contradict the words of Jesus. There is a too high possibility that our interpretations are colored by our modern way of thinking and we misunderstand some crucial details in the text.
I think that all messages in the biblical scriptures are context dependent, at least to some extent. There are some teachings that are truly general, like that there is God who is above everything else. Even these general teachings are usually told within a particular context and the context needs to be taken into account to understand everything in the teaching correctly.
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Scriptured is God-breathed which is assummed to by most to be inspired. I do admit it could be different in that iot could be interpreted as God writing through someone. If you check it was clear Paul wrote Timothy… Life giving refers to life in Christ and after life.
Certainly, the books of the Bible are not a systematic theology manual. Nonetheless, the God who creates everything, preserves everything, and takes care of everything - must know all the created things. So, it seems safe to infer that God is omniscient.
Surely, we can misunderstand both the words of Jesus and a message originating from someone else, whether we suppose that they contradict each other or not.
But the question is, how many options does one permit a priori? One may be theologically certain that there can’t be any contradiction between Jesus and the apostles - therefore, any apparent contradiction must be explained away at all costs.
Or one may admit that there could be a legitimate difference between Jesus and an apostle, due to their respective contexts. In this case, we have two a priori options: an apparent contradiction may be explained either by reader’s misunderstanding or by a legitimate difference. To have two a priori options instead of one option is more inducive to honest research.
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I agree with the first part of your phrase but not with the second one. Yes, it’s the Church who recognizes the Bible as inspired while finding there the foundation of her faith. But the Church can’t canonize anything at will. As far as I know, even the pre-Reformation Church has never attempted to canonize the works of her great saints and teachers - Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, etc. Why? The canonical Scriptures of the New Testament must be the apostolic writings - either the narratives about Jesus that were composed by the apostles and their earliest disciples, or the theological and moral teachings that stem from the same circle. The Church can do nothing but preserve the early tradition that some writings are authentic and hence apostolic while the other texts are dubious or undoubtedly fake. The problem is that some ancient churches have preserved the slightly different traditions about the list of the New Testament books.
I know, right? That command “You shall not commit murder…” lots of people think it hinges on that one word, “not.” But Scripture never relies on one word. Many interpreters can rightly understand the command as “You shall commit murder.” Who is to say? We dare not rely on that one word, after all…
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Lol
That word is meaningless out of context. And that was the point, but I am guessing you knew that. Cheap shot. Enjoy it
Richard
Yes.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος – in the beginning the Word was.
Jesus came first; everything else has to match/fit Him.
Apparently that’s really hard for some people to understand, wanting to limit “context” to the verses on either side and maybe some cross-references and ignoring the ancient context of language, literature, and culture.
That’s doing theology by employing human philosophy. Unless I’m missing something, the only thing the scriptures say that God knows all of is human hearts.
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