I am asking you to establish the Jewish consensus you are touting with actual-primary data that is contemporaneous with Jesus as you claim. I have one source from ca 100 years after Jesus died from you. Then you just referenced a boatload of Rabbinic commentary 400-1200 years after Jesus died with your “Midrash” reference. You say you are sure and there must be YEC literature in the first century. Therefore, you are sure or think it most probable Jesus was one as well. What is your evidence?
I am not really interested in what you assume or think must be true about ancient documents and authors when you should in fact just cite them or credible sources saying this. On the internet we all send out words to battle against other words. You will sometimes be required to check your assumptions and demonstrate your claims. Note, I didn’t generally disagree with you at all on this but I would like the evidence. Sometimes things we think are true are not. So if there is this major consensus at the time of Jesus, please cite us some sources as opposed to anachronistically assuming first century Jews viewed the Old Testament the same as modern fundamentalists. What did Josephus believe (he’s closer to Jesus), what about Philo? Any other literature? What ancient Jewish source contemporaneous with Jesus have you actually read? I see a lot of anachronism and assumptions in this thread.
Also some people argue one way…well they believed this so we must. I look at it from the opposite perspective. What does it say of modern fundamentalists if they have the same scientific viewpoint of people living 2,000 years ago? It’s an intellectual tragedy. In the journey of progress they haven’t even made it to the dark ages yet. We need to be moving forward. Revelation itself is progressive.
Many problems are created or made worse by not realizing Jesus while on earth had a human brain. It did not contain the infinite knowledge of the godhead. Jesus had to be toilet trained, learn to talk, and learn the teachings of the scripture. He learned these from his elders (and parents). Any special knowledge beyond that was the occasional revelation from the godhead to his human brain. So Jesus would have believed everything his community believed, even the beliefs which we now know were not correct.
Herb Spencer.
What is “literal”? The central tenet of modern young-earth creationism is that the one-week interpretation of Genesis 1 is the only possible “literal” interpretation. But Josephus goes into figurative interpretations of the days; unsurprisingly, so do Philo and Origen. Jewish readers in the first century would be much more in touch with the cultural background that was not obsessed with scientific authority, and probably would be much more aware than modern readers of the juxtaposition of one “day” in 2:4 with the seven “days” of chapter 1 through 2:3 and the more than one day’s worth of activity in chapter 2 relating to creation of animals and humans that are all in day 6 of chapter 1 (of course, they didn’t have chapters and verses, which would also tend to decrease the tendency to isolate one part from another.) Not that the idea of some incompetent redactor throwing together incompatible bits and everyone before modern critics being too stupid to notice is very plausible - putting the two together indicates that the original compilers considered them to be compatible in some fashion. But what the modern YEC movement claims to be THE reading of Genesis 1-11 is treating it as a rigid “just the facts” modernistic account rather than taking the literary characteristics seriously. Certainly, the number symbolism would have been much more familiar then than now, judging by Revelation, even if the specific Mesopotamian uses of a similar seven day framework to symbolize perfect completion were long forgotten (they even share some of the grammatical peculiarities that don’t match what one would expect for talking about calendar days).
A simple NO from me. Jesus was a man of his times, culture, traditions as were all of those who participated in the written formation of the Bible we have today. Those who continue today in Literalist reading of the Bible and insist that characters identified in the Scriptures had to be real people/Adam , Eve, Noah, Job…and longevity of life #’s are actual are simply reading-understanding the texts incorrectly. The same can be said about End Times foolishness. the words are “dead”. “The Spirit makes alive”. My 2 cents.
No, of course not. Jesus was and is the embodiment of truth and Young Earth Creationism is not truth. Jesus did accommodate his teaching to the limitations of his audience. He knew that what they believed about the creation, in the absence of more accumulated knowledge on their part, was an approximation that would allow him to make spiritual points. Among these are the facts that the present age is finite and that loving obedience to God is a matter of urgency.
Orthodox Christian belief is that Jesus was fully human. As it states in Philipians he “emptied himself of his divinity.” Thus he was sinless but not omnipotent. Thus he probably shared the same scientific and other beliefs of most 1st century Jews.
I’m not an expert on 1st century Jewish worldviews, but my impression is that most first century Jews believed in a literal Adam that lived 4000 years ago but it was probably not an important question to most of them as it is to most of us.
You have to read the Biblical creation naritives for what it is. An ancient creation myth answering the type of questions ancient cultures we asking. Which had much more to do with things like what is God like and what does it mean to be human than things like how old is the earth and what is the biological and geological processes that brought life and matter into the state that we now know it.
Lucretius, describes the Romans’ belief in a young earth,
and details the empirical evidence pointing to that conclusion.
Yec was not tainted with the pseudo intellectual / science that
so disgraces its promoters today.
Even Sir Isaac Newton believed in a Young Earth yet he was in a state of denial.
He accurately (for that time) calculated the distance of Sirius and was appalled by distance of the “backdrop stars” far behind Sirius that could be Millions of lightyears. He made a comment that questioned how could the backdrop stars look so far if it was because of the parallax effect.
The speed of light was just beginning to be measured in Newton’s day, so that would not have been a serious problem for chronology. Geological evidence began to point to an old earth in the late 1600’s and became conclusive by about 1775. The consistency of the speed of light was not realized until much later.
@Fernando: Did Jesus even care how old the earth is? Maybe the question never came up. (We’ve had numerous conversations regarding the antiquity of the earth and the cosmos – do a search on ‘antiquity’. Here’s a fairly recent one involving ‘fossilized’ teddy bears.)
My point exactly. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the places where Jesus is portrayed as espousing YEC are all off-hand throwaway comments taken out of context from situations where He was talking about completely different things. It’s eisegesis quote mining, pure and simple.
There’s a scene in The Chosen where Jesus is talking about the Pool of Bethesda with His disciples. One of them asks Him how it works, to which He simply replies: “I’m sure someone will figure it out some day, and then they’ll tell everybody.” Such a comment may be a fictitious element in the dramatisation of the Gospel stories, but it’s a highly plausible response, and it’s also the most plausible thing I could imagine Him saying if anyone had asked Him how old the Earth is.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
210
They are faithfully honest, true. They do not have our minority, privileged epistemology.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
211
It was Sir John Flamsteed’s 1672 work on Mars that gave us the distances of Saturn. Newton used that, the inverse square law and a few other assumptions to calculate Sirius’ distance in AU. I presume you mean within the same order of magnitude.
JC was very ambiguous on this subject. Why?
Because there were far more important things for him to talk about.
Few things bore me me more than what the bible ambiuously says about the origin of earth life etc
There are enough problems of huge relevance in todays crazy world about which Jesus had a LOT to say. Lets focus on those things. And learn
Good point, Speedy! And welcome to the forum. It seems to me that a lot of effort is spent in trying to get the Bible to say what people want it to say, not only in the words of Christ but throughout the scriptures. We should spend our efforts trying to understand what God wants us to learn from it.
