Ehhhh… I don’t think it is that black and white. It is a faith once and for all given. No other name under heaven. Etc.
Same with Tremper Longman and Craig Keener… I would be surprised if Keller was unable to communicate it to others, but I doubt he changed anyone’s mind on the spot.
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I don’t think anyone considers all translations to be equal. So they wouldn’t be equal in whatever authority we place in them. Some translations are better than others. Even though we will also disagree on what matters most in a making an accurate translation.
The view I am primarily locked down on is that reasonable people can disagree about the inerrancy and/or authority of the Bible.
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I struggle with this statement as Genesis Chapter 3 says:
14So the LORD God said to the serpent:…
15And I will put enmity between you and the woman,and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head,and you will strike his heel.c”
Genesis Chapter 3 clearly tells us that the Messiah was prophesied immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve…that is long before Watchers and Nephilim…and especially Babel!
Atonement for sin is universal for all alive on this planet after the garden of Eden. Sin entered the world and corrupted all of creation. therefore the modern evangelic view is absolutely correct and i would challenge the claim the Israelite would say Eden, Watchers, and Nephilim. Atonement became necessary immediately after Eve then Adam sinned…hence the prophecy in Genesis 3:15.
BTW, note that the prophecy in Genesis Chapter 3 confirms that its Eve’s seed will crush the serpent’s head. This is quite significant, I think its the earliest affirmation of a virgin birth we have in the bible. Given God was talking directly to the serpent (Satan) at this point, it would have been absolutely clear to Satan what this prophecy was referring to.
Except the serpent isn’t identified as Satan. This identification isn’t in the Hebrew Bible and was first developed outside of the Bible in the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypse of Moses. Neither of which made it into our canon.
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So? Does the announcement of the main course of a formal dinner mean there won’t be anything after it?
I’m wondering if you’re attributing too much to the Adversary. Sure, he was the first, but that doesn’t mean he’s like a king over other rebel elohim – they disobeyed God, so why would they be any more obedient to the Adversary?
Besides which, we find in the New Testament that the Messiah did in fact tackle all three: By the time of Christ, there were no more Nephilim nor their ‘successors’ the Anakim and Rephaim, etc., but a good case can be made that demons in the New Testament are the spirits of those giant types that were stuck on Earth because they hadn’t been rounded up and chained in darkness the way the rebel elohim had been, yet because of that heritage they weren’t allowed into Sheol, either – essentially they had been free to wander the Earth until Judgment Day rolled around. This matches what the one said to Jesus:
“What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
There’s lot of content in that query! First, since they were elohim they could see the things of that realm, so they knew the moment Jesus arrived there just Who they were facing, and the power/authority He had, and that they were going to end up like their non-human antecedents the Watchers, chained away in darkness (or chained with darkness, however that might work). They just acknowledged what Peter would write later, that those ‘angels’ who fathered the Nephilim were in Tartarus (there’s a whole story behind Peter’s use of that term!) already and weren’t getting out (according to Enoch they’d begged once and been refused; in this context the later statement that Jesus preached to “those in prison” makes sense – it wasn’t the spirits of the dead in Sheol, it was those guys chained in darkness, to tell them Jesus had triumphed and they would never be getting released, but that Judgment Day was coming . . . so they had something to “look forward to”). So in casting out demons Jesus was handling the evil that showed up in the Nephelim and their ilk.
Reversing Babel didn’t happen during Jesus’ earthly ministry; that had to wait for the promise He made to happen on Pentecost.
First century Jews would have seen these items in Jesus’ ministry, and it would have been a powerful indication that here was the Messiah.
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I just wonder how you can believe in the existence of these creatures and still proclaim any sort of Evolution
I don’t suppose here is a fossil of any of them?
Richard
I don’t particularly see a contradiction between those. It would involve some supernatural beings taking on human appearance and interacting with humans in a way that isn’t scientifically measurably distinct from just being people, thus neither view particularly says anything about the other.
Well, they probably wouldn’t be old enough to properly qualify as fossils (<11700 BP is generally termed “subfossil”), and people tend to fall apart pretty easily and live in areas that aren’t the best for fossilization (not in marine settings, not very many in deserts or tundra, etc.), so it would be unlikely for most given sets of (e.g.) a few thousand human-appearance beings to preserve. There are also the challenges of A. Would they undergo the same decay process? and B. Would they be detectably different from just another human skeleton?
So they will have the same DNA structure and sequencing that would not be visible.
We may as well believe in fairies, goblins and leprechauns.
Just because Jewish mythology is included in Scripture we have to believe it?
Hmm
some double standards here. Which parts of early Genesis do we include or exclude? Obviously this is not an all or nothing scenario.
Richard
Interesting observations, Richard. I don’t know what to make of them myself. But when I consider that their existence was written about by people of that time that believed they were real, whether they were or not, I can understand how they made it into the Bible, even though perhaps not part of God’s special revelation. I can’t really see how Nephilim make a difference in my life as a Christian.
If I said that about any other inclusion in the Bible I reckon there would repercussions, but, and here come the complaints, I think you can read too much into Scripture and study it beyond what’s healthy and useful.
Richard
About the only relevance I can think of is that they and their successor types show that God wasn’t just randomly ordering the Israelites to slaughter entire people groups, that it was part of an ongoing operation to get the world ready for Christ. That in turn tells me that salvation wasn’t a one-off operation unconnected to much else, but that it was a hard-worked, hard-established effort to arrange things so the Cross would happen.
Indirectly it also tells me that the Adversary does not head up a unified kingdom: these beings were definitely lower in rank, but there’s not the least suggestion that they even bothered to let the adversary know what they were up to, thy just acted – and that tells me just what Jesus meant when He said that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand; that wasn’t a philosophical observation but was a forecast of what was coming, that Satan’s realm is doomed.
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Wow, you have great imagination.
Shame it is pure fantasy. Still, makes a change from little green men.
Richard
You really love to ignore the scriptures when they don’t suit you. It isn’t that hard to trace which peoples God commanded to be totally wiped out and confirm that they were clans reported to have giants among them. That shows that the orders to commit herem weren’t just random.
And it matters why? Are you trying to justify God’s actions by any chance? Judging God?
Show me the practical use of all this!
Richard
How about all of it, but not assuming that it is modern-style history?
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Forgive me but
a) your answer is ambiguous
b) you have taken only part of a conversation and made it into a stand alone question.
Itis not about including or excluding anything as a blanket or universal stroke. It is about understanding what the passages are trying to tell and how that relates to us now…
I , for one, see no benefit in accepting Jewish mythology and legends ad incorporating them into my faith. Of course, that involves identifying them from the rest of the text. I would say that the maxim of
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck
would apply here.
Richard
Wow! I thought I would never get to the end of the dialogue, and when I finally did, began to doubt that anyone would bother to read my response coming so late in the piece. Nevertheless, some thoughts:
Many seem to begin with a belief about the Bible, such as inerrancy or infallibility, and then confront the text. This seems to be back-to-front to me. Rather, confront the Bible as a collection of ancient documents seen through the eyes of a historian and decide on that basis what you believe about the Bible. I have found this far more liberating than approaching the Bible with preconceived assumptions that you are not allowed to question. Many people show little understanding of how these preconceived assumptions arose in the first place. They are simply intimidated into believing that they must approach the Bible in that way.
There are also some mistaken assertions in the dialog above. The Septuagint was not a translation into Greek of the Masoretic Hebrew textual tradition. The Masoretic textual tradition, which involved the addition of Masorah to the consonantal texts, did not reach its final form till the early Middle Ages. The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that there was a Hebrew textual tradition behind the Masoretic text, now labelled “proto-Masoretic”. The DSS also reveal there was a different Hebrew textual tradition behind the Septuagint, and in fact, there were even more different textual traditions of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. One thinks of the “pre-Samaritan” textual family amidst the DSS.
Many scholars believe that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible reached its final form in the Persian and Hellenistic periods after the return from the Exile. However, it does not appear that these edited scriptures spoke with one voice. Sometimes the text appears to have resulted from a laying down side-by-side of competing textual material and from this one can determine the different social groups of Yahweh worshippers who collaborated to produce the final material.
If the above is accurate, one can see how approaching the Bible with predetermined assumptions about the way in which God speaks to us through the Bible can lead to an incorrect understanding of how the Bible should be interpreted. Rather than seeking to harmonise everything in the Bible, one can approach it as something in which competing views are held in tension.
This also applies to the New Testament as we discover, for example, Matthew’s Jesus versus Luke’s Jesus.
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Because the moment you start throwing out what you don’t like you’re just inventing your own religion.
I already did – it shows that there is coherence in the text that otherwise doesn’t appear, and thus that God isn’t just winging it.
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No you didn’t you justified yourself. That is not the same thing.
And my accusation still stands. You are trying to justify God’s actions or the interpretation of His commands. That is neither your place or mine.
You answered the wrong why. I was talking about the details that you insist upon.
Your blanket accusations are based on the "all or nothing " principle.
We have been here before, many times.
Furthermore, you pick and choose how you interpret Scripture as much if not more than I do, but you claim “learning”. or “study” as your guide. I claim the Holy Spirit who trumps any human understanding.
Richard