actually it was origianlly ratified at the hands of a Roman Emporer not the pope. Constantine realized that if he could get the church and state to combine it would increase his support base throughout the Roman Empire and thus help secure his kingdom against foes as the Church was a very powerful ally to have onside. Thats the history of it as far as i understand anyway.
- Try Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, martyred in Rome ca. sometime in the first half of the 2nd century. THE EPISTLES OF ST. IGNATIUS , BISHOP OF ANTIOCH
- To The Ephesians
- To The Magnesians
- To The Trallians
- To The Romans
- To The Philadelphians
- To The Smyrneans
- To Polycarp
- Source: Specifically, see his letter to the Magnesians, in which he wrote:
- VIII. "Be not deceived by strange doctrines nor by ancient fables, seeing that they are profitless. For if until now we live after the rule of Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace. For the Divine prophets lived a life in accordance with Christ Jesus. 2. For this cause too they were persecuted, being inspired by [His] grace, so that unbelievers 3. might be fully convinced that there is One God Who manifested Himself through Jesus Christ His Son, Who is His Word, 4. coming forth from silence, Who in all things did the good pleasure of Him that sent Him.5.
- IX. If therefore those who lived in ancient observances attained unto newness of hope, no longer keeping the Sabbath, but living a life ruled by the Lord’s day, whereon our life too had its rising through Him and His death – which some deny, a mystery through which we have received the power to believe, and therefore we endure, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only Teacher- how shall we be able to live apart from Him? 2. For the prophets also became His disciples, and awaited in the Spirit His coming to teach them. And therefore He, for Whom they rightly waited, came and raised them from the dead."
- Constantine wasn’t even born then. What the latter “ratified”, in your words, was a practice (at least a century or more old) that had became common after the fall of Jerusalem among non-Jewish converts. Seventh Day Adventists are, in a word, "judaizers, i.e. malcontents clinging to the “old ways” of Judaism, confessing–as Ignatius said–that they have not received grace through Jesus Christ.
- So what if Constatine “ratified” what Christians were doing, his momma didn’t raise no dummy.
2 Likes
I do not see the necessity of wasting time watching anything if it can be summarised. You have still insulted my intelligence falsely
If you are going to make an assertion then you should be able to back it up.
By you logic I can claim that you are incapable of summarising it.
Richard
So Adam didn’t rise to your bait, but the SDA church for a long time did believe it was a “Pope” (I used to know who, but can’t find it again) who made the change based on Ms. White’s visions. Given Constantine was never a Pope they have modified their position. Constantine is a convenient target for any change people don’t agree with.
2 Likes
I’m amazed at how many people think that rather than recognizing that God just assigned a meaning to the phenomenon.
I think I’ve mentioned before how my mathematician brother said that God both knowing what is coming and not knowing are possible if God is operating in sufficiently more dimensions than we are.
Recently I bumped into the suggestion that God the Father knows the future but God the Son does not, which would assign the two different aspects to different Persons of the Godhead.
Hey, that is just like me! My future self knows the future while my current self does not. LOL I am omnitemporal over my whole life… in every moment of my life, I am there!
Regardless… logical coherence requires that for the God who participates in the world, the future is a book which hasn’t been written yet - a superposition of possibilities. And it is only the God who participates which has any significance for our lives.
1 Like
From my more recent studies I think the Noah account was a story believed to have happened, but from the Hebrew used it meant the known world was wiped out, then it was heavily mythologized by a later editor who gave it the nested structure with its symbolic numbers. I don’t recall what any of my Hebrew profs said about the account other than pointing out the nested structure.
I doubt that the known world was limited to “a few thousand people”. If the origin of the story came from a Tigris-Euphrates megaflood, the numbers would have been in the tens of thousands. And if it was the entire Mesopotamian region, it doesn’t lose its punch if it doesn’t mean the globe; what would make it lose its punch is if there was no divine warning.
I see these as really just one point, and it’s a solid one.
Or parallel stories! After all, humans have a penchant for living along rivers, so inhabitants of various regions could well have experienced their own deluges.
Very good point!
That totally misunderstands what “reaching heaven” means in the context. Back then the standard dwellings of gods were considered to be mountains, and so the gods could be reached by going up the right mountain; if the gods happened to be off in heaven they could “come down” to meet (the right) people. But the people out on the plains had no mountains, and the solution was to build artificial mountains that (the right) people could ascend in hopes that the gods would “come down” to meet with them.
There’s a view of this that it only talks about the peoples in the “table of nations” in Genesis 10. I don’t know enough about it presently to comment.
Totally different situations in both the stories and the literary types!
In a New Testament Greek Readings course where we covered the Petrine Epistles the professor commented that Peter must not have known Hebrew, since the Hebrew word for “earth” means the land, i.e. the known world.
Probably 60; 600 is that age times 10, which signifies a completed work. 600 also has some mythic significance in the ancient near eastern culture, but I forget the details.
Or it’s following a common ancient near eastern custom of exaggerating the ages of important figures, though the Genesis writer tones it down a lot. Some of the ages may also be symbolic.
Jesus said as much about when he would return, but that could be voluntary, part of his humbling himself as a man?
Spacetime slices are logically coherent in cosmology and relativistic physics. And we know God is omnipresent, so be logical and cohere what that entails about God and time.
We also know that God is beyond fathoming and inscrutable. (Some things are allowed to be mysterious and beyond our ken. Unless you are claiming to be omniscient. And leave your golem and necromancy rhetoric.)
1 Like
You did make the argument, you said:
Of course it doesn’t necessarily mean that. What is this, a high school logic class? No one can prove a negative, that some guy named Noah or Ut-napishtim (hopefully you get the reference), or that Adam or Enkidu (hopefully you get the reference) didn’t exist 6,000 years ago. The problem is there is no valid historical evidence either way.
The flood stories were probably put together after the Babylonian exile into their current form. There are two versions in the OT together and they certainly predate this reworking.
But you have not established any historical lines of transmission going back 6,000 years. The extant Biblical account occurred many thousands of years after the alleged events it narrates. The account would be 100-200 generations old and passed through history where Israel and Jews were all over the place, slaves, influenced by other religions and countless cultures, sometimes ruling over and sometimes conquered by other people.
I have shown that not all myths need to have historical characters behind them. Not all fiction or myth about a guy needs to be based on an actual person in the past. How many figures and ancient deities do you want me to bring up from the past? If you have any actual evidence Noah existed present it. Not to mention there are older flood accounts with different characters and stories in the region. You are free to believe God saved some guy on a boat (was his name even Noah or something else?) but let us not pretend you have a shred of evidence for this view or its academically reasonable. It is not. Nor is just arbitrarily choosing to believe the tiniest snippet of the Biblical story is historical. I think the whole thing was myth, maybe spawned by an actual flood. You think 85% is myth and a small core is true. But theologically, we can both interpret the account the same way.
All that is needed to inspire flood mythology is a flood. The only thing that may be historical is an ancient flood. Floods happen all the time throughout the world and in antiquity they inspired a host of mythological narratives. Are all these stories and characters in them real too?
So Genesis 1 and 2 likewise describe a tribal deity only making small tract of land and small firmament in the sky? Clearly Genesis 1 and 2 and has no idea the earth is a globe either. A localized creation account? 
When I say the whole earth is meant, unlike your caricature, I don’t mean the author is thinking of a globe. The author is describing all the land that people live on in whatever shape or form he accepts it as. He is describing the entire earth, what he believes to be everything. He believes all the land of earth was flooded, all mountain were covered and all people died save Noah and Company.
The narrative thrust is God makes everything and people, humans screw it up, God floods and kills them all but saves one family. They repopulate (pairs of animals anyone?) but there is only one language. God scatters them which probably serves at an etiology for why people are spread far and wide and have different languages. The author doesn’t need to know how big the earth is or its shape to believe all people that exist anywhere stem from two people created by God in a special garden and all humanity spread from there. Your reading is entirely eisegetical and only exists because science has shown the account as narrated is not possible and Christians have a tough time with mythology in the Bible.
This is rich coming from the guy who promotes the Mckain International Version of the Bible (MIV) where you just dismiss 85% of Genssis 1-11 as myth and fantasy, reimagine what it says to what you want it to say, and then go on to warn of all the dangers of not taking the other 15% literally as you do. The whole point of taking the flood as “parable” (whatever that means) is understanding what it teaches us theologically, which is the exact opposite of what you warned it could do in your little three part rant that ended with:
All three of your original points were ridiculous and it’s sad not a single person on this forum besides Marta called you out on them.
Yes, floods gave rise to myths all over the world and the Genesis account is predated by several in the region and draws heavily from them. The Sumerian version of the Gilgamesh Epic has a similar flood story but features Ziusudra as opposed to Noah (Genesis), Atrahasis (Atrahasis) or Utnapishtim (Gilgamesh). Will the real Noah please stand up? The flood is about retelling an ancient story people probably took for granted at the time:
As I wrote to Mr. Mckain above:
The narrative thrust is God makes everything and people, humans screw it up, God floods and kills them all but saves one family. They repopulate (pairs of animals anyone?) but there is only one language. God scatters them which probably serves at an etiology for why people are spread far and wide and have different languages. The author doesn’t need to know how big the earth is or its shape to believe all people that exist anywhere stem from two people created by God in a special garden and all humanity spread from there. Your reading is entirely eisegetical and only exists because science has shown the account as narrated is not possible and Christians have a tough time with mythology in the Bible.
Sources showing the view? And when is back then? When the story of Babel happened or when the Pentateuch was put together many thousands of years later?
Both are myth to me. The author of Genesis 1-11 has no idea the earth is a globe or people are spread far and wide. Why is Genesis 1 about all of creation and not a small tract of land?
You mean the apostle Peter, the Aramaic speaking Jewish fisherman? But he knew high Greek? Did your professor explain that? Either way, that his how sacred scripture in the New Testament describes the flood. What happens to “scripture interprets scripture?” Only when convenient or agreeable with what we want it to say?
Or one of the flood authors actually believed these ages were true and God changed things at some point?
3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide[a] in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”
Millions of Christians today accept these ages. I see no reason to suppose ancient authors and readers did not either.
Any time anyone calls God the creator and appeals to Genesis 1 I will expect you to correct them and inform them that the author had no idea how big the earth really was, had no idea it was a globe, and therefore could not possibly be describing the creation of the whole planet. Rather, this is a localized creation of a much smaller tract of land. The Bible says nothing of how most of the earth was created. You can even adopt the comments of @mitchellmckain in response to the flood and call this ever so common Christian belief a “delusion” and “nonsensical.” belief.
The only “delusion” (mistaken interpretation) is taking clear creation accounts that describe all that there is from the author’s perspective and magically making an account where the author continues and describes all that there is being flooded and creation itself clearly being undone, as local but thinking the former is not as well. I am not interested in such inconsistency. It tells me people are just making up their interpretation as they go. Forcing the text say what they think it needs to rather than actually dialoging with it or reading it in its ancient context in light of other, older Mesopotamian myths.
I take Genesis 1-11 as the author talking about the entire earth. They may not know its actual shape or how big it actually is or that there were people on the other side, but it none the less is a creation account. It is describing how all things came to be, how humans screwed things up, how God destroyed all of them except one family (no need for a boat or 2 of each animal if you can jut migrate) and how God took humanity, which the second creation account believes started somehow in a garden with two people who lived very long and had many children, and separated them creating different nations so they spread throughout the world.
Vinnie
1 Like
Though it is possible that the story of Noah’s flood is a parable, I would say that Noah at least needs to have been a historical figure since he is listed as an ancestor of Jesus. Assuming the Bible reliably reports Jesus’ ancestry, it follows that Noah must have been a real person. Whether he actually was involved in preserving life on Earth from a catastrophic flood is another matter, but I think Noah at least needs to have been a historical figure.
That is an interesting point of discussion, Caleb. It also becomes a question of how genealogies were seen, maintained and found meaning from. The problem of different genealogies in Luke and Matthew also have to be taken into account. Ultimately, I think the purpose of the genealogy of Matthew was to illustrate continuity and connection within the Jewish culture as well as Jesus being answered prophesy. Matthew then goes to discuss how Jesus was not the biologic son of Joseph, which in modern western eyes sort of defeats the meaning of genealogies, though not in the Jewish culture of the day, which really did not see a problem with skipping generations and including non-biologically related individuals.
1 Like
It’s a suggestion I don’t really know much about, though the only actual mention in the scriptures that I can think of is the one you referenced.
1 Like
That view of where the gods lived and/or came to meet humans persisted right up through the Exile and didn’t change significantly even after the Hellenistic period.
The World History Encyclopedia gives a decent summary:
“As noted, the ziggurat’s purpose was to elevate the primary servant of the god (a high priest, usually, for a male deity and high priestess for a goddess) to a point between earth and the heavens. The gods were understood to live high above, and so, to confer with them clearly, one needed to draw as close to their realm as possible.”
Of course in political terms, size mattered, so cities at least on occasion aimed to build one bigger than their neighbors had. Whether they conceived that a higher ziggurat brought more favor from the gods I don’t know, though most cities had their own pantheons right up to when Alexander’s conquests imported the notion that similar gods of different peoples were actually the same god.
In a very general sense; there are different literary types going on which point to the lessons of the stories.
The opening Creation account is about everything that exists; it says so in the first line.
The story that follows it is confined to a region with emphasis on one part of that region, but the focus is on God’s special representatives.
The third story is about the fate of humanity due to the failure of those representatives.
The focus isn’t on place at all except where Adam & Eve get kicked out of the Garden, but that only serves the lesson of the account.
And the Flood isn’t about “a small tract of land”, it’s about the known world.
Why would you expect me to go against the text?
Genesis 1 opens with a statement that tells us it is about everything that exists. Whether the writer understood how much actually existed is not important; the phrase “the heavens and the earth” still means “everything that exists”.
Genesis 2 brings the focus down to a specific tract of land, but it isn’t about that tract of land, it’s about the relationship between God and humans.
But the text doesn’t say that; in context, it’s about the known world.
1 Like
Because you are doing it with the flood. The flood is all about the undoing of creation and neither it or Babel makes sense if the author is not attempting to describe all human life. The flood terms are just as universal as the terms used in Genesis. I am to believe the flood account only talks about the highest mountaits known to the author but left wondering why such local and pre-modern science cosmology doesn’t apply to Genesis 1:1? If Genesis 1 can describe everything without having any conception of the earth as a globe so can the author of the flood. Genesis 1 is not describing a globe? Of course not, it’s the same flat, 3-tiered cosmos the authors of the flood accounts assumed as they described its undoing consistent with other ancient Mesopotamian literature.
[1] The account uses universal language. Not a necessary clincher but combine with the other points below:
[2] The account very clearly looks back to early Genesis and undoes/uncreates the world only to repopulate it. God creates then God uncreates. It’s an obvious undoing of what God has done. It’s as global or universal as creation itself it. Below I lay out some quotes and examples.
[3] The need for an ark is gone in a local flood. Noah and animals could just migrate.Or Noah can migrate and eat new animals.
[4] The need for 2 or 7 pairs of animals to repopulate the earth is gone.
[5] Babel makes little sense if there are already millions of people with millions of languages around the globe.
[6] God never sending another local flood to kill a local group of humans may be a lie. Lots of local floods have occurred and hundreds of thousands of people have died in them. Either way, it seems a bit odd the is so important and narrated the way it is when these types of floods still happen and will certainly happen in the future.
[7] Genesis 9:2-3 has the entire created order changing post flood. Genesis 9:2-3 reads: “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. This makes no sense if given to just a single person if millions of people live spread around the world. Even if you think this part is myth (changing relation between human and animals) as I think it shows up the in the Enkidu account, I still believe it shows all creation in view. The relationship between humans and animals (peaceful in the Garden) is changing.
[8] So many details of the story are clearly fiction in line with other ancient mythology whose content I believe firmly supports a flood destroying all humanity. The flood was so devastating in other versions it frightened even the gods. Imagine a localized flood limited to say Iraq on the whole earth doing this. Read the other flood accounts then come back to Genesis. They provide the historical-critical context.
Here is some detail about how creation was undone:
[1] Bill Arnold, Baker Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, writes: “The cosmic phenomena described in 7:11–24 are not some banal punishment for the sin of that ancient generation, but they represent a reversal of creation, or “uncreation” as it has been called. The priestlycreation account of Gen 1 portrayed creation as a series of separations and distinctions,
whereas Gen 6:9–7:24 portrays the annihilation of those distinctions.231 As the sky dome was created to keep the heavenly waters from falling to earth (1:6–7), here the opened “windows of the heavens” reverse that created function (7:11). When the “fountains of the great deep [tĕ hoˆm]”burstforth(7:11),the cosmic order that had been fashioned from watery chaos returns to watery chaos (1:2, 9). Strikingly the sequence of annihilation, “birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings” (7:21), follows closely that of creation itself in Gen 1:1–2:3.232.
[2] Robert Alter, Genesis Translation and Commentary (pg 33), writes “The surge of waters from the great deep below and from the heavens above is, of course, a striking reversal of the second day of creation, when a vault was erected to divide the waters above from the waters below. The biblical imagination, having conceived creation as an orderly series of divisions imposed on primordial chaos, frequently conjures with the possibility of a reversal of this process (see, for example, Jeremiah 4:23-26): biblical cosmogony and apocalypse are reverse sides of the same coin. The Flood story as a whole abounds in verbal echoes of the Creation story (the crawling things, the cattle and beasts of each kind, and so forth) as what was made on the six days is wiped out in these forty.”
[3] G. V. Smith (Structure and Purpose in Genesis 1–11,” JETS 20 [1977]: 310–11) came up with the following points of contact between creation and the flood (chapters 1-2 with 8-9). I have put the relationship from Smith in list format:
“(a) Since man could not live on the earth when it was covered with water in chaps. 1 and 8, a subsiding of the water and separation of the land from the water took place, allowing the dry land to appear (1:9–10; 8:1–13);
(b) “birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” are brought forth to “swarm upon the earth” in 1:20–21, 24–25 and 8:17–19;
(c) God establishes the days and seasons in 1:14–18 and 8:22;
(d) God’s blessing rests upon the animals as he commands them to “be fruitful and multiply on the earth” in both 1:22 and 8:17;
(e) man is brought forth and he receives the blessing of God: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” in 1:28 and 9:1, 7;
(f) Man is given dominion over the animal kingdom in 1:28 and 9:2;
(g) God provides food for man in 1:29–30 and 9:3 (this latter regulation makes a direct reference back to the previous passage when it includes the statement, “As I have given the green plant”);
(h) in 9:6 the writer quotes from 1:26–27 concerning the image of God in man. The author repeatedly emphasizes the fact that the world is beginning again with a fresh start. But Noah does not return to the paradise of Adam, for the significant difference is that “the intent of man’s heart is evil” (Gen. 8:21)”
. . . we should be careful to read the account whole-heartedly in its own terms, which depict a total judgment on the ungodly world
already set before us in Genesis – not an event of debatable dimensions in a world we may try to reconstruct. The whole living scene is blotted out, and the New Testament makes us learn from it the greater judgment that awaits not only our entire globe but the universe itself (2 Pet. 3:5– 7). “
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Atum says, “I will destroy all that I have created. The earth will once again look like the primeval ocean, like the mass of water at the very beginning. “ [Westermann, Genesis an Introduction pg. 51] It looks very much like the same is happening in Genesis. After its destruction the flood narrative presents a new creation account (recreation!). This is the mythology the Biblical deluge is steeped in. The context is not modern Christians who know science trying to preserve a historical core. That is eisegesis.
Derek Kidner, Genesis An Introduction and Commentary, writes: “The flood undoes the order God has established during his creative week. God is wiping the slate clean and starting anew. Creation terminology and parallels are littered over many aspects of the Genesis flood which is narrated as universal with respect to humanity, regardless of the limited context of its author, which I take for granted. That the author had a limited understanding of the size of the earth does not preclude the author from actually believing and narrating that the entirety of the earth was flooded and all of humanity was destroyed. This localized flood view is based on a priori assumptions. It approaches scripture with a non-negotiable set of demands forcing specific interpretations to maintain concordant readings. That the author does not know the earth is spherical and people lived across vast oceans is no reason to force upon it a localized interpretation dictated by modern science. Just as we don’t force that on Genesis 1.
If you want to read more on the flood I put out a bunch of articles and posted some here in the past (Jesus and the flood), (did the flood happen?), (local or global) and so on.
There is no reason to suppose the Biblical deluge is local nor does the claim “earth as he knew it fly” when we view Genesis 1 as describing the entire universe (which the author certainly knew next to nothing about in terms of its composition and extent, let alone a spherical earth) since it uses universal language. The flood does the same. I think I am done with this topic (local vs global). I wrote enough and provided enough resources for my views. You can have the last word. The local flood is just a very bad interpretation of the text. You can believe one occurred and keep a historical Noah but to think the text actually teaches that is one of the most egregious interpretations of scripture I have ever witnessed.
Vinnie
I think the NT (and probably Jesus) took Noah as an actual figure in the past. It treats him no different than Moses, Abraham etc. Just above I linked an article on Jesus and the flood where I put out a longer argument claiming I don’t think it’s necessary to accept a historical Noah. Even if you accept Jesus as Lord, Savior and God incarnate. You certainly can as a Christian and most do but I think the question is very nuanced. Jesus never taught a historical Noah. He used and referred to the Biblical deluge to teach on readiness and being prepare for God’s return. I reiterate, Jesus never taught a literal flood, he taught readiness for the kingdom of God using the Biblical narrative. Some Christians might not distinguish between those two things but I certainly think “what the authors intended to teach” is the key to scripture since it is accommodated and generally uses the worldview and background knowledge of the day to communicates truth from within.
Noah also does not show up in the Nicene or Apostles Creed. Maybe a historical Noah is essential to some narrower or more conservative methods of Biblical interpretation and Christology, but certainly not all. Jesus also talks about stars falling from the sky, the four winds, and sun rise. He is not immune to phenomenological language or using the language and background knowledge of the day. Scripture also clearly puts knowledge limits on Jesus in several cases.
1 Like
In other words, you have made God into the ultimate rug under which you can sweep all of your theological incoherence and irrationalities. It is very similar to making God into the ultimate scapegoat on which some people place all the blame for everything which goes wrong in their lives.