Mike316:
Hello all, I attended Catechism study last week and a Deacon took Fathers place as instructor. Being formal Pentecostal I know my Bible and believe it from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. Our Deacon was discussing creation and stated that Genesis creation may or may not have taken place that way; Adam and Eve; the flood, and a few other things that really miffed me. Job is a parable!!! Well I have searched the Web and really don’t know what’s real and what’s not; on the Web. I know the bible and believe it 100%. Am I wrong? I have read the epic of Gilgamesh and to think that Genesis may have toggled off that dribble is unbelievable. Revelation 22:21 to you all. Mike
Revelation is apocalyptic literature, and is symbolic as that is what the genre is all about. Genesis on the other hand is history. Scholars of Hebrew see there is no other explanation other than that the author intended it to be actual history. Most of people who take it unliterally do so only because they are trying to compromise it with naturalistic sciences like evolution, cosmological and biological.
This is the first I’ve heard about Job being a parable. Though Job might actually be the oldest book in the Bible. Some speculate that it might have taken place even before Abraham. If you read Job closely you’ll actually discover many scientific statements that boggle the mind for their time such as the description that the earth is a circle and suspended on nothing, the water cycle and air current patterns in the two hemispheres. Quite fascinating stuff!
The Book of Genesis does match the ol Gilgamesh epic, and might even be ‘copied’ from it, but this is not a problem. If the world had a similar origin, and things as the creation and the flood etc really did happen, then you’d expect to find similarities of it in other cultures, and in fact, yes, you do! The native Americans, Ancient Chinese and Australian Aboriginies all have startling similar creation accounts or at least the flood. Did they copy this off the Gilgamesh epic too? That’s a laugh! The story goes like this as told in the Bible. After the incident of the Tower of Babel, people were confused and began to spread out over the world, obviously they’d want to retain their origins and history through oral tradition as much as possible. But of course due to the confusion as well as corruption that oral tradition tends to have overtime, the stories will differ and even beliefs in God change, which explains the different world religions and why they still share similarities in their creation aand flood accounts as well as morality. It would not be until the time of Moses when God decided to set the record straight, as every good theologian should know the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses under inspiration from God. Moses, being raised as a prince in Egypt, would’ve had access to the Royal libraries and studies that all princes of Egypt were raised in, so he’d be familiar with the Gilgamesh epic as well would most of the other lower class illiterate Egyptians and Hebrews who would have heard some of it. So Moses isn’t necessarily plagurizing the epic, since it would have some truth in it, but was rather the editor of it, giving us the true story under inspiration from God who is setting the story straight and beginning to write the history of the Israelite people through whom He would redeem the world.
So don’t worry, if you find difficulties with the Bible, search the net for Apologetic or Creationist sites, some I recommed are:
www.answersingenesis.org
www.icr.org
www.tektonics.org
Or simply use google and add in the words ‘Christian Apologetics.’ Most sites are non-Catholic, but you should rarely find any problems between CAtholicism and Protestants on most of them. If you do, you know where to come to get the facts!
