Do you take the Old Testament literally?

[patrick457]

I didn’t do a very good job distinguishing what I feel taking stories from the Bible as “literal” could mean with this particular thread. My apologies. I guess to me reading the creation story; God made the Earth in 6 days and rested on the 7th…my interpretation is that either God A. Made the earth in seven 24 hour time periods (days) or B. the (days) represent a longer time period (1,000 years or more just for example). Thus, an example as well as the story of Noah, Jonah, Job, Samson, etc.

I would take either A. or B. as literal in the question I proposed above in the story of creation as literal. That’s what I meant when I asked the question…looking back I should’ve mentioned “figuratively” as well…hope this helps with what you were asking.

God bless

No, don’t worry about that.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

I don’t believe in bible “stories”–I believe in bible REALITIES!

That was the stance of Catholic bible scholarship for about 1900 years–it’s the MODERN “scholars” who mention bible “stories”.

“Modern” Catholic bible scholars think that St. Thomas Aquinas doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

You know the type–believers in Q and believers in the apostles being too stupid to write anything and the New Testament being written by multiple authors who cut and pasted–wrote many years later than traditional Catholic bible scholarship says the books of the New Testament were written–the “Hail Favored one” and a “young woman will conceive” types.

The simple Catholic laity don’t believe all those modern “stories”–they really do believe that the bible is the word of God!

They believe that Mary is “Full of Grace”… they don’t believe that the REALITIES of Jesus’ birth are “STORIES” like the Raymond Brown types maintain!

The Nova Vulgata is the juridicial text of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

Believe it over any bible “story” translations!

 

[patrick457]

You know the type–believers in Q and believers in the apostles being too stupid to write anything and the New Testament being written by multiple authors who cut and pasted–

No offense, but I wonder which century are these “believers” living in?

 

[johnnyjones]

Forgive me for sifting further, but believing “that the events actually happened” could also mean a number of things. Did they actually happen as written (in other words, Genesis or Exodus are accurate transcripts of what happened; Adam or Jacob or Moses must have said or did exactly the same words or actions that you find written on the page, down to the last jot and tittle) in a literalist sort of way? Or something like “the stories are based on historical facts but are not to be taken as modern newspaper articles or encyclopedia entries or screenplays”? Or anything else in between or beyond?

I mean, one could believe that Genesis or Deuteronomy or Judges are “real” in the sense that all the accounts ultimately convey truth and in most cases, may well be grounded in historical fact, but that doesn’t mean that believing that they are “real” necessarily entails that one must read the books in a literalistic, ‘fundamentalist’ sort of way.

BTW, do you remember me asking you on another thread what you meant by the word ‘myth’? The reason why I asked that is because of this:

Personally, I believe Genesis to be ‘mythology’ par excellence. However, since the words ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ are more commonly used today in the sense of “stupid lies only stupid kooks would waste their time with,” (when some people say ‘the Bible is a myth’ they often mean it in this sense, unfortunately) I need to qualify what I mean by it.

When I say ‘mythology’ I mean it in the original sense, the sense it is still being used by folklorists: a sacred narrative usually explaining how the world came to be in its present form, in other words “a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture by explaining aspects of the natural world and delineating the psychological and social practices and ideals of a society.” Myths (in the folkloristic sense) could arise either as elaborated accounts of the ‘factual’ past, as allegories for or personification of natural phenomena, or as an explanation of ritual, and are used to establish models for behavior and that myths may also provide a religious experience.

I believe the same is true for Genesis: I think that these are ‘myths’, elaborated stories of real historical events in the distant past. Just because the accounts are handed down to us in an ‘elaborated’ form, however, does not mean that they could no longer convey truth: does it really matter whether our first parents were really named 'Adam or Ḥawwāh? Do we have to believe the dialogues recorded in Genesis is really what they said to each other, word for word (like a transcript), or for that matter, that they apparently spoke Hebrew? Personally, I don’t think the issue of whether Adam’s name was really 'Adam or something along those lines would have any effect on the ultimate truth that these stories convey: that God created the world, but man disobeyed and fell from grace. And even if somehow, what really happened back then was not totally ‘in agreement’ with what is written with Genesis, it still wouldn’t make the accounts an utter lie or the comparison with Jesus as the new Adam invalid, in my opinion.

In other words, I think that Genesis is mythical and at the same time, true. But that’s just my own personal opinion on the subject. Feel free to take it or leave it.

So, in the case of Genesis, one could say that I believe it to be a ‘myth’ (in the sense I described above) grounded in ‘fact’, ‘real’ and ‘true’ all at the same time. I believe God made the universe and that 'Adam or Ḥawwāh (aka Eve) existed (whether that is their actual names or not, or whether they had any name at all, is not of much importance to me - they’re our first parents all the same), but I do not take the creation accounts in a hardline literalist fashion, especially considering the OT’s original cultural context.

So yeah, I kind of doubt whether my own opinion - a huge mess as it is - is actually represented faithfully on the poll, which is why I’ll still refrain from picking one.

I remember the conversation. Using the word myth in any variation when applied to sacred scripture always gets dicey. Of course personally I don’t need to use it because when God gives us accounts, they are presented different than “stories”.

There is a difference between trying to figure out the correct meaning of a phrase, word or sentence, than deducing whether that phrase, word or sentence actually happened. The cliched vernacular example being “it’ raining cats and dogs” conveys what is happening (it’s raining hard), but no matter how it was said, it still happened.

A “Fundamentalist” of course reads word for word but they often have difficulty with context and word meanings. I read Genesis and other OT accounts through the prism of the more recent revelations of the NT. The Catholic church recognizes the parables of Jesus, and calls them stories to relay a message and rightly so. But in the NT, OT events are not categorized as parables.

In the NT Genesis and other OT events are not symbolized. They are incorporated into the gospels and epistles with a straight forward reality. You don’t find Jesus, St Peter or St Paul giving alternative history or a reconstruction of OT events. They happened as written.

Yes, the Lord created the world instantly, had a man in the belly of a whale and filled an ark with animals and the like. The miraculous hand of God.

 

[patrick457]

I remember the conversation. Using the word myth in any variation when applied to sacred scripture always gets dicey. Of course personally I don’t need to use it because when God gives us accounts, they are presented different than “stories”.

There is a difference between trying to figure out the correct meaning of a phrase, word or sentence, than deducing whether that phrase, word or sentence actually happened. The cliched vernacular example being “it’ raining cats and dogs” conveys what is happening (it’s raining hard), but no matter how it was said, it still happened.

A “Fundamentalist” of course reads word for word but they often have difficulty with context and word meanings. I read Genesis and other OT accounts through the prism of the more recent revelations of the NT. The Catholic church recognizes the parables of Jesus, and calls them stories to relay a message and rightly so. But in the NT, OT events are not categorized as parables.

In the NT Genesis and other OT events are not symbolized. They are incorporated into the gospels and epistles with a straight forward reality. You don’t find Jesus, St Peter or St Paul giving alternative history or a reconstruction of OT events. They happened as written.

Yes, the Lord created the world instantly, had a man in the belly of a whale and filled an ark with animals and the like. The miraculous hand of God.

That’s it, really. I believe that there is a distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘fable’/‘parable’. I don’t hold the OT to be a fictional parable or a symbolic allegory with no basis in historical reality, but I don’t read it as a modern-day history book either. I know it’s a nonstandard usage of the word in my part, but yeah.

P.S. It wasn’t a whale. It was dag gadol “a big fish;” ketos “sea monster” if you go by the NT. The word did not specifically mean “whale” until the medieval period. There; I haven’t nitpicked so a while so I might as well do so now.

 

[Gorgias]

That was the stance of Catholic bible scholarship for about 1900 years–it’s the MODERN “scholars” who mention bible “stories”.

So… the scholars of millennia gone by, who didn’t have access to some of the better manuscripts that are currently available, have more accurate insights than current scholars? As an overarching rule?

“Modern” Catholic bible scholars think that St. Thomas Aquinas doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

You know the type–believers in Q and believers in the apostles being too stupid to write anything and the New Testament being written by multiple authors who cut and pasted–wrote many years later than traditional Catholic bible scholarship says the books of the New Testament were written–the “Hail Favored one” and a “young woman will conceive” types.

I think that’s a rather unfair characterization of Scripture scholarship. There may have been trends – 30 or 50 or 100 years ago – by various groups (some Catholic, but also many non-Catholic Christian) who made one or another of your claims, but that’s hardly an indictment of modern Scripture scholarship, which generally eschews the assertions you’re parading about.

They believe that Mary is “Full of Grace”…

Far better that they believe that Mary is kecharitomene, wouldn’t you think?

 

[minichibi]

I think it’s absolute nonsense and naive to take the Old Testament, or even parts of the New Testament “word by word”. But it’s as much nonsense to ditch the bible just because “serpents don’t talk”, “there are no talking mules”, “there is no way Jonas was swallowed by a fish”, “they made the crowds bigger” sort of stuff. I turned myself away from religion for some time to be an agnostic/atheist because I believed the bible was nothing more than child bedtime stories with no credibility. But now I see the bible with a whole new perspective: that there are several literary styles coexisting in the several books that compose the bible, and these stories conveyspiritual truths, they were written a certain way to persuade and to make people understand the irreducible truth they hold. Now I hold a different idea of what divine inspiration and inerrancy is.

 

[Gorgias]

I think it’s absolute nonsense and naive to take the Old Testament

Do you mean this absolutely? That is, are you saying that there’s nothing that you might see as “historical fact” (or “literalistic” or “word by word”) in the OT? Or just that the NT more often has accounts that you can see in that way?

 

[minichibi]

Do you mean this absolutely? That is, are you saying that there’s nothing that you might see as “historical fact” (or “literalistic” or “word by word”) in the OT? Or just that the NT more often has accounts that you can see in that way?

Ok. I take the absolutely back. There are historical facts in the books.

 

[patrick457]

I think that’s a rather unfair characterization of Scripture scholarship. There may have been trends – 30 or 50 or 100 years ago – by various groups (some Catholic, but also many non-Catholic Christian) who made one or another of your claims, but that’s hardly an indictment of modern Scripture scholarship, which generally eschews the assertions you’re parading about.

I think the problem is that people sometimes assume ‘biblical scholarship’ to be this homogeneous, monolithic movement. Some might even characterize ‘it’ as the worst plague mankind has ever encountered since the Black Death, values-added tax or the Big Mac, as if all the evil cabal of scholars convene in some dark room and just cross out things they don’t like just because they’re pure wicked. It doesn’t help that the ones who get all the publicity are people like the Jesus Seminar (by no means the norm in academia, mind - they are highly infamous even within it). So it’s at least understandable why a few folks seem to view it as a sort of bogeyman, to be avoided at all costs: the whole ‘us vs. them’ mentality.

Now, if there’s anything I learned during all the time I wasted reading things and stuff, it is this: biblical scholarship is just like any other field. You have A saying this, B comes along and disagrees with A, C agrees with some of A’s ideas but disagrees with others, D disregards everyone else. In short, there is a huge diversity all across the spectrum (from the ‘liberal’ to the ‘conservative’ and everything in between) that you can hardly get a person to completely agree with you. That is why pointing the finger at ‘modern biblical scholarship’ is a huge oversimplification: labels like ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’, ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ or whatever are often not of much use either. Better it is to specifically ask, ‘whose scholarship is in question?’

Now I would agree that there are people within academia who are spouting (I’ll be frank) utter junk, but that doesn’t mean there’s no longer anything of value to be found in it. To overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation makes one no different from those who accuse priests of being child-molesters. The actions of the few are hardly reflective of that of the many. What we so unfortunately often have when we speak of “scholarship” (ooh, that dreaded word!) is a gross caricature, a strawman even. In other words, often people are thinking of and pitting themselves against something which technically doesn’t even exist, almost like the one-man swordplay anti-Catholics seem to enjoying themselves with when they accuse “the Catholic Church.”

…Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to get that out of my system.

 

[colmywaykurtz]

I think it’s absolute nonsense and naive to take the Old Testament, or even parts of the New Testament “word by word”. But it’s as much nonsense to ditch the bible just because “serpents don’t talk”, “there are no talking mules”, “there is no way Jonas was swallowed by a fish”, “they made the crowds bigger” sort of stuff. I turned myself away from religion for some time to be an agnostic/atheist because I believed the bible was nothing more than child bedtime stories with no credibility. But now I see the bible with a whole new perspective: that there are several literary styles coexisting in the several books that compose the bible, and these stories conveyspiritual truths, they were written a certain way to persuade and to make people understand the irreducible truth they hold. Now I hold a different idea of what divine inspiration and inerrancy is.

I don’t try to come up with some overarching schema on how to interpret OT or NT either one. Such sweeping statements are bound to end up being hedged round with qualifications and exceptions. I guess always try for a narrower focus when it comes to this kind of analysis.

I try to take it one event, one case at a time.

To take your examples, I have a hard time, for instance, in believing a serpent could talk. But, the serpent has always had manifold archetypal significance in religions the world over, and so it must have been in the Middle East at that time. The prevalence of the serpent in terms of his visual resemblance to various natural phenomena—dust devils, ripples on water, the shape of mountain ranges and low-lying land contours seen from the tops of those mountains, the course of the sun through the sky and its movement from north to south as the seasons progressed—all these things suggested the serpent, and formed the basis of the serpent’s importance in nature-worshipping religions the world over. It is no accident the author of Genesis put Satan in the form of a serpent—it symbolized the most potent tools being used by the devil in his efforts to deceive man in Moses’ time—those tools being the weight of pagan tradition and doctrine, the currents of thought that the devil was putting up in opposition to the worship of the one true God. Most people in the world at that time still believed that humans like Gilgamesh and demigods like Prometheus had made serious, almost-successful grabs for immortality and supernatural power—that man could attain divinity through his own efforts.

The image of a talking serpent was not literally true, in my view, but the threat it embodied was all too real—and still is.

Jonah being swallowed by a fish? I believe it. Some accounts from eighteenth-century whalers’ lore (which I read as supplementary material in a good edition of Moby Dick) showed that this actually happened, and a guy was actually rescued alive from the belly of a sperm whale when the whale was caught and opened up. I think it’s even possible Jonah’s whale literally swam from the Mediterranean around Africa to the Persian Gulf in three days. He just caught all the right currents.

The parting of the Red Sea? Yeah, I think it happened. AND it embodies what happens when human hubris sets itself against God.

The universal flood? I think that’s a moral parable, because the geological evidence in places like the Green River Formation goes against it being literally true. The moral of salvation through obedience to God instead of human social opinion is an eternal truth, notwithstanding that.

I take it case-by-case. But it ALL embodies a truth on some level.

 

[StevenFrancis]

As is par for the course, when I take a poll, there is not an answer which represents my position. The closest and most honest answer I could give was “I don’t know”. What I do know, is that everything in scripture is true. It is truth. Truth doesn’t always necessarily mean that some particular thing happened on some particular date. It means that some particular thing truly happened, and it is important to know that it happened, and WHY it happened, even if the how and the nuts and bolts of the thing aren’t clear. Old testament, (and New testament for that matter), scripture is written using many different literary forms. The histories such as Genesis and Exodus are usually what people are referring to when they argue over whether something is “literal” . Up to the Garden of Eden, of course, there is no one to tell the story, but God himself. The creation had to be transmitted spiritually. When God inspired man to write of pre-human history, it was formed in the mind of man in such a way that it could be communicated to other men, and begin the oral tradition of people. Genesis is not a book of cosmology, or science. But it tells us everything we need to know about creation. Existence exists. It began. God began it. It was perfect. Temptation entered the world because of the free will of another creature form (angels). Man succumbed to temptation. So while I’m not positive that satan’s temptation of man was actually a snake, nor that the tree of good and evil bore apples, or whether Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves, I have 100% faith that man and woman were created by God, and that they succumbed to temptation, thereby giving us the TRUTH of Original Sin, which can be derived from the inspired stories from Genesis. Once people were pretty much up and running, and interacting, and forming families, and tribes, and such, then the oral histories take on a different character. They begin to carry spiritual truth, and physical truth. There are now eye witnesses as well. So I believe that the story of Noah and his family, the covenants made with God, and the rest of the history thread running through several of the books are real events in the sense that we think of real events. That is, I think they are reports. But they carry divine inspiration ALSO, so that the lessons derived from the event, (which may or may not be embellished by human memory), are ALWAYS in tact, making the spiritual content of the story true in every case, even if the some of the physical details may have suffered a tweak here or there. There are some stories which don’t really seem to be incidental to the history of the Jewish people, and rather seem to be literary forms OTHER than history in order to illuminate a spiritual truth. These would be kind of like fables. Job comes to mind. This isn’t part of the historical timeline, and the events of the story aren’t necessary to history. This was likely a morality play. It is still 100% true. There are books of poetry, song lyrics, adages…these are not historical, and their content isn’t measured as against the same ruler that a history is measured against. Are poets and songwriters “lying” when they write a song or a poem, because the events didn’t happen to them? The events usually have happened to all of us. And a poem or a song draws meaning from shared experience.

The prophets tell us of great visions. These are true, though the events in the visions are generally in poetic and fantastic form. The truth is in the vision. The prophets physically spoke for God on Earth, and at His direction.

Having said all of this, I believe that all the events depicted in the historical books, from sometime after Eden, happened in point of fact, the way that 9/11 happened. However they are not “news stories”. They are the inspired word of God, written through and by men, to the best of their abilities at the time of their writing. And that even metaphor and allegory can be fully true, and when these devices are used in scripture, they are always true.

 

[edwest2]

Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us:

"The senses of Scripture

"115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

"116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."83

"117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.

"1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.84

"2. The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.85

"3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.86

"118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:

The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.87"

We cannot guess and decide for ourselves. We must investigate what the Church actually teaches. That means looking, online, for Church documents that deal with the parts of the Old Testament that some find difficult to believe. A poll like this must start with references from Church teaching not personal beliefs.

If you read the New Testament, you see Jesus referring to the Old Testament and you will see Old Testament prophecy as given by God and statements like: “This was done so that the scripture would be fulfilled.” And similar.

bible.cc/john/19-36.htm

The Scripture John is talking about is found in the Old Testament.

Jesus read from the Old Testament in the synagogue, and said:

bible.cc/luke/4-21.htm

And then we have this statement regarding the Old Testament:

bible.cc/2_peter/1-21.htm

Peace,
Ed

 

[Jerry-Jet]

What kind of scholarship comes up with “Hail favored one”?

That isn’t scholarship–that comes from the devil!

The LAMEST thing I ever hear here is that all the doctors of the church and all the early church fathers didn’t have access to the texts we now have therefore they couldn’t UNDERSTAND the bible like we do now.

That is HOGWASH!

You can take all the textual varients known on planet Earth and it’s all pretty much the SAME bible!

the same miracles are there! You have the same people now not believing in the miracles as you did in Jesus’ day when He performed the miracles!

What I am saying is this: ALL the “modern bible scholars” who do not believe that those miracles did in fact take place are point blank wrong!

That’s the type of MODERN bible scholarship that I take exception.

Let me put it this way–was the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the early 1900s right or stupid?

They didn’t believe in Q. NOBODY else for 1900 years believed in Q but we’re supposed to believe in Q now because MODERN "sophisticated “scholars” tell us it must be true!

I refuse to believe that malarky!

Jesus ROSE from the dead! Jesus fed the 5,000! Take a poll of “Modern bible scholars” and see how many of them believe in those HISTORICAL realities.

Many of them don’t believe in those realities.

That’s the problem–many people who don’t believe in those realities are bible translators.

They’re the type of people who throw Hail Mary Full of Grace out of our bibles!

Stating these obvious facts does not make me an unintelligent unsophisticated moron or a fundamentalist or a literalist.

If I am those things then all the doctors of the church for 1900 years who didn’t spout the truths of “modern bible scholars” are those things, too!

That is obviously not the case!

Is there such a thing as real modern bible scholarship that is led by the Holy Spirit and sees the bible through the lens of the Catholic Church’s magisterium over the centuries?

Of course! But that kind of scholarship is not the “Hail favored one” scholarship or the “Young woman will conceive scholarship”.

Those scholarships aren’t scholarship at all!

 

[triumphguy]

Have a nice cup of tea.