Hundreds Or Even 900 Years?

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Hope1960 said:
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Hope1960:
I read explanations here such as “poetic license” etc. but what is the Catholic Church’s teaching on it? Are we required to believe they literally lived 900+ years …?
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Anyone?
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The answer to the bolded is simply “No”, we are not required to read the passage in a literalist fundamentalist way.
 
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Are you Catholic? And what do you mean by a “target of opportunity?”
 
Hope1960 said:
Are you Catholic? And what do you mean by a “target of opportunity?”
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Yes.

What I mean is that some people on this forum treat every question as a chance to convince you to adopt their personal view, or the view of their religion, rather than simply saying what the Church teaches. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but your question is what does the Church teach. I answered that question (as have a few others by now, like goout).
 
Thanks to you and those who answered. It DOES get aggravating when posters do that. I’ll often ask a question that requires a one word/one syllable answer but instead I’ll get 1/2 a page of words that doesn’t even really answer my question.

<<<<<<<<<<<<some people on this forum treat every question as a chance to convince you to adopt their personal view, or the view of their religion, rather than simply saying what the Church teaches. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but your question is what does the Church teach>>>>>>>>>>
 
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I don’t know why it does, but it does, as far as the statisticians can tell.
 
I’m not a Catholic (yet), but might I suggest that the numbers are a polemic to the even more ridiculous numbers of the Sumerian king list and creation stories? A lot of Genesis is a polemic. Like an inside joke of the ancient world, if you will… one where outsiders in Sumer or later Babylon would recognize (or even Egypt in creation story of God’s Word making the sun rather than God being the Sun/Ra himself), and would purposely anger them. Stories where they share similar origins (Noah and Enoch are in multiple sources, for example), but the Bible always turns it on it’s head. Maybe there was even a symbolic significance to the numbers they chose (almost all of the ages are divisible by 5, for example).

I would say Abraham’s whole life specifically was a polemic. He was from Sumer (even his dad, “Terah” means priest in Sumerian… and they came from Ur, which was the temple of the moon god). Old apocryphal stories even have a young Abraham smashing his dad’s idols (which his dad apparently made) and causing a ruckus to the public. The bible doesn’t get into this, but it’s a very believable backdrop why God called him out of the land and made a new, breakaway civilization (which would eventually bless the world through Jesus Christ).
 
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If not be taken as factual, why include such mythology? Cannot whatever point the author is trying to make be made plainly without mythological stories to cause confusion among the faithful thousands of years later?
 
poche said:
I kind of wish that I could live that long.
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Trust me, I’ve lived since before Christ and it’s no tea party in a fallen world, especially when the only reason you have lived for 3000 years is punishment for eating yellow mushrooms!!

Every 100 years i go into a metamorphosis state like a larvae turning into butterfly. I’m awake for the whole process and it’s agonising. Limbs are torn apart and reconstituted, you know, that kind of thing.
 
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KevinK said:
If not be taken as factual, why include such mythology? Cannot whatever point the author is trying to make be made plainly without mythological stories to cause confusion among the faithful thousands of years later?
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Is it not us that is making the assumptions. When looking at a tradition outside of your normal experiences it is not wise to make assumptions based on modern traditions. But our parents didn’t understand and presented the bible to us according to it’s face value.
 
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KevinK said:
If not be taken as factual, why include such mythology? Cannot whatever point the author is trying to make be made plainly without mythological stories to cause confusion among the faithful thousands of years later?
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Why mythology?
You are asking a question about the purpose and meaning of mythology which is way to much for a blog response . There is a short video spot on another thread that addresses this. It’s a conversation between CS Lewis and Tolkien. I can’t find it at the moment.
Why mythology. That’s a mystifying question…

Your point about eliminating confusion is fantasy. We have confusion because we are human.
 
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