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prodigalson2011
Guest
You are misquoting me. Different languages have different rules of semantics, and it’s often hard (or impossible) to convey the full sense of a text in another language. This is a widely accepted fact, and footnotes about such difficulties appear in even the most orthodox of Catholic Bibles.
You are also taking Jesus out of context. He was speaking of His commandments and teaching. Regardless, I did not say the texts were lost. I said the full depth of them were “lost upon” modern readers. The phrase “lost upon” means that something escapes comprehension, not that it has ceased to exist.
Anyway, now, to reiterate and expound upon what I said previously, as Schroeder (who is a Torah scholar) illustrates, the written form of the Hebrew language could be manipulated by adding certain accents or ornamentation to different characters. In this way, Genesis contains alot of subtext that cannot be placed into the narative in plain language. He gives clear examples of this in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.”
In the ancient world, those Jews whose job it was to make copies of the Torah were trained to do so for years and years for exactly this reason, and they faced the consequence of death for altering the particular formation of a single letter, so important was it considered.
Nahmanides, a Torah scholar living in the 1200’s (700 years before the Big Bang Theory), in writing his commentary on Genesis interpolated the following from that sacred writing:
At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it. From this initial act of creation, from this etherieally thin pseudosubstance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed.
This is, in laymen’s terms, the Big Bang theory… written 700 years before the Big Bang theory.
The question of the age of the earth is actually incoherent, in that the answer is completely relative to the frame of reference, in terms of both time and space. This is a point that even people who understand the theory of relativity for some reason often don’t piece together. The theory of relativity proved that time does not flow in a uniform manner, being effected by gravity, velocity, and the size of the universe itself. The universe is only 15 billion years old from the frame of reference of modern day Earth.
For instance, let’s pretend you could take two perfectly synchronized clocks (which would never stop running) and place one at the beginning of time/the universe, and one here on modern day Earth and wait around here for about 133 days. At the end of the 133rd day, you retrieve both clocks. While the one here on earth would have registered the passing of 133 days, the one at the beginning of time would have registered only the passing of 1 second. As Dr. Schroeder explains:
What’s exciting about the last few years in cosmology is we now have quantified the data to know the relationship of the “view of time” from the beginning of stable matter, the threshold energy of protons and neutrons (their nucleosynthesis), relative to the “view of time” today. It’s not science fiction any longer. A dozen physics textbooks all bring the same number. The general relationship between nucleosynthesis, that time near the beginning at the threshold energy of protons and neutrons when matter formed, and time today is a million million. That’s a 1 with 12 zeros after it. So when a view from the beginning looking forward says “I’m sending you a pulse every second,” would we see a pulse every second? No. We’d see it every million million seconds. Because that’s the stretching effect of the expansion of the universe.
Thus we see that the question of the age of the universe is completely relative to the frame of reference from which it is measured. It just so happens that (and on this point both ancient Jewish and Christian Bible scholars agree) the semantic context of Genesis places it’s frame of reference at the beginning of time, looking forward. Dr. Schroeder’s entire theory rests upon that fact, and the science confirms it.