The Flood

  • Thread starter Thread starter JakeG
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Be careful of the word world
To ancients it meant those areas that were known
In the New Testament the world would b the confines of the Roman Empire.
I believe there was a huge flood .
The End of the last ice age would have triggered flooding beyond anything we can comprehend
Remember population tend to populate coastal areas or river valleys .the deaths could have been massive.
This is why skeletons of animals appear all overf the place including big fish on land, not some ice age but the flood itself.
 
My view is that the assertion that only the persons on the Ark survived is figurative. The Flood was a worldwide cataclysmic event, killing a vast number and high percentage of persons in the whole world. But not all human persons and not all animals died.
 
First of all, we should master the text. If you think that Noah simply put two animals of every kind on the ark, you have not mastered the text. If you are unaware of the chiastic nature of the account of the flood, you have not mastered the text. Etc.

St. Peter (not to mention Christ) had mastered the text. Virtually everyone they addressed when referencing the Flood had mastered the text. They all understood what it meant spiritually and had integrated it into their intellectual and cultural heritage (Ham vs. Shem and all that).

That does not make every reference to the Flood (by figures in Scripture or by Church Fathers) which parrots or recalls or uses that common heritage an interpretation of the historicity or literalness of it (or any other event, like Jonah).

The article in the Old Encyclopedia gives a very weak argument on the anthropological universality of the Flood for this very reason. Just because Peter repeats Scripture to make a point does not mean that he is giving a natural history lesson.

The article gives a very strong argument on the literalness of some great flood event in the past that devastated the known world.
 
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