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stephenSTOSS1
Guest
Based on your writings, it is clear that you believe Adam and Eve represent man, but are not real historical figures. You take myth to mean fictional stories. I told you before that you are misunderstanding the meaning of myth. Both Dogma and Doctrine tell us with certainty that Adam and Eve are real historical figures and our our first parents. I’ll get to that later. Let’s look at how Catholics define myth. George Johnston of the Catholic Education Resource Center writes:I am not really sure what your question about Moses time is looking for.
In the National Catholic Register , Mark Shea writes:While they do not teach science, the early chapters of Genesis are history and not myth. But they are not history as it would be written by a modern historian. … You might say that they are history written in mythic language a poetic compression of the truth, as it were.
Bernard F. Batto Ph.D., specializes in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern cultural and historical context. He writes:How can Genesis use figurative language, but still affirm a primeval event? It can do it because mythic language is precisely the best way to affirm such an event, an upheaval that inflicted incalculable spiritual damage to the whole of the human race. It’s exactly what the prophet Nathan does when he confronts [King David] … whose sin inflicts incalculable damage on his descendant,s (see 2 Samuel 12). … Is Nathan’s story of the rich man and the ewe lamb false? No. It is a perfectly true account, but it is not told using newspaper language. Genesis’ account of the fall does the same sort of thing. It uses figurative language to describe a real event which took place here in the real world … mythic language is truer language than newspaper language, because it brings us to the heart of what happened.
Msgr. M. Francis Mannion writes:In everyday usage today, myth carries a meaning of something untrue, a fable, a fiction, or an illusion. That usage has a long history, traceable back to certain Greek philosophers. Anthropologists and historians of religion, however, use the term ‘myth’ with a quite different meaning. For them myth refers to a traditional story… that has paradigmatic significance for the society in which the story is operative.
To speak of the stories in Genesis of the creation and fall as “myth” is very misleading, and they are certainly not myth in the sense that most people understand the term. In common usage, myth means a story that is the figment of someone (or some group’s) imagination and that communicates a message that is only vaguely reliable at best … Catholic teaching and the thinking of the best and most reliable Scripture scholars hold that these stories are symbolic narratives that communicate divinely inspired truths. As divinely inspired, they are not the figment of someone’s imagination but the result of the Holy Spirit’s influence on the biblical authors. These stories are not untrue or vaguely reliable or childish, but rather the means by which profound truths about the origin of creation and humankind are communicated.