Which Biblical Stories are Historical, Miraculous, and Unexplainable by Science?

[MH84]

HI patg,

There is actually no proof of the resurrection at all - no witnesses, no resurrection stories, etc. It certainly happened but belief that it did is* strictly* a mattter of faith.

The eye-witness accounts are in the gospels. Just because we accept the gospels as revealed by God does not mean that they have no historical value. The fact of the resurrection has been transmitted to me, mouth to ear, for some 65 generations. Of course, the gift of faith received in baptism, prepares my mind to receive this truth, but I take it as a historical fact. Otherwise, we are in a circular argument : the resurrection proves the gospels and the gospels prove the resurrection.

Some of the people here are just trying to intellectualise the event as if they could ever understand it. Get off your high horses. Im sure you are very knowledgeable, but why can’t you as Christians just accept the historicity of the Gospels?

(Im not telling you to believe, just that if you do believe, admit that the Gospels are historical accounts?)

 

[SemperFidelis]

The Pontifical Biblical Commission specifically states that the gospel accounts are neither eyewitness nor literal.

Yes and since 1971 the PBC, much like the ITC, has had no Magisterial Authority whatsoever, and I’ll take what they say with a grain of salt, especially when it coincides with what the only canonized Pope in the last 450 years Pope St. Pius X declared as error:

**The Apostolic Constitution
“Lamentabili Sane Exitu”
Given by His Holiness Pope Saint Pius X
July 3, 1907 **

With truly lamentable results, our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race. Thus it falls into very serious errors, which are even more serious when they concern sacred authority, the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, and the principal mysteries of Faith. The fact that many Catholic writers also go beyond the limits determined by the Fathers and the Church herself is extremely regrettable. In the name of higher knowledge and historical research (they say), they are looking for that progress of dogmas which is, in reality, nothing but the corruption of dogmas.

These errors are being daily spread among the faithful. Lest they captivate the faithful’s minds and corrupt the purity of their faith, His Holiness, Pius X, by Divine Providence, Pope, has decided that the chief errors should be noted and condemned by the Office of this Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition.

Therefore, after a very diligent investigation and consultation with the Reverend Consultors, the Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, the General Inquisitors in matters of faith and morals have judged the following propositions to be condemned and proscribed. In fact, by this general decree, they are condemned and proscribed.

1. The ecclesiastical law which prescribes that books concerning the Divine Scriptures are subject to previous examination does not apply to critical scholars and students of scientific exegesis of the Old and New Testament.
2. The Church’s interpretation of the Sacred Books is by no means to be rejected; nevertheless, it is subject to the more accurate judgment and correction of the exegetes.
3. From the ecclesiastical judgments and censures passed against free and more scientific exegesis, one can conclude that the Faith the Church proposes contradicts history and that Catholic teaching cannot really be reconciled with the true origins of the Christian religion.
4. Even by dogmatic definitions the Church’s magisterium cannot determine the genuine sense of the Sacred Scriptures.
5. Since the deposit of Faith contains only revealed truths, the Church has no right to pass judgment on the assertions of the human sciences.
6. The “Church learning” and the “Church teaching” collaborate in such a way in defining truths that it only remains for the “Church teaching” to sanction the opinions of the “Church learning.”
7. In proscribing errors, the Church cannot demand any internal assent from the faithful by which the judgments she issues are to be embraced.
8. They are free from all blame who treat lightly the condemnations passed by the Sacred Congregation of the Index or by the Roman Congregations.
9. They display excessive simplicity or ignorance who believe that God is really the author of the Sacred Scriptures.
10. The inspiration of the books of the Old Testament consists in this: The Israelite writers handed down religious doctrines under a peculiar aspect which was either little or not at all known to the Gentiles.
11. Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scriptures so that it renders its parts, each and every one, free from every error.
12. If he wishes to apply himself usefully to Biblical studies, the exegete must first put aside all preconceived opinions about the supernatural origin of Sacred Scripture and interpret it the same as any other merely human document.
13. The Evangelists themselves, as well as the Christians of the second and third generation, artificially arranged the evangelical parables. In such a way they explained the scanty fruit of the preaching of Christ among the Jews.
14. In many narrations the Evangelists recorded, not so much things that are true, as things which, even though false, they judged to be more profitable for their readers.
15. Until the time the canon was defined and constituted, the Gospels were increased by additions and corrections. Therefore there remained in them only a faint and uncertain trace of the doctrine of Christ.
16. The narrations of John are not properly history, but a mystical contemplation of the Gospel. The discourses contained in his Gospel are theological meditations, lacking historical truth concerning the mystery of salvation.

 

[SemperFidelis]

1. The fourth Gospel exaggerated miracles not only in order that the extraordinary might stand out but also in order that it might become more suitable for showing forth the work and glory of the Word lncarnate.
2. John claims for himself the quality of witness concerning Christ. In reality, however, he is only a distinguished witness of the Christian life, or of the life of Christ in the Church at the close of the first century.
3. Heterodox exegetes have expressed the true sense of the Scriptures more faithfully than Catholic exegetes.
4. Revelation could be nothing else than the consciousness man acquired of his revelation to God.
5. Revelation, constituting the object of the Catholic faith, was not completed with the Apostles.
6. The dogmas the Church holds out as revealed are not truths which have fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort.
7. Opposition may, and actually does, exist between the facts narrated in Sacred Scripture and the Church’s dogmas which rest on them. Thus the critic may reject as false facts the Church holds as most certain.
8. The exegete who constructs premises from which it follows that dogmas are historically false or doubtful is not to be reproved as long as he does not directly deny the dogmas themselves .
9. The assent of faith ultimately rests on a mass of probabilities .
10. The dogmas of the Faith are to be held only according to their practical sense; that is to say, as preceptive norms of conduct and not as norms of believing.
11. The divinity of Jesus Christ is not proved from the Gospels. It is a dogma which the Christian conscience has derived from the notion of the Messias.
12. While He was exercising His ministry, Jesus did not speak with the object of teaching He was the Messias, nor did His miracles tend to prove it.
13. It is permissible to grant that the Christ of history is far inferior to the Christ Who is the object of faith.

30 In all the evangelical texts the name "Son of God’’ is equivalent only to that of “Messias.” It does not in the least way signify that Christ is the true and natural Son of God.

1. The doctrine concerning Christ taught by Paul, John, and the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus and Chalcedon is not that which Jesus taught but that which the Christian conscience conceived concerning Jesus.
2. It is impossible to reconcile the natural sense of the Gospel texts with the sense taught by our theologians concerning the conscience and the infallible knowledge of Jesus Christ.

33 Everyone who is not led by preconceived opinions can readily see that either Jesus professed an error concerning the immediate Messianic coming or the greater part of His doctrine as contained in the Gospels is destitute of authenticity.

1. The critics can ascribe to Christ a knowledge without limits only on a hypothesis which cannot be historically conceived and which is repugnant to the moral sense. That hypothesis is that Christ as man possessed the knowledge of God and yet was unwilling to communicate the knowledge of a great many things to His disciples and posterity.
2. Christ did not always possess the consciousness of His Messianic dignity.
3. The Resurrection of the Savior is not properly a fact of the historical order. It is a fact of merely the supernatural order (neither demonstrated nor demonstrable) which the Christian conscience gradually derived from other facts.
4. In the beginning, faith in the Resurrection of Christ was not so much in the fact itself of the Resurrection as in the immortal life of Christ with God.
5. The doctrine of the expiatory death of Christ is Pauline and not evangelical.
6. The opinions concerning the origin of the Sacraments which the Fathers of Trent held and which certainly influenced their dogmatic canons are very different from those which now rightly exist among historians who examine Christianity .
7. The Sacraments have their origin in the fact that the Apostles and their successors, swayed and moved by circumstances and events, interpreted some idea and intention of Christ.

 

[SemperFidelis]

1. The Sacraments are intended merely to recall to man’s mind the ever-beneficent presence of the Creator.
2. The Christian community imposed the necessity of Baptism, adopted it as a necessary rite, and added to it the obligation of the Christian profession.
3. The practice of administering Baptism to infants was a disciplinary evolution, which became one of the causes why the Sacrament was divided into two, namely, Baptism and Penance.
4. There is nothing to prove that the rite of the Sacrament of Confirmation was employed by the Apostles. The formal distinction of the two Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation does not pertain to the history of primitive Christianity.
5. Not everything which Paul narrates concerning the institution of the Eucharist (I Cor. 11:23-25) is to be taken historically.
6. In the primitive Church the concept of the Christian sinner reconciled by the authority of the Church did not exist. Only very slowly did the Church accustom herself to this concept. As a matter of fact, even after Penance was recognized as an institution of the Church, it was not called a Sacrament since it would be held as a disgraceful Sacrament.
7. The words of the Lord, "Receive the Holy Spirit; whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained’’ (John 20:22-23), in no way refer to the Sacrament of Penance, in spite of what it pleased the Fathers of Trent to say.
8. In his Epistle (Ch. 5:14-15) James did not intend to promulgate a Sacrament of Christ but only commend a pious custom. If in this custom he happens to distinguish a means of grace, it is not in that rigorous manner in which it was taken by the theologians who laid down the notion and number of the Sacraments.
9. When the Christian supper gradually assumed the nature of a liturgical action those who customarily presided over the supper acquired the sacerdotal character.
10. The elders who fulfilled the office of watching over the gatherings of the faithful were instituted by the Apostles as priests or bishops to provide for the necessary ordering of the increasing communities and not properly for the perpetuation of the Apostolic mission and power.
11. It is impossible that Matrimony could have become a Sacrament of the new law until later in the Church since it was necessary that a full theological explication of the doctrine of grace and the Sacraments should first take place before Matrimony should be held as a Sacrament.
12. It was far from the mind of Christ to found a Church as a society which would continue on earth for a long course of centuries. On the contrary, in the mind of Christ the kingdom of heaven together with the end of the world was about to come immediately.
13. The organic constitution of the Church is not immutable. Like human society, Christian society is subject to a perpetual evolution.
14. Dogmas, Sacraments and hierarchy, both their notion and reality, are only interpretations and evolutions of the Christian intelligence which have increased and perfected by an external series of additions the little germ latent in the Gospel.
15. Simon Peter never even suspected that Christ entrusted the primacy in the Church to him.
16. The Roman Church became the head of all the churches, not through the ordinance of Divine Providence, but merely through political conditions.
17. The Church has shown that she is hostile to the progress of the natural and theological sciences.
18. Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.
19. Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and all men, but rather inaugurated a religious movement adapted or to be adapted to different times and places.
20. Christian Doctrine was originally Judaic. Through successive evolutions it became first Pauline, then Joannine, finally Hellenic and universal.

.

 

[SemperFidelis]

1. It may be said without paradox that there is no chapter of Scripture, from the first of Genesis to the last of the Apocalypse, which contains a doctrine absolutely identical with that which the Church teaches on the same matter. For the same reason, therefore, no chapter of Scripture has the same sense for the critic and the theologian.
2. The chief articles of the Apostles’ Creed did not have the same sense for the Christians of the first ages as they have for the Christians of our time.
3. The Church shows that she is incapable of effectively maintaining evangelical ethics since she obstinately clings to immutable doctrines which cannot be reconciled with modern progress.
4. Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted.
5. Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.

 

[SpiritMeadow]

Really? You would put your credentials and life’s work up against one of the great contemporary biblical scholars and authors of the Church? The author of the book used in a many, many adult ed programs, a diocesan Director of adult education? This is a book EVERY Catholic should be required to read and study over and over. We have taught from it constantly for over 20 years. She is perfectly in line with the other scholars of the church - from the Pontifical Biblical Commission to Raymond Brown to John Meier to Paul VI to Pius XII. You may burn it but that would be a very sad loss for your understanding of scripture.

Ditto here. Its the same catechical material our parish uses and the one I used at another parish as well. I really don’t understand this “I’m more conservative that Rome attitude”…Well actually I do understand it…

 

[SpiritMeadow]

I like some things about the book. Her explanation of how oral tradition works and how those traditions get written down were very illuminating.

But it seems like she got carried away with her method and at some point she stops even trying to explain her reasons for saying that the original accounts of the events have been changed or exagerated.

It’s very telling that she refuses to refer to God as he, and even invents a new pronoun to avoid making God masculine. It’s not “God did this Himself” it’s “God did this Godself”

I think you just don’t like it because you have a different personal opinion of what is fact and what is not. That is of course fine, but is certainly no indictment of her work. Since God is neither male nor female, gender is not an issue I submit, and given differences in experiences, its often important for some to be able ti visualize God in more feminine attributes. Attempting to ungender God provide better ways for some develop a close relationship with the divine. Godself is not a new pronoun. I’ve certainly seen it before in many contexts.

 

[Neil_Anthony]

I really don’t understand this “I’m more conservative that Rome attitude”…

Why do you understand people who are more liberal than Rome, but not understand people who are more conservative than Rome? What’s to understand?

 

[SemperFidelis]

I really don’t understand this “I’m more conservative that Rome attitude”…Well actually I do understand it…

It’s not this “I’m more conservative than Rome attitude.” You’ll find several modern scripture scholars, Priests, those in the hierarchy, apologists etc. who aren’t “big fans” of historical criticism. Historical criticism is the lastest “fashion,” it is not Dogmatic like some here imply. Instead of jumping on the “bandwagon” of fashion some feel the need to heed the words of those who came before us. Historical criticism does nothing for the Faith.

 

[SemperFidelis]

I think you just don’t like it because you have a different personal opinion of what is fact and what is not. That is of course fine, but is certainly no indictment of her work. Since God is neither male nor female, gender is not an issue I submit, and given differences in experiences, its often important for some to be able ti visualize God in more feminine attributes. Attempting to ungender God provide better ways for some develop a close relationship with the divine. Godself is not a new pronoun. I’ve certainly seen it before in many contexts.

Ah yes, the “Our Mother” prayer. I’m glad Jesus decided to use these words. I guess that’s okay for most Biblical critics though, because it never really happened anyway…

 

[SpiritMeadow]

Gosh I do wonder why the PBC even bothers any more. The apparently haven’t been told that nobody pays attention to their work any more. I wonder why Popes keep citing to it?

 

[SpiritMeadow]

Ah yes, the “Our Mother” prayer. I’m glad Jesus decided to use these words. I guess that’s okay for most Biblical critics though, because it never really happened anyway…

Are you attempting to make some point? Or do you disagree that God is ungendered?

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Gosh I do wonder why the PBC even bothers any more. The apparently haven’t been told that nobody pays attention to their work any more. I wonder why Popes keep citing to it?

SpiritMeadow, just because I disagreed with part of what this one book said doesn’t mean I would throw the PBC out the window. Why is it so black and white for you?

Was this “And God Said What” book published by the PBC? Surely there must be a range of different ideas that come out of the PBC? I wish I knew where to read more about it.

Also the PBC is working with a new method, it’s very experimental and theoretical. So discussing its pros and cons isn’t a bad thing, it’s the whole point of the exercize.

 

[SemperFidelis]

Gosh I do wonder why the PBC even bothers any more. The apparently haven’t been told that nobody pays attention to their work any more. I wonder why Popes keep citing to it?

Popes can do what they wish with the work of the PBC, or the ITC. What these commissions issue are by no means Dogmatic or part of the authority of the Magisterium. A good example of this is the recommendation put forth by the commission on birth control. It recommended that Paul VI change the teaching on artificial birth control. Realizing they were in error, he decided to disregard what they had taught, and published Humanae Vitae in response to their position.

 

[SemperFidelis]

Are you attempting to make some point? Or do you disagree that God is ungendered?

God is ungendered, but Jesus gave us the “Our Father” for a reason, and that wasn’t so that we could 2000 years down the road, feminize God to make us feel better and more inclusive.

 

[SemperFidelis]

SpiritMeadow, not to get this thread off topic, but I just came across a great article pertaining to my above post:

ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/mbrumley_father1_nov05.asp

 

[SpiritMeadow]

Why do you understand people who are more liberal than Rome, but not understand people who are more conservative than Rome? What’s to understand?

Because I can’t conceive of what anyone who is more conservative than Rome can be except a fundamentalist, and that’s something I’m not prepared to tolerate in my Church if I can help it. This kind of every religion now digging in their heels is most dangerous. Of course its only a small minority in each but they are starting to engage in a good deal too much violence for me at this point, so I don’t support it at all.

 

[SpiritMeadow]

SpiritMeadow, just because I disagreed with part of what this one book said doesn’t mean I would throw the PBC out the window. Why is it so black and white for you?

Was this “And God Said What” book published by the PBC? Surely there must be a range of different ideas that come out of the PBC? I wish I knew where to read more about it.

Also the PBC is working with a new method, it’s very experimental and theoretical. So discussing its pros and cons isn’t a bad thing, it’s the whole point of the exercize.

Sorry, that post was not directed at you at all. This has nothing to do with the catechical material we were discussing.

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Because I can’t conceive of what anyone who is more conservative than Rome can be except a fundamentalist, and that’s something I’m not prepared to tolerate in my Church if I can help it. This kind of every religion now digging in their heels is most dangerous. Of course its only a small minority in each but they are starting to engage in a good deal too much violence for me at this point, so I don’t support it at all.

Well geez, can’t you see that you’re being untolerant in the same way, just from the other side of the spectrum??

Am I a fundamentalist just because I’m cautious about which parts of scripture I don’t take literally?

 

[SpiritMeadow]

God is ungendered, but Jesus gave us the “Our Father” for a reason, and that wasn’t so that we could 2000 years down the road, feminize God to make us feel better and more inclusive.

Excuse me, there is no stated reason why Jesus said “Our Father”. One rightly assumes it was how he related to God. Since we all know God is ungendered or at least we all believe that, surely Jesus believed that as well. The fact that He used the words Our father cannot be subsumed into some statement that a female appelation is inappropriate.

Your opinion is simply that he wouldn’t do so. I can respect that. I understand you are quite single minded in your quest for perfect symmetry in Catholicism but I don’t see any proof of this conclusion of yours.