Mageth

She got it more or less backwards.

dado

i wonder if it isn't even simpler than that. the 15th century was Gutenberg's century; before texts were readily available, myth had primacy over canon because stories were passed from one human directly to another. with the easy availability of printed material, we started losing the context of the written word - a teacher can tell you what is in a book, a book cannot tell you what is in the teacher.

i can't be the only person who finds literalist anything a crashing bore...

Albion

Thanks for the responses so far. They've been very helpful. I haven't been able to find a book that addresses this subject specifically, so the replies here are really useful.

Dado

It isn't intentional deception. She and her other creationist friends on that board (and elsewhere) believe with an unshakeable and (to me rather desperate) fervour that their version of literalism is the only proper way to approach Genesis, and that people who use less rigid interpretations are less good Christians (in fact probably not real Christiains at all). Unfortunately this seems to be one of the criteria against which they measure the sincerity of people's faith; according to them, the notion that Jesus believed in the literal biblical Adam was the basis for Jesus's sacrifice, and Christians who don't believe in the literal Adam aren't really Christians. There's no intentional deception; they just believe what they're told by their pastors and by fundamentalist authors, and they dismiss other Christians as counterfeit on that basis.

Albion

Mageth, I found that Karen Armstrong book to be a very helpful guide to the fundamentalist mentality and outlook, although it didn't really explain why fundamentalists thought that Jesus was one of them. The funny (or pathetic) thing is that just mentioning Karen Armstrong to this particular group of fundamentalists (and some others on creationism-evolution boards) is pretty well guaranteed to elicit a furious response along the lines that Karen Armstrong isn't a True Christian, she's a Muslim sympathiser, she hates Jesus, she's writing anti-Christian propaganda, she's writing lies about fundamentalism (which doesn't even exist anyway because the only options are True Christianity and following Satan) and she doesn't have a clue what she's on about. Among other things.

Mageth

I'm only to page 50 or so. At least part of that post was my own speculation.

It's pathetic, IMO.

Albion

Well, that depends on the nature of the errors and the inportance of the passage to the whole book. I mean, I remember reading once about how Watson and Crick had discovered DNA. In a book about recent scientific discoveries or a book about the development of molecular biology, that would have been an indication of rather deficient research and understanding that might have applied to the whole book, since people writing on that subject would understand the difference between discovering DNA and discovering its structure. But this happened to be a biography of the Queen, and the author was setting her reign in the context of well-known things that had happened around the time she took the throne. In that case, this mistake wasn't an indication of an error-laden book, it was just an indication that the author was a historian who knew damn all about science.

Gooch's dad

One example I can think of, where Jesus didn't seem to take the OT literally, in Mark 7:10 and thereabouts. If you take that bit literally, then Jesus was scolding the Pharisees for not actually stoning disobedient children to death.

To me, either Christians have to accept that Jesus was promoting such a barbaric law, or they can accept that Jesus was simply using that law as one way of mocking what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.

Faith

dado,
Is there a way to know with certainty the sod, or mystical, meaning of the text? Or is it open to individual interpretation?

And is it true that each generation of Jews finds new meaning in the Torah?

dado

sure: when you find it, people start treating you like the dalai lama. but the idea of "the" truth doesn't really work with Judaism: there are many truths, and not all of them apply all of the time.

in theory, yes. judaism is prone to the literalist virus like any other faith, and there do exist streams of judaism intent on recreating the utopia of a 19th century polish ghetto...

Steven Carr

Surely many Orthodox Jews believe in both a Flood and an Earth which is less than 10,000 years old.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/judaism/FAQ...section-4.html