Amaleq13

Given the talking snake, I consider "fable" more appropriate.

jakejonesiv

:rolling: :rolling: :rolling:

jakejonesiv

Hi Rick,

Yes, I agee. Original sin was largely unknown before Augustine. After that we find a doctrine that consigns unbaptized :devil2: babies :devil2: to burning in hell.

Jake Jones IV

Solo

...which was never popular in the church to begin with, and which was replaced by "limbus infantium" by the time of St.Anselm and Peter Lombard, and perfected by Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of "absence of internal affliction" for the original sin, i.e. doctrine which held that no subjective pain whatsoever issued to an infant from being denied the sacrament of baptism.

Kind of slow following the Christian developments, aren't you, Jake ? :huh:

Jiri

Gamera

The Hebrew scriptures are hihgly redacted. Indeed, there is a major redaction of Genesis, as every scholar noticed. Presumably, the later redactors reviewed Genesis and found it consistent with their view of God, which didn't include God as a liar.

So your mythic theory seems unconvincing.

Gamera

You're quibbling. The issue is whether the author[s] deemed it a myth or whether they deemed it revealed truth. The later seems to be the case.

Yep, "maybe" in the sense of "the more likely interpretation."

Yep, God saw all his sentient creations as good, even though they had the capacity to do evil. Indeed, it is just that capacity that made them good. Consciousness and moral insight require choice.


You assume that this tree, whatever the heck it was, was the only way to become aware of good and evil. The point of the story, I would argue, that it is not.

Saying they evolved from earlier myths tells us nothing about this expression of these authors at the time of their writing. Myths can mean anything. It's how they are used that is interesting. Your "analysis" ignores everything interesting in the story.

pharoah

OK, we agree here.

You seem to have conflated redacting and editing. There is every evidence that the final redactors did very little editing of the text. They seemed to do more of a cut-and-paste job along with some minor editing to tie sections together, show theological significance here and there, resolve egregorious contradictions, etc..

They left in two conflicting creation stories. Two conflicting flood stories. Numerous improbable doublets and triplets. As an example, God is addressed by the name Yahweh numerous times by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Eve even calls him by that name. Yet he tells Moses that he wasn't known to the patriarchs by the name Yahweh. This makes God to be a seeming liar, and it should show you that the redactors first order of business was not editing the text to produce a god that squared with their current beliefs.

So your claim that the redactors would have "fixed" this section if they thought it was out of line with their beliefs about God amounts to special pleading, unless you can show why this particular problem should have been resolved in spite of the fact that they left a large body of other problems intact.

My "mythic theory" is that the story is a myth, not necessarily that the author knew it was a myth when he conceived it. For all I know, the redactors swallowed it hook, line and sinker. In my opinion, the author knowingly adopted it from other regional myths, but who's to say that he didn't believe it?

hinduwoman

what did the Jews believe about the fall before Christianity came on the scene? That would resolve all problems, unless there are not enough materials.

Until then a devout Christian's opinion on how Jews regard their religion is just that --- opinion, particulalry when it clashes with what actual Jews say.

greyline

See my link http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/web/faq/faq123.html - whatever they believe, it's not Original Sin.

Gamera

[QUOTE=pharoah;3722184]Well, I think a version of God as a liar would constitute an "egregious contradiction" for later redacteurs and likely would have caught their eye. You act as if they were light readers of this stuff. Probably the opposite is true -- they poured themselves into these texts and deemed them sacred. Since the Hebrew scriptures as a whole make it clear that God is the God of truth (and indeed God's truth is contrasted with Satan and his lies), it seems very unlikely that a depiction of God as a liar would go unnoticed by those putting these narrative together.

Well, this is six of one, half a dozen of the other. The author/redacteur had texts/narratives, and these texts ultimately passed through many hands and were changed. You claim that the depiction of God as a liar is an artifact from an earlier layer of myth (since clearly the later Hebrew texts shrink from that idea). Whatever the etiology, the fact is somebody would have noticed it if that were the significance to them, and likely changed it. If the author can "adapt" earlier myths for his religion, he clearly can cut out any indications that God is a liar.

But the passages remain -- which circles back to my point -- they aren't depicting God as a liar at all and we are invited to consider what God means by "death" other than physical death, because physical death in fact does not happen that day.