Basic Christianity. Jesus is the sinless, perfect sacrifice that stones for all our sins, shame, guilt etc and takes our punishment.
If Jesus lied or knowing suport3d a lie would he qualify as a sinless saviour.
Are you sending your neighbors to Hell?
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If Jesus lied or knowing suport3d a lie would he qualify as a sinless saviour.
Is it a bad assumption to believe that Jesus told the literal truth?
If he was knowingly giving support to what he, as the creator, knew to be false, how would that qualify him as our ' sinless ' perfect atoning sacrifice?
Jesus is saying there was No evolution, that there have Not been millions of years.
Wick Stick
Well-Known Member
Nobody has made an argument that Jesus lied. I'm not sure why you keep harping on it, other than it's an easy argument to make.
The literal part... maybe? Jesus made an allusion to a well-known story. He didn't say the story was historical. (It is pre-historical so that would have been incorrect)
Evolution isn't something that is even remotely hinted at in the Bible. That idea didn't exist back then. It seems unlikely that Jesus was trying to talk about it here. That's not at all what the chapter is about.
Why would Jesus respond to the Pharisees with what he knew to be false.
Matt 19:
3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Jesus is the creator.
Wick Stick
Well-Known Member
Wick Stick
Well-Known Member
Well... the Bible contains multiple genres of literature. Recognizing what genre you're reading is important to understanding it.
The genre we call History didn't exist till the 5th century BC. That doesn't make the things written before that false, but it does mean that if you're reading something older than that, you probably should take a moment to identify what genre you are reading.
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And a passage depicting an event, whether Jerichos walls falling flat, a great fish and Jonah, an axe head floating or the creation of the world instill a truthful account of what happened.
Other literary genre have there own distinctive patterns.
Wick Stick
Well-Known Member
You don't seem to be recognizing those patterns very well.
The book of Joshua, where Jericho's walls fall, is not written as a history, but rather a collection of short stories. Are the stories based on real events - probably. But each story has its own purpose. Some of them are there to tell who-conquered-what and thus owns it. Others are there to teach lessons.
The book of Jonah is generally grouped with the prophets, but only chapter 2 contains prophetic content. The other 3 chapters tell a moral story, and are written in a completely different style than chapter 2.
2Kings IS a history. It was written late enough to be in that genre, is arranged chronologically, and attempts to relate literal facts.
Genesis, like Joshua, is a collection of stories that have different purposes.
Genesis 1 in particular is a piece of epic poetry of the same style written by the Amorites in the 15th-12th centuries BC. This shouldn't be surprising - Moses conquered the Amorites in the 12th century. Is it literally about the creation of the world? Yes. But it isn't written as a history; it's an epic poem. It isn't trying to relate a chronology, so much as its staging a story dramatically for performance to an audience. We can recognize poetic forms in it and allusions to other stories we know from the same genre of literature.
I know this, that if genesis is a collection of mythical tales we have no Christianity.
When I read geneses I see no poetic imagery but a story, a story that tells history.
Wick Stick
Well-Known Member
That's simply not true at all. Nothing is lost that Christianity requires. Maybe we should take stock of exactly what would be lost?
Young Earth Creationism is lost. Genesis would still teach creation, just without the silly insistence that the world is 7000-ish years old. Can't say I'd be sorry to see that go.
Augustine's formulation of the doctrine of Original Sin is lost - the idea that everyone is guilty of Adam's sin. The Bible would still teach that everyone sins, and that men by their nature tend to work iniquity... just without the gross insistence that God condemns innocent babies who die to an eternity in hell because of something that someone else did. This seems like a net positive to me.
The idea of a global flood that killed all but 8 people in precisely 2386 BC is lost. The Bible would still teach that God periodically judges the nations throughout history, destroying the wicked and saving the righteous. Noah's covenant with God would remain intact, too.
The idea of Abraham and his literal, physical descendants as determined by genealogies being God's chosen people throughout history probably needs to be re-understood. Abraham's covenant with God remains, and he is still a father of nations, but his descendants need to be reckoned spiritually, according to adoption. Actually, this needs to happen regardless, because it's what Jesus and Paul and the New Testament teaches. So all we lose here is a common mis-understanding of the Bible.
It turns out that understanding Genesis doesn't dismantle Christianity at all.
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