> Allen wrote,
>
> << A huge
> fallacy that has been expressed on this net is that the writers of the
Bible
> MUST have had the same views of the world as their pagan neighbors. >>
I asked, Can you document this statement? Who said this?
Allan answered, This in essence what you say when you claim that the writers
of the Bible believed in a solid atmosphere and that the earth rests upon
water. Your
papers claim that the Bible writers came out of the culture of the pagans
and because that is what the pagans believed about nature then that is what
the Bible writers believed about nature. >>
Sound interpretation of any text demands that it be seen within its
historical setting. The Bible must be interpreted
_historically_-grammatically because words to not have meanings independent
of their historical settings. I, therefore, established the historical
meanings of "earth" "sky" etc in the OT. But, I did not take that meaning as
final. You missed the fact that that I then asked, Does the Bible say
anything which disproves those historical meanings? I went on to show that so
far from disproving them, the Bible agreed completely.
I have never said or inferred that the writers of Scripture "MUST have had
the same views of the world as their pagan neighbors." Of course God could
have revealed to them that the earth was spherical and did not rest upon
water, that the earth went around the sun, that the sky was not solid, etc.
But, there is _no_ evidence that he made any of those revelations to them.
All of the data, in the Bible and out testifies that the people in the OT
believed the earth was flat and floating on a sea, the sun moved, not the
earth, the sky was solid and had a literal sea above it.
Indeed except for the flatness of the earth, which educated Christians
learned from the Greeks was incorrect, the Church went on believing that an
ocean surrounded the entire earth, that the water of that ocean came up
through the springs and wells of the earth, that the sun, not the earth, was
moving, that the sky was solid, and that there was a literal sea above that
solid sky. If there is revelation in the Bible to the contrary, how come even
the Church did not see it? How come even Luther did not see it? (Sorry,
George, but Luther is such a good example of a person sticking right to the
Bible that I cannot pass him by.)
The apriori insistence that God MUST not accommodate his revelation to the
science of the times is the real fallacy because it first subordinates God
and his Word to an apriori human dogma, and then supports that dogma with
idiosyncratic interpretations of Scripture which no one ever saw in the Bible
until modern times, and which even now can rarely be found in the
commentaries of qualified OT scholars.
Paul
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