An invective hurled, would, perhaps, make more sense
if you explained the context in the post of why you
had stooped to an ad hominem attack.
--- Jim Eisele <jeisele@starpower.net> wrote:
> How come a group of grown men/women can't come up
> with a consensus
> on Gen 1? How weak and pathetic.
>
> Jim (no wonder Genesis Defended had to start our own
> web site)
>
As to the general explanation to your obviously
rhetorical question, four interrelated reasons:
language, the absence of an original monography,
context and interpretation.
Leaving aside the potential problem of not having the
original monograph of the Genesis text in question,
one first has to reconcile differences between extant
texts in Hebrew and Greek. There is no mathematical
word for word method of translation, even if you could
assume the contextual meaning of language was the same
between languages (which it rarely is). Assuming you
are a scholar of both of those languages, you also
have to understand the context in which it was written
(back to this in a moment). If you are not a scholar
of those languages, you have to deal with the added
complication of translation into whatever your native
language may be (assumedly English). At which point,
you need to educate yourself enough to distinguish
among the translations and interpretative approaches
used in various English translations of Gen. 1.
Even if you are assured you have a perfect translation
of the words used (whatever, if anything, that may
mean), you have to then address the context in which
those words were written in order to begin to hope to
approach authorial intent (if one can -- C.S. Lewis
noted once that no one who wrote such things about his
intent was ever anywhere near the mark).
Understanding authorial intent requires one to
understand not only the author but their cultural
millieu. One can come up with numerous turns of
phrase or idioms that mean something different than
the literal words as written. So, you have to have a
pretty good sense (ideally a perfect sense) of what
those are and what they mean.
Even then, when you have ambiguity in the words or in
a choice of the meaning, because the literal words and
the idiom that they may represent have different
meanings, you have to come up with some additional way
of interpreting what they mean. Thus armed with your
hermeneutics, you have to go back to the text. Funny
thing is, there are all sorts of different
hermeneutics depending on the rules you use to resolve
ambiguities.
Thus, rather than being "pansies", reasonable minds
may disagree on any of these steps and then reach
differing conclusions depending on how the ambiguities
are resolved. Perhaps, you may realize that you have
at least implicit (if not explicit) hermeneutics (even
if you don't recognize the word in its technical
meaning) that differs from someone who disagrees with
you. The argument then is not so much over the
particular text (unless you disagree over the
translation, but I haven't detected that you are a
scholar of the languages in question or the age and
pedigree the extant texts), but over the way of
resolving questions of textual interpretation to begin
with. Thus, you might gain some insight into what it
means for a text to mean something by understanding
the reasons behind different perspectives over
meaning.
Regards,
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