Jim has aproblem. That is clear. Please see my post to George.
Dr. Blake Nelson wrote:
>
> 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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-- =================================== Walt Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com> In any consistent theory, there must exist true but not provable statements. (Godel's Theorem)You can only find the truth with logic If you have already found the truth without it. (G.K. Chesterton) ===================================
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