Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?

On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, David Opderbeck wrote:

> I would grant that Peter's language might reflect his Second Temple
> presuppositions about what the Genesis texts mean, but I don't think Peter
> is teaching anything about those presuppositions in this passage. Moreover,
> if you really want to apply the hermeneutic you're endorsing, what would it
> mean for Peter to say that the earth will be destroyed at the final judgment
> when Peter would have had no idea at all that the Earth is a globe and that
> there were people living in what we now call Australia, North America,
> etc.?

I wonder whether a first century missionary in a world influenced by Greek
culture would have accepted Greek cosmology. It is hard to believe that he
would have been unaware of it. Still, I can't detect a shift in the
language between the OT and NT that would reflect the change in
cosmologies, but then we haven't necessarily updated the idioms in our
language to fit our present cosmology either.

The Greeks of that era knew that the earth was spherical, and they had a
pretty accurate calculation of its circumference. They also knew how big
the moon was and how far away it was. On the other hand, if I recall
correctly, the first century geographer Strabo thought that there was no
land below the equator or in the area west of Europe and east of Asia.

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395

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Received on Fri Mar 30 17:16:20 2007