(12 votes, average: 4.58 out of 5)
Loading...In my Bible Intro, I included a number of “boxes” that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here’s one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis.
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I am hoping we will see revelations in a nutshell… if that’s even possible!
You will! If the apocalypse doesn’t come first….
Ah, but maybe October 23, 1997 was when the Rapture took place! And so few people were taken up that nobody noticed! That would explain why Christianity has become so warped in recent years: the true believers are gone! (Hmm. Could I start a new church based on this idea? The Latter Day Aints?)
Nothing seems more likely…
It’s a test. God made the universe appear to be billions of years old but He wants us to believe it’s only a few thousand years old. Literalistic Christians will have the last laugh when most of us are burning in a lake of fire for billions and billions of years.
I understand that we can ask a question that is not related to the current post. I am very curious about where Jesus got his moral/ethical teachings, for example “do onto others as you would have others do onto you”, “turn the other cheek”, “love thy neighbour as thyself”, and “let he that is without sin cast the first stone”. Were precepts of this kind circulating in the Roman empire at the time? Did they come from Eastern religious traditions or perhaps from Egypt? Of did Jesus originate these ideas?
I’ll be dealing with this in my book coming out in the spring. Some of these are found in other teachers (e.g., do unto others…); others are from scripture (love your neighbor), and others are similar to others’ teachings but developed in a distinctive way. None of them appear to have come from the traditions of the East or Egypt.
October 23, 1997… I don’t recall that being one of the dates predicted by the various prognosticators.
Nope. Y2K was much easier to focus on ….
I was one of those that believed in the 4004 B.C. At the time, I was a KJV Only believer. I no longer hold those belief.
A good book to read is by S. Douglas Woodward and his books Rebooting the Bible Vol. 1 and 2. As I no longer believe in a man named “Jesus”, these books were still a help in proving Masoretic Text wrong in its timeline between Adam to Abraham.
The Masoretic Text has Abraham alive when Noah died just 350 years after the flood. Comparing the Masoretic and the Greek LXX Timeline between Adam to Abraham there is over a 1500 year difference.
If the gospels were true, then Jesus would have been born somewhere between 6 B.C. to 12 B.C. When coming up with the date of Jesus birth, most don’t take into account the Jewish Laws and other factors into account.
Jesus was six-weeks-old when Mary took him to the Temple. This was due to the fact that she was counted as being unclean for 40 days after giving birth to a son.
Nor did the three Magi story is false as well, they didn’t see Jesus as a baby.
A whole new facet to the Y2K scare I never knew existed..
How do you “know” that the world didn’t end in 1997? Maybe this is the tribulation and it will last 2.5 mm years! I mean, humans may not be around at this rate, but wasn’t that the heavenly plan?
In all seriousness, I legitimately can’t wrap my brain around young earth creationism. As a picayune example, I had a YEC tell me once that the light from the stars was on the way during creation, hence why the stars appear so old. I mean, except for destroying the universe via instant heat death, totally plausible! On top of the fact that YEC is contradicted by every evidence we have from archeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, anthropology, physics, geology, paleontology, et al. Perfectly cromulent indeed.
You have the restraint and patience – “non-evolutionary Christians,” eg – of a saint (Saint Bart of Lawrence, praise be his name).
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay on Ussher. I no longer have it but I recollect that Gould states that the main aim of the book was to attempt to reconcile historical dates from classical and biblical sources
In Gould’s view the section dealing with the date of creation was something of a jeu d’esprit and not intended to be taken totally seriously. In other essays Gould explains that scientists of the period based their estimates of the earth’s age on observations of sedimentary deposits so a young earth did not seem unreasonable. In fact David Hume, an atheist (probably) considered the idea of evolution by natural selection but dismissed it as there being insufficient time available.
The defence in a Scropes trial held in Ussher’s time would have had a very difficult time of it.
Would have been a pretty starless sky Adam was looking at when God created the universe, since the first light from the nearest star wouldn’t get to earth for 4.5 years (and that in the southern hemisphere). Heck, you can walk into your backyard and see the Andromeda Galaxy with your naked eyes, and that is 2.5 Million light years away. Now the creator of the universe could create light already in transit to earth, just to fool me, but why would he?
I think evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had the perfect response when he stated just like he would not expect a gynecologist to debate believers in the stork theory of human reproduction he won’t debate young earth creationists. Astronomers are seeing light from more than 13 billion light years away. How can that be with a 6500 year old universe? I’ve read that in the creation story of the Boshongo tribe of the Congo in Africa their creator god Bumba (sometimes called Mbombo) vomits up the sun, the moon, stars, animals and people. Their story has the same credibility as Genesis – there is zero evidence for either one of them.
I wonder how people who deny scientific facts (the ~14-billion-year-old cosmos) seem not to be bothered by the dishonesty of that kind of denial. The musical Triumph of Love opened on Broadway on October 23, 1997, at the Royale Theatre. Maybe literalistic Christians can formulate some sort of theology from that.
Thomas wrote down.
(1) And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”
(2) Jesus said, “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.”
“These secret the spoke
Didymos wrote
And whoever interpretation sayings
Experience
Let seeks
Until when
he become he
He astonished
Will thee
Thee will
Astonished he
He become he
When until seeks
Let experience sayings
Interpretation whoever and
Wrote Didymos
Spoke the secret
These”
By Joseph Luna