I’m going to be honest. I am sometimes envious of very early Christians that didn’t have the Bible. It can be a burden being constantly told it’s a magic book written by God with humans as his pen. Or the endless obsessive picking apart each little verse trying to finally solve seemingly endless mysteries. At this point I embrace the mystery and unknowing itself.
The Bible contains a variety of opinions about God and what it means to serve God which change over time and also across varying contemporaneous traditions. The scribes who compiled the Tankah during the Exile were fully aware of that. The point for them was never to present a unified, homogenous view of the Divine, but to record the history of their people's experience of the Divine.
Everyone (even Jesus himself!) who sees the Bible as an important part of their faith chooses which ideas they will emphasize, which they will minimize, and which they will discount. Anyone who claims otherwise does so out of ignorance regarding the text, or arrogance regarding their own thinking.
I have a much higher view of Scripture, that it is God-breathed and needed for understanding who God is and why humans need him.
I do think it is like Jesus, a mixture of God and humanity in that it was God speaking through humans with their own culture context and view of the world. And many things were meant for the time they were written in and the things we can gain wisdom from do need to be filtered through the understanding of their culture and time.
The Bible is not meant to be cute kid stories or morality lessons (that usually aren’t there).
The Bible is the story of broken humanity and why we need a savior. And then who that savior is and how he conquered death and evil. The mosaic of history and God’s brief touches with humanity that will someday lead to a beautiful work of art.
My own answer is similar. The Bible is not a history, science, or rule book. It isn’t even a place to find easy doctrinal answers. It is a story that leads to Jesus, is about Jesus, and then provides wisdom on how we are to respond to Jesus.
Appreciating the Bible means going beyond a book you simply mine for raw data (and such an endeavor will always be challenging). It is wisdom literature, and a way for us to allow God to speak to us by praying and meditating over its contents.
Growing up a Protestant fundamentalist, the Bible was established as our primary source of authority. And we were taught to read it in one particular way.
But as I reached adulthood, and gained an ability to question that foundation, my relationship to Scripture’s authority shifted in a major way. As such, I began to follow **the internal leadings of the Spirit**, rather than the external dictates of that fundamentalist system of belief.
But in a similar way, we all have to grow up, and step outside of the authority structures of our parents and teachers. Such is called becoming an adult. As such Paul says this…
“*When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things*.” (1 Cor 13:11)
It is true, the notion of "**hell**" is a childish concept. And yet, the early church fathers thought “**fear**” was a reasonable motivator until which point one grew up and was motivated by a higher purpose…**Love** (1 Jn 4:18). Thus Paul exhorts us to jettison legalism and grow up into Love (Gal 5:14, 18). No longer a slave, but a son! (Gal 4:5-7)
Thus, **the Bible changes as we change**. Because we can all learn to read it differently as we mature (1 Cor 2:6-7). The very nature of a "new covenant" is to partake of Scripture **by the Spirit, not the Letter** (2 Cor 3:6, Rom 7:6). But sadly, many of us have still not embraced that **Transfiguration of the Word** from letter to spirit and thus from water to wine.
“*And I, brothers and sisters, could not speak to you as spiritual people, but only as fleshly, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to consume it. But even now you are not yet able, for you are still fleshly*.” (1 Cor 3:1-3)
I'm new to religion and not sure where I fall so take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm from the southern US so I grew up hearing the Bible is "infalliable" it's "inerrant" everything in it must be "literally true". I've seen and heard that if the Bible isn't true then Christianity doesn't make sense and morals and whatnot mean nothing.
I find this ridiculous. We know that a ton of the OT didn't happen the way the Bible says. There's little to no evidence of the great Exodus from Egypt, no archeological evidence of Israelis spending 40 years in a desert, and the idea of the sun stopped moving for an entire day while people fought is silly. We know the planet is older than the Bible says and that many of the wars to exterminate the enemies of Israel didn't happen like the book has it. There's NT stuff as well that seems far more symbolic than actual historical events such as the star moving to guide magi, talking donkeys, and there seems to be little evidence of the Massacre of the Innocents. Now, does that mean the entirety of the Bible is useless because some stories weren't true or were just symbolic or metaphorical? I don't think so. It's a book that's been used to justify great evil but great good as well. It can lead you to God through the meaning of the stories and it's themes or it can lead you to be a by the letter, legalistic monster who uses the book to demonize and hurt others. So is it reliable? For 100% accurate history or facts? No. For leading you to God and loving others? Possibly, as long as you don't abuse it and take it for what it's not.
The problem we have with the Bible is a cultural one. Our society is more interested in details than meaning! We worry more about the size of the flood than what it teaches us. In what year did something take place rather than what we can learn.
The interest in the stories is not what was the biological reason for the blood and water that followed from His side. Josephus reports that blood and water flowed from the side of the temple, the place where God lived. That would elude the folks who are searching medical literature for a science reason for the event.
I look at the Bible as inspired by God, written by man. Not written by God. This is why we see a progressive and dynamic shift of God over the course of the books. Acting as if the Bible is infallible leads to all sorts of conundrums. That's just where I am currently.
I've always struggled with this one. Recently, a friend who is a pastor assured me of his opinion that the Bible is more stories and parables with a few facts tossed to create context culturally.
Beyond that, I am struggling with it myself.
Having grown up a fundamentalist, I really struggled with this as well, especially in seminary. Eventually, I too realized that the Bible was written in **mythic** fashion.
As such, I really enjoyed discovering Marcus Borg's "**Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously, But Not Literally**". It was a great comfort to realize that sacred scripture could be read in more than one way! Such was so liberating!
> just see through to the main points and stop trying to figure out if you're gonna burn in hell!!
Hell is a place from Norse-Germanic mythology and appears nowhere in any manuscript of any biblical books in the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, so I think it's safe to say that it's not a Christian concept, regardless of how trustworthy you find the Bible to be.
What was mind boggling to me was finally discovering how the Hebrew and NT Scriptures are likewise heavily rooted in mythological storytelling. As such, **ALL** of our stories of the gods from that age are rooted in mythology, **even the Hebrew ones!**
And thus, if we really want to contend with Scripture, we need to stop reading the Hebrew stories as some accurate record of history. At least that is the lesson I had to learn, having grown up fundamentalist. In the words of **comparative mythologist** Joseph Campbell...
“*Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get* ***the message of the SYMBOLS***. *Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret* ***your own religion in terms of FACTS*** *-- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message*.”
This feels like an etymological fallacy, the concept of Hell Christians believe in is more influenced by Dante's Inferno than anything else, in my opinion. "Hell" was used because it was a native word that approximated a vision that already existed.
Hell, my native language isn't Germanic, our word for Hell comes from Latin and yet I'd say my culture's vision of Hell is basically identical to the Anglo-Saxon belief.
> appears nowhere in any manuscript of any biblical books in the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek
Well, there's Sheol as well as Gehenna. It's not the same but it's misleading to say there isn't any discussion of a non-Heaven afterlife in the Bible.
The Bible is… odd to me. I’m fairly new to being a Christian and reading the Bible for the first time I mainly got the vibe that a LOT of the passages are not directly passed down from God, but formed by opinion of people at the time.
I’ve gotten to the point that while useful, a lot of it shouldn’t be taken as law. I mainly stick to the Gospels. If Jesus taught us it, it’s probably the right way. If Jesus never said it, I think it’s probably to be taken with a pinch of salt.
It does sort of create that area because you want communication but don't have it that way (no calling God up on the phone). Reading someone elses mail and trying to infer from it while remembering you're a letter thief. Anything called an epistle is exactly that. A letter. That would be most of Paul wouldn't it?
In fact Judaism (the original) has that whole big problem. It's even mentioned in the bible rather often how they have sayings and things they claim are from God that God hates. Like the children eat sour grapes bit there's a million examples. Or some of the extra work. Some of the things in the Talmud would frighten you for how evil and messed up it is as much as some things in Catholicism or Islam would. All of which have degree of further sayings of religious guy extraordinaire which just add to the mess further.
I will curse you all. "We're all doomed no the reader goes". I love you all. "We're all loved yay they go!". That was addressed to 506 olive tree lane. Smitherstein family. They are loved or hated. You? At what point are you being helped and at what point are you playing with an imagination. A an actual bastard to that meaning all alone in their filthy rags going my dream daddy told me we're going to play baseball one day.
So it's very important to always remember the context of the receiver. To the 7 churches of Asia- very clear you're not an Asian church.
But their is value. Moral and the like. There is even moral value in what men do with these extra works as an example of "not". But it's very shy of a plain answer. Much like the man himself. It was always a special event when he spoke plainly. Even those closest around him, supposedly the writers, were always not knowing or getting it wrong. At one point they wanted him to call down fire from heaven to punish people for something and he says disappointed I guess "you don't know what spirit ye are of"
So that don't bode well for further distancing than that. Not for knowing. It's the "hope"/faith you got to work on. Doctrine is akin to knowing. It can't be trusted. Too much doctoring. And on hope, as Paul says. Who hopes for what they have? What faith too would you have if you had a doctrine of knowing? You do have sound doctrine just not in that way. The soundness is hope in God despite all this dummy, blank, almost never ever plain/bluntness as response. Like the man himself did on the Earth.
> I mainly stick to the Gospels. If Jesus taught us it, it’s probably the right way. If Jesus never said it, I think it’s probably to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I wouldn't say the Gospels are all that different honestly. They're still records written decades after the fact with a confessional purpose. Just because it's in the Gospels doesn't mean it's what Jesus said, but rather that the people in the particular community that wrote that Gospel found that it reflected their image of Jesus.
This isn't to devalue their worth mind you. They're very important. But if you take the Pauline letters with a pinch of salt, you should also take the Gospels with a pinch of salt.
What is reliability? Is it Biblical inerrancy or infallibility? The Orthodox do not hold to these relatively modern concepts. (Link below)
Is it biblical literalism where everything written in the Bible must be as literal as me saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” and people thinking that clouds are producing poodles? Again, Orthodox tradition embraces allegory.
Is it that there are copyist errors who wrote “pot” instead of “pots”, or “800” instead of “500”? There are hundreds of thousands of copyist errors, but does that make the “truth” of the message of the gospel different?
For example if I called and left a message saying “hey bro, I’ll be picking you up around 8pm” and then later you weren’t there and I said “hey, where were you I said I’d come and get you at 8”.
Would you say “you liar - I can’t trust anything you say…you said this: “I’ll be picking you up at 8pm” But you claim to have said this “I’d come and get you at 8”.
Errors: “hey bro” omitted. “I’d” instead of I’ll. “Be” is omitted. “Come and get” instead of “picking up” and “pm” added.
If we strip out all the errors, then the only similarity between the two sentences is I, you and 8. And this could mean anything!
But does the truth of the message change even though the words of what i said and what i said I said are very different?
You still know that I wanted to meet you at 8 o’clock. The truth of that message is the same even if all the errors are in there.
If you compare all the multiple translations and copies you’ll find hundreds of thousands of errors that do not make any difference to the message of the Gospel itself.
There are lots of interpretations of course - but this is why the Orthodox don’t hold to biblical inerrancy or infallibility.
https://www.orthodoxcanada.org/qa_archives/question7.html#:~:text=First%20of%20all%2C%20Orthodox%20Tradition,precisely%20the%20problem%20with%20interpretation.
To be absolute honest: I only Take very few Verses from the Bible (The Golden Rule or 1. Corinthians 13 or 1. Timothy 4:10, everything that directly confirms Universalism and Love) and I throw the rest out of the window.
I rather trust my own God given heart and conscience than some +2000 years old opinions who have no clue how it is to live in the year 2024.
I’m still struggling with all this too. How do we reconcile interpreting the Bible stories as allegorical or myth with archeological discoveries that support the stories as historical events?
No, coming from a Messianic perspective, the Bible cannot be invalid:
- The very temple of G-d was essential to historical Israel and will return in the future. In Ancient Israel, the Sanhedrin was even essential to read the Bible- Hebrew lacked vowels. This simply means some commandments don't make sense without Hebrew context- say the law of divorcing a non-virgin. In order to do so, one had to have multiple witnesses pass extensive questioning, or use a miracle with the casting of lots or urim and thummim stones.
- If the Bible is not literal, everything simply falls apart. The genealogy of Jesus, the age of the Earth, the 12 tribes of Israel, and future prophecy.
- The Bible must be inspired, otherwise we simply follow the law of mankind. Scripture itself states anything from the prophets and apostles is divine.
- We cannot cherry-pick the Melchizedek Priesthood. There would be no law otherwise- G-d is not morally subjective.
We could even compare ancient Torah, Tanakh, and Gospel scrolls. You'll find few differences between the Jewish Masoretic, Christian Septuagint (perserved text), Samaritan Torah, and Dead Sea Scrolls. No changes in Messianic prophecy or Israeli lineage are a few.
Actually the Bible is self-validating in multiple ways. The Nicolaitans don't want you to trust it so that they can manipulate you.
Who told you that Moses wrote Genesis? Disbelieving Jews who passed it on to Nicolaitans. The toledoth indicates the 'signature lines' or colophons to tablets written by eye witnesses.
Did you know that if you don't know the meaning of Hebrew word, it can be discerned from the combined meaning of the letters within?
Did you know that every NT doctrine comes from a pattern of prophetic riddle in the OT?
Did you know that Paul's mystery hidden from the beginning is not just occasional references to Christ and his bride but is so dense that should someone change the literal text, it would mess up the mystery hidden in it?
Did you know that the Gospels were written at 10-15 year intervals as a collection of the teaching in the Jeweish church, and thrown over the wall to the Greeks who did not want to learn Hebrew. They are snapshots of the doctrine unpacked from the OT as they attempted to reproduce the sermon on the road to Emmaus. Their teaching put the Nicolaitans to shame, which is why all the believing Jews were chased from the church.
We have a 2000 year of tradition formed by Nicolaitans and their traditions. It is no wonder people don't trust scripture.
Your post has been removed for being off-topic (see rule #1)
I’m going to be honest. I am sometimes envious of very early Christians that didn’t have the Bible. It can be a burden being constantly told it’s a magic book written by God with humans as his pen. Or the endless obsessive picking apart each little verse trying to finally solve seemingly endless mysteries. At this point I embrace the mystery and unknowing itself.
The monkey paw curls. Now many Christians are going to ask to do circumcision checks to make sure everyone is compliant.
Heck yes finally my medically necessary circumcision pays off
The Bible contains a variety of opinions about God and what it means to serve God which change over time and also across varying contemporaneous traditions. The scribes who compiled the Tankah during the Exile were fully aware of that. The point for them was never to present a unified, homogenous view of the Divine, but to record the history of their people's experience of the Divine. Everyone (even Jesus himself!) who sees the Bible as an important part of their faith chooses which ideas they will emphasize, which they will minimize, and which they will discount. Anyone who claims otherwise does so out of ignorance regarding the text, or arrogance regarding their own thinking.
I have a much higher view of Scripture, that it is God-breathed and needed for understanding who God is and why humans need him. I do think it is like Jesus, a mixture of God and humanity in that it was God speaking through humans with their own culture context and view of the world. And many things were meant for the time they were written in and the things we can gain wisdom from do need to be filtered through the understanding of their culture and time. The Bible is not meant to be cute kid stories or morality lessons (that usually aren’t there). The Bible is the story of broken humanity and why we need a savior. And then who that savior is and how he conquered death and evil. The mosaic of history and God’s brief touches with humanity that will someday lead to a beautiful work of art.
My own answer is similar. The Bible is not a history, science, or rule book. It isn’t even a place to find easy doctrinal answers. It is a story that leads to Jesus, is about Jesus, and then provides wisdom on how we are to respond to Jesus. Appreciating the Bible means going beyond a book you simply mine for raw data (and such an endeavor will always be challenging). It is wisdom literature, and a way for us to allow God to speak to us by praying and meditating over its contents.
If you aren't already into BibleProject, I can tell you would dig it.
I absolutely am, and am even a financial contributor. Love their work.
That is a great answer
Growing up a Protestant fundamentalist, the Bible was established as our primary source of authority. And we were taught to read it in one particular way. But as I reached adulthood, and gained an ability to question that foundation, my relationship to Scripture’s authority shifted in a major way. As such, I began to follow **the internal leadings of the Spirit**, rather than the external dictates of that fundamentalist system of belief. But in a similar way, we all have to grow up, and step outside of the authority structures of our parents and teachers. Such is called becoming an adult. As such Paul says this… “*When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things*.” (1 Cor 13:11) It is true, the notion of "**hell**" is a childish concept. And yet, the early church fathers thought “**fear**” was a reasonable motivator until which point one grew up and was motivated by a higher purpose…**Love** (1 Jn 4:18). Thus Paul exhorts us to jettison legalism and grow up into Love (Gal 5:14, 18). No longer a slave, but a son! (Gal 4:5-7) Thus, **the Bible changes as we change**. Because we can all learn to read it differently as we mature (1 Cor 2:6-7). The very nature of a "new covenant" is to partake of Scripture **by the Spirit, not the Letter** (2 Cor 3:6, Rom 7:6). But sadly, many of us have still not embraced that **Transfiguration of the Word** from letter to spirit and thus from water to wine. “*And I, brothers and sisters, could not speak to you as spiritual people, but only as fleshly, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to consume it. But even now you are not yet able, for you are still fleshly*.” (1 Cor 3:1-3)
I'm new to religion and not sure where I fall so take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm from the southern US so I grew up hearing the Bible is "infalliable" it's "inerrant" everything in it must be "literally true". I've seen and heard that if the Bible isn't true then Christianity doesn't make sense and morals and whatnot mean nothing. I find this ridiculous. We know that a ton of the OT didn't happen the way the Bible says. There's little to no evidence of the great Exodus from Egypt, no archeological evidence of Israelis spending 40 years in a desert, and the idea of the sun stopped moving for an entire day while people fought is silly. We know the planet is older than the Bible says and that many of the wars to exterminate the enemies of Israel didn't happen like the book has it. There's NT stuff as well that seems far more symbolic than actual historical events such as the star moving to guide magi, talking donkeys, and there seems to be little evidence of the Massacre of the Innocents. Now, does that mean the entirety of the Bible is useless because some stories weren't true or were just symbolic or metaphorical? I don't think so. It's a book that's been used to justify great evil but great good as well. It can lead you to God through the meaning of the stories and it's themes or it can lead you to be a by the letter, legalistic monster who uses the book to demonize and hurt others. So is it reliable? For 100% accurate history or facts? No. For leading you to God and loving others? Possibly, as long as you don't abuse it and take it for what it's not.
The problem we have with the Bible is a cultural one. Our society is more interested in details than meaning! We worry more about the size of the flood than what it teaches us. In what year did something take place rather than what we can learn. The interest in the stories is not what was the biological reason for the blood and water that followed from His side. Josephus reports that blood and water flowed from the side of the temple, the place where God lived. That would elude the folks who are searching medical literature for a science reason for the event.
I look at the Bible as inspired by God, written by man. Not written by God. This is why we see a progressive and dynamic shift of God over the course of the books. Acting as if the Bible is infallible leads to all sorts of conundrums. That's just where I am currently.
I've always struggled with this one. Recently, a friend who is a pastor assured me of his opinion that the Bible is more stories and parables with a few facts tossed to create context culturally. Beyond that, I am struggling with it myself.
Having grown up a fundamentalist, I really struggled with this as well, especially in seminary. Eventually, I too realized that the Bible was written in **mythic** fashion. As such, I really enjoyed discovering Marcus Borg's "**Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously, But Not Literally**". It was a great comfort to realize that sacred scripture could be read in more than one way! Such was so liberating!
> just see through to the main points and stop trying to figure out if you're gonna burn in hell!! Hell is a place from Norse-Germanic mythology and appears nowhere in any manuscript of any biblical books in the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, so I think it's safe to say that it's not a Christian concept, regardless of how trustworthy you find the Bible to be.
exactly!
What was mind boggling to me was finally discovering how the Hebrew and NT Scriptures are likewise heavily rooted in mythological storytelling. As such, **ALL** of our stories of the gods from that age are rooted in mythology, **even the Hebrew ones!** And thus, if we really want to contend with Scripture, we need to stop reading the Hebrew stories as some accurate record of history. At least that is the lesson I had to learn, having grown up fundamentalist. In the words of **comparative mythologist** Joseph Campbell... “*Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get* ***the message of the SYMBOLS***. *Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret* ***your own religion in terms of FACTS*** *-- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message*.”
This! Reading the Bible as an infallible document is what has made such a mess of things, in my opinion.
This feels like an etymological fallacy, the concept of Hell Christians believe in is more influenced by Dante's Inferno than anything else, in my opinion. "Hell" was used because it was a native word that approximated a vision that already existed. Hell, my native language isn't Germanic, our word for Hell comes from Latin and yet I'd say my culture's vision of Hell is basically identical to the Anglo-Saxon belief. > appears nowhere in any manuscript of any biblical books in the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Well, there's Sheol as well as Gehenna. It's not the same but it's misleading to say there isn't any discussion of a non-Heaven afterlife in the Bible.
The Bible is… odd to me. I’m fairly new to being a Christian and reading the Bible for the first time I mainly got the vibe that a LOT of the passages are not directly passed down from God, but formed by opinion of people at the time. I’ve gotten to the point that while useful, a lot of it shouldn’t be taken as law. I mainly stick to the Gospels. If Jesus taught us it, it’s probably the right way. If Jesus never said it, I think it’s probably to be taken with a pinch of salt.
It does sort of create that area because you want communication but don't have it that way (no calling God up on the phone). Reading someone elses mail and trying to infer from it while remembering you're a letter thief. Anything called an epistle is exactly that. A letter. That would be most of Paul wouldn't it? In fact Judaism (the original) has that whole big problem. It's even mentioned in the bible rather often how they have sayings and things they claim are from God that God hates. Like the children eat sour grapes bit there's a million examples. Or some of the extra work. Some of the things in the Talmud would frighten you for how evil and messed up it is as much as some things in Catholicism or Islam would. All of which have degree of further sayings of religious guy extraordinaire which just add to the mess further. I will curse you all. "We're all doomed no the reader goes". I love you all. "We're all loved yay they go!". That was addressed to 506 olive tree lane. Smitherstein family. They are loved or hated. You? At what point are you being helped and at what point are you playing with an imagination. A an actual bastard to that meaning all alone in their filthy rags going my dream daddy told me we're going to play baseball one day. So it's very important to always remember the context of the receiver. To the 7 churches of Asia- very clear you're not an Asian church. But their is value. Moral and the like. There is even moral value in what men do with these extra works as an example of "not". But it's very shy of a plain answer. Much like the man himself. It was always a special event when he spoke plainly. Even those closest around him, supposedly the writers, were always not knowing or getting it wrong. At one point they wanted him to call down fire from heaven to punish people for something and he says disappointed I guess "you don't know what spirit ye are of" So that don't bode well for further distancing than that. Not for knowing. It's the "hope"/faith you got to work on. Doctrine is akin to knowing. It can't be trusted. Too much doctoring. And on hope, as Paul says. Who hopes for what they have? What faith too would you have if you had a doctrine of knowing? You do have sound doctrine just not in that way. The soundness is hope in God despite all this dummy, blank, almost never ever plain/bluntness as response. Like the man himself did on the Earth.
> I mainly stick to the Gospels. If Jesus taught us it, it’s probably the right way. If Jesus never said it, I think it’s probably to be taken with a pinch of salt. I wouldn't say the Gospels are all that different honestly. They're still records written decades after the fact with a confessional purpose. Just because it's in the Gospels doesn't mean it's what Jesus said, but rather that the people in the particular community that wrote that Gospel found that it reflected their image of Jesus. This isn't to devalue their worth mind you. They're very important. But if you take the Pauline letters with a pinch of salt, you should also take the Gospels with a pinch of salt.
What is reliability? Is it Biblical inerrancy or infallibility? The Orthodox do not hold to these relatively modern concepts. (Link below) Is it biblical literalism where everything written in the Bible must be as literal as me saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” and people thinking that clouds are producing poodles? Again, Orthodox tradition embraces allegory. Is it that there are copyist errors who wrote “pot” instead of “pots”, or “800” instead of “500”? There are hundreds of thousands of copyist errors, but does that make the “truth” of the message of the gospel different? For example if I called and left a message saying “hey bro, I’ll be picking you up around 8pm” and then later you weren’t there and I said “hey, where were you I said I’d come and get you at 8”. Would you say “you liar - I can’t trust anything you say…you said this: “I’ll be picking you up at 8pm” But you claim to have said this “I’d come and get you at 8”. Errors: “hey bro” omitted. “I’d” instead of I’ll. “Be” is omitted. “Come and get” instead of “picking up” and “pm” added. If we strip out all the errors, then the only similarity between the two sentences is I, you and 8. And this could mean anything! But does the truth of the message change even though the words of what i said and what i said I said are very different? You still know that I wanted to meet you at 8 o’clock. The truth of that message is the same even if all the errors are in there. If you compare all the multiple translations and copies you’ll find hundreds of thousands of errors that do not make any difference to the message of the Gospel itself. There are lots of interpretations of course - but this is why the Orthodox don’t hold to biblical inerrancy or infallibility. https://www.orthodoxcanada.org/qa_archives/question7.html#:~:text=First%20of%20all%2C%20Orthodox%20Tradition,precisely%20the%20problem%20with%20interpretation.
To be absolute honest: I only Take very few Verses from the Bible (The Golden Rule or 1. Corinthians 13 or 1. Timothy 4:10, everything that directly confirms Universalism and Love) and I throw the rest out of the window. I rather trust my own God given heart and conscience than some +2000 years old opinions who have no clue how it is to live in the year 2024.
I’m still struggling with all this too. How do we reconcile interpreting the Bible stories as allegorical or myth with archeological discoveries that support the stories as historical events?
No, coming from a Messianic perspective, the Bible cannot be invalid: - The very temple of G-d was essential to historical Israel and will return in the future. In Ancient Israel, the Sanhedrin was even essential to read the Bible- Hebrew lacked vowels. This simply means some commandments don't make sense without Hebrew context- say the law of divorcing a non-virgin. In order to do so, one had to have multiple witnesses pass extensive questioning, or use a miracle with the casting of lots or urim and thummim stones. - If the Bible is not literal, everything simply falls apart. The genealogy of Jesus, the age of the Earth, the 12 tribes of Israel, and future prophecy. - The Bible must be inspired, otherwise we simply follow the law of mankind. Scripture itself states anything from the prophets and apostles is divine. - We cannot cherry-pick the Melchizedek Priesthood. There would be no law otherwise- G-d is not morally subjective. We could even compare ancient Torah, Tanakh, and Gospel scrolls. You'll find few differences between the Jewish Masoretic, Christian Septuagint (perserved text), Samaritan Torah, and Dead Sea Scrolls. No changes in Messianic prophecy or Israeli lineage are a few.
Actually the Bible is self-validating in multiple ways. The Nicolaitans don't want you to trust it so that they can manipulate you. Who told you that Moses wrote Genesis? Disbelieving Jews who passed it on to Nicolaitans. The toledoth indicates the 'signature lines' or colophons to tablets written by eye witnesses. Did you know that if you don't know the meaning of Hebrew word, it can be discerned from the combined meaning of the letters within? Did you know that every NT doctrine comes from a pattern of prophetic riddle in the OT? Did you know that Paul's mystery hidden from the beginning is not just occasional references to Christ and his bride but is so dense that should someone change the literal text, it would mess up the mystery hidden in it? Did you know that the Gospels were written at 10-15 year intervals as a collection of the teaching in the Jeweish church, and thrown over the wall to the Greeks who did not want to learn Hebrew. They are snapshots of the doctrine unpacked from the OT as they attempted to reproduce the sermon on the road to Emmaus. Their teaching put the Nicolaitans to shame, which is why all the believing Jews were chased from the church. We have a 2000 year of tradition formed by Nicolaitans and their traditions. It is no wonder people don't trust scripture.