One issue which has caused great concertation and, to be blunt, wars, throughout history is the question as to whether the Holy Scriptures are true, the argument being; mine is true and yours is not thusly I will go to paradise and you will not, or, you are wrong to believe in a God as I do not, ergo there is no God, how do I know this, I know this as I have knowledge of all things, almost Godlike knowledge, hey, wait a second, Godlike…I’m not God like, I AM GOD, and having proven that I do not exist I cease to do so.
My own person thoughts on this are thus- the Bible is literal however it is not historical.
What do I mean by this? Well, previous readers may recall my piece on the History of God in which I show how the concept of God came about as an attempt to understand and explain the world. As all knowledge and understanding comes from conceptualisation, which is done through language, when we encounter something which we have never encountered before we cannot conceptualise it and therefore fall back on what we know. Firstly, God/s took on the form of nature- the Sun, thunder etc. then, from approximately the Ancient Egyptians, the gods started to take on a human form, all be it with animal likenesses in part, such as a jackal’s head etc. The most interesting thing about this was that the divinities were ceasing to be nature but were becoming the causes of nature- now there was a god who would make the sun rise and fall, as opposed to the sun being a god in itself. From the Greeks onwards, the gods became fully human, in manner and also in temperament. The gods were petty, spoilt, tedious, wise, powerful etc., all things that we humans either were or aspired towards. Then polytheism started to move towards monotheism and suddenly there was only one God in which all of humanity had to be embodied. This God was wise and loving, but prone to jealously and genocide if not properly adored (note: this is why the Old Testament God can send floods etc.).
Anyway, what was the point of my recapping of my previous work? Well, as you can see the notion and concept of a God came about to explain and understand the real world. The flooding of the Nile, something which caused civilisations to fall, was now the whims of the gods, gods who could be swayed by sacrifice and prayer (note: the Danish theological philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that prayer changes not God but the one who prays and above we may glean and understanding into what he meant). But not only was the land in the hands of the gods, but also the lives of mortals. One would fall in love because of the gods, one would kill because of the gods, one would even justify killing based on the desires of the gods, such as the auguries taken at the temple of Apollo in Greece where drug ingestion would let priests interpret the, for example, flight of birds or the value of the bribe the king had given them.
With this is mind we can read the bible as a literal document of the rise and birth, not only of civilisation, but also of the individual, the person in the movement away from pre-historic ages into the modern world (note: for the purposes of this I am defining the modern age as beginning approximately 800-400 BC with the beginning of the Golden Age of the Greeks through Homer-Pericles-Plato et al). However, as I stated before, although we can see the bible as a literal story of the internal and external development of humans, it is not historical. What I mean by that is that although these developments took place, they did not happen as the Bible states in a linear narrative full of excitement, obsessive measurements, copious begatting and intrigue. From this the bible itself can be read as a parable of the development of the human and not as a biographical account of a historical document.
However, just for fun, let us suppose that the Bible is historic, and everything happened just as it is written, including the bits which contradict each other. The aforementioned Kierkegaard, in his book on the origins of anxiety, raises an interesting point. If Adam had not eaten from the tree of life, then our history would not exist. What does he mean by this? Well, many interpretations of ‘The Fall’, even Genesis, state that once Adam and Eve had eaten from the Tree of Life, they became conscious as themselves as both Godlike and animals. They became ashamed of their nakedness as it made them animals and attempted to cover their humanity. Also, it is worth noting, that Cain and Abel we conceived after the leaving of the Garden (note: gardens seem to be the places of betrayal if the think of this example and also that of Gethsemane), and thusly, it appears, that once they had eaten of the tree they also discovered the most fundamental of animalisms- the pursuit of food (learning to toil the land to grow crops), shelter and procreation. From this, we can hypothesise that, in suggesting that our history begins with Adam and Eve committing the first sin, the eating of the fruit, we are faced with the startling conclusion that, if the Bible is a literal, historical document then sin was a necessity in order to begin a history which reaches from then to you reading these words.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 