Subject: Revelation in the Gospels? |
Bible Note: Schwartzkm - Thank you very much for an eloquent, thoughtful, charitable response. You seem to be exactly on the track I am, and I agree with everything you said. My point in my previous posting was to get everyone to realize that the Bible is literature (and beautiful literature), and at the same time is inspired, and theologically true. The fact that it's not all literally true simply doesn't matter, in my opinion. And when I say "not literally true", I don't mean it's a lie or a deception or anything like that. I mean that it's not a man-on-the-scene, blow-by-blow accounting of what happened. And as I've tried to point out elsewhere, the Bible is rich with literary device, like poetry, and parable, which aren't supposed to be taken as "true" - they're tools used to present Scriptural truth. The examples I used were deliberately extreme to get folks to see that it's not reasonable to say "the Bible is all true because it's inspired" - the one is not dependent on the other. Just to clarify, it wasn't my intent to suggest that Matthew made up Jesus' lineage to prove His Messiahship - if that was the perception, I apologize. I was trying to say pretty much what you did - it wasn't a completely accurate geneology, and it wasn't supposed to be. That doesn't make it wrong, or a deliberate attempt to obsure on Matthew's part. It's just "the way they did things." Pax, Jim D. |