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Originally posted by bib:
There is much in the Bible which means a great deal to me, but there are other parts that I find too incredulous or at times offensive to accept. For example the story of Jonah and the whale. Who in their right mind could believe that Jonah was swallowed whole by a whale, spent a few days in the whale's stomach and then emerged completely unscathed? No, this is complete rubbish! What things in the Bible do other shipmates find they can't take on board?

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Originally posted by bib:
… I have a very sincere but gullible friend who insists that everything in the Bible is factual and cannot be questioned. There seem to be many people such as her and I think their beliefs create a stumbling block for many young people who are seeking to learn about Christianity.

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
If you throw the phrase 'Bible contradictions' into a search engine you can kick up web pages devoted solely to places where Scripture contradicts itself.
The fact is that in a work of this length, written by so many authors over so many years, there is no way that there will not be contradictions and difficulties. Either you fall at this barrier, or you grasp that there is more to Scripture than its word-for-word meaning.

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Originally posted by Sipech:
One potential way to break things to them gently is via the use of the book of Job. It's clearly grouped with the books of poetry. Plus, ask them to consider how an author would know the details of the conversation between Satan and God.

Then compare the style of the dialogue with other works of philosophy (for more modern, Hume's Dialogues or more ancient, Plato's Republic). Show them that seen this way, Job is a work of pre-Socratic philosophy exploring the problem of evil, rather than an account of an historical tragedy and the fallout from it.

In my experience, that tends to go down slightly better than looking at Exodus or any of the gospels. Though maybe asking them to read Hume may not go down too well.

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Originally posted by HCH:
Responding to the title: Who does? In an case, does anyone ever believe in all of Scripture equally?

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Originally posted by bib:
I can certainly see that many of the stories in the Bible are meant as parables or allegories and are subject to interpretation. However I have a very sincere but gullible friend who insists that everything in the Bible is factual and cannot be questioned. There seem to be many people such as her and I think their beliefs create a stumbling block for many young people who are seeking to learn about Christianity.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by HCH:
Responding to the title: Who does? In an case, does anyone ever believe in all of Scripture equally?

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I think everybody has a hierarchy, although for some it may be more unconscious. The Orthodox definitely start with the Gospel of John, then the other gospels, then the letters attributed to John, then the other epistles, then the Psalms, then it gets fuzzy for me. I believe the bottom of the list is the apocalyptic books. I may be wrong there.

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Originally posted by bib:
... For example the story of Jonah and the whale. Who in their right mind could believe that Jonah was swallowed whole by a whale, spent a few days in the whale's stomach and then emerged completely unscathed? No, this is complete rubbish!

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Jonah 1:17ff (2:1ff in the Hebrew Masoretic Text and LXX Greek translation).

Yahweh appointed a big fish (dag = דָּג) to swallow Jonah and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. Jonah prayed to Yahweh his God from the stomach of the fish and said,
“I called out to Yahweh from my distress
and he answered me;
from the belly of Sheol [= שְׁאוֹל]I cried out for help
and you heard my prayer.
You threw me into the deep waters,
into the middle of the sea;
the ocean current engulfed me;
all the mighty waves you sent swept over me.
I thought I had been banished from your sight,
that I would never again see your holy temple!
Water engulfed me up to my neck;
the deep ocean surrounded me;
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
I went down to the very bottoms of the mountains;
the gates of the netherworld barred me in forever;
but you brought me up from the Pit, Yahweh, my God.

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Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck!
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. …
Deliver me from sinking in the mire!
Let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters.
Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up,
or the pit close its mouth over me.

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Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

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Originally posted by Nigel M:

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Originally posted by bib:
... For example the story of Jonah and the whale. Who in their right mind could believe that Jonah was swallowed whole by a whale, spent a few days in the whale's stomach and then emerged completely unscathed? No, this is complete rubbish!

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I'd say that you are quite right; no one should read it that way. In fact, I doubt anyone in the ancient near east read (or heard) it that way either, because they were not stupid; they did not believe that people who were swallowed / eaten by fish or mammals came out alive later.

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Okay, I'll bite. (yes, I see what I did there.)

I do take the story literally, which will doubtless make me look an idiot in the eyes of most here, but that's okay. You knew me to be so already.

No, seriously. It is entirely possible to have an acted-out parable where the real-life events carry a heavy symbolic freighting. Jesus did it with the fig tree. Heck, he did it with his own passion. So I have no trouble with the fish being both real and being a symbol of something else (=death, Sheol) as well.

In the case of Jonah and the fish and etc. I note first of all that the fish is not the main point of the story, but is almost an accident. The main point is the contrast between the quick faith response of the Ninevehites and the lazy, grudging response of the Lord's own prophet Jonah.

Why do I think this story historical, then? Well, primarily because Jesus refers to Jonah as a real person, and in particular to the fish swallowing bit ("the sign of Jonah"). The way he references it (as a sign) assumes its reality. And I cannot blithely assume he was just mistaken, given my understanding of his deity and humanity.

There are also a couple of fleeting references to Jonah in the historical books that are completely and totally bland and boring, which is not what I'd expect of a fictional character. I'd expect either no references at all, or else something as extraordinary as the careers of Elijah and Elisha--something more in keeping with the weirdo vibe of the Book of Jonah. But no, it's such boring stuff that I can't recall the content off hand.

(Okay, I stopped being lazy and looked it up. It's just boring stuff about land boundaries, here:

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2 Kings 14:25

He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.

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Originally posted by Al Eluia:

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by HCH:
Responding to the title: Who does? In an case, does anyone ever believe in all of Scripture equally?

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I think everybody has a hierarchy, although for some it may be more unconscious. The Orthodox definitely start with the Gospel of John, then the other gospels, then the letters attributed to John, then the other epistles, then the Psalms, then it gets fuzzy for me. I believe the bottom of the list is the apocalyptic books. I may be wrong there.

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Personally, I'd put the "begats" at the bottom.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Why do I think this story historical, then? Well, primarily because Jesus refers to Jonah as a real person, and in particular to the fish swallowing bit ("the sign of Jonah"). The way he references it (as a sign) assumes its reality. And I cannot blithely assume he was just mistaken, given my understanding of his deity and humanity.

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Originally posted by Golden Key:
Re Jonah:

I don't have a problem with it being fact. I also don't know what did/n't happen.

My problem is with God planning to destroy Nineveh. IMHO, that's Ogre God* territory. But God also gave them a chance, and they took it.

Fiction or not, it has some good details. Like the sailors, wanting to survive the storm, using divination to find out what was up. IIRC, all signs pointed to Jonah. When they found out he was running from his god, they were terrified, and reluctantly threw him overboard. (Was that Jonah's idea?) And the storm stilled. Now, *that's* a good story.

I also liked the compassion lesson for Jonah, at the end. Though I felt sorry for the gourd plant. (I think it did survive, though?) And having a prophet stuck inside, causing acid reflux, probably wasn't much fun for the whale/fish/whatever, either.

Not to mention the sailors--or Jonah, for that matter. {Slight tangent: Just occurred to me that Jonah is somewhat like Rincewind in the Disc World books. If he senses there's a reason to run, he's off!}


*LC: Not trying to push your buttons, re a past Hell convo. It's just my perspective, FWIW.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Why do I think this story historical, then? Well, primarily because Jesus refers to Jonah as a real person, and in particular to the fish swallowing bit ("the sign of Jonah"). The way he references it (as a sign) assumes its reality. And I cannot blithely assume he was just mistaken, given my understanding of his deity and humanity.

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I don't see how his reference means he believed in the story literally. One could quite easily say, "It's like when Harry Potter was living under the stairs in his aunt's house. They were shamed by the letter from Hogwarts and let him have a room of his own. Just so, shame can make people do what's right when no other persuasion will. We must do what's right because it's right, and not wait to be shamed into it." If a pastor said this in a sermon, you wouldn't think, "He's flipped. He thinks that's real and it's just a novel."

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Originally posted by Nigel M:
On the historicity of Jonah, the usual arguments against include:

[1] The nature of the narrative (i.e. it is parabolic in nature)
[2] Sensationalism, especially with the account of a the big fish
[3] Jesus’ reference to Jonah is as a sign and therefore doesn’t make any point about its historicity. A sign can function in the presence of a fiction just as well as in the presence of fact
[4] The existence of an historical Jonah as a prophet does not, on its own, authenticate the contents of a later work; pseudepigraphical texts existed for some time, attributing authorship to an older hero (or even actually, anyone who gets a one-off mention in the bible)

I’ll come back to [1] in a bit, but as for the others:

[2] Not a good argument really; stranger things have happened and all that. Just because one has never seen someone survive consumption by a big fish doesn’t mean that a piano is not about to fall on one’s head.

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Originally posted by Nigel M:


[3] I agree with that one as far as it goes. Jesus’ reference to what happened to Jonah as a ‘sign’ can function independently of the historical nature of the sign’s referent, but by the same token (or sign!) it does not rule it out. So not really an argument against historicity as such; it just does not take us near enough to call it out as either history or something else.

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Originally posted by Nigel M:



[4] I’d agree with that, too, but obviously again it does not rule it out. It comes down to the nature of the contents of a work, I think.

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Originally posted by Nigel M:


So [2] to [4] do not really work, it seems to me, as arguments against the historicity of Jonah’s narrative. Back up to [1]. I go along with the idea that Jonah is being told as a parable. The structure of the piece lines up nicely with parables – particularly the annoying bit at the end that parables often had to throw hearers off balance and destroy any cosy conclusion.

This, though, does not actually negate an historical background. Parables work because they deal with real life, real expectations, and real counter-expectations. Jesus told a story about a man who went out to sow and this mere fact works as a fact because men did indeed go out to sow. Just because we don’t have an account of what the prophet Jonah did throughout his life doesn’t mean that people at the time of the book’s dissemination did not know a lot more background than we have at our disposal.

So actually I would agree that the events in the book of Jonah may well have had a basis in history. It can’t be ruled out. The telling of the event, though, seems to me to fit better the genre of parable and if that is the case then I would expect the peak of the narrative to be at the end, with the twist. An event with a big fish earlier on in the narrative does not have a resolution in the peak in the same way, say, as the murder of the servants and master’s son in the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 21:33-46) acts to set up an expectation that is undermined in the ending twist. The fish event seems in tension with the development and at odds with the reference to Sheol. Hence the resolution it seems to me that works best is the one that takes the fish as a metaphor for Sheol (or death).

Taking the fish out of the story by substituting it for a more prosaic reference doesn’t really destroy the flow of the tale. The ebb of Jonah’s journey downwards from the beginning of the tale, through the storm, over the side and to the bottom of the sea, can carry on through Sheol – being as good as dead (or even really dead?) - back up to the surface to land again, without reference to a fish.

Having said that, however, to take BroJames’ point, there is a ‘big fish’ in the tale. Even if it is being used figuratively it adds something to the tale. That is the translational conundrum we have. Do we take the reference over literally (i.e. a big fish in one language is just a big fish in another), or should we try to work out a reference that takes over the connotation? There may have been a time when Greek mythology was more ingrained among more people when a reference to Hades as god of the underworld may have worked here, but that really could only have worked with people who had been educated in the Classics. So we may be doomed to footnotes.*


* Like this. For allegory as a reflection of Jonah, see Key, Golden. Getting Away from it All: Rincewind as an Allegory of the Parable of Jonah. Discworld: Pumpkin Patch Publications, 2016.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Fair enough, although in the context in which he is using it, I think it could be defended that the word sign as applied to Jonah has the first-century equivalent of scarequotes around it.

The only sign they'll get is the "sign" of Jonah.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Is Jonah's whale episode called a "sign" anywhere else? If there were a longstanding tradition of calling the fish thing a "sign" that Jesus was tapping into, that would be something else entirely, if you could also show that "sign" was never used metaphorically.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Ultimately of course we will end up agreeing to disagree.

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Originally posted by ThunderBunk:
Lamb Chopped, I'm sorry but that's absolutely 180 degrees from anything approximating to a reasonable approach to the use of texts in a culture.

Objective evidence is only, exclusively of importance in anything other than a practical/scientific context to post-enlightement, therefore protestant, western cultures. Where the question being asked of the text is not "what is this thing I am looking at/that is staring at me? What do I do with it? Will it kill me?", metaphorical, allegorical, etc. uses of the text were its primary uses, and still are in many cultures. There's no need to signal that use, because that's what the text is there for. Treating it as a literal description of anything would have struck its author and its first-century reader as a frankly perverse thing to do.

Ignorance of the cultural uses of texts is one of the main things that keeps me away from reading about 99% of biblical commentary. The bible is fundamentally made up of texts, and until one understands how they work, commenting on it seems to me unwise.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Well, we're a pair then, as my doctorate in English and my theological/Greek/Hebrew training has failed to open any doors in academia. So no worries.

I must confess that I don't understand what you are saying in your first post (and suspect you don't understand mine either). I've done textual studies. Of course the Bible is a library-full of texts, and of course those reflect a culture (or several, really). Why would that fact invalidate the question of whether a described event in fact occurred?

ETA: I have 30 years' experience living in a partly literate partly oral third world culture (transplanted to the US, yes, but they brought their textual uses with them). And these people at least appear to use texts for the full range of human activities, whether representational or symbolic or both.

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Originally posted by ThunderBunk:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Well, we're a pair then, as my doctorate in English and my theological/Greek/Hebrew training has failed to open any doors in academia. So no worries.

I must confess that I don't understand what you are saying in your first post (and suspect you don't understand mine either). I've done textual studies. Of course the Bible is a library-full of texts, and of course those reflect a culture (or several, really). Why would that fact invalidate the question of whether a described event in fact occurred?

ETA: I have 30 years' experience living in a partly literate partly oral third world culture (transplanted to the US, yes, but they brought their textual uses with them). And these people at least appear to use texts for the full range of human activities, whether representational or symbolic or both.

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In that case, I understand your method of approaching the bible even less. What made me see red was when you said that you could see no triggers in the text not to take it literally. Why should there be any?

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Originally posted by ThunderBunk:


And in any case, why could/should they not be there when you can't see them? It's entirely possible, for example, that in the culture of original writing/reception, all stories about being swallowed by large marine creatures functioned as allegories of death, or that stories about Nineveh were ways of talking about something else - power, etc. for example. In either case, that knowledge would then be held at cultural, rather than textual level, and no sign would be visible to the reader of the individual text. On the other hand, they would almost certainly be a member of a small receiving/interpreting community, to whom the interpretative tools needed would be a natural part of their culture.

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Originally posted by ThunderBunk:


It's also baffling to me why anyone, particularly one of your learning, would make the assumption narratives should have as their natural purpose the retailing of information about the apparent subject. Narratives have always performed a huge variety of functions: why such the ones selected for, or which ended up in, the bible have that particular function?

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Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure;

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
To be sure, this is not the only purpose of communication; but when I come across a text that looks like a story, and smells like a story, and quacks like a story, well, I'm going to take it that it is a story. It may have secondary purposes (probably does; most stories do). But there's nothing wrong with examining the story as a story either.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
To be sure, this is not the only purpose of communication; but when I come across a text that looks like a story, and smells like a story, and quacks like a story, well, I'm going to take it that it is a story. It may have secondary purposes (probably does; most stories do). But there's nothing wrong with examining the story as a story either.

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From this it does not in the least follow, however, that the story is meant to express what we call history.

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Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you

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Jonah is not a historical book--fact is, it is considered a book of wisdom.

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The historicity test is not predicated on what you or I think may have been factual, but what the writer may have thought factual,

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Originally posted by Kwesi:
Honest Ron Bacardi

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The historicity test is not predicated on what you or I think may have been factual, but what the writer may have thought factual,

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Surely, that is not the case? The writer of Jonah may have believed he was describing historical events, but that does not make them so, does it? He could be mistaken, delusional or whatever. What you and I and others think is very important in determining its provenance as history or whatever. Isn't that what justifies this discussion?

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Originally posted by Kwesi:
Honest Ron Bacardi

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The historicity test is not predicated on what you or I think may have been factual, but what the writer may have thought factual,

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Surely, that is not the case? The writer of Jonah may have believed he was describing historical events, but that does not make them so, does it? He could be mistaken, delusional or whatever. What you and I and others think is very important in determining its provenance as history or whatever. Isn't that what justifies this discussion?

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To give you a parallel example, Trump's retelling of various events concerning Hillary Clinton are definitely historical in genre--it's clear he expects us to believe they really happened.

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