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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

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we humans have a job to lovingly care and rule the world, just as God would have us do. In that sense, we are in God's image - we are appointed rulers of the world under him.

Within Christian historical theology, this isn't novel. It's one of the mainline understandings of the image of God.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

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Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

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Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

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Does this contradict the clear scriptural teaching, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"?

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

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Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

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Does this contradict the clear scriptural teaching, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"?

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I don't know. Ask a complementarian. Or don't; they tend to waffle on about differences in "role" without actually admitting to subordination. For further reading: The Trinity and Subordinationism, about the only theological work I've read from end to end in seven years.

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Originally posted by Hawk:
I would echo MikeRussell's surprise at the argument you quoted. I certainly have never come across anyone who claims that men and women are not both equally created in the image of God, despite their beliefs about the subordination/submission/complementarianism of of women.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My understanding is that some try to make the transition from 'myth' to history at the start of Genesis 12. I earlier gave some reasons why I don't think such a split in the Genesis narrative can be maintained.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi Martin PC - I freely admit that myth is not my strong point, and that my reading in the theology that embraces myth is miniscule.

So I'm happy to be enlightened and educated in this area.

However, let me hazard a definition of myth for our purposes 'a story that validates a worldview, occuring outside human time'

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time.

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Originally posted by goperryrevs:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My understanding is that some try to make the transition from 'myth' to history at the start of Genesis 12. I earlier gave some reasons why I don't think such a split in the Genesis narrative can be maintained.

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There are brainier minds than mine on this thread, but just to engage with this one point:

As far as I see it, rather than a sudden cut-off, where myth becomes history, it's more realistic to see that some parts are myth, and some parts are history, all the way through to the New Testament. Thus, I read the NT as 98% history, 2% myth, and Genesis as 98% myth, 2% history. The books in-between have different ratios, dependent on a number of factors. Someone like David is around the 50:50 mark.

And others have made this point before, but I think it's good to reiterate that Myth is just as valuable as History, but for different reasons.

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Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
Even in the New Testament, which I agree is generally seen as more "historical" than the Old, is influenced by this process. There are parts of the Gospels where it makes sense that the writer was using this story to address a contemporary issue of the early Christian church (I'm thinking of the verse where Jesus talks about a person offending another in church and how to reconcile the two, the church did not exist until Pentecost, so it makes sense to me that that was the case of the writer putting words to Jesus' lips to address a contemporary situation of his time).

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Originally posted by shamwari:

I would give a bit more weight to historicity in the David era.

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Could you elaborate on that, Ken? I'm not sure I follow you.

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Horses. No-one rides horses in the Pentateuch. Camels for the desert and donkeys for the mountains. You don't get horseriding until near the end of Kings, in Hezekiahs time. In David's time kings can ride mules. What self-respecting king or price would have been seen dead on a mule or donkey in post-exilic times?

Philistines. Brushing aside for the moment the anachronistic reference to Abimelech as "King of the Philistines" - which I think is probably a later reference to the land that later became Philistia, just as sometimes people call southern Britain "England" when talking about Roman times before the English got here - and why would an early Philistine have a Cananite name like Abimelech anyway? - and what would they be doing running things in Beersheba? - there are no Philistines in the Holy Land in Patriarchal times.

They are (correctly, according to our idea of history) described as from Capthor (which is somewhere over the sea to the north west - possibly Cyprus or Crete) But when the Exocud happens there are Philistines in the way and Israel has to go round them. And from about half-way through Judges to the begining of the book of Kings they are the main military enemies of Israel. Then, for the rest of Kings, they are there, mostly harmless and either friendly to or subject to Judah - until Hezekiah rebels against the Assyirians and goes and whops the Philistines.

The Philistines turned up in the Gaza area about 1185 BC after having fought against Ramses III. They are almost certainly part of the great invasion of the Sea Peoples who fought the Egyptians between about 1220 and 1180 BC, and then went on to destroy (or perhaps benefit for the destruction of) the Hittites and the Mittani and other kingdoms - basically the end of the Bronze Age and begining of what later got called the archaic dark ages. Reading between the lines (it is in the text but they don't go out of their way to point it out) the inhabitants of Canaan for most of Biblical history, including the Hebrews, are are actually semi-independent tributaries of Egypt up till about halfway through 1 Kings (when the Assyrians take over) Egypt was hit hard by the Sea Peoples and lost control of Sinai and Canaan from about 1200/1180 to some time in the 10th century BC. So if there was a time when Hebrews and Philistines could freely move around massacring each other without getting up the noses of the Pharaoh it was then. And Kings chapter 9 claims that a Pharaoh attacked Gezer, a border town between Philistines and Hebrews, and gave the city to Solomon - in other words that is the Egyptians re-asserting their general overlordship in southern Canaan, and Solomon is their ally (they would have looked on him as a vassal of course)

The events of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and the first few chapters of Kings, whether historical or not, are set in the period between about 1200 and 900 BC, and in a political situation which agrees with our current view of those times - Egypt in eclipse, Assyria not yet important (they turn up in 2 Kings 15), a historically brief impoirtance for the Arameans of Damascus, but basically the small kingdoms of southern Canaan - five Philistine cities, Judah, Moab, Edom and assorted city states - are pretty much left to themselves.

Military technology too. In the middle part of Genesis men fight on foot. The first mention of a chariot is when Joseph goes to Egypt. But between the arrival in Egypt and about most of the way though the book of Kings there are chariots used in warfare - up to about the time of King Hezekiah at the latest. That is exactly contemporary with the ewarliest know depictions of large nbodies of cavalry in inscriptions. There are plenty of mentions of chariots after than in the Bible but no-one is depicted as fighting from them - they are ceremonial or just used as a poetic reference to warfare. (The Persians did try to revive chariots in warfare a few times but they were impressive rather than effective)

Iron. No iron industry in the Pentateuch. When the people get back to the Promised Land they hear of "chariots of iron". Which are scary high-tech superweapons they can't fight against. Industrial iron production from ore is usually supposed to have started among the Hittites, but it didn't spread to Syria until the early 12th centiury BC, when it came in from two directions - in the neo-Hittite city states of northern Syria like Carcemish (which were likely either old trading colonies of the Hitties now cut off from their empire, or Syrian cities that accepted many refugees from the collapsing Empire) and from the Sea Peoples - such as the Philistines - who either nicked the technology from the Hittites or had learned it anyway seeing as some of them came from those parts. Other people made things out of iron, but didn't seem to get it form ore on a large scale till the 12th century BC. In Exodus and Joshua and Judges and Samuel the Hebrews turn up in southern Canaan and find everybody else has iron-working technology - the Philistines on the coast, the Phoenicians and Syrians to their north - but they don't.

1 Samuel 13.19-20 "Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock." That's a story that - historical or not - only makes sense in the late 12th century BC and for a few generations after. Earlier than that, ordinary farmers would not have dreamed of using iron - iron! - for agricultural implements. It would be like modern farmers using atomic tractors. But much later, and every village in the Middle East would have had its own smith. There would be nothing strange in it at all.

Anyway, that went on a bit. And I've said similar stuff before at similar tedious length. But, seriously, whatever the historicity of the narratives, the settings of the main historical stream of the OT - Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings - fit our current ideas of the historical and technological developments in the six centuries or so from the end fo the Bronze Age to the rise of the Persian Empire.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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Originally posted by ken:
1 Samuel 13.19-20 "Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock." That's a story that - historical or not - only makes sense in the late 12th century BC and for a few generations after. Earlier than that, ordinary farmers would not have dreamed of using iron - iron! - for agricultural implements. It would be like modern farmers using atomic tractors. But much later, and every village in the Middle East would have had its own smith. There would be nothing strange in it at all.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
On the broader topic, a similar level of historical accuracy can be found in the Iliad (Nestor's cup, Odysseus' boar-tusk helmet, the populated centers listed in the Catalogue of Ships), but that doesn't make it an accurate history or prove the literal existence of Zeus or Aphrodite.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Mike

Your examples are all predicated on thinking that can't work. Thinking that ... isn't. The examples can't validate the thinking. The thinking spawns the examples. It's inverted, closed. Circular and it cannot be squared. Logos isn't mythos.

Hawk's analysis is excellent. Ken's and Croesos' contributions. Gamaliel's. Anglican Brat's.

You can't stand here Mike.

You don't speak the language of discourse, the dialectic. You will disappear without trace and go and lick your wounds for decades before you realise, if ever in this life, that no matter what they dispositionally believe, their thinking is superior.

Mine is simply parsimonious. Which makes it automatically superior to yours:

"Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time."

You even appear to be alluding - unclearly, ambiguously - to Jesus travelling back through time after death. Why ? May be not.

Furthermore the spirits aren't dead they are alive. And they were never human. Not parsimoniously.

But you cannot be challenged on this or anything else. The concept of parsimony is alien to you. You will ALWAYS have a 'yeah but'.

You cannot see the weirdness, the questions begging in your imparsimonious interpretation. And you're too proud to ask. To stay with it come what might.

Too frightened.

Believe me. I've been you. And I'm NEVER wrong. You can't do this Mike.

I fear to say that you can't even pray about it.

But I do.

I've been coming here for oooh 12 years Mike and only since doing battle with YECists elsewhere in the past year have I been able to shake off Intelligent Design.

Only in the past couple of months have I realised what applies to YEC applies to the myth of The Flood.

Almighty God's myth.

In between I realised God's pragmatism in applying the Sabbath retrospectively.

And NONE of that makes me a theological liberal, antinomian, lawless in sexual matters. I take the impossible standard of the beatitudes completely seriously.

Peter and even Jesus may have believed every word of the Tanakh. As literally, as woodenly as any YECist today. But NOT with their perverted anti-scientific thinking. Science, history, forensics, even law didn't exist as we know it.

They didn't have a conflict between logos and mythos. Neither do 'we' here. You do. That's a MODERN phenomenon, like 'weak' YECism.

It's a blip that will pass.

I'm conservative, neo-orthodox. Intellectually liberal as there is no other way to be, they are synonyms to a huge degree of overlap. I horrify theological liberals here as I take God's pragmatism to an extreme degree: He IS God the Killer, not just happy to be wrongly assumed to be until we grow up.

So where the narratives could move behind the scenes of science, as Eden could, I don't DEMAND a materialistic rationalization as the athiest Christians here do. But I find I couldn't care less really.

Adam's sin isn't mine. MINE are mine. I am truly not liberal as I know that every human heart is deceitful above all things and yeah desperately wicked. That we are fallen. Depraved. Broken. Fearful. Sick. Murderous. I ain't no liberal Mike.

There is NO threat in thinking to faith Mike. On the contrary. And then some. Unreason undermines faith. Replaces it. Prevents it.

Lord illuminate us.

Martin

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Or, let me put the challenge differently: Please find a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD) that denies those genealogies could be used for chronology.
If you can't find such a strand, I'd say you have no case against the way I use those passages.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
...whether the genealogies of Genesis 5, 11 can be used for chronological purposes. My evidence that they should be used for chronology includes a key point I made in passing earlier: Jewish pre-Christ commentators and early Christian commentators considered that the Genesis 5, 11 genealogies should be used for chronological purposes. The reference I've got for that is E. Merrill, "Chronology," Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch: 117-118.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
That is to say, in NT times, the way I am treating Genesis 5 and 11 was precisely the mainstream.
So yes, of course I concede that modern understandings of history and science were unknown to the Genesis author(s)/editor(s). But that does not negate this main point I am making: Jesus and the New Testament should be taken as the Genesis interpreters par-excellence. And from what we know, their disposition would have been to side with me on this question of chronology.

So the burden of proof rests on those who would show that Jesus and the apostles would reject the use of the Genesis genealogies to calculate chronology.

Or, let me put the challenge differently: Please find a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD) that denies those genealogies could be used for chronology.
If you can't find such a strand, I'd say you have no case against the way I use those passages.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
... I would note that I calculate my chronology (including my date for Adam) with an Exodus around 1270 BC, following Kenneth Kitchen. This 1270 date sits well with the sort of commentary Ken was making. Some (literalists) would see my approach as being unfaithful to 1 Kings 6:1, and the 480 years mentioned there, but the number of '40 year' symoblic periods mentioned in the era of the judges is high, and this 480 years can be taken as symbolising twelve 40 year periods. (With Kitchen, I go for around 300 years having passed, rather than 480)

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That is to say, in NT times, the way I am treating Genesis 5 and 11 was precisely the mainstream.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why don't you put your understanding of 'the first human' on the table. If you believe Adam was a real person (I think that's necessary theologically, due to Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for example), and you believe in evolution, you have the same problem that you accuse me of having - a parallel race of 'non- human humans'

I challenge you to produce any schema with a real Adam and human evolution that isn't open to a charge of implying a parallel race of 'non-human humans'.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
If we assume that the Biblical Adam was Y-Chromosome Adam

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Genesis can't be a mix of historical fact and myth. It has to be one or the other and not both.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Demetrius the chronographer is 'almost certainly the earliest Jewish author we know to have written in Greek'…You can read page 118 of that article by going to amazon, searching looking up the dictionary, hitting 'look inside', and searching on chronology.

This might work:
http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Old-Testament-Pentateuch-Bible/dp/0830817816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297131316&sr=8-1

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why don't you put your understanding of 'the first human' on the table. If you believe Adam was a real person (I think that's necessary theologically, due to Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for example), and you believe in evolution, you have the same problem that you accuse me of having - a parallel race of 'non- human humans'

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One should not even identify the imago as an individual matter at all. Human beings were created, according to Genesis 1, as a plurality, and out of this plurality arose culture…the imago is much bigger than the human brain and mind; it encompasses humanity collectively, culturally, and, according to Genesis, theologically.

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In light of human evolution, the primal couple in the garden represents the hominid developing through various challenging transitions: from specialized knowledge to cognitive fluidity, from gathering food to cultivating the land, from nakedness to clothing, from blind trust to moral consciousness. From child to adult. This short story is a wonder of conflation.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I think the biggest problem for assuming that the Genesis' ages are symbolic (by parallel) is that no one has produced a viable explanation for what all the numbers symbolise. You get guesses here and there, but it's widely acknowledged that no one has come even close.
What do the numbers mean then? The answer that makes most sense is they mean exactly what they say - this is how long the person lived...This is quite different from the symbolism of the numbers 7, 12, 40 and so on, which is well established, and which I accept. (See my interaction with Ken).

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