I don’t mean some Holy Roller Evangelical from Dayton, Ohio. Quite the opposite. I mean those people who are always bashing the Bible.
”It’s a bunch of fairy stories’. Yes Bible stories have like a fairy- tale like quality but a Bible story has I believe a connection to historical fact.
Chesterton called the Bible -‘The Fairy tale that is true’. Tolkien-‘The myth that is true’.
Bible bashers read it the wrong way. Or put another way the New Atheist is as fundamental as the Fundamentalist.
They take everything so literally. There they are with their great big sausage fingers in the text ‘but it says here that the Ark was…’ 80 cubits this and 40 cubits of whatever it is ‘so we know that it couldn’t float…’ or some such…but that was only a literary convention. A lot of ancient writing is like that. Very detailed. The Iliad is.
We often hear of some terrible disaster as being of ‘Biblical Proportions’. But I always think that ‘Biblical Proportions’ should rather mean a smallish disaster. In the Bible it says the Flood ‘covered the whole world’. But the whole world back then would have been ancient Israel. I have heard that it could be translated as ‘The Flood covered the whole land’.
I think Noah existed. He is described as a crank and drunkard. Very human. He was ridiculed and scoffed at for putting all his energy into building ‘his Ark’. Just like some American ex-forces building a bunker in the desert to escape nuclear Armageddon.
There is truth in the story I mean. It rings true. I know some moron who’s only read it in Wikipedia will mention Gilgamesh. That there is a similar story there. But that just proves there were catastrophic floods back in ancient days. Like there was a huge catastrophic flood in 2004. Like there have been floods throughout history. I just believe some visionary could have predicted it and prepared. Like Noah.
The animals went in two by two. Once again that would be the animals Noah had. His livestock. This is what I mean- about literary convention- one of them was HYPERBOLE. Something happened and it was deliberately exaggerated. But SOMETHING DID HAPPEN.
The Parting of the Red Sea. A miraculous escape. We know that the Red Sea can at times under certain atmospheric conditions PART. See link. I am not saying the Red Sea Pedestrians were waiting for the little green man to appear and then they crossed but SOMETHING, something as in the link could explain it.
The 10 plagues of Egypt. I always think of that line in Shakespeare – ‘“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions”. When one load of suffering is compounded by more and more suffering (a bit like now).’Could things get any worse?’ we often think to ourselves. Well they did for the ancient Egyptians. And once again all the 10 plagues can be explained scientifically. See link. The Burning Bush. That burned and was not consumed. I just can imagine that. Can’t explain.
Balaam’s Ass. The Ass who could talk. Now this is a difficult one. Cardinal Newman said he was prepared to believe it. I remember once a bird singing and I felt it was talking to me.
Old Testament times are known as ‘Sacred History’. When fantastical things happened. A time of supernatural events, a special time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11383620
https://www.livescience.com/58638-science-of-the-10-plagues.html
Nominated by: Miles Plastic
