Posted: Feb 27, 2010 10:49 am
Onyx8 wrote:
Love learning this stuff (bolded, but also all of it), how come I loathed history in English public school when I was a kid, did they just teach it poorly or is history more important as you become part of it?
That seems to be how it works.
So the other miracles were written to prove an existing point?
It seems so. Elisha is supposed to have made an iron axe head float on water (2 Kings 6:1-7) - Jesus walks on water. Elisha feeds 100 men with 20 loaves (2 Kings 4:42-44) - Jesus feeds 5000 people with five loaves and two fish.
These parallels are so close and would have been so obvious to Jewish readers or those with any grasp of the OT that it forces us to ask "are these stories presented as fact or are the gospel writers asking us to see them as symbolic and non-literal statements?"
All too often atheists treat these stories at the same level of clueless face value as fundies and sikip the idea that the gospels aren't meant to be wholly read that way.