Replies

Yes I did, in my original post. "Four corners of the earth" was as much of a "figure of speech" in the 1st century as it is in the 21st century - unless you want to believe that the newspaper editor I referenced earlier really thinks the earth is flat. Indeed, since your approach seem to be the woodenly literal approach that doesn't take into account figures of speech, etc., you probably think Christians think Jesus was a wooden plank with a metal knob, since Jesus said "I am the door", etc.

In other words, your problem is likely that you don't bother to really think about something before you comment on it.

I had to laugh when I saw your comment about early Christians rejecting a spherical earth. Actually, the typical Christian cosmology in late antiquity was that of a spherical earth nested inside a set of concentric spheres - an idea at least partially picked up from Isaiah's statements about the "circle" (which, as my link showed, in Hebrew indicates a sphere) of the earth, as well as from the simple observation that, since the sun and moon are round, it stands to reason that the earth is too.

To my knowledge, the only Christian writer in antiquity who seriously disputed the idea of a spherical earth was Cosmas Indicopluestes - and he wasn't exactly a major or influenctial voice on Christian cosmology. Augustine did not dismiss the idea of a spherical earth, he merely dismissed the notion that men could live in the antipodes, basically arguing that there was no way men could have crossed such a wide ocean as was (rightly but accidentally) posited by many writers - pagan and Christian alike - to exist surrounding the tripartite "habitable realm." Actually, not necessarily such a laughable conjecture, when you consider the level of sailing technology at the time, and the fact that most ships tried to never even lose sight of land, much less cross open ocean.