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The writings of the Bible exist as historical artifacts and may therefore be read as historical artifacts. To properly interpret a text we must seek to understand it within its historical context. We need to know all sorts of things: we need to know who wrote it and why; we need to know its intended audience; we need to know the literary genre to which it belongs; we need to know about the society in which the author and audience lived; we need to know the cultural and literary conventions of the time; we need to know the worldview the text inhabits, etc. Contrary to those who think that the "plain meaning" of Scripture is easy to determine, it is no easy thing at all. Witness the vast scholarship that has been devoted to the Bible over the past two hundred years.

Okay . . . ordinarily I wouldn't respond to such a post, and I most definitely do not subscribe to the Protestant concepts of "perspicacity of scripture" or sola scriptura; but what this author is saying goes way beyond merely dismissing those two positions.

Anyone who reads can see this is the standard excuse for dismissing Genesis 1-11 (along with Jonah, Daniel, and Esther) as mere mythology whose only message is as moral fables. The reference to the "vast scholarship that has been devoted to the Bible over the past two hundred years" makes this explicit. All Biblical traditions have scholarly traditions going back to the very beginning, but the past two hundred years have dismissed all this as primitive mythology based on acceptance of historical criticism, which is itself predicated on the unproven assumption that G-d could not possibly have inspired mere men to write down exactly what happened in these books.

So it seems the "neo-reactionaries" are as liberal, modern, iconoclastic, and free-thinking as any Bultmann or Wellhausen. Once again Adam and Eve get the shaft.

I am disappointed in you, NRx.