Posted on 05/07/2011 9:20:41 AM PDT by Olympiad Fisherman
The Biblical Archaeological Review, by no means a conservative Christian magazine, recently published a surprising article by Yosef Garfinkel entitled, “The Birth and Death of Biblical Minimalism.” While Garfinkel limits his discussion to the last 30 years among certain modern archaeologists working at the University of Copenhagen, biblical minimalism is the general presumption that the Biblical text cannot be a trusted source of actual verifiable history, especially with regard to the authenticity of the Old Testament. Garfinkel shows in his article that the minimalist position is no longer a viable one. Too much archaeological evidence has been uncovered. While this has not and cannot prove the inerrancy of the biblical text, it is still a far cry from the German tidal wave of skepticism that inundated the modern world back in the 1800’s ...
(Excerpt) Read more at theignorantfishermen.com ...
The shortness of written history is a good argument that human beings have not been around for hundreds of thousands of years. There is next to no archaeological evidence for such vast time periods precisely because such so-called ancient hunter-gatherers would leave virtually nothing behind, but then all of a sudden about 7-8 thousand years ago, man decides to become a farmer and start civilization. What in the world was man doing for all of those thousands upon thousands of years? Why did it take him so long to get smart? There is something seriously wrong this story and evolution cannot explain it precisely because they call the beginning of the farming/civilization the Neolithic Revolution. Revolutions and evolution do not mix together very well. The whole caveman story is a figment of the modern evolutionary imagination - no matter how many scientific pedigrees have used to substantiate it.
I would think it is quite likely man was nearly wiped out many times by natural disasters, climate changes, or famine.
For all we know many or our most advanced societies may now be under the deep oceans or buried under many layers of rock.
Read Genesis 6-9.
You got it. Liberals love to bash people with real biblical morals and values over the head with the bible. They do the exact thing that they accuse us of doing.
There is not four levels to understanding the Bible. The key to understanding the Bible is context, context, context, context, context, and more context. Developing an understanding of the context of the Bible is what Bible study is all about. Not enough people do this, and this is why there are so many many various interpretations of the Bible and why it is so misunderstood and misinterprted. Context places proper controls on how a passage is to be interpreted, and being sensitive to context is the heart of biblical exegesis. If people paid attention to context, we would solve about 75-80% of all the interpretive problems out there.
I know nothing of this site but it was first to explain the four levels of understanding of the Bible.
The entire Bible was written in history on purpose - to avoid mysticism and so-called deeper mystical interpretations which always looks for meaning under the text, between the lines, etc. - in other words, a deeper meaning that the text does not support. People get bored reading the history of the Bible and so want to dress it up with deep forms of various forms of mystical interpretations, which always distort what the Bible actually teaches. This has been the bane of Bible study since the Greeks began using mysticism and allegory to interpret the Old Testament after the Babylonian exile. Greek minded Christians followed suit in the early church since so many Greeks became Christians. This approach, though popular and widely used through the centuries, has only obscured the biblical text with countless arbitrary meanings and interpretations that the context does not support. Context controls meaning and each passage must be interpreted in context. It is not that each text has various levels of meaning, but that there is a variety of different contexts throughout the Bible. Some contexts are allegorical, some are parabolic, many are narrative history, some are biographical like the gospels, others are poetic or proverbial, others are prophetic, the New Tesament itself is made up of many personal letters with doctrinal content expressed in them. Sensitivity to such contexts is the heart of solid Bible study - http://www.xenos.org/essays/herme.htm.
btt
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