"We can argue that virgins can give birth, that uncircumscribed God can empty Himself into a body of a Man and still be God who is a Spirit everythwere and transcends time, but we can't prove it to others who don't believe it."
I agree. What I disagree with is the idea that anyone can disprove the historicity of Biblical accounts that have been treated by the Orthodox Church through the centuries as factually true. Your question of "so what if none of this is true?" thus has no relevance to those who believe.
But, what I do maintain is that if you accept the idea that scholars and scientists can disprove Biblical accounts that are treated by the Fathers up to this day as being historically true, then there is no logic whatsoever to believing that God became man, was born of a virgin, that a corpse rose from the dead and passed through stone wall, that that resurrected person ascended in the body into heaven, and that he will come again in the same manner but with glory, in that same resurrected body.
Why does your logic and acceptance of science (or rather your credulity in the face of it) reign supreme when it comes to whether Abraham, Isaac and Jacob actually existed -- but then when it comes to Christ, you believe in Him?
A key message of the New Testament is indeed love and mercy. It is right there in the words of Christ, and it is there that he tells us exactly the lens through which to read the OT: "on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." But the central message of the New Testament is not an abstract idea of love. It is a very concrete and explicit love: God becoming man and walking among us, taking on our human nature, making all things new.
And Christ tells us that the Patriarchs existed, and in fact that they are still alive in Paradise: "Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, not the power of God... as touching the resurrection of the dead have yet not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the Bod of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."
We are to believe in Christ, but not to believe his words? It is reasonable to believe that he rose from the dead but not to believe that his ancestors in the flesh of which he spoke were real people?
"Did Adam and Eve exist?" Well, the Apostles certainly treat it as such. "by one man sin entered into the world..." He is listed in the Biblical chronology of St. Luke of the ancestors of Christ. Christ himself speaks of Adam's son Abel as a real person in more than one place, saying in one: "That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias..."
I am certainly not claiming that I can prove any of this to modern scientific and historical satisfaction. Modern science and scholarship is united in its declaration that none of it is true. You know this -- I've read as you call the History Channel the Satanic channel or something like that. I am acutely aware, as you are, that modern science and historical scholarship tends to have a very clear agenda, and is not objective when it comes to Christianity.
You quote a Father who says that the Bible should be read for spiritual meaning. Of course this is true, and all the Fathers treat the Scriptures that way.. That is as old as the Bible itself. Think of St. Paul and his pointing out the allegorical meaning of the two sons of Abraham in Galatians.
But throughout, Abraham is also treated as a real person, and the stories as true. And neither do the Fathers ever say: "OK, here's the spiritual meaning of this or that story about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- but it didn't happen." This is the characteristic nature of Scripture -- there is not only one meaning, but many deep meanings that are simultaneously true. Ishmael and Isaac are allegories that really happened.
Picking at the historicity of the Bible is also as old as the Scriptures themselves. Look at the famous exchange between Julius Africanus and Origen over the historicity of the story of the story of Daniel and Suzannah, or the careful refutations by St. Augustine and others of the very early claims that the two different geneologies of Christ in the Gospels meant that probably neither was true. The entire idea of Christ having risen from the dead was mocked from the beginning, and defended from the beginning.
I completely agree with you that "historical, geographical, physical, (in)accuracy are not the measure against which the truth and value of the Scripture is tested." But what I strongly maintain that there is no value, and much danger, to one's spiritual life to go down the path of believing that most of Scripture is *only* metaphor and allegory.
This is a moving discussion and I hope you don't mind me commenting. I am not Orthodox but Protestant, and one who reads Patristics and finds great meaning in contemporary Orthodox theology.
One of my favorite theologians is John Zizioulas. In an essay on eschatology in salvation history he contends that
we cannot place our security in what is given to us, or facts and substances graspable by our minds or senses. Facts do not decide in identifying beings: only the future can disclose the truth.Zizioulas maintains that the importance of the Incarnation, God's primary revelation in history, takes its meaning from the Resurrection, an eschatological event, not a historical event. Indeed, all of history takes its meaning from the end, the eschaton--the coming of the kingdom--and not from history as fact.
In this scenario, the role of the Spirit is to take us out of history. That is not to destory history, but to acknowledge that history can only take its meaning from the future. The significance of history from an eschatological perspective is not in the facts.
History of the Jewish kings is irrelevant to my daily life; what is relevant is what they say in the Bible and what they do; the combined message. They might as well be fictitious for all I know, but it's the message behind the story that counts.
You say they all believed in the Prophets. So the Bible says. And for all practical purposes we believe it too, but it's not their historical reality or fiction that matters but the message they project.
As for historical veracity of the Bible, that is a matter of debate as you know. Very few things mentioned in it are readily verifiable, including any reference by anyone (save for Josephus, in pasisng, and some 30 years later, and based on what he has been told by Christians!) who make reference to Christ. If His presence was such a threat to the Jews and to Rome, something other than the Bible would surely be recorded. Yet, mysteriously, nothing of God's presence, no relics of His have been preseved, although they are the holiest of holies -- the ark, the tablets, the grail, the cross, etc.
We make sure our family hairlooms are passed on from generation to generation, yet we lose things God touched, save for a written account we call the Bible. Why? Because nothing else matters except His message, A. Things of this world that were His would become the subject of worship, people would fight over them, so God made sure nothing of His that is material is preserved. Only His Spirit.