"How about the flat earth myth?"
Very few of the church hold that particular myth nowadays. Indeed, almost all biblical superstitions from blood on your ear and big toe as "medicine" to an immovable earth to a 6 day creation to God being repelled by iron chariots to Jonah and Joshua and all the other nonsense...have been dropped in favor of a dozen NT verses preached over and over again with a lot of hymns.
The fact that the flat earth was one of the first absurdities in the bible to become part of Christian "apologetics" is not too important to me. I will certainly not be one to insist that all of the Christian fathers believed thusly. Indeed, I believe that many of them did not believe in the bible at all. Occams Razor tells me that just because they were forced to a Christian "education" does not mean they were all stupid and ate their buttered bread upside down.
edwardtbabinski.us
6) FLAT EARTH (SOME EARLY CHURCH FATHERS); UNMOVING EARTH AND SOLID FIRMAMENT (ALL OF THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS)
It is agreed upon by all historians that at least some early fathers of the Christian church did believe in a flat earth. And those fathers who believed in a spherical earth still believed that the spherical earth did not move and that the "firmament" was solid. Holy Scripture continued to be cited in support of those latter two assertions for centuries. Origen called the firmament "without doubt firm and solid" (First Homily on Genesis, FC 71). Ambrose, commenting on Genesis 1:6, said, "the specific solidity of this exterior firmament is meant" (Hexameron, FC 42.60). And Saint Augustine said the word firmament was used "to indicate not that it is motionless but that it is solid and that it constitutes an impassable boundary between the waters above and the waters below" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, ACW 41.1.61).
For millennia before the Christianity ever arose, the ancient Near Eastern civilizations agreed that the earth was flat. You can see it in their hieroglyphics, and stelles and stories. [See especially, Othmar Keel. The Symbolism of the Biblical World, Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms.] The flat earth view was undeniably prominent in Babylon, Egypt, and Greece during the time when the Old Testament was written. Even during the intertestamental period (after the Old but before the New) Jewish literature like the Book of Enoch spoke unmistakably of the shape of the earth as flat.
The New Testament writers from the Gospels to Revelation likewise took for granted the flatness of the earth. So naturally at least a few of the "early church fathers" were flat earthers, though by that time in the Hellenistic world, the spherical-earth view was prominent and most of the church fathers simply ignored or explained away the flat earth implications of various Old and New Testament passages. The point to keep in mind was that before the age of the church fathers, i.e., during the Old Testament, Intertestamental, and New Testament, periods, the "flat-earth" view was certainly the prominent one, and the one employed during the composition of all the books in the Bible." |
