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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (112657)	6/5/2009 1:07:28 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541777

Since there are no contemporaneous narratives, the actual source for the "Jesus said" quotes come, not from Jesus, but from the early church, all of which are second and third and fourth hand. So, even then, it's the present creating/recreating the past and reading it's own needs into it. I agree. This is true of the historical record in general. Even recent history, with photographs and living witnesses, is subjected to constant revision by writers who are perhaps "reading their own needs into it" or, more likely, bending it to support their own idealogy/religous beliefs/academic tradition....whatever. What's a true statement, thus, is that truth, especially those capital T guys are hard to nail down. The big problem with the Bible is that the truth of things jump off the page if one has already forged a relationship with God. I've always felt it was very unlikely that someone could forge that relationship simply by reading the Bible. It's a genuine conundrum. We all want to read something for enlightenment, and not be told we have to believe something first before we can read about it with understanding. It's a paradoxical dilemma of sorts. The Bible itself addresses this dilemma with the promise that if one has but the faith of a mustard seed, the truthfulness of all things will unfold to them. Nevertheless, what you say is valid, and added to the difficulty is the fact that one does bring one's own experiences to a reading of scripture, just as they do when they read a novel or watch a movie. There are scriptures I either didn't fully understand or didn't think were important when I was younger that became understood or meaningful in later years. There is, however, much in the Bible, probably the most important stuff, that is plainspoken and can only be taken literally. The meaning is clear regardless of the translation. Quibbling over sections of the Bible where the veracity of the historical context is suspect doesn't warrant dismissing the entire text as suspect.