Brian2
Veteran Member
We do of course have plenty of evidence from science that some of the stories in the Old Testament cannot be taken literally (e.g. creation and the flood in Genesis) and that others are unlikely since there is no historical evidence for them (e.g. the Egyptian captivity in Exodus).
Sorry I have taken so long to answer.
There is literally and there is literally. I think I take the creation stories pretty literally, certainly not as allegory. I do take the creation days as being undetermined period of time, and that meaning seem pretty reasonable when we look at how the word "day" is used in the stories.
The more that archaeology finds the more evidence there is for stories in the OT.
In Egypt for example under the ruins of Ramasses in Goshen where the Hebrews are said to have lived an area with 12 graves has been found with one of them a small pyramid (a type of grave the Egyptians only used for pharaohs and the like. It is in the time period where the Bible puts the Hebrews in Egypt also. This could definitely be Joseph and his brothers.
David Rohl seems to want to alter Egyptian chronology but even without doing that the Hebrews can be places in Egypt and into the history of the time.
The flood has also been found in geology even if it is not a world wide flood. But that does not matter, as the Biblical story can be translated to mean a local flood.
However, even as far back as 200AD, fathers of the church like Origen did not take these stories all literally. So there is nothing "new" about the idea that these stories are not literally true. We did not have to wait for science to tell us that. It has been the view of the church for centuries. They have been treated as allegorical and contemplated for the messages they convey about God, Man and creation.
Now they can be seen as stories that show that the Bible is historically accurate.
What is "new" is some particularly naive strands of Christian fundamentalism, prevalent in the USA, that decided to ignore all the teaching and scholarship of the past and simply start from the silly axiom that every word MUST be literally true. That, I think, is what has led many atheists to oppose the bible so vehemently - and by extension Christianity more generally - because it presents Christianity as a religion for fools. I find this a depressing state of affairs.
It is depressing for me also at times, but imo it has stopped the whole Christian church from going down the road of the stories being allegories only. It has caused Christians to think more seriously about the nature of the stories and the nature of science, which imo is a good thing.