John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
Give us a few examples of really established facts that turned out to not be facts. We can't count assumptions like how infection was caused by bad spirits instead of micro-organisms. Micro-organisms were observed, thus factual. Spirits were just assumptions left over from obsolete religious beliefs.
Isaac Newton's first employment was as an alchemist. If you've read any alchemy treatises, they give metals personal names, and consider various reactions spirits. But it's just language of accommodation. Newton moved from alchemy to other forms of scientific endeavor seamlessly.
In the language the Bible uses to accommodate the thinking of the age, invisible things are related to spirit, or spirits, or angels. It's just a communication technique meaning something is "invisible" (or unseen) but still real.
You might be revealing too much about your understanding of the world, or lack thereof, if you assume ancient peoples communicated just like we moderns do. It's like an argument I had trying to tell someone that in the Greek of the New Testament a verse meant something different than the English translation such that my interlocutor told me that if the King James English was good enough for Jesus it was good enough for her. She thought he really, literally, word for word, said "Ye shall know the truth . . . .," rather than ידעתם אמת. We seem to see that kinda thing in many of your responses.
Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew. The ancients used the communicative constructs of their day and anyone exegeting ancient texts or ideas is fully aware that you must learn the communicative constructs employed before you can interpret what's being said. To read the Bible like you read the morning paper just doesn't work. To study the Tanakh or the New Testament you not only need to learn the original languages, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, but more importantly you must learn the idiomatic nuances, and the communicative constructs used at the time. When Jesus said to enter the kingdom of God you must drink his blood he was using language of accommodation. His disciples didn't slit his wrist and start guzzling like some here might have tried if their understanding of metaphor is as simple-minded as it appears to be.
John
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