Category: Mythology
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A Fresh Look at Genesis One
In the beginning, the Bible had no chapters and verses. The creation of biblical chapters took place around the year 1227; of verses in the Hebrew Bible around 1448; and of verses in the New Testament around 1555. In other words, these internal divisions are neither original nor ‘authoritative’, though now more or less universally…
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God’s Life Story (ii)
A previous post noted that the first Israelites were Canaanites, and so their chief god was called El or Elohim (as in the name Isra-el). How many other gods and goddesses did they follow? The answer is, lots! Unsurprisingly, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t go into details, but frequently denounces Israelites who followed the weather/fertility god…
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God’s Life Story
When people give thought to the word ‘God’, they may well have sophisticated notions about its meaning, and might use such words as infinite, eternal, all-powerful and so on. But let’s step back a bit, and focus on the Jewish-Christian God. If we journey back in time, we discover that he has a ‘life history’…
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The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible …
Apparently, there are still some people who believe that the Earth is flat and, presumably, at least some of them are not joking. Equally unreal (at least to me) is that there are also people who believe the entire Bible to be literally true and historically accurate, all without errors of any kind. It’s unquestionably…
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Jesus on the Sea of Galilee
Following on from my previous posts about the Feeding of the 5000 being a parable rather than historical, the same can be said about Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. He’s said to have instantly calmed its stormy waves – “a windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped”. Normally,…
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Food for Thought (ii)
Rather than being dismissive because of disbelief in ‘miracles’, my previous post suggested understanding gospel accounts, like the feeding of the 5000, as ‘story-parables’ rather than historical facts. But if this is a story, where might the idea originally have come from? The early followers of Jesus, being Jews, were well versed in the Hebrew…
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Food for Thought
It troubles me that some people have no interest in reading the Gospels because they can’t take seriously some of the things they read there. An example is the “feeding of the five thousand” from five loaves and two fish. As it happens, this is an instance of occasional patriarchal prejudice. According to Matthew 14:21,…
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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The Exodus times Three
In its final form, Exodus, like the Bible’s other opening books, was a well-crafted compilation using a variety of oral and written source materials. These had originated, and then been expanded upon, for at least five centuries, in different locations, at diverse times, by numberless story tellers and writers. The final editors had exemplary respect…
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