The parts about feeding poor people are parables. Those stories are metaphors for spiritual poverty. What Jesus fed the hungry was the bread of life, ie, the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t want you to actually feed people, he wants you to preach to them.
Everything else is literal, especially the parts where God created the Earth in its current form in six 24-hour days and decreed there were only two immutable biological genders.
(The prosperity gospel is a hell of a drug. It’s no wonder Trump follows it.)
Almost everything in there is a parable. It’s a cultural thing, because stories were only worth preserving as a lesson. The concept of preserving objective reality for its own sake is a very modern and recent ideology. It would have been seen as madness by ancient peoples.
It would’ve been madness in that region at that time. The Romans were writing entire books on natural history and that’s not even getting into something like the lost works on the Etruscan civilization. Recording things in that way fell out of favor with the Jewish people at that time due to centuries of rather brutal occupation requiring a certain level of obfuscation. Though I will say that objectivism wasn’t a concept at that point, the Garlic Wars is as much an account as it is propaganda by Caesar.
Asked one of those “Bible is all literal truth” guys one day, “How did Jesus teach?”
“?”
“He taught in parables, right? Stories that aren’t true, meant to illustrate a point.”
“Ok.”
“Is it possible other Bible stories are parables?”
“?”
The parts about feeding poor people are parables. Those stories are metaphors for spiritual poverty. What Jesus fed the hungry was the bread of life, ie, the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t want you to actually feed people, he wants you to preach to them.
Everything else is literal, especially the parts where God created the Earth in its current form in six 24-hour days and decreed there were only two immutable biological genders.
(The prosperity gospel is a hell of a drug. It’s no wonder Trump follows it.)
Almost everything in there is a parable. It’s a cultural thing, because stories were only worth preserving as a lesson. The concept of preserving objective reality for its own sake is a very modern and recent ideology. It would have been seen as madness by ancient peoples.
It would’ve been madness in that region at that time. The Romans were writing entire books on natural history and that’s not even getting into something like the lost works on the Etruscan civilization. Recording things in that way fell out of favor with the Jewish people at that time due to centuries of rather brutal occupation requiring a certain level of obfuscation. Though I will say that objectivism wasn’t a concept at that point, the Garlic Wars is as much an account as it is propaganda by Caesar.