The biggest thing that turned me away from creationism, however, was the dishonesty of the creationists. I like to check my facts and go back to original sources, and time and again I found that creationists were taking quotes out of context, suppressing important data, and outright lying.

But that’s a whole field in and of itself, and I want to keep this blog-lengthed, so let’s move on….

Okay, and I agree that it probably was best here to stay on topic, but I’d love for you to come back to this topic on its own at length sometime, if possible.

~David D.G.

The ellipse falls short of the perfect correspondence of the parabola by a fixed ratio. The ellipsis represents falling short in speech or thought. The hyperbola’s diameters exceed the fixed correspondence of the parabola. Hyperbole is overstatement in speech.

I’m not going to claim that Noah is a parable, though I can see that I was sloppy with my response above and it looks like that’s what I’m saying here. I do think that the story of Noah is in the book for a theological message, but I guess I wouldn’t quite go as far as to say that it counts as a “parable”. (It more fits into the recurring theme of the whole book – God tells people to do something, they don’t do it, God kills lots of people and forces the remainder into exile, then God restores the exiled people to their place and gives them some new rules to live by so the cycle can start all over again. It’s pretty much a consistent theme of the OT – I’d even argue that The Fall from the garden is just another variation of this without the restoration bit. But I wouldn’t really call it a parable.)

But my understanding of the word parable is that it’s a story that is specifically intended to highlight an ethical or moral question and give the “proper” teaching via the direction of the story. By that definition Jonah is clearly a parable – the story is set up with a dilemma and ends with a moral lesson (the moral being that God cares about everyone, even non-Jews, so you should too). God pretty much narrates the moral right at the end with that bit about the vine, making it almost a fable rather than a parable – since a parable usually seems to entail the reader having to think for themselves about what the teaching actually is. But God is suitably cryptic in his response to Jonah, so I’ll just call it a parable.

Swimmy:

You don’t know how depressed you’ve made me. That someone could look at the story of Job and all they could think is that it’s some kind of record or history almost makes me physically ill. I can understand thinking Genesis is real history – the folks who committed it to papyrus back in the day probably assumed it was real history themselves. But Job? It’s clearly as much a parable as the story of the Prodigal Son, or the Parable of the Talents. Sigh. I think I need a drink. Some days I’m really glad to have been raised Catholic – at least you’re allowed to believe that the writers of the Bible could have employed allegory and poetry and metaphor to make their points under Catholic theology.

WTF? That is the most hard-hearted interpretation of the parable of Jonah that I think I’ve ever heard in my entire life. My understanding/interpretation of Jonah is that it’s a repudiation of a lot of what the previous portions of the Bible stood for. Through much of the OT God is the God of Israel – he’s exclusive to Israel and ignores the rest of the world. My reading of Jonah is that the writer is repudiating that stance – God is the God of the entire world, not just Israel. His Word needs to be spread to everyone, not hoarded by the Israelites alone. God loves all people and wants all of them to repent and be saved, not just the Jewish people alone. By my reading it’s a very proto-Christian, evangelist message, which is probably why the author of Matthew stuck a reference to the story into Jesus’s mouth. (But then I don’t claim that my reading is the only one – I just have never heard the idea that God saved Ninevah so that they could turn around and slaughter the Israelites later – that’s just cold).

As for this being argument that Jesus thought that Noah and Jonah were literally true events that happened sometime in the past – this isn’t even an argument. First of all, once again it’s an argument to the infallibility of Matthew not to the infallibility of either Jesus or the Bible. Mark has the same argument between the Pharisees and Jesus (Mark 8:11-13), but never mentions Jonah or Noah in it – Matthew added it for some reason. (There are more problems with these two accounts – like the fact that they contradict each other completely, but that’s another issue). Second of all even if we just go ahead and assume that Matthew had access to the “correct” dialogue here, there’s STILL nothing there that says that the stories of Noah and Jonah should be taken as literal history rather than as references to the stories themselves as stories – parables that are useful as a teaching device. It’s not like Jesus himself never used a parable to make a point.

And Jonah is pretty damn clearly a parable not a dictation of history. A believer trying to communicate to others what his vision of God was like and what the duty of a believer was. Just like Job. But now I’m wondering if the same folks that take Jonah as history take Job as history as well. And that just makes me sad – I’m not sure I want to know that people like that exist.