Not reading God's Word right is just wrong. No talking snakes!

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When you've convinced the evangelical movement behind creationism that Noah's flood was regional you come back and let us know, all right? For starters, why don't you go over to the Was there a worldwide flood? thread and convince Peg that the flood was regional.

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Don't make the mistake of viewing evangelical Christians as a monolithic group. Not all evangelical Christians accept a worldwide flood or young-earth creationism. Many evangelical Christians hold to a local flood, and some to a mythical flood. Many hold to an old earth (and a century ago, the majority of evangelical leaders held to an old earth.)

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And your unfamiliar with PARDES!? weird...

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Your link was the first I had heard of it, too (and I have an MA in theology).If you look at your link, you will see that "Pardes" is a method used in "rabbinic Judaism." And as far as I can tell, it is pretty much restricted to rabbinic Judaism. This method is not used in Christian biblical exegesis, and I do not believe it is used in broader biblical studies, either.Mainstream Christian biblical exegesis seems to be analogous to the "Peshat" portion of your "Pardes." ("Peshat bears striking parallels and has been compared to the concept of Exegesis.") The wiki entries on Exegesis and Biblical_hermeneutics are pretty poor, but under the latter you will at least find an outline of the "techniques of hermeneutics" as described by Virkler. This is pretty much the standard Christian approach. (The classic text is "Protestant Biblical Interpretation" by Bernard Ramm, though wiki doesn't mention it.) As greentwiga implied, the assumption is that the original author was trying to communicate something to his contemporaries; our goal is to try to understand what this author meant to communicate. This is sometimes imprecisely called a "literal" method of interpretation; it is better called a "historical-cultural-grammatical-literary" method of interpretation.

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Did you study the Hebrew?
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I just figured that PARDES would come up at least once if you're carefully scouring the Hebrew.

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Maybe you can clear that up for me. Did you too study the Hebrew and have never heard of PARDES?

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Yes, I studied Hebrew. Two classes of language study followed by a class of Hebrew exegesis. For textbooks we used Ross and instructors' notes. And I never heard of Pardes in any of this.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fixed link as per mentioned in next message.

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greentwiga, if your claim was only that the severe regional flood in Mesopotamia circa 2900 BC is the factual source behind the wildly exaggerated global flood myth of Genesis, I'd agree with you.

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The problem is also claiming that, because there was a real-world event behind the flood story, the Bible is true.

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It's true only if you remove all of the exaggerated features of the story that make it what it is.

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You've seen movies "based on a true story," right? Would you call them "fiction" or "non-fiction?" Are they typically "accurate recordings of history?" Do you ignore all of the alterations made to the actual historical record so that an entertaining and marketable movie can be made and claim "this movie is historically accurate" even though 90% of the movie was written by script writers, not historians?

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The fact is, the end result (the actual text of Genesis that's been around for the past few thousand years) is not historically accurate even if the person who first told the story was completely accurate in retelling a real-world event. The story in Genesis no longer resembles that story.

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I know that you don't see the path of your logic the way I'm describing it - but then, very rarely do human beings think of their thoughts and personal curiosities in terms of premesis, hypotheses, and conclusions. The fact is, you're claiming that the Bible is inerrant...but your interpretations if the original author's intent require that you presuppose that the original author was accurate. Your conclusion (the Bible is inerrant) is contained within the premise that the original author was inerrant. Without that premise, all of your attempts to match Biblical myths to real-world events falls apart - if, for example, the Adam myth was literally completely false and made-up in the same way that Thor and Zeus and unicorns are completely made-up, then your line of reasoning would be completely invalid. You'd be chasing a red herring, because you're using circular reasoning.

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You are equating "truth" or "error" with "historical accuracy." This presupposes that the account was intended to teach history. But how can you be so positive that this is so? What if the early Genesis accounts were intended to teach theology, and borrowed imagery and story structures from neighboring cultures to do so, similar to the parables of Jesus? No-one would claim that since Jesus' parables were not historically accurate, they then must be untrue or erroneous. Why couldn't the early chapters of Genesis be similar?