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I think the whole thing stinks of presentism. The thing I observe about history is that the farther back you go, the more literal people seem to take things. In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.
And even in other forms of thought. It just doesn’t seem like up until Plato or Socrates that there was any sort of meta analysis going on. No real thought about categories or how to think about the world. It was all very much rooted in practical, realistic, and everyday sort of concerns. I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought, or what makes a woman a woman.
As such, I don’t think modern ideas like sexuality or sex/gender descriptions are even possible n the remote past. The ideas are simply too abstract and complicated for a mind that deals mostly in the here, now, and the physical. It’s a product of our time, something we do because we are used to meta thinking and abstractions and symbolic thinking. We are no longer bound to what we can see and touch. In fact I suspect that AI is starting the next level of abstraction for human minds. Not just dealing in logical and symbolic abstract reasoning, but thinking about how we think, and thinking about what kinds of thinking will do the most good.
Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.
They don't quite date back to the Bronze Age, but the Pythagoreans came before Plato and were famous for their belief in the transmigration of souls, and advocated vegetarianism on the basis that inflicting suffering on a living being unnecessarily diminished the human soul. Those concepts also showed up in the early Orphic religions as well, to the point that several authors said that Pythagoras was just repeating what he'd learned from them.
The story of Tiresias directly presents an example of someone changing sex but retaining their identity as a man (despite giving birth to a daughter) and then returning to masculinity. Just to be clear I'm not saying that they would endorse modern gender ideology, but they most definitely understood the idea that you could have an inner self whose gender/sex didn't match up with your body.
The people and faith clearly could think metaphorically or as God as a transcendent being before Islam.
@MaiqTheTrue is probably right in the sense that if you wanted to pick up the canonical texts and not run into an embodied God you'd fail with the OT and NT (assuming Jesus is God). They have a lot of language about an embodied God - just as they have more transcendent visions - because the books were written over a long time and don't agree with each other or even themselves.
Islam as a late redaction that emphasizes strict monotheism can cut out a lot of the embarrassing references (when the author even knows about them). It polemicizes against the other religions because of this too. Qur'an 5:75 rejects the deification of Jesus and Mary (why Mary is added is a question for another day) by pointing out that they can't be deities because they "both ate food".
This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e.
Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that re: the Christian texts.
Jesus is treated as a taking on of flesh by a God who is not material. And the old testament has things like Jeremiah's, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" among others. I'd be inclined to argue the deliberate lack of depiction in the design of the ark etc. is gesturing towards God's immateriality as well, which would make it hard to argue that it's some late development. The New Testament, at least, you can't pass off as a contradiction between different authors. It's just a more complex position.
Yeah, Jesus' eating food isn't a problem; the contrary position would be worse, in light of Hebrews 2:14 and 17.
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Interestingly, Islamic doctrine contains quite a bit of self-contradictory falsehood about what Christians believe. In Mohammed’s time there were definitely Christians in Arabia, so it’s unclear why.
Not just Christians. There's the claim that Jews think Ezra is the son of God that people have puzzled over since.
The likely reason is that the author didn't have the Bible in front of him but was going off oral tradition (which explains the stew of both canonical sources and apocryphal ones, and straight up legendary elements or how the Qur'an could conflate two Marys). Reynolds also suggests that the author is weighing in on theological debates nearby churches had, things could have become extra garbled by disagreement by the time they got to the author.
Mohammed’s time is too late for massive theological disagreement- my main point was ‘the Quran is definitely not dictated by the angel Gabriel, and probably not double checked either(like the kind of book an illiterate man makes up)’.
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There are a lot of Christians in America today, but there are a ton of false beliefs (both by non Christians and even sometimes by other Christians) about what they believe. I'm not too surprised that sort of thing happened in Mohammed's time as well.
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