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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am not a trained apologist either, but I think I can provide further background to your question about Scriptural Infallibility in a Catholic Context.

The Catholic Church would say that the Bible is infallible, but in a very narrow way. I don't want to quibble about words, so it makes sense to just say, the Bible isn't 100% infallible, in the way that word is commonly used today.

The Bible contains exactly what God wanted it to contain. It contains every spiritual revelation necessary for a person to be granted peace with God and know, love, and serve Him. That said, God didn't set out to give us a treatise on Natural Science.

Every Scriptural passage contains four meanings in it: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The fourfold senses of Scripture—the literal, allegorical,moral (tropological), and anagogic senses—were first proposed by John Cassian (ca. 360-435). By way of example, Cassian wrote, “The one Jerusalem can be understood in four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological sense as the human soul.”

The allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses are infallible. The literal is infallible only as far as it points to an allegorical, tropological or anagogical meaning.

For example, Genesis is clearly begins with myths parodying Babylonian and other Near Eastern myths. The author of Genesis takes a Babylonian myth about a flood, and then says, "there's only one God, and He made humans out of love, so how would this myth play out if the true God was involved instead of these false gods." The writing style is mythic. I don't think there was ever an intention to deceive, their original audience knew the original myths that were being parodied. That's what made the parody so powerful.

Early Christian converts from Greco-Roman paganism took Genesis as allegorical from the start. They knew given the state of natural science at the time, that the world was created in one instant and the four elements were Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, but Genesis only refers to Water and Earth. So obviously Genesis left some important things out from a natural science perspective, but the moral and anagogical truths are still infallible.

The second half of Genesis moves to Folklore. Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree? I don't think so. Would I include that anecdote if I was writing down oral traditions for George Washington's biography? Probably. Because it portrays something important about his character with a conciseness that only a story can draw out. Did Abraham really pretend his wife was his sister twice? I don't know. The authors of Genesis thought that it conveyed something important about his character and his relationship with God though.

Meanwhile, the four Gospels are very clearly portraying themselves as Eye Witness accounts or collections of Eye Witness accounts of the strangest thing to have ever happened on Earth. Theistic and atheistic scholars recognize that the genre is Ancient Biography. Noted skeptic Bart Erhman calls them Greco-Roman biographies. The writers of the Gospels really do want their audience to believe the events described genuinely took place.