Was the bible supposed to have a deeper philosophical meaning or was it supposed to be taken literally...

It's both historically true and filled with deep symbolic meaning. Your example interpretation has neither historical accuracy nor spiritual depth.

The 'Old Testament' was a way to standardise belief and truly establish the religion, with the temple priest class as the unquestionable authority in jerusalem.

Similarly the 'New Testament' was a response to gnostics, with the goal of standardisation of the faith.

>he doesnt know women are at fault for all the evils of the world
this is a trope, you have this in greek mythology as well with pandora and all that shitstorm.
its the word of god is it was meant to be taken literally by the jewish people but im sure the smarter guys and priests in their society saw it as more interpretable than the stupid plebs kids and women

>women are at fault for all the evils of the world

its obviously the men

>both man and woman is at fault for the tragedy
>implying

roasties getting btfo by a bible quote

its really just roasties brahs, the sooner the chinks start mass producing sex bots the better

Jesus literally taught in parables and used loads of metaphors.

Historically speaking most of the bible was written to be read literally. We are talking about a group of very primitive desert dwellers that never amounted to any great civilization and borrowed heavily from the mythology of the Babylonians and neighboring tribes. Genesis has flat earth created 6,000 years ago because to the people writing that's the best they could come up. They had neither the time nor the reason to ponder any philosophy because they were too busy dealing with starvation and warring tribes.

Eventually the Jews were exposed to Greek philosophy. The more educated Jews found it a far deeper world view than their primitive religion and set about to to interprete their own holy scriptures in a philophical way by turning everything into allegory. God went from a physical being that lives in the clouds to a metaphysical abstraction. Stupid, naive cosmology and stories that were meant to only have meaning for warring dessert tribes started turning into Platonic philosophy. Eventually the origenal meaning was denied entirly.

Yeah well I still have to read and understand the KJV for novels

You'll probably need some sort of secondary literature that offers an interpretetion close to what you want to read. Common interpretetions are not always something you would read going in blind. If all you need is to understand the name-drops you'll do fine though.

>very primitive desert dwellers
the books were written in developed cities

It has to be interpreted, as everything in the world, especially books, words. There is never any given meaning, never.

>all my knowledge of the bible comes from secondary sources

Biased, secondary sources at that.

Best way to appreciate the Bible though is through a television show on the Science channel, they are sure to give you a rational explanation of how The Holy Bible works.

Maybe you could learn through Richard Dawkins, I'm sure you would receive some absolutely impartial unbiased interpretations of the Old and New testaments from him, seeing as how he visibly jeers when someone mentions religion around him.

/sarcasm

Honestly, when New Atheists say they mind their own business I just fucking laugh and walk away.

You're basically saying the entire scholarly study of the bible and it's historical period from the for last centuary or so has been one giant "biased" conspiracy.

But if you drop the name Richard Dawkins and go on a neurotic rant about atheism maybe that will be mean something.

where in Genesis does it mention that the earth is flat?

oh, nowhere?

dipshit

why does every bible thread on here deal with the most pleb subjects possible, take this to Veeky Forums faggots

You vapid dogs.
Why is this conversation still ongoing?

Read Rene Girard...

How many times have I told you frogs to stop posting here?

It's a religious text and should be read in its religious context. If your'e coming to your "deeper philosophical meaning" by trying to secularize it, then your interpretation is wrong.

the book literally says it is metaphor and parable.
literally it tells the reader this.

reminder that homo sapiens were the dominant species of human for at least 100,000 years before the invention of writing and that many of the writings in the bible (especially the pentateuch) are transcriptions of stories from oral tradition. orality is almost unfathomable in a completely literate society (especially one in which the internet has now become so prevalent). the stories were never meant to be taken "literally" in the way that you're using that word. the particular nuances of their wording are likely meaningless. projecting modern ideas onto the texts is likely a huge mistake. you'll likely never achieve a complete/total understanding of the content and should instead focus on drawing as much positive learning from it as you are able.

Ancient myths usually aren't supposed to have a deeper philosophical meaning, unless it's something really obvious like "God rewards the good and punishes the wicked." In interpreting a myth, you're not trying to figure out the intended message of some guys telling stories around a campfire thousands of years ago, you're trying to figure out why that story resonated with people well enough to be remembered for so long. So yeah, people might have really liked the idea that man is created in God's image for reasons most people couldn't articulate, but are related to the philosophical meaning that later interpreters find in the stories.

>or was it supposed to be taken literally
Probably, yes. Again we don't know the intent of the first person who came up with the idea of Adam and Eve, but another reason some myths survive is because people desire to have some understanding of their history and how the world works.

Where?

Here. It's all properly cited with the appropriate passages.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology#Heavens,_earth,_and_underworld

This is a lie.

To add to this I beleive it is a great disrespect to the Old Testament to deny the very thing it's trying to communicate and impose what ever more recent interpretetion onto it. It's a total and complete disregard for the entire fucking book, it's religion, and the people behind it. No apprecietion for culture or hertiage, in fact a denial of hertiage.

>Ancient myths usually aren't supposed to have a deeper philosophical meaning
Wrong, just look at the Eleusinian Mysteries from the Greeks, where the rituals and magical plays where so deeply profound and life changing for the people that participated in them. It became enormously popular that even the nords and even Russians knew about this because we found pamphlets there.

Early Christians took the Bible very, very literally. When people try to say Augustine wrote against Biblical literalism, what Augustine wrote against was accepting things like a flat Earth with a dome over it for a sky with the stars and sun embedded in the literal dome. He took the creation story and Old Testament chronology very, very literally, as everyone did until the Enlightenment.

Maybe the only early Christian not to be that much of a literalist was Origen, who was still very literal compared to what a moderate Christian would accept today.

As for whether the original Judaic tradition was intended to be literal or not, there the terms aren't so well defined. Like most ancient creation myths, it would probably meant to be taken literally but not *seriously*. With Christianity it became not only literal, but important to seriously consider the implications of its literalism.

There's a difference between rituals and stories. Rituals usually are supposed to have deeper meaning.

Also, ALL of Catholic doctrine still depends on Biblical literalism. The most fundamental of Catholic doctrines rest entirely on pretty strict Biblical literalism. Even though the Church allows a critical, academic view of the text, it doesn't at all reconcile it with its doctrine.

this thread is retarded

Who cares? No one in authority gives a shit what the laity believes anymore.

The Greek myths were philophical. The Greeks were a philophical people and the mystery cults came up after a great deal of philophical leg-work had been done.

The ancient Isrelites were not philosophers and thus they did not create philophical myths. However after being exposed to Greek culture they did go back and reintrperte their myths to be philophical.

The interpretetion most certainly does exist but it is not what the Old Testament was intended to discuss. The New Testament does dabble in philosophy because it is written by Greeks and possible a hellinized Jew or two who were living in a very philophical climate. However the degree to which it discusses philosophy is grossly exagerated by the book's advcocates, it is a product of it's time and still highly superstitious even compared to works of it's own time such as Plato.

just lol

But the rituals and the myths are connected, often these myths are portrayed by figures portraying archetypes in a dramatic play/ritual, upon getting more initiated in the mysteries the more you understood the deeper profound truths hidden in these myths.

Fucking idiot. What did I say?

See

But the Christiand and Jewish religion were not conceived as mystery religions. There were failed attempts to impose mystery on it through Gnosticism and Kaballah. The old and new testament are very much silly superstitious.

The mystery religions of the Greeks were successful attempts to impose mystery onto silly superstitious. Persophone was origenally just a nature deity. The Greeks did not have a hard concept of cannonical texts so the religion could evolve naturally. Judaism and Christianity had a very hard concept of cannonical texts so they needed to keep the old superstitious texts and than force it to mean something philophical by reintrepreting it into something the origenal writers did not intend.

>philophical

You're fucking idiot too. Everyone here is.
Everyone shutup and read Rene Girard and stop embarrassing yourselves. It's really pathetic.

Nobody is going to read your book, cunt.

>philophical
>philophical
>philophical
>philosophy
>philophical
What did he mean by this

...

Cool Wikipedia is Genesis now tite

Spoken like a true dopey dumb dumb.
I'm literally giving you the source to answer the question of the thread, yet dopeys in here want to wax lyrical to prove to strangers how clever they are.

It's not a typo though. He clearly meant to spell it that way if he did so that many times.

The point is the bad arguement.

>i read one book so i have all the answers