@DizzyDream #74145
And frummies are incapable of understanding metaphor, fable or parable (despite the guy they profess to worship teaching with parables). The idea of something being true in the non-literal, ahistorical sense makes their heads explode. They focus, not on the message but rather the means of delivering the message.
It’s like looking at Aesop’s Fables and just seeing talking critters in weird, random situations and never considering the lessons being taught. It’s like thinking that word-based math problem describe real events.
Adam and Eve is a metaphor of humanity evolving into existence, developing the ability to reason and know right from wrong but choosing to do wrong, anyway. Though the order of stuff being created on each day is out of order a couple of times, it does get it somewhat right in the rest (Earth, then the plants, then ‘creeping things’, then birds, then other animals, then people). “Let There Be Light!” could be “The Big Bang”.
“The Firmament” is likely the atmosphere.
The Flood was likely the same local one that inspired the one in Gilgamesh or a mythic metaphor in the Campbellian sense.
“Moses vs. Pharaoh” was likely a labor dispute involving some monotheistic Canaanite transplant "habiru” laborers (The Habiru people aka ‘Hebrews’… though ‘habiru’ technically was a term for ‘dry, dusty, vagabond, etc.’) that got a bit out of hand and ended with an environmental mess caused by the island of Santorini blowing up (and they crossed The Reed Sea, a tiny portion of the Red Sea that’s wetlands that become dry-ish land at low tide).
Jesus & the Apostles were likely pseudonyms or a vague nameless group of Essenes that got retconned as separate named characters.
If Jesus never existed he exists as a cosmic metaphor. Perhaps that same group of Essenes got some divine revelation and constructed a word-or-mouth narrative… or parable… to convey it clearly… These stories were then written down, hence The Gospels.
I imagine the roots of Christianity would likely involve Essenes or perhaps an Essenic sub-group (perhaps a Lay-Group auxiliary… they allow marriage, sex, having families, etc. … in a kibbutz-like settlement which would one day morph into Nazareth, perhaps these folks were Nazarene Essenes). The monastic branch at Qumran wrote of a “teacher of Righteousness” or something. Perhaps that figure evolved into “Yeshuah Bar Yoseph / Miriam” aka “Jesus of Nazareth”.