re: Satanic Temple puts up display at Michigan Capital

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The stories are myths written with a theological intent. They have never been seen as historical events except by a very small minority of Christian, mainly American evangelicals. And if you believe these stories were meant to be taken as actual historical events, then you're just as guilty of fundamentalism as those you so gleefully mock.

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To believe in Satan

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Well you have if you've read the New Testament. This is just one of many examples of Jesus talking about literal people in the Old Testament;

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I hear this theory thrown around lots but if this is true, you'd have to explain why Jesus and the disciples spoke of these things you call myth as factual stories. And these same mythical characters have real genealogies that trace them back to Adam. And if you want to say that Jesus didn't know they were myth, you'd have to explain how God incarnate in man didn't know that these stories and people were fake. It doesn't hold water.

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I hear this theory thrown around lots but if this is true, you'd have to explain why Jesus and the disciples spoke of these things you call myth as factual stories. And these same mythical characters have real genealogies that trace them back to Adam. And if you want to say that Jesus didn't know they were myth, you'd have to explain how God incarnate in man didn't know that these stories and people were fake. It doesn't hold water.

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I've heard Genesis addressed in a variety of religious settings. I've never heard someone addressing Genesis literally. Never. Obviously some folks out there ignore the allegorical, and instead interpret every word literally. I've simply never encountered that.

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There are, however, big problems with these genealogies raising a number of legitimate questions. As pointed out by Arnheim4c, there is a huge difference between the two genealogies, especially in the number of generations separating Jesus from King David. Matthew specifically tells us that there were twenty-eight generations, fourteen from David to the Babylonian Exile and another fourteen from the Exile to the birth of Jesus. The writer of Luke gives no figures, but a count of the number of names he mentions as Jesus' ancestors yields a total of no fewer than forty-one generations for the same period represented by Matthew's twenty-eight. For the thousand-odd-year period Luke's forty-one generations average out at just over twenty-four years apiece. Matthew's fourteen generations from David to the Exile average out to about twenty-eight and a half years each, but his last fourteen generations have a mean span of a whopping forty-one and a half years thereby rendering it totally unacceptable. When the genealogies are compared, one can easily see that the lists are almost identical up to David.

However, from David onward there is little similarity. For example, the writer of Matthew tells us (1:16) that Jacob is Joseph’s father where as in Luke 3:23 we are told that Heli is Joseph’s father. The major reason for the contradictory names given after David is that the account in Luke traces the genealogy through David's son, Nathan, while the one in Matthew traces it through Solomon. This would easily account for the wide divergence in names following David but raises a couple of crucial questions: (1) How could two sons of David father two completely different genealogies which merge together with the last two individuals, Joseph and Jesus? And (2) how could Jesus, or for that matter anyone else, have two contradictory genealogies4d?

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