"Bible miracles are allegorical". What does that really mean?

[grizzlyman]

The statement implies that these unusual events mask actual historical situations. However, attempts to connect the large number of 'supernatural happenings' with profane history have left us with secular differences of opinion only equaled by the gale force of religious Theo-babble that divides theist from non-theist. Both sides attempt to 'clarify' their meaning but to no avail, and we remain confused.

[geo]

Folks used to believe in the Bible as literal truth, but it still has relevance today when read for its metaphorical value. We can connect to those who lived a long time ago who shared at least some of our values even if there are other areas that seem very strange and barbaric to us. The Bible is an artifact of its time.

[Dexter]

It means taking the Bible literally has become too ridiculous (although not for everyone). But the part about Jesus dying for your sins, that still happened of course.

[Robert Tulip]

The idea that miracles are allegory is one that I have argued.

Allegory is text that stands for something else. For example Nazareth was invented as an allegorical cover for the Nazarene sect. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is allegory for the belief that good will win over evil. The loaves and fishes are allegory for the stars.

[sonoman]

I was lucky(?) some might say that God put me on the Bible can only be taken allegorically right from the beginning of my non-traditional Christian walk. There is much much spiritual wisdom in the Bible, especially the Gospels, but it's embedded within ancient stories created around sets of ancient symbols and meanings that actually tell the real story because one can see the ancient meanings carried through the generations but still keeping their original themes. Such as the major astrological Sign of Aquarius one that runs through the Jewish/Christian theology of the Messiah, the Water God powers connection to Hebrew foundational stories, e.g. Noah and the Flood, e.g. Moses parting the Red Sea with "Moses' the Egyptian name changed in Hebrew meaning to "drawn out of water" with the Egyptian word for "water" being the same hieroglyph as the Sign of Aquarius, e.g. Elijah parting the Jordan, e.g. Jesus calming the sea, walking on water, turning water into wine.

Atheistic interpretation of ancients using symbolic language thinks its all deliberately manufactured by priesthoods seeking commonly accepted cultural tales and icons to create their social governance systems around. But then they have to account for people like me, a Gentile former atheist who goes through a life-changing religious conversion experience that informs him of a prophet's role and then 14 years later finds out he's Jewish when his mother dies and the family rediscovers her Jewish heritage. Atheists will also have to explain how this new Christian believer gets astrological connection to the Gospels and his new spiritual role which refines itself in later visions as Jewish Christian prophesy bearing, one such major prophetic vision involving a strange request by God for sanctifying a sword with baptism rituals. Then finding the special sword so sanctified creates an unexplainable positive reaction in Nazareth, Israel during their annual Easter Procession so the sword becomes a religious icon, the newest one in the Holy Land. And then 9 years later God bestows the Celestial Torah information on the now Jewish Christian prophesy bearer which connects his own double Aquarian Sign to the whole Christ Aquarius Celestial Torah information he's found.

So this prophesy bearer actually went the very opposite way atheists think religious visions happen, going from complete ignorance of Aquarian connection to baptism to full consciousness of it--after the fact of discovery of the Aquarian connection to Messiah/Christ theology. In bringing the John the Baptist astrological connection to my consciousness mind I have to thank Acharya and her information in her Christ in Eqypt book. It's too bad she can't receive my thanks because I've got this terrible theistic disease she might catch: spiritual vision, and that would ruin her reputation among her atheist audience which propels her career.

[youkrst]

"Bible miracles are allegorical". What does that really mean?

to me it's not only the bible miracles that are allegorical but moreso the entire text.

the text is so chock full of parable, simile, metaphor, symbolism, allegory etc etc that barely a thing in it can even begin to be properly understood except in connotation rather than denotation.

it's a collection of books written with a permanent wink.

but so very few seem to get past the literalist reading, the outer shell, the oyster of denotation, to get to the pearl of connotation to see if it's worth the effort.

it's written like history but it is all an allegory, a metaphor.

obvious (or not so obvious) gnostics, esotericists, symbolists wrote this collection.

if you think about it the same thing happens again and again, for example most people still think of an alchemist as some crazy weirdo in a cellar trying to convert lead into gold but of course the lead is symbol for base conciousness and the gold is symbol for developed consciousness and it was all about transformation of conciousness, just like water into wine, lead into gold.

so lead into gold = water into wine

heres another

the temple encircled by the twelve tribes
the christ encircled by twelve apostles
the sun encircled by the twelve zodiac signs
the centre of the clock encircled by twelve numbers.
you in the midst of twelve aspects of your physical existence.

to me it is clear (after a lot of reading) that christ is a metaphor so is almost everything else in the bible, it all has a hidden meaning, a connotation.

but people keep reading it like it's surface meaning is the main thing, it most certainly is not.

why would writers do such a thing?

why would they hide spirtual/psychological teaching in allegory, metaphor and symbol

An Explanation from Mark 13 in the bible

10And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”11Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.12“For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.13“Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

14“In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,
‘YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND;
YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE;

15FOR THE HEART OF THIS PEOPLE HAS BECOME DULL,
WITH THEIR EARS THEY SCARCELY HEAR,
AND THEY HAVE CLOSED THEIR EYES,
OTHERWISE THEY WOULD SEE WITH THEIR EYES,
HEAR WITH THEIR EARS,
AND UNDERSTAND WITH THEIR HEART AND RETURN,
AND I WOULD HEAL THEM.’

16“But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.17“For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

but of course christ himself is a metaphor that must be read in terms of connotation not denotation, so are the twelve.

think symbolically, not literally

look for every thing to have a symbolic, metaphoric meaning.

thorns>lies
trees>body
christ>the best in you
devil>the carnal mind>the resistor of good within

these are of course gross oversimplifications but i type in the hope that someone will see for the first time what this book is really up to.

and i realise a bit of reading will do a much better job than i can, if you are really interested read this

http://www.mountainman.com.au/ab_kuhn.html

a bit of kuhn and some joseph campbell and some comparative mythology and it all starts to make sense.

death and resurrection?

have you ever felt like a part of you was dying, gone through an experience where a part of you died, but after the death experience a newness of life burst forth and the sun shone again and you were glad you didnt kill yourself because now you feel so much alive, especially compared to how crappy your experience was before.

as humans does not the child in us have to "die" so that the mature adult can come forth unhindered by infantile insecurities.

death and resurrection

a lot of them folks back then and before were into it, egyptians for example.

The Ritual text (Ch. 170) calls to the glorified soul: "Hail, Osiris, thou art born twice!" Again: "Stand up living forever. Thy son Horus reconstituted thee. Arise on thy bed and come forth! Come! Come forth!" They call him (Page 388) to come forth "like a god" "from the mysterious cave." (Cf. the raising of Lazarus and the man who took up his bed and walked.)

bed is symbol for physical body that the soul "sleeps" in

wake up!

(here i simply mean that the egyptian text quoted above is actually a call to our inner Osiris (christ krishna buddha etc) to wake up from it's slumber within and come forth or rise up from the bed that metaphorically is our body)

[DWill]

This is interesting stuff in itself, youkrst, and pardon me if I do seem literal-minded. I wonder when you say that the whole Bible is to be read as intended as allegory, how much of the book this really applies to. If we could talk in terms of percentage, what would the figure be? Although that's a crude measure, it might be important to do it so that we put the matter in perspective. Most obviously, there large swathes of the OT that ask to be read as history, whether they are that or not. There are of course the Leviticus/Deuteronomy catalogs to take into account as well. I don't see much alternative to viewing most of that book as the statement of facts and stories that were culturally vital to a class of people struggling to forge an identity. The problem might be to separate what was intended as history from what was intended as story, but even when we come down in the side of story (Adam and Eve, Noah, etc.) we don't necessarily have allegory.

You might be talking actually about the NT, specifically the Gospels. I think most people would agree that the Gospels contain the most mythic content, along with Revelation, and it is underlying myth that would be equivalent to allegory. But looking at Acts and Letters, and without being intimately familiar with these, I can't see that they lend themselves well to allegory, at least not in any wholesale way.

The matter of intent is always tricky to judge. But that's important if we are to decide whether allegory is overlaid onto the intended history or if the opposite happened. People are always capable of doing both, and it's your contention that the writers couldn't have been intending for anyone to take the material at face value.

The way I look at it, since the Bible is a huge pastiche of elements, generated over centuries and with many editorial hands in it, it makes sense to see it as an amalgam of literary types, one of which would be allegory. This is really just the standard, accepted scholarly view.

[stahrwe]

q

[sonoman]

I wouldn't be surprised to find even Acts and the Epistles containing the ancient symbolic codes. I've certainly quite a bit of astrological coding and I've just begun to look seriously in the last couple of years driven by the "Aquariana Call" awakened in me at my religious conversion decades ago from atheist to believer in God and the Spirit of Christ. At the initial religious experience God revealed to me what I called a "biomystical code" running through the whole Bible, one that was both biological, involving the firstborn son's greater share of inherited abilities, and yet spiritually opposed theology of the last born becoming raised up to exceed the first, i.e. there being a sort of curse on the firstborn to suffer deprivation, the full extent in Jesus' case, in order to establish the human social role of males as heads of society there to help all the rest and not exploit them as is the usual human animal territorial warlord gangster Machiavellian power politics, money rules all, i.e. our "normal" world. In short, the Bible's teaching subtly that the Last should be placed First, like Seth becomes, like Ham will become as Egypt becomes central in the history of Christianity's beginnings, like almost Joseph in that funny 11th, (Aquarian) position near the lastborn, like David, but not like Jesus who takes the firstborn's fall from self empowerment and self reward to establish the self-sacrifice icon of how it must be for humanity to keep rising in holistic progress towards becoming one with God in my religious belief, i.e. becoming the full potential of humanity as humane beings. This was the "Biomystical Code" and meaning of Jesus' sacrifice that overthrows the otherwise animal nature of males especially to war for territorial gain and control. See http://biomystic.org/jesussacrifice.htm (Forum URL function not working here).

And as you know, now I'm all involved with the Celestial Torah Christ astrological code I've found running back 4000 years, farther back than the Bible which is contains so much of the ancient's ideas about the heavenly realms they saw in their skies, filled with jillions of stars, much clearer than ours..

[Interbane]

This was the Acts and the Epistles and meaning of Jesus' sacrifice that overthrows the otherwise animal nature of males especially to war for territorial gain and control in that funny 11th, (Aquarian) position near the lastborn, like David, but not like Jesus who takes the firstborn's fall from self empowerment and self reward to establish the sel up to exceed the first, i.e. there being a sort of curse on the firstborn to suffer deprivation, the full extent in Jesus' case, in order to establish the human social role of males as heads through the whole Bible, one that was both biological, involving the firstborn son's greater share of inherited abilities, and yet spiritually opposed theology of the last born becoming symbolic codes. I've certainly quite a bit of astrological coding and I've just begun to look seriously in the last couple of years driven by the self-sacrifice icon awakened in me at my fall from self empowerment.

I don't understand. Has anyone else tried to comprehend this? Stephen, are you messing with us?