Would it have any value if the bible is a fairy tale?

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Methinks you use the word truth to liberally. They were real world functional methods. However as time passes and the environment of the reader/listener becomes more and more removed from that of the original writer/teller it has less and less validity.


It preserves content but at what cost? Folk lore has always, (though it need not be) imbued with the fantastical.
I do not disagree that the doing of such increased the chance of the folk lore's survival, but it perverts the historical truth which would hold more value. Folk lore, as it all too often came from oral tradition in it's infancy, contains far too much bias as well, to be given any real validity.
Memetic principles hold that such is the only folklore that will survive. If not imbued by these, and other factors reducing it's validity, then other folklore that IS so imbued, will be more likely to replicated and passed on. Given enough time the less vigourously replicated folklore will become extinct, assuming it ever takes off to begin with.


We are talking about the bible here, right?
What certifiable events?
There may be a small few that may bear brief similarity to verifiable events, and a few more that are events which could be consistent with possible (but not verifiable) events.
But I'd really like to know what "eyewitness accounts of certifiable events" you may refer to.
(though it's off topic for this thread... so never mind)


a historian discounts ANYTHING at his own peril. But he/she should take it for what it really is. A biased, fantasticized account of possible events.
The largest peril a historian undertakes by discounting folk lore completely is the being shunned by those who take that folklore as divine truth.

Or impossible events, like the sun and moon standing still over Gibeon. Even God cannot undo the property of inertia (which presumably He created).

ruveyn

A) True.
B) True.
C) True.
D) True.

That being said, historians analyze folktale, but often they tend to disregard mythical content, simply because most mythical content is wrong. I mean, the problem with folklore is that we often literally have a game of telephone, and if it is written down, then we even see politicking in the folktales as well.