Do Historic Books Have Metaphors?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: A Follow Up After Josef G. Mitterer? Presenting Joseph Foster ... · Creation vs. Evolution: Do Historic Books Have Metaphors?

St. John's Gospel is a historic book, like the other three Gospels, the Synoptics, and like the book of Acts.

Here are the verses from John 15 that have in them some aspect of the metaphor of the vine as Jesus, and the branches as us or as the Apostles and their successors:

1) 1 I am the true vine; and my Father is the husbandman.
2) 2 Every branch in me, that beareth not fruit, he will take away: and every one that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3) 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in me.
4) 5 I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing
5) 6 If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.
6) 8 In this is my Father glorified; that you bring forth very much fruit, and become my disciples.
7) 16 You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.

The chapter has 27 verses, whereof 7 involve the metaphor of vine and branches and bringing forth fruit and what happens to branches that don't.

The rest of the 20 are interconnected with these, but they do not directly use this metaphor, which on the other hand bolsters their content too in our understanding.

So, the passage as a whole is literal. Most especially, the passage as a whole is literally saying that Jesus said these things.

It would be a mark of bad faith to cherry-pick these to prove that historic books contain passages making metaphoric rather than literal narratives of the Gospel events, in this case Jesus very literally did hold this discourse.

Now, I had perhaps carelessly asked "what do I NOT take literally in the Bible?" and the interlocutor had with even more carelessness (or bad faith) pretended to take this as an affirmation of a total absence of metaphor.

I could have phrased it as "in the historic books" (as the prophetic ones include very extended metaphors, notably the Apocalypse), and been precise about meaning whole passages rather than single verses.

There are lots of good reasons why we should believe Tradition, like the disciples after the Resurrection were presented with 1) information, which 2) is not wholly present in the NT books as text, and 3) was meant to be kept by the Church, notably the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament.

To St. Timothy, St. Paul is not saying that the OT Scriptures which he knew could instruct him to salvation all by themselves, but rather by the faith which is in Christ Jesus. This is an endorsement of the proposition I just made about the OT Exegesis.

• To the Disciples of Emmaus it spanned all of OT (Luke 24:27);
• we do in fact not find all of OT commented on by Christ either in the bare text of the OT or in the text references in the NT
• but nevertheless, all of it must remain present to the Church through the ages (Matthew 28:20, John 14:26).

Therefore, it is present IN the Church, but OUTSIDE (mostly) the NT text. This is what we call Apostolic Tradition.

But I think the very worst way to make a case for tradition is, other than to a very convoluted section of Protestantism, the idea "the Bible actually does contain metaphors, therefore we can't know if anything else is perhaps also a metaphor, therefore we need tradition to settle the utter obscurity of the Bible.

Now, when it comes to Exegesis involving Jesus, Mary, the Church, in the OT, this was what Jesus added for instance when walking to disciples to Emmaus. But the literal sense of the OT was already known, and did not cease to be known, when He did so.

Yes, Historic Books do have metaphors. But Historic Book factual narratives are not metaphors. The metaphors generally come in what different persons written about in the narrative say to each other.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Tuesday of Holy Week
26.III.2024

PS, there are some who certainly do not just pretend that "you need the Church to know if Genesis 1 to 11 are literal chapters of narrative or not", which is over the top, but who will also take for granted that they are not, when in fact the Church over the ages, in the Church Fathers, in the Scholastics, in Dogmas related to Genesis 3, systematically says the opposite — yes they are literal narrative about true events truthfully told. They will not even consider that it could be defended as literally true, they take it for granted it was never meant like that ... that's the kind of crew who will from somewhat different standpoints deny that the miracles in the Gospels were literal events./HGL