Monday, 12/19/16
Our first reading recounts the miraculous events that led to
Sampson’s being conceived in the womb of the wife of Manoah. That was eight centuries
before the conception of John the Baptist in the womb of the wife of Zechariah.
From to time you might wonder whether or not those were
factual accounts of what happened. As kids we were raised to hold that as good
Catholics we were bound to believe that things really happened that way.
However, the Church at Vatican II told us that such accounts need not have been
historical. While insisting that they were true, it said they could have presented the truth in a
poetic way.
Like, the poet William Wordsworth that Lucy was a “Violet by
a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye,” but he was not implying that the girl
actually with a flower with real roots in earth.
Let me quote what Vatican II said about this matter.
‘In determining the intention of the sacred writers,
attention must be paid among other things to the literary forms. For the fact is
that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of
writing: in historical, or prophetic, or poetic texts, and other forms of
literary expression.
One literary form that much favored in the ancient world was
myths, and the Bible at times presented some special blessing from God in the
guise of a myth.
For instance, back before there were any bridges, a big
healthy fellow made his living by knowing where a river could be forded, and by
ferrying travelers across. And many myths
were concocted around the tricky doings of such porters. Chapter thirty-two of
Genesis gives us a version of such a myth to explain how the people came to be
called Israelites. (Isra-el means to struggle with a god, and Jacob struggled
with a God-sent guardian of the Jaboc.)
In the ancient world when a man of super-human importance
came along, his followers, truthfully believing his greatness came from God, would
sometimes they clothed that conviction in a myth purporting to recount the way the
hero’s conception came from a heavenly intervention.
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