Comment on What's the deal the miracles jesus chose to do?
jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 week agoI’m going to claim brain fart. I’m horrified to find I had thought that it was about, like, modern Israel. Dumb.
OTOH, it sounds like you are suggesting taking interpretations like that; reading things into the text and adopting the symbols for our own purposes. Blindness wasn’t a metaphor for depression. You have to insert that as a modern reader. The text doesn’t fully support it and you have to creatively interpret at times. I don’t think that’s very satisfying.
civilcoder@lemm.ee 1 week ago
You mean depression is not just a modern word but a modern concept (it did not exist before)?
jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
When the original authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their words in the original Greek, they were not imagining blindness to be a metaphor for clinical depression. Or even for feeling sad, if that is what you mean. Blindness is often used as a metaphor in the Bible, for example for ignorance, pride, deception, and unbelief. You can attempt to take it as a metaphor for the modern concept of depression (which of course they did not even possess) but to do so, you are clearly reading into the text.
I’m trying to understand if you are advocating doing that intentionally, but it’s not even clear if you’re aware and accept you’re doing that at all.