Who told the first lie? (page 8)

TonusOH

Halcon: But would you still eat of the tree of life if it meant to keep living?

I would have to, wouldn't I?

Jeffro

sloppyjoe2:

Don't JWs believe that for the entire millennial reign, humans will be growing back to perfection?

Yes (though the Bible doesn’t say that). See also What does the Bible really teach about the 1,000 years?

But you said JWs believe that people won’t die anymore after Armageddon, which is not what they believe.

I should have clarified that more, when I was a JW I was under the impression that after Armaggeddon, no one would die of old age or sickness. That was the "people won't die anymore" I was referring to. I remember being taught always that someone that sinned and didn't repent whether during the millennial reign or after that Jehovah would destroy them.

Jeffro

sloppyjoe2:

after Armaggeddon, no one would die of old age or sickness

Sort of, but it’s a bit more complicated than that (because it’s nonsense). They do kind of say that being murdered by God would be the only reason anyone would die after Armageddon. But because of their made up distinction between ‘immortality’ and ‘everlasting life’, the official position is that people on earth would still need to eat and breathe etc to stay alive, meaning they could otherwise still die. So they just don’t really talk about it.

sloppyjoe2

@Jeffro

Do you have any article links where they talk about it? I currently can't find much at all about it.

Halcon

Tonus - I would have to, wouldn't I?

Yes, to live. I would too.

Jeffro

sloppyjoe2:

Do you have any article links where they talk about it? I currently can't find much at all about it.

Not at the moment. It’s tedious searching on mobile. If I feel like it tomorrow I might post something. Or you could find it yourself.

sloppyjoe2

Peace for a Thousand Years—And Beyond! | Simplified (jw.org)

Found this article. Paragraph 12 says death will be no more during the millennial reign which is what I thought I had learned as a kid. Also says the resurrection will happen in the millennial reign which is the opposite of what the bible says.

slimboyfat

If you’re not interested in the Bible’s answer to the question who told the first lie then I don’t know what we’re talking about. Even if you think it’s fiction, I don’t know what the point is of imposing a different answer than the one given by the Bible itself. You could argue Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz wasn’t from Kansas because she didn’t have a Kansas accent. Okay but what’s your point. In the film she’s from Kansas.

If you’re making an argument about the original intention of the author of Genesis against what later Bible writers interpreted that story to mean, then I don’t think it’s as straightforward as you might imagine for a number of reasons. Who the original author was, what form the story originally took, and what it meant to the first audience is perhaps beyond recovery at this point. It’s entirely possible the original author meant something completely different than the text can currently divulge because it has been adapted and now appears in a context which it didn’t originally have. So it’s not as easy as you might think to say that later Bible writers got the original meaning wrong but you have got it right, and this is what it is. Even if you could be certain about original meaning of the Genesis story (presumably before there was a book of Genesis, an earlier source that we don’t have access to) by the author in its original form, whatever that was, it’s still different from the meaning it currently exhibits as part of the Bible as a whole.

While it’s true the Bible arose as a diverse set of documents that accumulated and adapted over time, it now appears as an edited collection and it makes sense to read it in that way. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that the book of Revelation recapitulates and resolves issues set up in Genesis, including the identity and fate of Satan. If you say you are not interested in the answer the Bible itself supplies to the question of what was going on in Genesis, who was the first liar, and so on, fair enough, but I don’t know what we’re doing then. The Bible itself says Satan was the original serpent and the first liar.

Jeffro

slimboyfat:

The Bible itself says Satan was the original serpent and the first liar.

Fallacious argument from authority, fallacy of composition.

The Christian Bible says that. But it’s just because a later work retrofits a character from an earlier work without regard to the actual development or original purpose of the source material, not because any of it is actually true.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t say the snake is Satan at all though.

So if you don’t care whether something is actually true, then yes ‘Satan is the first liar’ according to Christianity (duh). But it’s only true to the extent that it is an entirely mundane and pointless unfounded assertion.

Who told the first lie?

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