. i could be super trivial and say that other people in the bible lived for 50 years or whatever under what would have been the same system of measurement that resulted in adam living for 900years but honestly its pointless.
Ur right - back 2-3 thousand years ago u'd get many, many people living to be 80 for instance, its just the average was pretty low - in the UK in 1900 the life expectancy for a man was 40, in 1900!
But its just not plausible they lived to be a thousand but God shortened their wicked little lives....
I have to say Izzy has made some great points in this thread, the bible's stories are just parables
Thanks
Though i don't think the bible is all fiction
I'm sure much of the Bible is true, or pretty close? - i'd imagine much of the New Testament is fairly true (i.e the people, the places, and the main events)
But - miracles for instance - i'm sure they are a stylistic device - all the good writers exaggerate a little bit to make the story more intresting - i.e Jesus buys a load of wine and delivers it unannounced when they were short of it - where did it come from people say? It must have been a miracle!
His curing of Lazarus - think about it, what a modern doctor does would seem a miracle 2000 years ago - these peoples limited education meant they were easily impressed remember, the simplist thing would seem a miracle - after all, if u went to some isolated Amazon tribe and showed them ur ''amazing'' mobile phone - they would believe u were talking with the spirit world.
Between the fundamentalists and the non-believers the Bible has been made to seem far more confusing than it is - its the points it made i.e ''don't steal'' that are important NOT how come on the road to wherever Jesus's disciples couldn't recognise him a week after they'd last seen him....Moses wasn't really walking the desert for 40 years, that's just obvious, but if the writer had said 4 days it wouldn't seem very impresive would it?
After thousands of years and a hundred translations - which weren't even started on till hundreds of years later! - is it really surprising there are inconsistencies? After all witnesses at the scene of an accident will all give different accounts, so disciples writing decades later can be forgiven