Ah, I see. OK, well, let me begin by re-stating my original disclaimer that I actually have no idea what the answer to the question is, and that this is pure speculation on my part. But with that firmly in mind, here’s my best shot at re-forumulation that speculation under this taboo.
Let’s recall the original question:
when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I don’t think this is an exhaustive enumeration of the possibilities. My guess (and I cannot emphasize that enough) is that they were (and remain) attempts to make sense of subjective experiences that many people actually do experience. In that sense they were more “claims of truth” than “persuasion tricks”.
However...
There is some evidence (I don’t have the references handy but I can probably find them if you really want to know) that the ancients view of truth and falsehood was very different from the modern conception. The ancients had at least three categories of “truth”, what we moderns would roughly call “objective physical truth”, “fiction or falsehood”, and “myth.” The ancients believed that a claim like, “And God said...” was of a very different nature than a claim like, “Achmed ate an apple yesterday.” Part of the problem with modern thought—and one of the reasons that it seems to lead to so many intractable arguments—is that we insist on getting rid of the “myth” category and lumping all claims into two buckets: objectively true or objectively false.
It is easy to see that this is problematic in other regimes, like artistic beauty. Most moderns readily recognize that it makes no sense to try to categorize a claim like, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is a beautiful painting” into “objectively true” or “objectively false.” (Note, however, that David Deutsch actually disputes this!) The ancients would have considered an attempt to categorize “the law was given by the gods” as “objectively true” or “objectively false” to be equally futile.
Ah, I see. OK, well, let me begin by re-stating my original disclaimer that I actually have no idea what the answer to the question is, and that this is pure speculation on my part. But with that firmly in mind, here’s my best shot at re-forumulation that speculation under this taboo.
Let’s recall the original question:
I don’t think this is an exhaustive enumeration of the possibilities. My guess (and I cannot emphasize that enough) is that they were (and remain) attempts to make sense of subjective experiences that many people actually do experience. In that sense they were more “claims of truth” than “persuasion tricks”.
However...
There is some evidence (I don’t have the references handy but I can probably find them if you really want to know) that the ancients view of truth and falsehood was very different from the modern conception. The ancients had at least three categories of “truth”, what we moderns would roughly call “objective physical truth”, “fiction or falsehood”, and “myth.” The ancients believed that a claim like, “And God said...” was of a very different nature than a claim like, “Achmed ate an apple yesterday.” Part of the problem with modern thought—and one of the reasons that it seems to lead to so many intractable arguments—is that we insist on getting rid of the “myth” category and lumping all claims into two buckets: objectively true or objectively false.
It is easy to see that this is problematic in other regimes, like artistic beauty. Most moderns readily recognize that it makes no sense to try to categorize a claim like, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is a beautiful painting” into “objectively true” or “objectively false.” (Note, however, that David Deutsch actually disputes this!) The ancients would have considered an attempt to categorize “the law was given by the gods” as “objectively true” or “objectively false” to be equally futile.