That's not necessarily true; several Biblical passages indicate scientific knowledge a good deal ahead of the time of their being written. I'd hafta check exactly where they are, but I know that one passage speaks of the earth as "hanging upon nothing" and as a "circle" (also translated "sphere") when most people believed it was flat and riding on top of something. Somewhere else (I think the book of Job) makes reference to the water cycle, a long time before that was ever "officially" discovered. Then there are the various laws on cleanliness and the like in the Mosaic law, such as burying human waste, which pretty much no one else on earth did at that time (some even used it as medicine on open wounds, IIRC).sffan wrote:However, before people knew anything about natural history, Christians did believe this literally. It may have been meant as literally 6 days by the authors. So, should every passage that is proved incorrect be then looked at in a metaphorical way? That seems silly to me too, since the original intent was literal.
Even if you believe that the Bible was written more recently than it says it was under false pretenses for the purposes of fulfilling prophecy or the like, this sort of thing was still ahead of its time, one way or another. As such, there's no reason to assume that early Christians who read Revelation believed that there were actually a whole bunch of nasty critters with 7 heads running around, especially when a similar account was given to Daniel awhile earlier, and back then it was said outright that the beasts were symbolic. This sort of thing isn't exactly unheard of throughout the scriptures.
