Does it matter if Jonah is fiction?

[BlessedByTheBest]

if we can believe we were formed from dirt and our souls by His breath, i find it humorous that people would doubt God maintaining Jonah's life in the belly of a beast.  

 

does it matter if it's fiction? not really, imo.  God is still omnipotent, with or without our faith in the many marvelous accounts in the Word of God.

[GoldenEagle]

 

It wouldn't matter to ME if people claimed it was fiction....I would still believe it.   

Thank you MG.  That may be a short and simple response, but it is exactly how I feel, not only about Jonah, but about the entire Bible.  People continue to attack it's inerrancy, but I still believe it all.  The Bible speaks of a strong delusion, that if possible, would deceive even the very elect.  Thank the Lord the very elect will not be fooled, but multitudes will be fooled by these false teachers, and many are already deceived. 

 

For clarification I don't think anyone on this thread is actually attacking the inerrant nature of Scripture. It is important to know what we believe and more importantly WHY we believe it.

God bless,

GE

[Hall7]

Here's an interesting article: http://www.icr.org/article/7484/

 

What Really Swallowed Jonah?
by Brian Thomas, M.S.

Did a fish, whale, or something else swallow the prophet Jonah? Historian Bill Cooper recently helped answer this question in his 2012 book The Authenticity of the Book of Jonah.¹ The main clue Dr. Cooper followed was simply the then-common Greek word the Lord Jesus used in Matthew 12:40 for Jonah’s monster, transliterated kêtos. What was the ketos? Dr. Henry Morris wrote, “It could have been…a large whale-shark, or possibly some now-extinct marine reptile.”²

 

Although knowing the animal’s exact identity is not necessary to understand the Jonah passages, its proper identification would add an element of historicity to the prophet’s traumatic experiences. Jonah 1:17, referenced as 2:1 in the Hebrew Bible, uses the Hebrew word dag to refer to a broad range of sea creatures. It had “great” (gadôl) size—large enough to swallow a whole man.

The second century B.C. saw the Hebrew Old Testament translated into the Greek Old Testament, commonly called the Septuagint. There, dag gadôl (“great fish”) translates into kêtei megalô, meaning a “mega-sized ketos.”³

 

Jesus said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the [ketos], so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”⁴ Was Jonah swallowed by a now-extinct marine reptile? Ancient writers—including New Testament authors—used specific words for specific creatures.⁵ Why did Matthew’s gospel not use the common words for fish, shark, or whale?

Cooper identified an array of sources from outside the Bible that pinpoint the ketos as a sea dragon. A ponderous weight of historical evidence shows those who best knew the Mediterranean Sea consistently used ketos to mean “a sea serpent.” Cooper wrote, “The ketos—the dog-headed sea-dragon—appears in accounts from ca. 700 B.C. and all the way up to ca. A.D. 500.”¹

These and other ancient authors and historians mentioned the ketos:¹

• Homer (9th–8th century B.C.)
• Euripides (ca. 480-406 B.C.)
• Aristophanes (448-380 B.C.)
• Lychophron (285-247 B.C.)
• Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 B.C.)
• Diodorus Siculus (ca. 60 B.C.–A.D. 30)
• Manilius (1st century A.D.)
• Pausanias (2nd century A.D.)
• Claudius Aelianus in his De Natura Animalium (ca. A.D. 175-235)
• Oppian of Apamea (ca. A.D. 200)
• Eustathius (ca. A.D. 300-377)
• Hesychius (5th century A.D.)
• Johannes Moschus (6th century A.D.)

As if it were needed, additional visual art evidence identifies the ketos as a sea serpent. Artists in Rome, Africa, Turkey, Asia, and England painted, carved, and modeled the ketos with consistent anatomy. Again and again, they depicted its dog-like head with prominent teeth and plume-like flaps or frills above the head and neck. They also consistently rendered its huge body as slender and often coiled.

 

The Authenticity of the Book of Jonah describes a first-century painting from a Roman catacomb showing Jonah being thrown to a sea monster. This ketos had a dog-like head and a flexible neck. Numerous artifacts show a similar animal, including tile mosaics, wood, stone, ivory carvings, and even coins. The ketos looked like nothing common today, but that does not mean marine reptiles were not common in the past. After all, both the books of Job and Psalms refer to the large sea reptile leviathan.
 

History and archaeology indicate that the Lord Jesus’ audience might have understood exactly the kind of creature to which He referred—the ketos, the sea serpent that swallowed Jonah.

Edited August 8, 2013 by GoldenEagle
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[Guest]

Does it matter if the Book of Jonah is fiction? Why or why not?

In reading the 4 chapters of Jonah, nothing written leads me to believe that what I'm reading is allegorical, metaphorical, or anything along those lines.  What I read is the truth of what happened to the Prophet Jonah as he was led by the Holy Spirit to write.

To say otherwise, that it is a fictional account, is not handling the Word of God correctly. 

 

To answer your question, yes, it does matter for the above reasons, especially concerning the truth of the matter. 

 

God bless you,

Randal

[FreeinChrist]

I agree with the majority, it does matter.

 

 

As for post 22; I really like your first statement GoldenEagle, and agree that Jonah's three days and nights in the belly of the fish was a foreshadowing of Christ Jesus Resurrection.

 

But as to your second statement while it is true, I feel as if my toes have been step on, but hey I needed it.