I'm an atheist, a philosopher, and a biblical scholar.

I'm an atheist, a philosopher, and a biblical scholar.

In my books, I explain that hermeneutics requires contextualization and classification of the literary genre. Therefore, if you made the basic error in Anthropology by critically interpreting the Bible, which was to bring a 5,000-year-old custom into our century without the respect of the timeline.

Civilization was barbaric compared to today's times, perhaps not so much for some behaviors, so evaluating and judging behavior outside the context of that time is a huge methodological absurdity.

Three crimes were committed in the genocide of the Moabites narrated in the book of Numbers for comparison with today's civilization: rape, murder, and pedophilia.

None of these were crimes at the time.

Another error was translating the Bible as a genre of human history book.

The Bible should be read as a genre like Hollywood cinema, where the types are ideal. In the police genres, the obstinate police officer who loses his credentials because he wants to find the killer and violates all police rules and procedures to fulfill his moral duty, or the romantic genre in which Romeo and Juliet face the social norms of families in the name of love, or the hero genre where a hero overcomes all adversaries with extreme courage and kills hundreds of enemies, is part of the genre, like the adventure genre where the most unimaginable and absurd dangers are overcome only with courage. This is the Bible genre full of mythologies and magic and superhuman spiritual beings and saints, absurd wars and fictional adventures and mythological legends.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político