Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

Getting Ready for Christmas… for Centuries

If you’re like me, Christmas Season is as enjoyable, if not more so, than Christmas itself. First we break out the decorations. We relish the memories from all the years for each item while listening to CDs of the Nutcracker and O Holy Night. We get to sing songs we’ve been waiting for all year. Then there are the parties with coworkers and friends. Don’t forget all the treats! (Whether picking out the gifts is enjoyable or not depends on what the selection’s like on Amazon.) Anyway, there’s too much delight there to pack into one day. I love our Christmas traditions and look forward to them for months before they actually get here.

Well, the first Christmas took a lot of planning itself. Centuries of it, in fact. Paul says in Romans 5:6 that Christ died “in due time” (KJV). The life of Christ was the most carefully planned event in history. If you look at the forces at play, you’ll find that they created an opportunity for the work of the Messiah and the creation of His Church at the most favorable time like never before or ever since. What’s astonishing is that the very things you think would hinder God’s plan of salvation actually paved the way for it.

Technically, God had been preparing for Christ’s coming since the beginning of history. In Genesis 3, a matter of hours after the first sin, God promises that He will send someone to crush the serpent’s head and vanquish sin forever. I’m just going to focus on the immediately preceding centuries, though.

I’ll start with the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BC. You wouldn’t think that a tragedy that could inspire the Book of Lamentations and that saw mothers eating their babies would have anything to do with mankind’s salvation, but it did. This campaign led to the Jewish Diaspora. Fleeing the Babylonians’ wrath, Jews settled throughout the known world. That way, when Christ came and commanded His people to spread the Gospel throughout the world, there were ready-made nuclei of churches in the Jewish synagogues all around the Mediterranean. Yes, most Jews were hostile to the early Church, but you see the pattern again and again of Paul preaching as a rabbi in a Jewish synagogue and starting his church-planting there. Rodney Stark, in Cities of God, demonstrated that a Greco-Roman city with a Jewish community was more likely to have a church earlier than one without one.

These Jews had been given a list of prophecies to verify who the Messiah would be and what His plan of salvation would be like when He did come. The Jews in Judea completely missed the point, but there were Jews in the Diaspora like the Bereans who confirmed what Paul taught them by searching the Old Testament. The canon of the Old Testament was not universally agreed upon yet, but all the books were in existence and well known. In fact, there hadn’t been a prophetic word in Israel for over 400 years by the time Christ was born around 6-4 BC. That way, when it did come, in the person of John the Baptist around 29 AD, people were thirsting for it.

Interestingly, during that time of silence, Judaism had actually deteriorated. Jesus found them “like sheep without a shepherd.” The two leading religious groups were the Pharisees, who believed they could earn their way into the New Jerusalem, and the Sadduccees, who denied there would even be a New Jerusalem. When Jesus told them both they were wrong, they killed Him. It’s kind of surprising that God would let His people fall into such unpreparedness before He visited them, but when you consider that their rejection of their visitation led to the extension of God’s offer of salvation to the whole world, it makes perfect sense.

Also, the ruler at Christ’s birth was a raging tyrant. Herod the Great would kill anyone he even remotely considered a threat, be they his family members or even little babies in Bethlehem. I’m sure God had a reason for putting Herod in power before the first Christmas, but I don’t know what it is. The only thing I can think of is that he built one of the most magnificent temples in the ancient world, which the early Church was wont to worship in until its destruction in AD 70. (As an aside, I once asked my pastor how Herod was able to build a more splendid temple than Solomon when he ruled a smaller kingdom. He replied that he was just that much better at fleecing his people. That’s saying something when you consider that Israel eventually broke off from Solomon’s kingdom because of his rigorous taxes.)

300 years before Christ came, Alexander the Great conquered the known world. The conquered peoples actually took up Greek culture enthusiastically. That way, when Paul set out to evangelize or write his epistles to churches he had planted, he could do so in one language. It is a very descriptive one at that. It has four words for our word love, for instance, not all of which the New Testament needed. Thanks to the Ptolemies in Egypt’s desire for an exhaustive library at Alexandria, the Gentiles could read the New Testament in that language as well instead of having to learn Hebrew. The New Testament uses the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament to cite prophecies. Even Rome went crazy for Greek. As one Roman put it, “Conquered Greece conquered Rome.” When Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans, he wrote it in Greek because the Romans had so thoroughly adopted the Hellenistic culture.

The Greek tongue was the major contribution of the Greeks to the preparations for Christmas, but their culture was part of it too. John 1 makes extensive use of the Greek concept of the overarching Logos (in English, the Word) overseeing the universe. Paul had a lot to criticize about the Greeks and their idolatry, but he didn’t hesitate to refer to Greek culture when reaching out to them. He quotes two Greek authors talking about Zeus in his speech to the Athenians at the Areopagus and maybe makes an allusion to Polyphemus’s blinding in the Odyssey when he talks about mankind groping for God. Even when writing to his friend Titus, he quotes a Greek poet about the Cretans. Years later, when the Church had to define its orthodox position, it relied heavily on Greek philosophy with all that talk about essences and substances.

By far the most conspicuous development in the years before Christ’s coming was the rise of the Roman Empire. By this time it encompassed virtually the whole Mediterranean. Now, you might think that an empire that fed Christians to lions and insisted that sacrifices be made to its emperors would be an obstacle for the Church to overcome rather than a factor in its success, but God didn’t ordain their authority over the known world for nothing.

First of all, there was the famous Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. On the frontiers, Roman emperors still sent out armies to conquer lands and glory, but all around the Mediterranean they had established an area of relative peace and stability. Thus when Paul sent his couriers with his epistles, they could travel with comparative security, and churches in, say, Ephesus were not wiped out in a sack of their city. The contrast between Julio-Claudian order and the preceding centuries of war between Alexander’s successors or feuding Roman generals couldn’t be starker.

Even though the Roman Empire turned on the Christians before a full generation had passed, for the Church’s most formative years, it largely protected it. Since it recognized Judaism as a legal religion, until it came to see Christianity as a separate religion, it had no real problem with it. You see Paul several times in Acts using his Roman citizenship to secure protection from hostile Jews. In all likelihood, Nero martyred Paul in 67 AD, but the mobs in Ephesus and Jerusalem would’ve been happy to do it for him many years before. If the Roman soldiers hadn’t carried Paul away from the frenzied Jews trying to pull him apart, we wouldn’t have the Prison Epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon) or the Pastorals (I and II Timothy and Titus).

Moreover, there’s the Roman infrastructure to consider. Rome’s economy was very primitive compared with ours, but they could support what was for that time large cities that it could supply with food and water along roads and with aqueducts. This was important because Christianity largely spread through cities. Luke reports Paul’s activities in Acts according to the city where he was preaching, and most of Paul’s epistles are grouped by the city the church is in (so are the seven letters to the churches in Revelation). The word pagan, in fact, comes from the Latin for field because the rural populations were the holdouts for the old religions as Christianity spread.

There’s another interesting historical aside I’d like to pursue. The concept of adoption is crucial to the New Testament and our identity as God’s children, but it’s almost entirely absent from the Old Testament. Other than Mordecai adopting Esther, I can’t think of any Jews doing that. The Romans, however, were all about adoption. They even took it to the most farcical extremes. Augustus adopted his wife Livia in his will. Earlier, Roman patricians had had plebeians adopt them so they could run for the influential office of tribune without forfeiting their patrician status. One of Julius Caesar’s opponents had had himself adopted by a plebeian who was younger than himself! Anyway, however ridiculous the Romans got, it would be a theme Paul’s readers would readily relate to. In the same vein, he describes Christ’s Second Coming with the imagery of a Roman triumph, a parade that often celebrated the most unjust wars and ruthless campaigns.

So the first Christmas came at exactly the right moment, one that took centuries to lead up to. Never has the Mediterranean world experienced such unity and stability of language and politics as it did in under the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It proved a splendid nursery for the infant Church.

Something you probably noticed throughout this post is how surprising these developments were. Jeremiah bewailed the miseries that befell his people under Nebuchadnezzar’s army, but God used it to pave the way for the expansion of His kingdom. You wouldn’t think God would let the world become saturated by a culture as perverse as the Greco-Roman one before He sent His Son into it, but that was the one He deliberately set up to work with. He put in power a man who tried to murder His Son right after He was born, and He put influence in the hands of those who finally did find a way to murder Him. This Christmas, I hope you’ll enjoy Matthew and Luke’s accounts but also say with Paul, “O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33, KJV).

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What about All the “Contradictions” in the Bible?

The inerrancy of Scripture is a powerful doctrine. What could be more reassuring than knowing that you have a 100% reliable guide to attaining a blissfully happy eternity? It is also one of the most attacked doctrines of Christianity. This seems odd when you think about it, given how much time we devote to securing our own happiness and the amount of ink and money we spend on other books telling us how to achieve it. Of course, the Bible also says that the means of attaining that happiness are impossible for you to achieve on your own and that if you don’t, you will inherit an eternity of misery. Naturally, that’s the part people don’t want to be true.

One of the most common methods of attack is to find some sort of contradiction in the Bible. Often this involves a contradiction between the Bible and other nations’ histories of the time. Evidently, the critics believe the boastings of egotistical conqueror-kings are more reliable than the chronicles of historians willing to admit when their heroes commit incest, adultery, and murder. From the materialistic standpoint of the critics, any author who believes that God intervenes in history is automatically starting from a flawed premise and is therefore less reliable. (Or perhaps I should say, “anyone who believes that the Christian God intervenes in history,” since the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures they rank as more reliable than the Bible also believed their gods intervened in their histories.) Of course, we all know how many contradictions are supposed to exist between the Bible and modern scientific theories. I dealt with that issue in my first blog post, so I won’t say anything more about it here.

Instead, I should like to devote this post to equipping you for wading through the sea of supposed contradictions within the Bible itself. For anyone who actually bothers to read the Bible before attacking it and the bloggers who take their word for it, this is one of the most popular means of criticizing it. That makes sense because, if one Biblical writer says the opposite of another, they can’t both be right and the Bible is ipso facto in error on a point. Q.E.D. Certainly, the Bible contains enough material to keep them very busy with its variations.

First, let’s specify our terminology. As Dr. R. C. Sproul says, drawing on his philosophy background (though I can’t remember his exact words), “The Law of Noncontradiction maintains that something cannot be A and not A at the same time and in the same way.” So I’ll give you an example of a genuine contradiction. At the Battle of Minden in 1759, six British infantry battalions pierced the French center after withstanding attacks from artillery, cavalry, and infantry. In an early history of the battle, someone wrote that one of the British commanders, General Kingsley, fell from his horse when his brigade was for the moment pushed back by fresh troops. Kingsley himself read a copy of this work and made his own annotations. He took exception with many of the things the historian said and wrote in the margin, “Kingsley did not fall from his horse.” So, here are two authors saying something happened and did not happen at the same time in the same way. Unless you can find Scripture doing that, you don’t have it contradicting itself.

Most people find the contradictions in the implication rather than the explication. Here’s an example of what they do. If I tell one friend, “I heard from James that the party will be at 6:00” and another friend that, “I heard from John that the party will be at 6:00,” a Biblical critic will say that I contradicted myself. The implication they read into it is that the second time I said, “I heard from John (and not James).” Makes sense, right? But, in actuality, there’s no logical necessity that one of those statements is false. Who’s to say I didn’t hear it first from James and then later from John?

Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, tells a story that illustrates the danger of disbelieving the Bible based off of implication and assumption. He says that Zedekiah refused to repent and surrender to Nebuchadnezzar because he ultimately relied on his false prophets rather than the true ones. The true ones he rejected because he thought they had contradicted themselves. Jeremiah had told him that Nebuchadnezzar would capture him and take him into exile in Babylon, but he had heard that Ezekiel had said he would never see Babylon. Contradictory, right? Well, actually, Nebuchadnezzar captured Zedekiah, had him blinded, and then took him prisoner to Babylon. Both prophets were right; they just focused on different aspects. I don’t know if that story is true or not, but I expect that will be the experience on Judgment Day of everyone who eased their conscience with a supposed contradiction in the Bible.

In addition, it really makes no sense to go after the Bible’s “contradictions” with the viciousness its critics resort to. We’re talking about the most powerful religion in history. It has withstood, off and on, millennia of persecution from the various superpowers of the day, rising to reshape Western culture and make inroads in every other one. Slavery was for millennia the socio-economic basis of Western civilization, but thanks to Christianity, it is now illegal throughout the West. The Bible turns fierce enemies into sincere friends and brings troubled people to unfathomable peace. Martin Luther appeared to many to be insane from the way he agonized over his sins, real or imagined, but one verse from Romans salved his conscience and relieved his fears. Yet, the critics say, the people who made up this earth-shaking religion were so stupid and disorganized that they couldn’t keep their story straight for two pages!

So here are some ways of interpreting why one part of Scripture says one thing and another part says the “opposite”:

First of all, the Bible is rich in paradox. This happens when two seemingly opposite things are true, but in different ways. This results from the Bible contrasting our natural earthly perspective with our new heavenly perspective (that’s the whole point of Ecclesiastes). Jesus says in Mark 10:44 that a Christian wanting to be first must make himself the last. Contradictory, right? Well, what He’s saying is that a Christian who subordinates his own interests to others’ in a way that loves his neighbor as himself will be from the world’s perspective the very least successful of people, but that in God’s eyes he’s one of the best Christians there is. There’s another paradox that has tripped up a lot of people: the Bible teaches that we are not saved by works but that we are not saved without works. The simple truth reconciling this is that God justifies us by faith without reference to our works, but on a human level those who have faith must have a new nature that will by necessity delight in doing good works.

It seems paradoxical that II Samuel says God moved David to foolishly take a census of Israel and for I Chronicles to say that Satan did it while James adds that God tempts no one. Surely it’s a contradiction for the Bible to say Satan and God did the same thing, right? Especially when it involves someone being led to sin. Well, does II Samuel say, “God moved David, and Satan didn’t”? What all these authors mean is that God, in His eternal decrees, had decided that His wisdom and justice called for David conducting a census at that moment in time and that He therefore permitted Satan, who was more than willing to oblige, to tempt David to it. God allowed it, but Satan did the tempting. What looks like a paradox is actually an object lesson in how God ordains that all things, even sin, should come to pass as He planned them. The fact that God plans something and works good out of it doesn’t make it good in and of itself. The ends don’t justify the means, as we say.

You must also allow for everyday things like approximations, exaggerations, figurative language, etc. If I say π is equal to 3.14159, I doubt most of you would correct me when technically π is a number consisting of infinite digits. Sometimes one Bible writer is being more precise than another or emphasizing something more than another because he has a different objective or audience in mind. I Kings gives the circumference of Solomon’s “Sea” in the Temple as 30 cubits when, at 10 cubits in diameter, it would have been 31.4159 cubits (approximately). Either the writer of Kings is measuring the inner circumference after accounting for the handbreadth of thickness between outer and inner rims, or he is making a rounding approximation only a pedant would find objectionable. We do that sort of thing all the time, and nobody calls us liars for it, so I don’t see why we should refuse the Biblical writers that same latitude.

You must also consider the summarizing nature of the Bible. Its history covers, starting with dates we can establish with reasonable certainty, as many as 2,200 years between Abraham’s birth and Paul’s captivity in Rome, and its ethical principles seek to govern the entirety of human behavior. Naturally some things are going to be telescoped. Therefore, when Kings says a King of Judah was bad and did not remove the high places of idol worship and Chronicles says the opposite, or vice versa, maybe they’re referring to different phases of the king’s reign. Maybe he started doing one thing and later changed his mind. That is not without precedent. Joseph II of Austria is remembered as an emperor who tried to enact sweeping reforms in keeping with the Enlightenment, but, towards the end of his life, when he was a broken, disillusioned man, he repudiated many of his reforms. Chronicles presents Manasseh going through such a personality change, but Kings does not. Is one contradicting the other, or is one just emphasizing a matter more important to his story? Kings, written during the Babylonian Exile, explains how Manasseh corrupted Judah to the point of no return, and Chronicles, written after the Restoration, explains how God could restore even such a wicked king like He had the Jews from their exile.

Sometimes Matthew and Luke disagree on how many people Jesus healed in a particular story- Luke might say there was one and Matthew that there were two. Neither says, “There was one, and only one.” Instead, one evangelist chooses to be more exact whereas the other focuses on the one who interacted with Jesus the most. Matthew says the man Legion possessed had a confederate; Luke mentioned just the man with the multitude of demons because he was clearly the major player in the drama.

Summary, I think, is the source of most of the really conspicuous “contradictions” in the Bible. The Passion and Resurrection narratives differ in details from one Gospel to the other, so some think they’re garbled accounts of what actually happened. But, really, why would John have bothered to write his Gospel if he was just going to copy what Mark had written? They all have their different emphases and therefore include different details. What you don’t have is John saying, “Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ,” and Matthew saying, “Mary Magdalene was not the first to see Christ.” Or you don’t see Matthew writing, “And the two thieves on the cross mocked Jesus,” and Luke saying, “The one on His left, and only the one on His left, mocked Him.” Presumably, both of the thieves mocked Jesus, but when the one on His right saw how Jesus bore all the torment and mockery with fortitude, he realized his mistake and repented. Matthew wants to emphasize that Jesus’s humiliation was so great that even people suffering the same loathsome fate as He felt He was below them, and Luke wants to point to the power of faith that can save someone even at the point of death. If every Biblical author included all the details that everyone else wrote about his particular story- well, in the first place you’d have a pretty boring, unmanageable tome to sift through, and in the second, you’d have one that didn’t focus well and tell its story in artistically crafted themes.

One aspect of Biblical variations is the influence of translation. Jesus spoke to His audience in Aramaic while the Gospel writers were composing their works in Greek, so obviously they couldn’t give the exact words He spoke (in most cases, that is- every now and then they give the original Aramaic, like, “Talitha cumi” in Mark 5). Thus, they had a certain degree of liberty in how they worded their quotation, just like any other translator. When Jesus is asked in Mark if He is the Son of God, He says, “I am,” but in Matthew and Luke He says, “You say that I am.” It’s obvious from the priests’ reaction (and the fact that He used similar words to unquestionably affirm that Judas was the treacherous disciple) that Jesus was affirming His deity in Matthew and Luke just as in Mark. Mark just translated a little bit less literally than Matthew and Luke to make it less ambiguous.

Translation probably accounts for the famous “contradiction” where Jesus says David ate the showbread “in the days of Abiathar the High Priest” (Mark 2:26). Biblical critic Bart Ehrman lost his faith by thinking Jesus meant that David ate the bread during the term of Abiathar as High Priest, which isn’t true since his father Ahimelech was High Priest at the time (at least for a little while before Saul slaughtered the priests and Abiathar as the survivor did become High Priest). Some say the “epi” in the Greek should be translated, “in the story of Abiathar the High Priest.” At this time the Bible did not have chapters and verses but had to be referenced by subject matter of the passage. Makes sense. Or Jesus was referring to the fact that this happened during the life of Abiathar, who became High Priest, which is also true. It’s like the book Napoleon in Egypt, where the author referred to his subject as “Napoleon” after admitting that in 1798, when he invaded Egypt, he was still known as General Bonaparte. He only became Emperor Napoleon (and was referred to on a first-name basis) in 1804. Looking back, though, we almost always refer to him as Napoleon, not General Bonaparte, and only a pedant is going to insist on a book entitled General Bonaparte in Egypt. If I say, “Mrs. Jones went to elementary school at Such and Such Academy,” are you really going to contradict me even though it’s obvious Mrs. Jones was not Mrs. Jones at the time but rather Miss Smith (or whatever her maiden name is)? In all these cases the speaker is just referring to the subjects by the titles they assumed and became famous for so we’ll know whom exactly he means.

Lastly, the fall-back position is that there was an error in the scribal transmission. With all the textual variations in the Bible, they can’t all go back to the original reading, so we know it did happen. Just because Samuel and Chronicles sometimes differ by essentially a decimal point in their casualty figures doesn’t mean that when they were originally written they didn’t both agree on the correct figure. Sometimes these are downright obvious. Yes, II Samuel 21 says in the Hebrew manuscripts that Jaare-Oregim slew Goliath the Gittite after I Samuel 17 made a whole pericope out of David slaying him, but who really thinks a historian capable of writing an epic story on the level of the Book of Samuel would forget that his hero David played the pivotal part in what is the best-known story of the work? Homer nodded, yes, but never on anything that big. Of course the author of Samuel originally wrote, “slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite,” like Chronicles! Some scribe just messed up and was copied by others; anyone fabricating the story could have done a better job than making such an obvious blunder. Inerrancy doesn’t claim that every manuscript we possess is 100% accurate; the original authors would have had to have been crazy to write all those variations. It claims that the originals are completely trustworthy, so when you have the original wording, you have the words of God. (When I discussed C.S. Lewis’s trilemma in the prior blog post, I went into the reliability of our New Testament manuscripts in preserving the original meaning.)

The Bible nowhere says something along the lines of, “Joab fell from his horse at the Battle of Rabbah,” and then elsewhere, “Joab did not fall from his horse at the Battle of Rabbah.” If we think it is contradicting itself, we’re not considering the subtle nuances one would expect in a work written by dozens of authors over the course of at least thirteen centuries. A measure of variation is the mark of one author following his own style and emphases, not an indication that one of two authors is necessarily mistaken. Don’t be like Zedekiah.

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Lewis’s Trilemma Defended

C.S. Lewis created a famous “trilemma” in his Christian apologetics. He had to deal with many people who admitted Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher but did not want to believe He is God. Lewis pointed out that, in addition to the commands of love and kindness the moralists readily accepted, Christ said some very radical things. He claimed that all of His words would remain true for all eternity, He claimed to forgive sins, He claimed to be the only way to God, and He claimed a connection to God the Father so close that the Jews executed Him for blasphemy.

Lewis observed that no mere moral teacher would say such things. For someone to claim such preeminence over the entire universe, He would either have to be insane, an evil deceiver, or someone who really had such preeminence over the universe. The one thing He couldn’t be was a merely mortal moral teacher.

Lewis’s argument is unassailable if Jesus really said everything the evangelists attributed to Him, so anti-Christian scholars try to chip away at that if. Their basic design is for Jesus and the New Testament writers not to have said what they say in our current editions of the Bible. Basically, they have to contend that later writers made up the extraordinary things Jesus said as part of a developing legend around Him. In other words, “Yea, hath God said?” Now where have we heard that before?

The lengths they go to when crafting their arguments vary from mildly cunning to downright farcical. They set the dates of composition for Biblical writings so late as to admit of the wildest fabrications having seeped in. I can’t think of a New Testament book that someone somewhere has not denied its being written by the author the Church has traditionally ascribed it to. Christianity is accused of ripping off any number of Eastern mystery religions of the day. The authenticity of our manuscripts receives scathing criticism. The attitude of Bart Ehrman, one of the leading assailants of Lewis’s trilemma, towards the New Testament can be summed up in a phrase he belabored in Misquoting Jesus: “error-ridden copies.”

Let’s start with the date of composition for the New Testament. Unfortunately, Paul and the other writers left no notices of “© 55 AD, the Apostle Paul. All Rights Reserved,” on their manuscripts for us to go on. The earliest manuscript we possess is a fragment of John called the Rylands Manuscript (verses 13:31-33 and 37-38) dating to about 125 AD, but that’s almost certainly a copy and not the original (it came from Egypt, not Ephesus where tradition places John). I find God’s irony here delightful that the book that’s most explicit about His Son’s deity is the earliest one we have. However, even though that’s an earlier date for John than many critics want, I think we can go even earlier. I posit there are three books at least that we can be fairly certain were written before Jesus’s generation had passed away and were thus open to contradiction from other eyewitnesses.

Consider Acts. Is there a book in history with a more anti-climactic ending? Luke concludes with a succinct, “And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (28:30-31, KJV). This is hopeful to be sure, but it is a massive letdown nonetheless. Luke has been building up to his friend and hero Paul’s arrival at Rome for eight chapters (out of twenty-eight): through prophecies; through riots; through testimony before crowds, the Sanhedrin, governors, and a king; and through the defying of death by assassination, shipwreck, and snake venom. He has even received a divine command that he preach in Rome. Yet to this day, we do not know what exactly happened to Paul in Rome. (Most likely, Nero acquitted him, he evangelized for a couple more years, and then Nero changed his mind and had him executed in 67 AD, but this is based off of hints in the Pastoral Epistles rather than any historical book of the Bible.)

What could possibly account for this? Luke delights in recounting apostolic apologetics, especially before those in authority, as in Peter’s speech to the population of Jerusalem at Pentecost, Deacon Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin, Paul’s speech to the Athenian Council at the Areopagus, his account of his conversion to the mob of Jerusalem, and his later defense before King Agrippa and Governor Festus. Why did he not crown them all with an apostle’s apology before the Roman Emperor? Had something gone wrong that Luke was trying to hide?

Did Paul have a bad day? Most unlikely. He had more experience in apologetics to the Greco-Roman culture than anyone and had had two years to prepare. Even if Nero had somehow gotten the better of him, wouldn’t a later writer making things up as he went gone ahead and written the crowning speech of the book? Did Nero conclude the trial by martyring Paul? Luke would certainly have given him a hero’s death like Stephen’s. In fact, what would have been more poetic than for the former persecutor of the Church who is introduced in Luke’s story while participating in the first Christian martyrdom concluding the book with his own martyrdom for Christ?

Luke is one of the finest authors in history. He would have known better than to leave his readers hanging for all time like that- unless, of course, he didn’t know what had happened because the trial had not taken place yet. There’s really no other plausible explanation for this otherwise unforgivable literary error than that Luke wrote Acts before Paul’s trial before Nero. Based on Festus’ governorship of Judea, the end of that two-year period brings us to 62 AD, which is only thirty years after Christ’s death. Luke refers to his Gospel at the beginning of Acts, so he must have written it earlier (very possibly during Paul’s imprisonment in Caesarea a couple of years earlier). The majority report posits that Luke drew on Mark’s Gospel for inspiration, so Mark dates to at the latest the 50s AD, twenty years after Christ’s death.

So, does Mark (who may have been an eyewitness as the young man in a linen garment on the night of Christ’s arrest) present Jesus as saying the kinds of things that make Lewis’s trilemma ineluctable? In Mark 1, God the Father calls Him His “beloved Son.” In Mark 2, He claims and then proves He has the authority to forgive a man’s sins in the face of objections that only God can do that. He claims to be Lord of the Sabbath, the day God Himself has blessed as His special day, at the end of that chapter. After He heals the Gadarene demoniac in Mark 5, He tells the man, “‘Go home to thy friends and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee’” (verse 19, KJV). When He calms the disciples during the storm in Mark 6 while walking on water, He introduces Himself with literally, “Be of good cheer- I am” (verse 6). Any Jew would have known that I AM is how God introduces Himself in Exodus 3, and it’s rather a unique way of announcing your presence anyway, I’m sure you’ll agree. Peter, who in all likelihood supervised this Gospel, calls Him the Christ in Mark 8:29, and Jesus soon after makes reference to coming “in the glory of His Father” (8:38, KJV). He poses a question in 12:37 about Himself that proves He transcends human nature and conventions by ruling over David when He is his son. He calls the angels and the Elect His own in 13:26 and makes His statement that His words will never fail no matter what in the Olivet Discourse. Finally, when the Chief Priests asks Him if He is the Son of God at His trial, He makes the astounding claim, “‘I am, and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of Heaven” (14:62), which the religious authorities without hesitation denounce as blasphemous.

These are some pretty outrageous claims for a mortal moral teacher to make. Anyone who tries to water them down into something acceptable for a mere human to say (somehow diluting every last claim to superhuman power and authority) has to bend over backwards to rationalize them all. They then must do so all the more when the Bible gets more explicit about Christ’s deity elsewhere, as in Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, and II Peter 1:1 (though I must admit the task never wants for volunteers). So, basically, we have everything we need to render Lewis’s trilemma inescapable in a book written at most two decades after the events. Sam Watkins’s memoirs of his time in the Army of Tennessee, which remains a favorite source on the Civil War with historians, were written about the same amount of time after the war, so evidently this is a perfectly acceptable separation from events. It would have been hard for legends to creep in in that space of time, and there were no doubt plenty of scribes and Pharisees who had been present at Christ’s ministry and especially his trial who could have written a refutation of Mark’s account of Jesus’s words. Given the hostility between the majority of Jews and the Church, such a refutation would very plausibly have been handed down to us if it had existed through the efforts of those Jews who rejected Christ. Josephus’ Jewish history of the time, however, accords with Mark’s version.

The New Testament also demonstrates that it is not merely a later fabrication through what it records. The Apostles in the Gospel look like idiots, constantly misunderstanding and doubting Jesus and getting rebuked for it. Would someone pretending to be an apostolic writer with authority really make his sources (or even himself) look so stupid? It gives a place of preeminence to a tax collector (Matthew), something not calculated to win many friends in the first-century Roman Empire. All the Gospels say that women first discovered the empty tomb, something which no one would have made up because their statement would not have been admissible in a Greco-Roman court. Who would have tried to base a religion on the teachings of an impoverished carpenter who died the most despised death of His day if he had been free to select anything he wanted?

Of course, Lewis’s trilemma is a moot point if Mark and Luke did not actually write those words. We come to Bart Ehrman’s “error-ridden copies” criticism. The New Testament has vastly more hand-written manuscripts than any book in history, and together those manuscripts have more textual variations than there are words in the text! It’s nearly three variants to every one word. An error in the manuscript back then would be like a snowball rolling down a hill; every copyist who followed that manuscript would make that error, as would those who copied the second-generation text, and so on up until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, when that error would be copied en masse until it would appear in many people’s Bibles today. Besides the obvious potential for scribal errors on the part of fallible human writers, what of devious schemers who might alter the text to get it to say what they wanted it to?

Well, in all honesty, the manuscripts indicate that there was some of both of those going on. Any textual variation by definition means that a scribe changed the text he was given (intentionally or otherwise), and Ehrman is more than happy to point out some famous variations where the most plausible explanation is that those pressing for orthodox Christianity altered passages that heretics were using for their version of doctrine (and also some more where that is not the most plausible explanation).

But, from the big picture point-of-view, how much damage did these variations cause to Christianity? The overwhelming majority of textual variations, as much as four out of five, do not survive translation into English. A name might be spelled a different but perfectly recognizable way (understandable at a time when the vast majority of people couldn’t write their own names), or the detachable ν might be added or removed from the definite article without in any way confusing the reader (this harmless variant is actually the most common one). Greek, as an inflected language where spelling determines a word’s meaning and role in the sentence, can present words in different orders, as many variants do, without changing the English translation, where word order does count. (To give the example I learned in Latin, another inflected language, “The dog bit the boy” will assume an entirely different meaning in English if you change the word order, but, provided you spell all the words right, in Latin they can go in another order and mean the same thing. To this day, I don’t know if Porcius Cato was famous for saying, “Delenda est Carthago,” or, “Carthago delenda est.”)

Other errors are obviously typos that no one in their right mind would confuse doctrine over. While we’re on the subject of typos, there are examples of scribes who deliberately copied obvious errors in Galatians 2:12 and Philippians 2:1 or who kept the section numbers of the Pauline Epistles in the Codex Vaticanus after the shift of Hebrews from between Ephesians and Galatians to the end of Paul’s writings had made them obsolete, rather than alter their version of the manuscript. Another common variant is using Jesus’s name when breaking up the Gospel into daily readings rather than the original “He,” which obviously does not change the meaning but is instead necessary to understand the text in its divided format.

What changes there are indicate only the barest tinkering with the text. From the manuscript evidence, no one ever succeeded in wholesale revising any book of the New Testament; at best they might shift around, insert, or delete a couple of paragraphs or verses.

In fact, looking back on the thousands of manuscripts, the textual critic finds only one variant in one hundred where the original wording is in question and where the variation matters to the meaning of the text. The bungling or dishonest scribes who made the “error-ridden copies” only managed to add two percent to the New Testament, which means it survived substantially all intact. We have traditions from the Church Fathers about what happened to Paul after Acts ends, but no scribe ever dared to append them to Acts posing as Luke’s words to cover his seeming error.

There are only two substantial passages that we can’t be certain were in the original: the long version of Mark 16 and the story of the Jews wanting to stone the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Mark 16 provides material that, with the exception of apostles surviving drinking poison, can be found elsewhere in the Bible. Meanwhile, John 8 doesn’t appear too different from Jesus forgiving the sinful woman in the Pharisee’s home in Luke 7. It doesn’t look to me like they would endanger any Christian doctrine whether they were left out or kept in. Bart Ehrman might get points for effort in his attempts to alter our perceptions of Jesus in individual Gospels through variant readings, but he gets deductions for gross exaggeration.

I’ll give an example. When Jesus heals the leper in Mark 1, there is a variant, potentially reliable, reading that He was “moved with anger” rather than “moved with compassion.” Ehrman likes this reading and prefers to translate the Greek as Jesus then “casting out” the man rather than “sending him away” (because He was annoyed at the man bothering Him, perhaps?). Anyway, it’s hard to claim, as Ehrman does, that we should interpret Mark differently based on one word. Mark presents Jesus as uniformly compassionate (except when provoked by vicious unbelief) throughout the rest of his Gospel. Was he really trying to put a dent in that image with one example of a “sin” on Jesus’s part?

Well, in the first place, it’s not always a sin to be angry. It can easily be a sin and lead to more sins, but not always. The Scriptural admonition to a person with righteous indignation is, “Be angry, and do not sin,” not, “Never be angry at all.” Second, who says Jesus was angry at the leper? He could have been angry at the Devil oppressing this man with a condition that kept him away from God’s people or just at the sin in the world that made it possible for this to happen. If He was angry at the man for bothering Him, I doubt He would have said He was “willing” to cleanse him. Ehrman strains with other similar one-word or one-verse variants to chip away at the orthodox doctrines of Christianity, but that’s really all he has to work with. Out of potentially 400,000 textual variants, no one has ever found the “smoking gun” variation that proves that Jesus never claimed divine authority. That aspect of His teaching just permeates the New Testament too thoroughly for every reference to it to be a mistake.

But wait a minute, cries the critic! Jesus Himself denied being God when the rich young ruler came to Him and called Him Good Teacher. Didn’t He say, “Why callest thou me good? There is no man good, but one, that is God”? They read it as Him saying, “No, I’m human just like you and make mistakes like everybody else.” But did He say, “Don’t call me good; I’m not good”? Taken with the rest of the testimony of the New Testament, it makes more sense that Jesus is actually anticipating Lewis’s trilemma and saying, “Knock off this ‘good moral teacher’ nonsense. If I’m good, it’s because I’m God.” For someone to say their words will be true for all eternity or that God has put Him in charge of His holy day or that the angels are His own but then to say He’s error-prone like anybody else makes no sense. Moreover, I don’t see any footnotes with variant readings in my Bible at this verse. If a conspiracy of orthodox Christians were rewriting the Bible like the critics claim to push their version of doctrine, I think they would have started here, as easily as a critic can misinterpret it.

Speaking of mistakes, and since I love history so, does the New Testament ever make a historical mistake? Well, the historians of the time outside the Bible didn’t really care too much about what was going on in Palestine, but they largely concur with the Bible. By the time of Trajan, just before the first New Testament (fragmentary) manuscripts we possess were copied, Pliny the Younger already records Christians singing hymns to Christ like He was a God. Suetonius agrees with Acts 18:2 that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, Tacitus states that Jesus was crucified and believed to have been resurrected, and Josephus’s account of Herod Agrippa’s death accords well with Acts 12. A controversial passage in Josephus also recounts how the Sanhedrin handed Christ over to Pilate for execution but then suffered the embarrassment that His followers claimed He was alive. How much of that Josephus actually wrote and how much a Christian scribe inserted remains hotly contested, but evidently he was familiar with the orthodox Christian depiction of Christ. He also made mention of Herod Antipas’s murder of John the Baptist.

Luke comes across as none the worse for scribal wear. His depiction of geography, which refers to nearly one hundred places all over the eastern Mediterranean, is flawless. Some have tried to criticize his depiction of his voyage with Paul to Rome as a landlubber’s invention, but it passes the standards of meteorology and ancient seamanship. Similarly, John and Mark received some criticism for their architecture and geography, until archaeologists unearthed John’s porticoes at the Pool of Bethesda and one factors into Mark’s account the different conditions for travel in first century Palestine than in an industrialized society with automobiles.

I’ll wrap up by briefly addressing the claims that Christianity plagiarized Eastern mystery religions like Mithraism. The answer the Church Fathers gave to that charge is that God let humans believe such things in a false religion so they could not raise an objection when He did it for real. “You think such and such about Christianity is ridiculous? Well, you already believe such and such about your own religion.” Lewis knew this point better than anyone. He studied mythology extensively in the days before his conversion, and his fellow mythology student J.R.R. Tolkien showed him that the human dreams and hopes he loved in mythology actually did find fulfillment in a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. This historical person made the most outrageous claims anyone has ever made and then backed them up with His miracles and Resurrection.

Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

The Surprisingly Scientific Bible

Welcome to my blog! I will be exploring topics from my four great intellectual passions: history, biology, mythology, and Christianity. That last one is much more to me than just an intellectual pursuit, but there’s plenty there to delight the mind with. The blog’s name, of course, derives from Norse mythology. It was where Odin sacrificed an eye for a drink to attain more wisdom, but I will be approaching these things from a Christian perspective (much like Paul used pagan accolades to Zeus to preach the Gospel to the Athenians at the Areopagus). Let’s start with a post that looks at all four, namely, how scientific is the Bible? I contend that, in contrast to the current popular view, the Bible is reliable in science and actually points to its divine origin in the way it transcends its time and culture with modern science.

Does it teach that there is a supernatural world and a God governing the universe? Of course! But it also shows that, in the normal course of events, God governs His universe through ordinary scientific laws. Anything unscientific in the Bible is either vivid symbolism not meant to be taken literally or a direct intervention of the supernatural. In addition, many believe that Paul in I Corinthians 13 predicted that miraculous these supernatural interventions would become less frequent once the canon was closed and God’s Word was available to all the world, as has happened. As Dr. R.C. Sproul is so fond of explaining, the purpose of a miracle is to act as God’s seal of approval for His representative speaking His words. Now that we have the Bible, we don’t need prophets anymore, so there are no more miracles.

I actually began thinking about this topic back when I had the delight of watching BBC Earth’s Planet Earth. This fascinating series glorifies God by showing how he can create the harshest of environments and still tailor organisms to inhabit it or create the most beautiful of environments and adorn it with amazing creatures. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the episodes are arranged by biome. Each one looks at a different type of habitat (mountains, forest, ocean, etc.) and how animals are adapted to live there.

Interestingly enough, this is actually the approach Genesis 1, supposedly the least scientific part of the Bible, uses to depict creation. Poetically, the first three days set up the environment, and the last three days fill it up. Day One creates light for day and night; Day Four provides specific sources of light: the sun, moon, and stars. (I personally believe the sun was created first and that what Day Four is referring to is early plants’ photosynthesis clearing out enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that the sun could actually be seen.) Day Two produces sky and sea; Day Five fills it with birds and fishes. Day Three creates dry land; Day Six creates terrestrial animals. A vastly more rudimentary approach than modern science, but a clear indication that God made habitats and then adapted creatures to them. Mythologies typically portray animals existing before the creation of the world; usually they’re involved in it. In Scandinavia, for example, the Norse posited that a primeval cow licking primordial ice was responsible for the creation of the first god, and the Finns believed that an eagle laid eggs on a goddess’s knee in the middle of a vast ocean that she broke to become the universe.

While we’re discussing adaptations, the Bible remains true to genetics while other ancient cultures did not. It depicts plants and animals in Genesis 1 as reproducing “according to their kind.” Jacob doesn’t understand genetics when he tries to make the goats produce speckled or spotted kids by showing them streaks of white when they mate, but in the next chapter God takes credit for intervening on Jacob’s behalf in making them speckled and spotted. There is no need to read a naturalistic violation of genetic principles here, just a supernatural direction of them. There are no historically presented fantastical creatures in the Bible such as you’ll find in other mythologies. No hybrids or one-of-a-kind monsters that defy genetics like the Sphinx or the Chimera. Of course, the Bible has mythological creatures like Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab, but these occur in the context of poetry or apocalyptic prophecy and were clearly intended as figurative symbols rather than an actual depiction of life on earth. Almost every animal the Bible presents “as is” is known to science; for the rest we just don’t know how to translate the Hebrew. But no Jewish hero in the historical books makes a name for himself by slaying a gorgon or a dragon like you’ll find in mythology. There are no magic amulets in the Bible like you’ll find in most mythologies. Whatever Raiders of the Lost Ark said, using the Ark in battle did not magically grant the Israelites victory; instead, they lost the battle and the Ark itself for a time.

This is even more surprising when you consider that the Jews and Christians actually did believe in mythological creatures. Extrabiblical works feature them, such as “Bel and the Dragon” (where Daniel kills a dragon during the Babylonian Captivity) in the Jewish Apocrypha. Clement of Rome uses the Phoenix as an analogy for the resurrection in I Clement. The books that claim to be presenting literal facts from a divinely inspired perspective do no such thing.

The Bible also does not personify what we now know to be inanimate objects. In Norse and Greek thought, the sun and moon were chariots driven by horses. Heaven and Earth were husband and wife in the Greek creation myth. The Chinese legend is about a monster holding back Yin and Yang and being transformed into the world in the struggle. The constellations in Greek mythology are likewise the remains of heroes and monsters. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians linked their gods with heavenly bodies, and the planets all bear the names of Roman gods. Psalms presents a metaphor of the sun running a race, but it is only that. Genesis portrays everything as inanimate that we know to be so, despite what modern critics try to read from the text.

The Bible portrays animals acting the way modern biology shows them to. You don’t find legendary depictions of hares going mad in March or lemmings jumping off of cliffs, at least not when the Bible intends to be taken at face value. God’s depiction of the ostrich in Job 39 actually taught me things I didn’t know about it. It does say in the Psalms that the moon won’t hurt you, which implies that the Hebrews believed that the moon could cause insanity (i.e., you’d be “moonstruck”), but notice the Bible says that won’t happen. The exceptions would be the talking serpent in Genesis 3 and Balaam’s ass in Numbers, but, again, this is clearly the supernatural. Well, it’s also strange for the lion to attack the man of God in I Kings 13 but to just stand beside the unharmed donkey, but this just proves that God was judging the man of God through the lion. Normally lions in the Bible attack livestock.

The Bible also presents humans in normally human terms (at least after the astounding lifespans early in Genesis, which it portrays as highly unique and a regression of the world from perfection to the decay we’re familiar with). There are no demigods or innately superhuman heroes. Yes, the Bible has people achieving incredible feats, like Elijah outrunning Ahab’s chariot or Samson’s stupendous strength, but it almost invariably states (and where it doesn’t, it implies) that this is a direct intervention of the supernatural into the natural world (usually the Bible notes that the Spirit of the Lord comes upon the hero) and would not otherwise happen. When God departs from Samson, he’s no stronger than anyone else. No Hebrew hero sighs so powerfully he bursts his mail coat like Sigurd in Norse mythology. No Hebrew hero makes wings and flies like Daedalus and Icarus. The one possible depiction of an innately superhuman character, Goliath of Gath, is still possibly portrayed as a supernatural intervention. Assuming Goliath was 9’9” (it’s possible the scribes copying the Masoretic Text made a clerical error and that he was closer to 6 feet), it was probably because of a union like the one between demons and women in Genesis 6.

Genesis 1 confirms what science has recently figured out about the universe- that it had a beginning. Those are the first words of the Bible. Mythologies don’t do that. Norse mythology has Muspelheim and Niflheim, and the cow and giant they produce, preceding the earth. Mesopotamian mythology, which Genesis is supposedly a Hebrew ripoff of, presents Marduk killing Tiamat the dragon and fashioning the world out of her. Every mythology I know of has a creation story where the universe is made from preexisting physical material. The Greek philosophers believed the world was eternal. The Bible, in contrast, posits a Big Bang like modern science does; it just presents it as intentional rather than spontaneous (that will be the subject of a later blog, if the Lord wills).

Moving on from Genesis 1, we find something rather surprising in another story critics love to lash out at: Noah’s ark. If placed in water, Noah’s ark would float. In fact, it has similar dimensions to an oil tanker. What’s surprising is that this comes from a most land-lubbing people, the Hebrews. The Israelites feared the sea and made it a symbol of disorder and evil; they generally did not venture out into the Mediterranean (or used someone else’s ships when they did, like Jonah). How did they just “make up” this well-designed ship? They certainly didn’t get it from the Babylonians, whose flood story the Bible supposedly ripped off as well. The craft that is to preserve life on earth in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a cube that would sink in water.

There’s a lot of discussion as to how vast the Flood was because we don’t have any evidence of a worldwide deluge in the geological record. Hugh Ross does a good job explaining how it’s probably not meant to be taken as a global flood but as one that wipes out everything man’s world consisted of at the time. Presumably, in a few generations, he had not spread very far from Mesopotamia. Moreover, there’s no way an ark Noah’s size could hold two specimens from every species that inhabits the globe. We’re used to the story of the ark floating above Mount Ararat, but the Hebrew word does not have to mean a mountain. A hill will do, and Ararat was a region as much as a mountain at the time (near Mesopotamia, I should add). Many mythologies, like the Greeks and Babylonians, portray a flood brought by divine agents, often with an ark saving creatures. That’s an interesting tale to show up so widely in the human consciousness.

These are the main examples I can think of. There are other little tidbits where the Bible was potentially centuries ahead of its time in terms of science. It’s possible to interpret verses like Job 36:27-28 and Psalm 135:7 as depicting the Hydrological Cycle centuries before scientists understood it. Matthew Fontaine Maury was inspired to study currents from Psalm 8:8 (“whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas”). Circumcision on the eighth day of a child’s life is the safest time to do it because the child has a rush of prothrombin, which helps with blood clotting, that would keep him from bleeding too badly. Circumcision on any of the days preceding or following this rush is much less safe. Notice also how the clean animals in Leviticus that Israel was allowed to eat are also the safest animals to eat before modern food preparation. The pigs they were forbidden to eat are notorious for carrying trichinosis.

What about the “unscientific” aspects of the Bible? Doesn’t the account of creation in Genesis 1-2 contradict the commonly accepted scientific account of the origins of the universe, life, and humanity? Well, to be frank, I still haven’t figured out exactly what to affirm with regards to this question. I can, however, recommend two excellent books on the subject: The Genesis Question by Hugh Ross and Seven Days that Divide the World by John Lennox. I personally lean towards a belief in events more in accord with the modern scientific theory than in the traditional Christian reading that takes the simplest approach to interpreting Genesis as a literal week of creation. Hugh Ross focuses on the science and how Genesis 1-11 can be interpreted as saying the same thing as modern scientific theory while John Lennox focuses on the Hebrew grammar and vocabulary to see what things we are required to believe from the text and where there are grayer areas.

A few notes on the subject. Genesis can be read to depict the evolution of life on earth as science posits it developed. You do kind of have to interpret the “creation” of the sun and moon like I did above with them becoming visible on the fourth day rather than coming into existence altogether, but the Hebrew word allows for this, as it does not necessarily mean “created” (“worked on” will do). Fish and birds did evolve before mammals (if one counts the dinosaurs whom the birds are believed to have descended from). This tension between the Bible and science, of course, is only a problem to you if you are committed to macroevolutionary theory. Hopefully a future blog will present some of its rather glaring flaws.

The weakness in interpreting Genesis with modern science is that it requires predation and death in an explicitly good creation. If the Isaiah says there will be no predation and death in the world restored to perfection, why would there be predation and death in the original perfect world? Of course, this assumes predation is inherently evil. Psalm 104:21 says lions seek their prey from God, which indicates that feeding on other animals is not necessarily bad. Moreover, just because something is true about the new Paradise doesn’t mean it was true about the first. God created marriage in Eden, but Christ refuted that it would have a role in the New Jerusalem.

Also, the Hebrew in Genesis 1 is subtler than to require six 24-hour days one right after another. We don’t need to be hidebound by the simple reading of the King James Version. The original Hebrew uses the definite article only for the Sixth Day and the Seventh Day. It’s perfectly possible to translate the first five days as ‘a First Day,’ ‘a Second Day,’ and so on. Further, note how Day Seven doesn’t have a “and there was morning, and there was evening” appended to it. Maybe that’s because Day Seven, when God has ceased creating because He has finished His work, is still going on today.

Personally, I thought one of the strongest arguments in favor of the single-week theory was the presentation of it as standard Christian dogma until the modern era. Would God give us an account that all His people for millennia would interpret to mean what is actually false? Well, the truth is more complicated than that. Lennox actually observes that heroes of the faith like Augustine, Justin Martyr, Clement, and Irenaus all thought that the six days could have been otherwise than six twenty-four-hour periods in one glorious week.

Speaking of traditional Christian interpretations that have been wrong, let’s briefly discuss the notorious Geocentric Theory of the universe that has so embarrassed Christianity. Based on a few texts like “Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed forever” (Psalm 104:5), many Christians resisted Copernicus and Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun. The Church has long since come to realize the Geocentric Theory is not what the Bible is saying at that point. It is making a general statement about the stability of the world such as God promised after the Flood, as the following verses indicate by referring to floods over mountains. The Jews seem to have feared deep down that the ocean would one day surge over the world and drown everything again. They make reference to that possibility in Psalm 46 as something extreme that devout Jews would not allow to shake their faith, which means probably a lot of people feared it when they shouldn’t have. Anyway, the Bible depicts earthquakes and states that there will be an end to this world, so it’s not saying there will never, ever be any movement of dry land. It does, however, depict a general stability of the human habitat that has been borne out for millennia.

I’d like to point out one last thing. While many in modern science seek to disprove God’s being and deride those who believe in Him as unscientific, have they ever stopped to consider that the Scientific Revolution they are so beholden to took place in the most heavily Christianized part of the globe at that time? If you do a search on Wikipedia for a list of scientists who were also Christians, you get a long and distinguished collection of some of the greatest scientific minds ever. You have to make allowance for the fact that Wikipedia is overly broad in their definition of what makes a person a Christian, but, still, it at least proves that people can easily believe in God and pursue science at the same time. For the sake of credibility, I’ll leave Wikipedia’s comments aside and just give you examples I know independently. Besides Maury mentioned above, Robert Boyle, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, was passionately devoted to missionary efforts and bequeathed some of the money he made from his chemistry to fund lectures defending Christianity. Johannes Kepler and Galileo, the great astronomers, believed they were studying heavens made by God’s hands. It’s a little unclear as to whether Sir Isaac Newton was actually a Christian (from what I’ve heard, he was probably an Arian), but there is no doubting that he was at least a theist and creationist. Carolus Linnaeus, who invented the taxonomy system we still use in biology in the 18th century, believed he was classifying creatures according to God’s design. Evidently, Christianity actually leads to good science as men of faith who believe that God created the universe seek to explore the glorious details of His handiwork and discover the laws by which He governs it. As James Maxwell, the great physicist, had inscribed above his laboratory at Cambridge, “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein” (Psalm 111:2).