Originally posted by Terry Leatherwood:
Here's what you're missing. In modern literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, the narrative thread is linear, going from beginning to end unless otherwise specifically labeled. But ancient cultures, including Greek, Babylonian, Hebrew, and others, didn't record information that way. It wasn't unusual, for example, to read a summary of a series of events followed by a more detailed exposition. The play "Antigone," credited to Sophocles, begins with a simple statement by the two sisters about a freshly-concluded battle in which their two brothers had both died. The next scene describes the battle in more garish detail given by the Greek chorus. Immediately following that, the king comes on stage and restates the narrative a third time.
Each telling gave a bit more detail and a different point of view to the story of the battle. And just because the tale is thrice-told does not mean that there were three battles. The "contradiction" you pointed to in Genesis 2 is not a contradiction at all. It's simply an ancient narrative device that we don't use all
that often any more.
The comparison between "Antigone" and Genesis is good enough, Terry. It is certainly good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis. Indeed, Genesis itself is good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis.
But if you want to claim a scientific knowledge of the historical accuracy of Genesis and base that knowledge on the narrative similarity between "Antigone" and Genesis, then, in my opinion, your argument isn't good enough. And if you want others to accept the historical accuracy of Genesis, then I think you have to do
much better than just point out the similarities in narrative style between "Antigone" and Genesis.
The bottom line is this. Would any historians claim that "Antigone" definitely portrays a millennia-old battle in a perfectly historically accurate way? Would any historian claim that all three descriptions of the battle that can be found in "Antigone" are all perfectly accurate? And for that matter, would any historian argue that the battle that "Antigone" describes must have happened in the first place just because Sophocles says so?
Yes, narratives were different in the past. And in the past it was harder to know what the exact historical truth might have been. Back then there were no photos, no newspapers, no television, no voice recordings. There were few records of the past, few eyewitness accounts. There were legends of things that had happened in the past, but people had no way of really knowing if any of it was true. Why shouldn't our ancestors tell the same story three times in three different ways, when they couldn't know which if any of the three versions was true anyway?
Our present ability to record the world around us for posterity is quite new. Today we are used to the idea that we can be relatively sure of what happened in the (recent) past, but our ancestors simply couldn't know very much of what had happened a hundred years or more before they were born. There were stories but few or no reliable records. So the past, therefore, became a realm of fantasy and myth. Of course our ancestors might as well believe in these myths, because they could never disprove them, could they?
As I read the stories of the Gospels of how Jesus had risen from the dead and shown himself to various people, I was struck by how the people he showed himself to didn't recognize him at first. That would have made sense if he had already been given his "heavenly body" that Christians believe in, but it is noteworthy that the people who met the risen Christ didn't seem to react to his appearance at all. Not only did they not recognize him, but they also didn't seem to think that he looked at all "heavenly" or stunningly beautiful. They didn't recognize him, pure and simple.
And then I asked myself, how could these people be sure that the person they met was Jesus in the first place? How could they recognize him? And it struck me that most people just wouldn't be able to recognize Jesus. Think of it. Not only were there no photographs back then, but all Jews were also strictly forbidden to make pictures or images of anything. Therefore,
no contemporary image of Jesus can ever have existed. Only those who had seen the living Jesus themselves could ever hope to really recognize him. Really, only those who had met Jesus in person and were particularly good at memorizing faces could really recognize him.
My point? The four Gospels all tell completely different stories of how Jesus showed himself to other people after his resurrection. Not one Gospel confirms a single post-resurrection story of another Gospel. There can be different explanations for this. One possible reason, however, could be that the stories of how people met the risen Christ began circulating gradually, and that they were based on rumors, not hard facts like the details of the crucifixion, which are pretty consistent. Anyway, if you really don't know what Jesus looked like and have no way of ever finding out, how can you be
sure that you haven't met him? And how can you know that another person who tells a story about meeting Jesus is not telling the truth?
Bottom line, Terry, is that many details of the past are hard or impossible to know. The Bible tells stories of the past, and the Bible does, indeed, tell those stories in different ways, which leads to many contradictions. Creationists who ask other people to accept the verbatim accuracy of the Bible really ask other people to believe that the Bible is the scientific and literal truth because the Bible is the scientific and literal truth.
That is a perfect example of circular reasoning.
Ann
