Limitations in Historical Analysis of the New Testament

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Historians use textual and historical criticism (also called lower and higher criticism, respectively) as they sift through mountains of Bible manuscripts to decide how old they are, where they came from, who wrote them, and what the original probably said. Despite their power, however, these techniques are hobbled by an important and obvious limitation.

Let’s first consider some of the impressive successes by looking at three important New Testament passages. Scholars are in general agreement that these were not in the original manuscripts.

Success #1: the Comma Johanneum

This “comma” (that is, phrase) is the bold part in the epistle of 1 John below:

For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. (1 John 5:7–8)

This phrase is the clearest biblical statement in support of the concept of the Trinity. (I’ve written more on the long and bumpy road to the Trinity here and here.) This fundamental doctrine became an important point of debate, and it was resolved only at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. And that’s an important clue. The Comma would’ve surely been a central piece of evidence in the debate, if it existed at that time, but it was never brought forth. The early church fathers clearly didn’t know about it. Our oldest manuscript evidence is from a seventh-century Latin manuscript, and it’s in none of the early Greek copies.

With the best manuscripts not having the Comma and early fathers curiously silent, this one is easy to resolve.

Success #2: The woman caught in adultery

In this story (John 8:1–11), the Pharisees bring to Jesus a woman accused of adultery. The Law says that such a woman should be stoned to death, so what does Jesus say? Jesus replies, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” While Jesus draws in the dirt, the men drift away. When they are gone, he admonishes the woman to sin no more.

The evidence is similar to the case of the Comma Johanneum. The story is absent from copies of John from the early third century and from the earliest complete New Testaments (the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, from the fourth century).

The story is referenced by third- and fourth-century church fathers, but the first copy of John to include it is from the fifth century. The New Testament manuscripts that include it don’t always put it in the same place, as if it were a cherished story that scribes found a home for in various spots.

Though Augustine in the fourth century thought that the story might’ve been omitted to avoid the impression that Jesus sanctioned adultery, the consensus is that this story is not original.

We will look at one final example and the limitations of this method in part 2.

Be hard on your opinions.
A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like a**holes
in that everyone has one.
There is great wisdom in this but I would add
that opinions differ significantly from a**holes in that
yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.
— Tim Minchin

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/30/13.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Do We Get More Awe from Christianity or from Science?

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You may be surprised to learn that not everyone is convinced by the arguments of New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. It certainly shocked me.

One negative review of Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great  said:

Hitchens claims that, “As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”

Is he serious? I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “far more awe-inspiring” than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.

And can this author be serious? He’s saying that the awe from science is dwarfed by that from religion?

Science in Palestine

Here’s a brief caricature of what I imagine “awe” meant in the Old Testament. Imagine a Jew and a non-Jew meet 2500 years ago in Palestine. They’re comparing gods.

Jew: And strong! Let me tell you how strong Yahweh is. See that rock over there? The one as big as a house?

Not-a-Jew: Okay.

Jew: Yahweh could pick it up and throw it just like you’d throw a pebble.

NJ: Wow!

Jew: Yeah, and that mountain over there? He could pick it up and move it across the valley without even trying.

NJ: Impressive.

Jew: And did I tell you that he created everything? And I mean everything! This was thousands of years ago—he formed all the land from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia; from Egypt to Greece. He created the sun and moon. Rainbows, earthquakes—everything!

NJ: I didn’t know that . . .

Jew: Yeah, so don’t mess with us ’cause he’s on our side.

Yahweh was like a superhero—stronger than Hercules, with better generalship than Alexander, and wiser than Solomon. The Jews needed a big brother to help with all their difficulties with neighboring tribes and countries. It’s nice to have a superhero on your side when there are bullies around (who each have their own superhero protectors).

The imagination of a primitive desert tribe 2500 years ago wasn’t that broad, and that superhero concept of God was probably as much as they could imagine.

… vs. science today

Compare that with what modern science has given us in the last few hundred years. Let’s ignore the advances that make our lives much more bearable (vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia, energy, transportation, engineering, etc.) and focus on the cerebral stuff. The mind-expanding stuff. The awe-inspiring stuff. Things like the age of the earth and the universe, the huge distances between stars and galaxies, or the amount of energy stars produce.

Try this experiment: on a clear night, go look at the stars. Now extend your arm and spread your fingers. The nail of your little finger covers one million galaxies. In each galaxy are on average 100 billion stars. This gives a good perspective on the tiny space our earth occupies in the universe.

Or look at the small scale and consider the complexity of a cell. The Creationist who argues that evolution is counterintuitive should focus instead on quantum physics.

And notice the irony in the author’s “I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos ‘far more awe-inspiring’ than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.” Yes, the Sistine Chapel fresco is marvelous, but it was created by a man! Can he be saying that a work of a man trumps nature’s marvels?

The author lists other great works inspired by religion: “Giotto, Bach and Handel, Chartres and St. Peter’s.” Art, music, and architecture—here again, these are all made by humans.

Who, exactly, do you give praise to?

I can’t resist an aside on the topic of what God does vs. what people do. You’ve probably seen the iconic woman who survived the big disaster (hurricane Katrina’s rampage through New Orleans, for example) and is now back on her feet. “Thank you Jesus!” she says. “I lost everything, but now I have clothes and an apartment and a job.”

She seems to forget that Jesus didn’t lift a finger to give her those things—she’s doing well thanks to other people. Her thanks should be aimed at the combination of government aid and charitable donations that helped her out. And while we’re talking about Jesus, he was the guy who brought the disaster in the first place. What she should have said was “Thank you America! And Jesus, we need to talk . . .”

Of course, this doesn’t address the “Does God exist?” question. Maybe God does exist, and he produced the amazing things we see in nature. But it’s through science that we see these awe-inspiring things, not through the Bible. This marvelous universe is not at all what the early Jews, living on their small Mesopotamian disk of a world with the sun rotating around it, imagined it to be.

The awe we get using religion’s Glasses of Make Believe can’t compare to the awe from the glasses of science.

If God had wanted us to believe in him, 
he would have existed. 
— Linda Smith

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/23/13.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Bad Atheist Arguments: “Atheists Don’t Need God for Meaningful Lives”

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Andy Bannister The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist book This is part 9 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

Chapter 9. The Peculiar Case of the Postmodern Penguin

In today’s opening episode, our hero dreams that he’s wandering through a penguin colony. He muses that penguins have meaningless lives, but one penguin speaks up and says that, on the contrary, his life has plenty of meaning. He makes his own meaning. And then he gets eaten by a sea lion. (Which don’t eat penguins, but then we were told that it was a dream.)

Is it possible for life to have meaning if God doesn’t exist?

If humans are just the result of happenstance, isn’t life meaningless? If we protest otherwise, aren’t we just like the penguin? Bannister says that creating meaningful lives for ourselves without God is like a child squashing arbitrary jigsaw puzzle pieces to fit—yes they’ll fit, sort of, but you ignore how they’re intended to go together.

But without God, there is no supernatural intention. There is no Grand Plan, and his problem vanishes.

Bannister says that imagining that we create our own meaning “assumes that the universe cares.” Within the universe, we are insignificant. We can declare that we’ve created meaning, but that has created in the universe no sense of obligation.

Uh, yeah. We obviously are insignificant to the universe, God or no God. We’re stuck on an unimportant dust speck in a corner of one galaxy, one of 200 billion galaxies. The universe doesn’t care; it can’t care.

Bannister continues: “Why should we imagine that the universe owes us something?” (We shouldn’t.) Bannister says that if we’re just the result of physics, “then life doesn’t suddenly acquire meaning just because I say it does.”

Why is this hard? I say that my life has meaning, and that’s it. That’s not a grand platform, but it’s all I’ve got. And it’s all I need. I make no claim for absolute or objective meaning, just my own meaning. Like so many before him, Bannister seems to think that the only meaning is an objective meaning. For this, I point him to the definition of “meaning” in a dictionary.

Next, he considers the fate of the penguin—eaten just as he was pontificating about the meaning he had for his life.

Yeah. Shit happens. It could’ve been our hero who got eaten instead. What’s your point?

He blunders on, promising to point out the “many further problems with the idea that we can mold our own meaning.”

Further problems? I’ve yet to see one. He’s simply observing that living on a planet with scarcity and unfairness means that we will sometimes step on each other’s toes. Sometimes life is a zero-sum game, where for me to win, you must lose. (I can imagine his first day as a legislator. “You mean we have to compromise?!”)

For one of his “problems,” he contrasts meaning in a book, where we can ask the author to resolve differences in interpretation, with an authorless universe where we’re on our own for finding meaning. “Claiming that we have found the meaning is utter nonsense.”

Right—that’s not my claim. But Bannister is living in a glass house. He does claim to know the meaning of life, but his source is the Bible, a book for which there is no the meaning because Christians themselves can’t interpret it unambiguously. Christianity has 45,000 denominations worldwide, increasing at the rate of two per day. The only thing theists in general seem to agree on is that the other guy is wrong. (Read what the map of world religions tells us here.)

In an unguarded moment, I flatter myself that if I could’ve caught Bannister early in this chapter, he would’ve realized that his hysterical rending of garments was based on nothing, but of course that’s naïve. He is like a sleepwalker—it’s not that you shouldn’t wake him up but that you can’t.

But he has more.

“If atheism is true . . . what awaits us—our civilization, our race, our planet, indeed the universe as a whole—is destruction and extinction, no matter what we do.” Obviously. This is news?

“Atheists have a problem: namely that we cannot live as if life is meaningless.” It’s not meaningless, you simpleton! And if the only meaning is objective meaning, show us that it exists. Life as objectively meaningless isn’t depressing; what’s depressing is the hours I’ve spent reading and responding to your pathetic existential handwringing. Jesus Christ—grow a pair and quit whining! Yes, in trillions of years, the universe will eventually grow cold. Deal with it and move on.

“If your life is of the same value to the universe as that of a gnat . . .” You don’t like reality, so you retreat into the bosom of the Christian god? Your problems only multiply. Now you’ve got to explain the Problem of Evil, Problem of Divine Hiddenness, and God’s Old Testament tantrums and support for slavery and genocide. How is this better?

The Christian hard sell

After making his non-arguments, Bannister must think that the customer is softened up for the close. “I believe passionately that Christianity answers those questions better than any other world view I have investigated, not least atheism, which scarcely gets off the starting blocks.”

Sure, you can answer questions, and so can anyone, but is there any reason to believe your answers? Any evidence? You haven’t given me any reason to move Christianity out of the Just Pretend bin.

Bannister gives some questions that he thinks make his case.

  • Who am I? You aren’t an accident but were fashioned by God. I was fashioned by God to burn forever in hell? That’s what your book says is the fate of most of us. Jesus said, “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14). Thanks, God.
  • Do I matter? “God was willing to pay an incredible price for each one of us.” An incredible price? Nonsense. Jesus popped back into existence a day and a half after “dying.” The sacrifice narrative is incoherent and embarrassing (more here and here).
  • Why am I here? Our purpose “is to know God and enjoy him forever.” Seriously? Yeah, that’s a purpose that will put a spring in my step. Not to help other people, not to make the world a better place, not to eliminate smallpox, but to enjoy God, who won’t get off the couch to make his mere existence obvious.
  • Can I make a difference? We can be part of God’s greater purpose. That atheism thing is sounding better all the time. Instead of brainlessly showing up to get an assignment from the foreman, we’re on our own. We are empowered to find our purpose rather than have it forced upon us. Yes, that can be daunting. Yes, we might get halfway through life and realize that we’d squandered much of it. But the upsides are so much greater because there’s a downside. Because we can screw up, it makes the successes that much more significant. And we have ourselves to congratulate for our success.

Bannister moves on to an observation that, from him, is shocking: “I can hear some protest that this all sounds very lovely, but it doesn’t make it true.” Finally! Are we now to get the evidence?

Of course not. Citing his oft-mentioned but ill-supported claim that the only meaning is objective meaning, he calls atheism, not cake, but “the soggy digestive biscuit of grim nihilistic despair.”

Wrong again. You can try to find someone to impose this on, but that’s not me. Ah, well—so much for the possibility of evidence.

And he wraps up the chapter wondering about the consequences of atheism not being true. Because humans desire absolute meaning, purpose, and value “this would make us fundamentally irrational—poor, mad, deluded creatures” and blah, blah, blah. There is no acknowledgement that holding beliefs that conform to the evidence may be the best route to mental health.

Huh?

It’s like Bannister has just reached some major age milestone and has suddenly realized that his generation is now in charge. No longer can he look to his parents’ generation to protect him from reality. But instead of manning up and facing the challenge of making things work best for society, he wants to crawl back under the covers with his footie pajamas and blankie.

Maybe this topic was weaker than most or maybe I’m just getting fatigued by the weight of chapter after chapter of slobber, but I wonder at the praise at the front of the book. For example, “This is a lovely book, which draws deeply on high-quality philosophical, historical, and scientific thinking.” And, “The book is remarkably free of smugness and self-congratulation.” Did we read the same book?

Seeing what passes for meaningful intellectual contribution within Christian circles, I despair of crossing the gulf separating Christians from skeptics.

Continue with part 10.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable
in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
— H. L. Mencken

Image credit: pixabay, CC

Bad Atheist Arguments: “Morality Doesn’t Come From God”

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Andy Bannister The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist bookThis is part 8 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

(There are three more chapters after this one. I’ve been hoping that a thorough critique of this book would be an opportunity to respond to good apologetics arguments—or what passes for them. I don’t completely fault the author, as this may be about as good as they get. Though the quality of arguments has been poor, I think that this comprehensive survey has been useful. I hope it continues to be for you.)

Chapter 8. Humpty Dumpty and the Vegan

In today’s opening episode, Fred has become a vegan to satisfy his girlfriend. They’re at a vegan restaurant, and our hero isn’t happy with his unappetizing vegan pizza. He’s shocked when Fred sprinkles tuna on his half. “It’s not meat if it lives in the water,” Fred says. Ducks live in water, so they’re on the menu as well. And cows live near water, so they’re also kosher. He justifies his lax attitude as a “progressive” approach to a vegan diet, though our hero wonders if one can define words according to convenience.

Can words mean whatever you want them to?

Atheists make a big deal about morality—violence and intolerance are bad, while humanism and science are good. Atheists think “that atheists are, in fact, better than religious people, because atheists do good for no ulterior motive.” But is morality a win for atheists, Bannister asks? He gives Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass as an example of someone who defines words however he wants.

I agree that changing definitions to suit your whim is a bad idea, but Bannister might want to get his own house in order first. “Faith” is an important concept that has two incompatible definitions, and many Christians switch between them as convenient to make their argument (more here). Another slippery area for many Christians is morality. They imagine that any moral statement must be a claim to objective morality, even though that’s not how morality is defined (more here).

Bannister demands, “Who gets to define what the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ mean?”

Uh . . . humans? The definitions are in the dictionary. But if he’s asking how we put moral actions into the Good bin or the Evil bin, we do it with the imperfect sense of right and wrong that we got from evolution and society (more here and here). If he wants to carve out a spot for God and show that only with godly insight can we have morality, he’s done nothing to argue for that.

He notes that as long as two people with very different views on things “can agree not to try to suggest that the other one is wrong, everybody can get along famously.”

But of course, we often correct each other’s morality. We talk it over. We debate. We argue. Can he have never seen how humans try to resolve disagreements? It’s not always pretty, and minds often don’t change. But no supernatural is required to explain morality, as he wants to imagine.

Tough love time!

Bannister makes clear our error:

Quite frankly, my first reaction, when I meet anybody who tells me that they sincerely believe that we decide what is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ based on our preferences or our feelings is to lean over and steal something from them. When they protest (“Give me back my seal-skin gloves!”), I simply say, innocently and sweetly: ‘But I thought you said “good” and “evil” were just questions of personal preference. Well, my preference is that I’m smitten with your mittens.’ That usually changes the conversation quite rapidly.

Does he really want to steal my stuff? If that doesn’t fit with my plans, then I have society and the law to back me up. Theft where I come from is illegal. But if he’s just making a point, what’s the point? That people can steal things? Yes, they can—is that a revelation? We live in an imperfect society with many moral disagreements. If harm is involved, that’s usually central to society’s resolution of the problem.

Maybe he’s saying that his stealing something will snap me out of my simplistic reverie and return me to the real world. But what insights does he imagine he’s given me—that people don’t like being stolen from? That we share morals? We already know that. None of this argues for objective morality.

Next, Bannister moves on to fret if might makes right.

Yeah—sometimes it does. The Allies defeated Germany, so guess whose laws were used during the Nuremburg Trials. A German concentration camp commandant might have honestly thought that he was carrying out a noble mission, that he was right. However, the Allies disagreed, and since they won the war, they decide the standard of “right” used in the court.

In the West today, criminal defendants sometimes say that they were unjustly convicted. Is it right that they be punished? Not objectively so, but there’s no reason to imagine objective morals. Appeals may overturn a conviction, but until that point, might will prevail. It’s the best approximation to right that we have.

Consequences of the secular viewpoint

Bannister moves on to highlight some of the problems with human morality, and I largely agree with his concerns. What he wants to imagine is that he can solve these problems with a godly morality. And maybe he could, if such a morality existed, but he never gets beyond the, “Wouldn’t this be nice?” phase.

Challenge 1: If we go back to the 1950s and tell people that in 2017 we’re largely pleased that same-sex marriage is finally legal, most people would be horrified. Now imagine that the tables are turned so that we are the horrified, regressive people compared to people in society fifty or a hundred years in our future. What society declares as “good” changes with time.

Response: Obviously. Morality changes, and each society thinks that it has things largely figured out, though there are moral dissidents in each society, some longing for the morality of the Good Old Days and some pushing new attitudes that will gradually become accepted.

This causes no problem for my position, but I’m not the one who needs to justify the Bronze Age morality in the Old Testament.

Challenge 2: Without God, you can (1) let everyone decide good and evil for themselves. Or (2) the state decides, but then might makes right. With (1) morality is impossible, and with (2) morality is meaningless. In both cases, you have no absolute authority with which to overrule another person or state. But there is a solution: “If goodness were something bigger than us, something outside us. Only then could ethics, morality, and law actually work.”

Response: You know what it’s like to tell a joke and have it fall flat? That’s like Bannister’s Hail Mary suggestion that ethics, morality, and law might actually work if God were behind it. He supports this claim with nothing. He imagines that God is the authority that will resolve moral dilemmas, but how is that possible when you can find Christians today on every side of every moral issue?

Challenge 3: Sam Harris wants to use science to find morality. “I do give Harris credit for at least realizing something that many other atheist writers have failed to grasp—that atheism has a major problem when it comes to the question of goodness.”

Response: Atheism says nothing about goodness. That’s not a problem, just like it’s not a problem in chemistry or geology. It’s not supposed to—atheism is simply a lack of belief in god(s).

There are more, but you get the idea. He imagines that atheists are made uncomfortable by his tough hypotheticals. If his questions are uncomfortable, that’s only because they make me reach for a barf bag. They’re not driven by evidence. They’re forced. That reminds me of Christopher Hitchens charging a Christian with “trying to slip God through customs without declaring him.”

With Bannister’s argument, we never discover God waiting inevitably at the terminus of a logical sequence of evidence; rather God is shoehorned in. It might sound cute coming from a five-year-old, but it’s obnoxious coming from an adult. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a god to put things right for us?” Maybe, but why bring it up? Wouldn’t you like a unicorn, a submarine, and a ham sandwich? Maybe, but how does that fit into the conversation?

Bannister asks us where morality comes from, and he desperately wants us to pick God. Sorry—natural explanations are sufficient.

Continue with part 9.

Any God who would grant prayers for football championships
while doling out cancer and car accidents to little boys and girls
is unworthy of our devotion.
— Sam Harris,

Image credit: Wikipedia

Combat Myth: The Curious Story of Yahweh and the Gods Who Preceded Him

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The Combat Myth is a supernatural battle between order and chaos (or good and evil) that we see in mythologies of civilizations throughout the Ancient Near East, culminating with Judaism. Yahweh isn’t a remarkable god, different from the made-up gods in surrounding cultures. Instead, his story is just one stage in a long line of mythology. If the Akkadian god Anzu or the Babylonian god Marduk are obvious myths, Yahweh is the same.

While the Mesopotamian myths are unfamiliar to most of us, we see a hint in Greek mythology. Zeus wasn’t always the chief god of the Greek pantheon but took that role from his father Cronos. And Cronos succeeded his own father, Uranus. Though there are important differences, this succession is common to the Combat Myth.

1. Akkadian myth: Ninurta defeats Anzu

The Akkadian Empire followed Sumer as the primary Mesopotamian civilization. This myth developed about a thousand years before the Yahweh story in the Old Testament.

In the Akkadian pantheon, Enlil was the king of the gods. Kingship was invested in the god who possessed the Tablet of Destinies, which showed all that has happened and all that will happen.

The griffin-like Anzu, assistant to Enlil, steals the Tablet and flies away. Chaos threatens the order of the gods. Kingship will go to the god who restores order, but none steps up to respond to the challenge. Finally, Ninurta, an unimportant god to that point, volunteers.

Besides being able to fly, Anzu has two useful powers. One is that he can make all his feathers fly out and then come back, which distracts his opponents. The other is that he can disassemble things (such as arrows shot at him) into their component parts. And, of course, he has the Tablet, which is handy for seeing what an opponent is about to do.

The first battle is a stalemate. Anzu is able to disassemble Ninurta’s arrows. But Ninurta enters the second battle with a new stratagem. He shoots an arrow disguised as a feather at just the right moment so that it’s lost in Anzu’s cloud of feathers. Anzu pulls the feathers back in and is killed by the arrow. Order is restored, and Ninurta ascends to become the king of the gods.

The Combat Myth

From this, let’s distill out the Combat Myth. It begins with a chaotic threat to the council of the gods. None of the gods from the older generation is willing to face the challenge, but one young god steps up. He defeats the monster and becomes the new chief god. This structure is constant, though the details are customized in subsequent civilizations.

Two features are not shared by all examples. In some, we see the hero god dying and being reborn in the process. Also, our human world is sometimes created from the carcass of the slain chaos monster.

2. Babylonian myth: Marduk defeats Tiamat

This story comes from the Enuma Elis, the Babylonian creation epic. In the beginning were Tiamat, the female serpent or dragon who was salt water, and Absu, the male god who was the fresh water.

(I’ve written more about how the Genesis story parallels the Mesopotamian myth of a saltwater dome above the primordial earth and a fresh water ocean underneath.)

Tiamat and Absu create a generation of younger gods who become too noisy for Absu’s liking. He plans to kill them all, but they learn of his plan and kill him first. Tiamat is furious.

Marduk the storm god steps up to respond. He kills Tiamat, forms the universe from her body, and installs himself as king of the gods.

3. Ugaritic myth: Baal defeats Yam and then Mot

This myth comes from Ugarit, just north of Israel. It’s dated to roughly 1300 BCE. This is the environment from which Judaism emerged.

Our historical record is fragmentary, but El is the chief god, and Baal (“Lord”) volunteers to fight the chaos threat. (Yes, these are the same El and Baal mentioned in the Old Testament.) He uses a supernatural club to kill Yam (“Sea”), the serpent-like sea god. Some variations give Yam seven heads and use Lotan and Leviathan as synonyms.

Next, Baal fights Mot (“Death”), another threat to order. Baal dies in this battle but is brought back to life to finally overcome Mot.

4. Israelite myth: Yahweh defeats Leviathan

Early Judaism had the same council of the gods as in Ugaritic mythology. (I’ve written more on Israelite polytheism here.) Yahweh is a son of El (also called Elyon) and was just one of many in the council of the gods.

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods. Yahweh’s portion was his people, [Israel] his allotted inheritance. (Deuteronomy 32:8–9)

Yahweh was assigned Israel, and other gods in the council were given their own tribes to rule.

We see the Bible’s version of the Combat Myth in Psalms 89:5–12. First, Yahweh has taken his place as king of the council of the gods.

The heavens praise your wonders, Yahweh, your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies above can compare with Yahweh? Who is like Yahweh among the heavenly beings? In the council of the holy ones God is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.

Yahweh has slain the chaos monster Rahab (yet another name for the sea monster).

You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them. You crushed Rahab like one of the slain; with your strong arm you scattered your enemies.

Finally, Yahweh created the earth.

The heavens are yours, and yours also the earth; you founded the world and all that is in it.

We read a similar retelling in Psalms 74, where Yahweh is credited with creation. But first, he defeated the monster(s):

It was you who split open the sea [Yam] by your power; you broke the heads of the monster in the waters. It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. (Ps. 74:13–14)

We see this multi-headed dragon both looking back as Lotan in Ugaritic mythology and looking forward as the sea dragon in Revelation 13.

With Yahweh as just one more step in the evolution of the Combat Myth, little besides wishful thinking supports the idea that he alone is for real.

And that’s the point about beliefs—they don’t change facts.
Facts, if you’re rational, should change beliefs.
— Ricky Gervais (The Unbelievers movie trailer)

Acknowledgment: My primary source for this post was a podcast episode by Dr. Phil Harland (York University, Toronto) “Podcast 7.2: Origins part 1 – Ancient Near Eastern Combat Myths.” I recommend his “Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean” podcast.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/11/13.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

If Pro-Lifers Got into the Car Business

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Have you heard of Trinity Car Company? They’re new, and they claim to have a much more sensible approach to car buying. They’ve eliminated the showroom, and you go right to the factory. A friend of mine, whom I’ll call Frank, told me about his experience. For his college graduation present, Frank’s father made the down payment. Frank wasn’t sure that Trinity was the right car or that now was the right time, but he went along.

Frank was greeted in the lobby by the salesman, a clean-cut young man with a big smile.

“I’m amazed you’re so quick,” Frank said. “I just put my order in a week ago, and yet here I am.”

The salesman carried himself as if he had found his dream job. “We treat every car for the miracle it is,” he said. “‘Every Design has a Designer,’ after all.” He pointed up to the large plaque on the wall that carried the same motto. “Well, let’s go see your baby.” The salesman ushered Frank into a large room that appeared to be empty except for a car’s engine block on the floor. It lay on a fuzzy pink blanket. The pistons hadn’t been installed, and the six shiny cylinders were empty. “There you are,” he said. “You’ve made a nice choice. She’s a beaut! Five days ago, it was just a schematic.”

Frank looked around. “Where?”

“Right here.” The salesman took a step closer to the engine block and pointed.

“That’s not a car.”

“It is a car.” He put his hands on his hips and smiled, looking back and forth between Frank and the engine block. “Well, if we’re done here, let’s go wrap up the paperwork.”

“For what?” Frank said. “It’s not finished.”

“It will be.”

“Then get back to me when it is. I’m not paying $21,000 for that.”

The salesman cocked his head to the side like a perplexed puppy. “I must say, you seem to have a cramped definition of ‘car.’ Think about how fun it’ll be to drive.”

“But it’s not a car!”

“Of course it’s a car. What else would it be? It’s not a flower. It’s not a dinosaur. It’s a car. You’re just not familiar with the development process.” He walked over to the engine and pointed to the front of the block. “And take a look at this.”

Frank walked over and knelt next to him.

“See? It even has your VIN number—it’s unique.” The salesman ran his finger gently over the small engraved characters as he read out the number. “You can touch it if you want to.”

Frank stood and waved his hands. “Look, this is not what I wanted.”

The salesman said, “Getting a car is big step, I’ll grant you, but I’m sure you want to see this process through.”

“I do not.”

The salesman’s smile dissolved. “I can show you what it’ll look like next week and the week after that and so on. Let me show you the pictures.”

Frank held up his hands. “Hold on. Maybe this is my fault. To me, a ‘car’ is what it’ll be when it’s finished, but I don’t want to debate definitions. A car that won’t be finished for months simply won’t work for me. This isn’t a fit.” He took a step toward the door.

The salesman ran his hands through his hair compulsively, erasing the clean-cut façade. “You knew about this when you signed up.”

“What’s the big deal? Sell it to someone else.”

The salesman looked at Frank as if he’d vomited on himself. “That’s not the way it works here. You saw the VIN. This is your car! Do you know what happens if you don’t take it?” He paused to catch his breath. “Let me show you.” He took out a small packet of photos from his jacket pocket.

“No, that’s okay,” Frank said, stepping back.

“I insist.” The salesman stood between Frank and the door. “They come with a crane with sharp tongs. They pick it up. They drag it out.” He flipped through photos of these steps. “They put it in here.” This photo showed some sort of grinding machine with enormous teeth. “Is that what you want? Can you live with that?”

Frank feinted to one side, and the salesman blocked him. Frank dashed around the other side and ran to the door. He looked back as he yanked the door open.

The salesman was holding up the photos as if showing a cross to a vampire. “Murderer!” he said, his eyes glistening. “Murderer!”

I was not;
I was;
I am not;
I do not care.
— Epicurus’s observation on death

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/2/13.)

Image credit: Don O’Brien, flickr, CC