Further to Ancient Science
My colleague Rick Brannan of ricoblog fame has found some rather curious science in the Epistle of Barnabas. Do check it out.
Never mind the plainly silly science, the exegetical method the author of EpBarn is using here is creative, to say the least. Of all the lines of reasoning I can think of not to be a pederast, this wasn’t one I thought of:
A — The Mosaic law declares certain kinds of hares to be unclean.
B — Hares grow a new posterior opening to the alimentary canal each year.
Therefore — A means, “Don’t (ahem) mess around with young boys.”
Clearly, when we read ancient texts, we are dealing with with a world view in most ways foreign to our own. Our assumptions concerning many facts about the natural world are different, and when that happens, the ancient folks are usually just wrong. Hares do no such thing. The causes of disease, the mechanisms of fecundity in mammals, the function of organs in the human body, the nature and composition of the stars and planets: Our assumptions now are fundamentally different from theirs then.
They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. So what?
There is an understandable impulse in believers to exempt the Bible from this phenomenon, along these lines:
A — God knows everything;
B — God wrote the Bible;
Therefore — The Bible doesn’t have any of these weird science moments.
I disagree:
Premise A — God may know everything but I certainly don’t, never mind the backward folk who have read the book throughout the centuries. It does not follow that God, when communicating his message to humankind, must freight it with facts that cannot possibly be understood by his audience. Sacrificing the comprehensibility of your message in favor of technical precision is a rather perverse way to communicate, and I tend to think of God as something other than perverse. To the contrary, he seems genuinely to want to get his message across.
Premise B — God didn’t “write” the Bible. He inspired human beings to write it. This is not the post in which I will wade into that particular patch of tall grass, but suffice it to say that this premise is an oversimplification.
Conclusion — Sorry, no. The Bible has plenty of bad science. For just one example, rain does not come from sluices opened in the firmament (Gen 7:11). Such plainly false assumptions about the world and its workings underpin both the imagery and argumentation of the biblical text.
There, I said it: Plainly false.
As an exegete, you have three choices: Ignore it, explain it away, or deal honestly with it. I choose the third path, but I don’t worry about it much. They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. And it’s okay for them to have been wrong at the time. We’re probably wrong now, too.
Ombudsman
pilgrim at strangerpilgrim dot com
