When I was little, I loved to hear about "the olden' days." As if we could generalize the past in one phrase! But it always fascinated me how people lived, what games kids played and what people did to pass the time! As I got older I came to understand each era and take it in context. It all started with that phrase "the olden' days." Learning about the past gave me a warm glow and that grew into my academic pursuits which are ongoing.
When I became a Christian in my teenage years, I heard this same expression used in a different way. The preaching cast an ethereal, magical canopy over the era that encompassed the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament era. There was a glow on these events through the words of the Bible. And taking Genesis as a history book, the past gets foggier and focused on this era as the origin story that explains it all. We can explain away the supernatural because of its literary beauty and convincing building blocks.
In a similar way we can see the origins of the United States as ethereal and otherworldly. People elude to characters from the past in caricature form: heroes, villains. Its a simplified way to understand history. I was on a mission to take away the fog and understand each culture in context. Regarding the United States, it didn't take long into my study to realize the absurdity of deifying or vilifying any founder. It wasn't that simple. Each player had interests and background and trying to generalize gets the historian into more and more issues. Adams was a very different person than Washington, Paine was a different thinker than Jefferson, Hancock had an agenda, so did King George and Lord North. There's so much to unload and sort out.
So we use sources to get past the glow and fog to put the events in context. These were people, they didn't exist in a vacuum. It was complicated. That's history.
But, at the same time as learning this, we come to the claims of the bible as a historical sourcebook. Could I use the same perspective I used to deconstruct other histories? or would this hold up as the one perfect, verifiable origin story? I didn't have a choice because this was the heavy lifting that I had to do to sort out the claim of the divine. Was I correct in assuming these recorded events were historically accurate? Did the validity of the bible rest on these texts being accurate?
For Christian apologists it certainly seemed that they were banking on these texts being accurate. Ken Ham's site is aptly called "Answers in Genesis." This was historic bedrock for a number of claims that were paramount to Christianity including: original sin, curse on the snake, prophecy of the seed, the historic claims of Noah, dispersion of languages, the promise to Abraham to bless all the world through his seed, the system of atonement by substitution and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but the creation account and the early history of humankind and the land claims of Israel. The fact that God spoke to one people group to preserve his word. And doing this, Christians claimed a direct descent from the promises to the Jewish people.
Just writing it out shows some deeply problematic historicity. As we look around the world, we can see religious movements rising out of an older idea of God and creating their own origin story. The issue here is that the origin story of the bible was created in a world that lacked the scientific and historical understanding and went unchallenged in the western world until those genres of study were able to sort things out. Obviously, with a monopoly on the historic view of the world, western cultures hold dearly to this foggy ethereal past. But that's why the sciences and history matter so much and using a multi-discipline approach, we can get a clear view of the past.
Before the fog rolls away, its important to state something. We can vilify this era as fraudulent all we want just like older generations venerated it. Neither is beneficial in a historic context! There is benefit to studying these works and the people of this period. And there's no way to take away the influence that they have had on Western Civilization just because we find that they also have a context. Historians have correctly stated that the world would look vastly different without Judaism or Christianity/Islam.
As the fog rolls away we see the Jewish holy texts in a wider perspective of 2nd millennium BC Canaan and the various polytheistic religions and pastoral cultures. And we see similar origin stories and values. But none of these existed in a vacuum either. Archeologists and Anthropologists are paramount to tracing civilizations back further and further and using that lateral academic approach to understanding the past better. It makes sense that the origin story of Abram starts in Ur of the Chaldeans and we see older civilizations in this area and a context for the religion of the Jewish people! It broadens our horizons and helps us find that common ground.
It also means we need to deal with inerrancy and literalism. Science couldn't be clearer regarding the development of homo sapiens from other cousins in Africa and then spreading out over the world until they were the last of the homo genus. DNA shows this and we can look back at sites all over the world to track development of culture. Evidence of tools, art and an academic approach to dating and bringing this to a consensus.
Art is a powerful tool to looking at the past. I will never forget looking at the various cave paintings that I assumed would be primitive. They were transcendent! Art that would stand the probing eye of modern artists like Picasso who saw the paintings and stated that we have created nothing new! It brought me to the point where I needed to see the world of these hunter gatherers and understand them! Otherwise, my historical curiosity would not be quenched and I'd be restless.
It opened up my eyes to the other element of scholarship: multi-ethnic and international cooperation. And that meant not holding one origin story to be silly or inerrant. But to take each one and find value in sacred works, laws and tales. A respect for the human need to tell stories and sort out the past in order to draw out morals and standards!
When the fog rolled away from the Genesis story, the world burst in a magnificent firework of beauty! The world looked bigger and also smaller because I could see commonality like never before.
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