Henke 2022bL

A Lot of Gullible People Believe Lies

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I stated that:

“In Lundahl (2022d), Lundahl (2022f), Lundahl (2022b), and in several of his emails, Mr. Lundahl makes a totally unwarranted assumption that if the earliest known audience believed that Genesis 3 or another claim in an ancient text was historically true, then the claims must be true. Of course, this assumption is nonsense for the following reasons:

1. People lie and make up stories.

2. People misinterpret natural events and sometimes credit them to supernatural forces (e.g., volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, severe storms, draught [sic, drought]).

3. The history of Mormonism, Scientology, etc. demonstrate that lies can become accepted by thousands or even millions of gullible people in a short amount of time, perhaps in no more than decades or a century.

4. Even if ancient historians (such as the five ancient biographers of Alexander the Great, Section 6.0) were sincere and honest, they still may have included inaccurate information, false rumors and misinterpretations in their works.

5. We don’t know who wrote Genesis 3 and when it was written.

6. The Dead Sea scrolls have the oldest known fragments of Genesis. This was about 1,000 years after Moses supposedly wrote the book. So, how could the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls have reliably known anything about events that occurred perhaps a thousand or more years earlier? How does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 is not a fabrication that may have been additionally altered or rewritten long before the Dead Sea scrolls? Why should anyone trust the claims in Genesis? Lundahl (2022c) assumes that God would have protected Genesis from corruption, but this assumption is totally without merit.

7. The biology of snakes is incompatible with them talking and there’s no evidence of either a supernatural or biological Talking Snake ever existing.

8. As further discussed in Section 5.0 and Henke (2022a), Hypotheses #3 and #4 on the origin of the Genesis 3 Talking Snake are rational, but Hypotheses #1 and #2 are not.

9. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that the claims in Genesis 3 and elsewhere in the Bible are factual.

Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that ancient histories by themselves cannot be trusted, especially if they were written centuries or millennia after the supposed event that they are describing or if the documents are copies of copies of copies of copies... and not the originals Even if an ancient history happens to be an original copy describing an event that occurred at the time that the document was written, unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history. There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.” [my original emphasis in italics only; my current emphasis in bold]

Lundahl (2022k) makes the following comments about point #3 in Henke (2022b), where I stated that large numbers of gullible people often believe lies:

“I don't know how many Scientologists believe fraudulent claims involving Xenu, and how many just seek a method for living (like dianetics seems to be a kind of hypnotherapy with very light trance and heavy coaching). For Mormonism, the claims in the book of Mormon are in a sense accepted as historic, but in another sense, they aren't. a) Because the first audience includes US citizens who did not become Mormons, b) because even those who became such, considered the transmission of the facts to be of a miraculous order (involving golden plates) and not of a historic order (involving for instance Joseph Smith interviewing Indians).”

I agree that the number of Scientologists that can actually afford to reach the level where Xenu is introduced and then accept that belief is certainly up for debate.

Currently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Utah branch) has over 16 million members. Plus, there are other Latter Day Saint denominations with up to thousands of members that also consider Joseph Smith Jr. to have been a prophet. Although there are Christian denominations with many more members than the Mormons, 16 million is still not a trivial number.

Even though the Mormons readily admit that Joseph Smith Jr. “miraculously” translated the Book of Mormon into English, they would argue that the original gold plates were an inerrant “history” finished by Moroni around the 5th century AD. The plates were then carefully preserved in the ground from the 5th to the 19th century until Joseph Smith Jr. recovered them. The Mormons would further argue that the “first known audience” of the Book of Mormon were the Jews that wrote the “history” on the golden plates and not the 19th century Americans. Joseph Smith Jr. merely found and translated this “history.” Supposedly, several eyewitnesses actually saw the original plates of the Book of Mormon that Moroni and others had written (Hinckley 1979). While Joseph Smith Jr. supposedly was able to translate the Book of Mormon into English through visions produced by magic seer stones, the Mormons would also point out that the books of the Bible also have a “miraculous order.” They would argue that the Holy Spirit “miraculously translated” Jesus’ Aramaic into perfect Greek for the original Gospels and that the writing of the Bible books often involved visions and not historical accounts, such as in Ezekiel and Revelation. Mormons would also claim that they have copies of Joseph Smith Jr.’s first English edition of the Book of Mormon. This is in contrast to the potentially corrupted copies of copies of copies … of Old and New Testament books dating centuries to perhaps even more than 1,000 years after the originals. Mormons then conclude that the chain of custody (Moroni directly to Joseph Smith Jr. and then directly to the public) and reliability of the Book of Mormon are far superior to what Christians and Jews could claim for the Bible. Although Mr. Lundahl and I recognize that the Book of Mormon is a fraudulent document and that Joseph Smith Jr.’s claims about its origin have no merit whatsoever, where’s Mr. Lundahl’s evidence that any book of the Bible is inerrant and totally trustworthy when all of the originals have been lost? Where’s Mr. Lundahl’s archeological and other evidence that Moses actually existed, wrote the Pentateuch and that our Hebrew manuscripts are exact copies of the originals when Tov (2001) and archeology books like Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) say otherwise? Because Joseph Smith Jr. and the Book of Mormon have deceived millions of people, why couldn’t the Bible?

When we look at 19th century America as Mormonism developed, we see a nation that was not homogeneous. Although the vast majority of Americans opposed (sometimes violently) Mormonism, the religion survived and grew. Whenever a religion starts, there are always skeptics and non-believers among the “first audience.” This is another reason not to accept the “earliest first audience” argument because any audience is unlikely to have a uniform set of beliefs. That is, whether it’s ancient Israel or 19th century America, the nation was not even close to being a monolithic group. So, which beliefs among the “earliest first audience” should we accept and how do we know that those beliefs were really representative of the majority of the “first audience”?

Certainly, there were plenty of skeptics of Mormonism going back to at least the publication of Howe (1834). Today, there are a number of staunch critics of Scientology, including actress Leah Remini. Similarly, archeological evidence indicates that polytheism and henotheism were common from the very beginning in ancient Israel and that these beliefs had nothing to do with Exodus 32 (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman 2001; Dever 2005). We can argue that by the time of the Dead Sea scrolls, the vast majority of Jews probably accepted Genesis 3 as something that actually happened. However, how does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 was immediately accepted by the vast majority of ancient Israelites when it was first written? He can’t. Even if 100% of the first audience of Genesis 3 believed that the verses were history, how do we know that they were right? We don’t. There’s a big difference between a group of people believing that an event happened in their distant past and them actually being able to demonstrate with good evidence that their beliefs are correct. Conservative Christians have a long and difficult job ahead of them to demonstrate that the entire Bible is the inerrant word of God. They will need a lot of evidence that they simply do not have.

Starting with the supposed accounts of Judas, there have always been individuals that became dissatisfied with Christianity and left it or never wanted to join it in the first place for whatever reason (e.g., Acts 17:18-34). Around 110 AD, Pliny the Younger in his letter to Trajan supposedly met individuals that had left Christianity as long as 25 years ago previously. So, what good is relying on what the “earliest first audience” believed, when their beliefs were never monolithic, but greatly varied? How does Mr. Lundahl know that Jesus’ actual teachings are in the New Testament? Perhaps, they were recorded in the Gospel of According to the Hebrews or another apocryphal Gospel, or perhaps Jesus’ actual teachings are entirely lost. We simply do not know.

References:

Dever, W.G. 2005. Did God Have a Wife?: Archeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, USA, 344pp.

Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.

Hinckley, G.B. 1979. Truth Restored: Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 156pp.

Howe, E.D. 1834. Mormonism Unvailed: Or A Faithful Account of that Singular Imposition and Delusion, from its Rise to the Present Time, with Sketches of the Characters of its Propagators: Paintsville, Ohio, https://www.mormonismi.net/pdf/Mormonism_Unvailed_Howe.pdf (accessed September 6, 2022).

Tov, E. 2001. Textural Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd revised ed., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 456pp.