Henke 2022bm

Mr. Lundahl Must Fulfill His Wishes and Demonstrate Both the Historicity and Inerrancy of Genesis 3. He has Totally Failed to Do So in Lundahl (2022d), Lundahl (2022k) and His Other Essays and Emails

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 #4 in Henke (2022b) and raises the issue of inerrancy and the works of ancient Roman historians:

“Indeed. The absence of false claims is to me not synonymous with "historicity" in a general sense, but with "inerrancy" - and while I believe both to be true of Genesis 3, I believe them to be different truths about it. Since I know Henke to be a non-Christian, I am at first mainly concerned in establishing historicity, not inerrancy.”

I also don’t equate historicity with inerrancy. In Henke (2022bh), I’ve already admitted that it is highly doubtful that any historical account is without error. That’s why nothing on my history probability scale in Henke (2022b) ever ranks a 100.

Hypotheses #3 and #4 in Henke (2022b) already state that the ancient Israelites came to believe either by misinterpretation or by being deliberately deceived that Genesis 3 actually happened. Clearly, these hypotheses argue that the ancient Israelites (Mr. Lundahl’s “first audience”) were wrong about Genesis 3. Just because a high percentage of a “first audience” happens to believe that a story is history that does not make it history. Evidence is needed to separate delusions and lies from facts. So far, Mr. Lundahl has utterly failed to demonstrate that Genesis 3 is history. Hypotheses #3 and #4 remain intact. If Mr. Lundahl ever finds enough evidence to state that Genesis 3 more or less actually happened, his work does not stop there. He must then demonstrate the second part of his desires. He must somehow find additional evidence that the account in Genesis 3 is not just history, but “inerrant history.”