Henke 2022bo

Why Believe in Any Accounts in Ancient Documents if They are Not Supported by Archeological or External Other Evidence?

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 rambling and unreliable comments about the Dead Sea Scrolls in point #6 of Henke (2022b) and supposedly why we should trust the beliefs and traditions of the ancient Israelites:

“This is so parallel to Plutarch's parallel lives, to Caesar's corpus (corpus caesareum), to probably Arrian as well, even if I couldn't find the earliest preserved manuscript for Arrian. The solution is, for books this old, ‘earliest known manuscript’ adds a terminus ante quem, but furnishes nothing like a terminus post quem. The authorship is in all the secular cases based on earliest known audience, precisely as genre historic vs fictional is, ‘epic poetry’ and ‘tragedy’ being among historic genres, and not by the accident of not having a manuscript preserved to us prior to 1000 years after the purported original.”

According to Mr. Lundahl’s preference, The Oxford English Dictionary, terminus ante quem refers to “the latest possible date at which something could have occurred or might occur” and terminus post quem refers to “the earliest possible date at which something could have occurred or might occur.” For the sake of our readers, it would be nice if Mr. Lundahl stopped showing off his knowledge of Latin and just clearly write in English so that all of our readers can understand him.

Once more, instead of providing evidence that Moses ever existed and wrote the Pentateuch, Lundahl (2022k) rambles on about other unrelated ancient sources that also have questionable claims and supposedly also involve his unreliable “earliest known audience” scheme (see Henke (2022b); Henke 2022bh). As I discussed in Henke (2022b), there’s no reason to believe Greco-Roman, Biblical or other ancient stories actually happened unless they are confirmed by archeology or are supported by other external evidence. Again, over the ages, people have frequently lied. Gullible audiences have then believed them and written down these lies as “history” and “scripture.”