Henke 2022dj

We Can’t Blindly Trust Copies of Copies of Copies… of Accounts Written Long after the Supposed Events

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

A lot of Lundahl (2022m) consists of quoting email exchanges that he and I had back in February 17-18, 2022. In an email to Mr. Lundahl on February 17, 7:29 PM US Eastern Time, I wrote:

“There are partial copies of Genesis in the Dead Sea scrolls, but the bottom line is that we don't know who wrote Genesis 3 or when. It's very possible that the writer sincerely thought that Genesis 3 was an inspiration from God about events that occurred thousands of years ago from the author's time. However, that does not make it history any more than the ramblings of Joseph Smith about supposed events that occurred in the Americas thousands of years ago before him or the delusions or lies of Kat Kerr about "Christmas Town" in Heaven. It does not take very long for a charismatic con-man to form a religion and get millions to believe fiction and half-truths - Mohammad or Joseph Smith. Any blood relationships of Mormons to 18th and 19th century novelists doesn't matter at all. The point is that there are millions of people believing that fiction was actually ancient history.” [my emphasis]

In his reply to my bolded statement, Lundahl (2022m) simply quotes the following section of an email to me on February 18, 2022 at 7:37 PM US Eastern Time:

“There is a Xth C. manuscript of Caesar in Carolingian France. Are you saying we don't know Caesar wrote the Commentarii de Bello Gallico? This is exactly where I as a Classicist can give you the context you lack of what comparative evidence is needed in comparative cases. You said you have studied YEC for 40 + years. But I have studied a lot of other things, which have helped to prepare me for that debate during the same 40 + years.”

I’m not sure what Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum (Commentary on the Gallic War) has to do with Genesis 3 and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nevertheless, I would approach the claims in the Commentary on the Gallic War with the exact same standards that I used to evaluate the claims about Alexander the Great or any other claims about ancient history. Now, is it possible that someone cleverly forged part or all of the Commentary on the Gallic War just as individuals forged 1 Enoch, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Revelation of Peter and other apocryphal works that almost got into the Bible? Certainly. Nevertheless, before we can decide whether or not Caesar actually wrote the Commentary on the Gallic War, we need to determine if any of the claims in the document are supported by archeological or other contemporary external evidence. If the claims in the document cannot be collaborated and if there’s internal evidence that the document might have been forged or tampered with during hundreds of years of copying, then it can’t be trusted no matter who the author might have been. We don’t blindly accept whatever these ancient documents say especially if we only have a copy of a copy of a copy… from nearly a 1,000 years after Caesar lived.

As further discussed in Henke (2022eb), Lundahl (2022m) again brings up the topic of Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallio (Commentary on the Gallic War), but this time as an example of his “earliest known audience” scam and as another unnecessary diversion to one of my questions in Henke (2022b).

Now, for more on my background. I started out as a young-Earth creationist around 1977 and, after taking several college-level geology courses, I became quite critical of it a few years later. So, after studying the issues, I had to admit that I was wrong and recognize that the geological record indicates that Earth is far older than 6,000 to 10,000 years. Mr. Lundahl, have you ever used the Method of the Multiple Working Hypotheses and radically changed your mind on a major issue? If you have, great! However, if you have only spent decades reinforcing your preconceived religious beliefs and indoctrinating yourself against the opposing evidence then I think that you’ve wasted a lot of time. If you really started preparing for this kind of a debate when you were about 14 years old, you would be providing solid archeological and other scientific evidence, and not relying on flawed traditions and unsubstantiated claims about “first known audiences” and “normal historic collective memories” to try to convince our readers and me that a Talking Snake and magic fruit trees actually existed.