Henke 2022dL

Memories and Mr. Lundahl has No Evidence for the Initial Transmission of Genesis 3

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I stated:

“As indicated in Lundahl (2022c), Mr. Lundahl accepts Hypothesis #1. In Lundahl (2022d), he argues that “historical events” in Genesis 3 could have been successfully passed down from Adam through Moses using Hypothesis #1 by comparing the number of generations between Adam and Moses with the number of generations between the battle of Granicus (May 334 BC) and when it was recorded and the fall of Troy (1179-1185 BC) and when it was recorded centuries later. Besides containing individuals that are unidentified and solely hypothetical, his Granicus and Troy chains also mention Nestor, Diodoros Sikeliotes, Arrian and Homer. For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later. Unfortunately, Lundahl (2022d) fails to realize that the memories of his hypothetical 20-year-olds would tend to considerably fade and distort long before they turn 80. Human memories are not that good and, in reality, details are often lost or even completely fictionalized over time. A good example of memory loss and alteration are seen with the eyewitnesses of the Challenger and the September 11^th disasters. See Neisser and Harsch (1992) and Greenberg (2004). Tepper (2014) also gives a layperson’s summary of the Challenger study at: https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0128/Where-were-you-when-the-Challenger-exploded-Why-your-memory-might-be-wrong Years later, people are often shocked by what they wrote or said in videos immediately after the events. They are no longer remembering the events correctly. People also lie and boast about seeing events that they really did not. As I have seen with some of my relatives, senile individuals in their 80s may actually come to believe some of the stories that they obviously made up.” [my emphasis]

Lundahl (2022m) then especially replies to the bolded sentence in the above paragraph:

“Here is his core point:

Kevin R. Henke: ‘For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later.’

Mine is, it is easier to recall the words you make on an event or someone else told you about an event, in a short text, than it is to recall the vivid details of the event correctly. I have compared the early chapters of Genesis, which I consider to have been transmitted at least at some point orally (maximally for Genesis 3, all the way from Adam and Eve driven from the garden or them telling Cain about it as a child a few years later to Abraham setting out to serve with his Beduin tribe God, with writing material at their disposal, and minimally, Sarug read it in written form, but his son and grandson took it away and he had to transmit it from memory to Abraham), as to text length, to creeds and to songs of the Homeric epics.

Creation vs. Evolution : Length of Two Texts

https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2019/11/length-of-two-texts.html

Creation vs. Evolution : 6078 Words

https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/12/6078-words.html

Long story short, once a memory is verbalised in a short text, and the sooner this happens after the event, the more accurate it is likely to be, if the text is rehearsed by self and by others learning from one, it will be correctly transmitted more likely than incorrectly. Known text versions on the Iliad basically involve things like an invocation to Apollon rather than to the Muse in the beginning of Iliad A. It's not a question of diverging accounts of events. And this despite Homeric songs being transmitted orally from Homer to the time of the Sons of Peisistratus. Milman Parry confirmed an overall accurate memory (though inclusion and exclusion of details could vary from performance to performance) of a text as long as the Vitovdan epic:

Parry’s career as a classicist lasted about fifteen years, from the first Greek courses he took until his sudden death, in 1935, at the age of thirty-three. He published no books and only a few papers. His most important research, undertaken in the last years of his life, involved travelling to remote areas of Yugoslavia to make recordings of local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier. These recordings revolutionized the understanding of oral literature, but when Parry died no one had yet listened to them; they were just a pile of thirty-five hundred aluminum disks sitting in a Harvard storage room.

The Newyorker : The Classicist Who Killed Homer

How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.

By Adam Kirsch, June 7, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer

Note the title is tendentious. What he proved is, Homer did not write and he used already in-use formulas (while he could have invented a few extra ones himself). The composition was made for oral transmission.

There are two main ways to achieve faithful oral transmission : easily recognisable features along the text (like dactylic metre and epic formulas) and simply shortness. Homer and Serbian bards have the former, Genesis 1 to 11 and Austrian legends (mostly more historical than Paracelsus' "kiss the penny" episode) have the latter. This is a very different story from trying to recall 60 years later what you had experienced yourself and not verbalised. There is however another aspect to this:

Kevin R. Henke ‘For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later.’

We are not dealing with all the overlapping generations of the transmission, we are reducing to a minimally overlapping generations - the limits of which involve when your new learners can no longer refer to your oldest teacher but needs to refer to you (or to older pupils of his).

We are also not dealing with a single line of transmission unsupported by parallel transmissions in other lineages. A Homeric bard in Athens could verify with a Homeric bard in Korinth, if they met before Peisistratus. A Yugoslav bard in Belgrade could confer with a bard in Kosovo, before Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës took over some areas. While the main responsibility of recalling the lineage in Genesis 5 was on that lineage, not on the Cainite one in Genesis 4, it did mirror the genealogy on the line from Cain to Lamech and his sons, and probably both had a recall of Genesis 3, and the Cainite one had a mirror of the Genesis 5 genealogy.

So, no, the transmission conditions would be far from hopeless or from totally unreliable.

In this quotation, Lundahl (2022m) provides some lengthy discussions along with a few references on how people in oral cultures could supposedly memorize stories and effectively pass them on from generation to generation. In reality, cognitive scientist and philosopher Dennett (2006, pp. 141-151) and his references discuss the effectiveness of memorization in oral cultures and, contrary to what Lundahl (2022m) claims, it’s not very effective. Nevertheless, all of the arguments in Lundahl (2022m) about the effectiveness of memorization and his shear speculation in “Length of Two Texts” about the supposed superior intelligence and memories of post-Babel people are absolutely worthless because Mr. Lundahl has never demonstrated that Adam, Eve, Cain, “Sarug” (Serug, Genesis 11:20), and Abraham ever existed. How can Mr. Lundahl speculate about what these characters did or could do if we don’t even know if they ever existed? Again, Mr. Lundahl is just making up stories about the Bible and expecting people to blindly accept whatever he says. Even conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews that believe Hypothesis #2 of Henke (2022a) would find Mr. Lundahl’s speculations and excuse-making about Genesis to be too far-fetched to be believed.

Reference:

Dennett, D.C. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon: Viking: Penguin Group: New York, 448pp.