Tradition, “Collective Memory” and the “Earliest Known Audience” are Not Evidence of Adam or Moses. Mr. Lundahl Needs to Do Better.
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
Starting with Henke (2022dm), I am replying to some responses that Lundahl (2022m) gave to a series of questions from Henke (2022b). In a section of Henke (2022b), I reintroduced the four hypotheses on the origin of the Talking Snake story in Genesis 3 and I gave a series of questions for Mr. Lundahl to answer dealing with his support for Hypothesis #1. Here’s the context and the responses in Lundahl (2022m) to my second and third questions in bold:
“In Henke (2022a), I proposed four hypotheses to explain Genesis 3 with its Talking Snake story:
1. The Talking Snake existed and the account in Genesis 3 was accurately passed down by Adam to Moses. Moses then wrote it down in Genesis. There would have been no human eyewitnesses for most of the events in Genesis 1-2:14. If Genesis 1-2:14 is history, God would have to have given the information in these verses as visions.
2. Moses saw Genesis 1-3 and perhaps most or even all of everything else in Genesis through visions given by God. There didn’t need to be a continuous human transmission of information from Adam to Moses. Visions from God would not be open to errors unlike written or oral transmissions from Adam to Moses.
3. The Talking Snake of Genesis 3 was part of a made-up campfire story, a parable or based on a pagan myth that eventually was taken as fact by the ancient Israelites, like how President Reagan and his fans mistook fictional stories from World War 2 as real. William Tell (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/ ) and a number of Roman Catholic saints (https://listverse.com/2014/05/17/10-beloved-saints-with-fictitious-biographies/ ) are probably also myths. Of course, in the United States, pro-abortionists regularly use fictional TV shows to convince Americans that abortion is a good thing. Even though they are fiction, many people believe the propaganda. Right now, a lot of Russians are believing the fictional propaganda their government is inventing about Ukraine. People also often pick and choose parts of fictional stories that they want to believe and ignore the rest, such as individuals believing in the existence of “The Force” from the Star Wars movies, while recognizing that the rest of the movies are fiction. A lot of people are gullible and believe fictions are real.
4. “Prophets” or others claimed to have visions from God about events that supposedly happened thousands of years earlier. These visions were delusions or outright lies, but a lot of people came to believe them. Joseph Smith also did this and Kat Kerr continues with this nonsense in the US.
This is a serious issue for conservative Christianity. If the Talking Snake story is fiction, then how did Adam and Eve fall into sin? Did Adam and Eve even exist? If there was no Fall, then why did Jesus need to die for an Atonement for sin? If Genesis 3 never happened, what keeps the entire foundation of conservative Christianity from collapsing? Thus, any conservative Christian must find some way of demonstrating with either Hypothesis #1 or #2 that Genesis 3 is history and that Hypotheses #3 and #4 that promote Genesis 3 as probable myth must be false.
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 11th 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.
Lundahl (2022d) then states:
“The Battle of the Granicus in May 334 BC / Troy Conquered 1180 BC (between 1179 and 1185) - someone was 20 and could recall it well.
60 years passes, he is 80 and dies, but before that, someone who is then twenty has been formed by him : 274 / 1120.
60 more years, handed on to third minimally overlapping tradition bearer : 214 / 1060.
Fourth needs to take over as Nestor - within the minimal overlapping generations, not overall - in : 150 / 1000.
Fifth : 90 (had Diodoros Sikeliotes as younger contemporary) / 940.
Sixth : 30 / 880.
Seventh : 40 AD / 820.
Eighth : 100 AD (we are talking Arrian) / 760 (we are talking Homer).
In Masoretic chronology, Moses would be eighth from Adam, as Haydock said, and in LXX (without the second Cainan) Abraham would be sixth from Adam, Moses 12th.
In each of the three cases, we believe the eighth generation account to be reliable because:
· it was in its time believed to be history (or it wouldn't have acquired that status later)
· there is no reason specifically to believe someone specific actually frauded about it being history, no potential Joseph Smith in sight.
If it is adequate in two of the cases, there is no real reason why it wouldn't be so on the third case too. Except obviously, Henke has, contrary to his announced agnosticism, a pre-set agenda excluding talking snakes and such. But that agenda is - however respectable it may be in academia - no actual reason to exclude the history of Moses from historicity.”
Once more, Mr. Lundahl uses fallacious circular reasoning by invoking groundless claims for the existence of two biblical characters (i.e., Moses and Adam) to justify the existence of another groundless biblical character (i.e., the Talking Snake of Genesis 3). Before Lundahl (2022d) can even make these proclamations, he needs to thoroughly answer the following questions, which he has, so far, utterly failed to do:
· [#1] How can Mr. Lundahl demonstrate that any of his three eighth generational examples were passed down uncorrupted and without any mythology?
· [#2] Where is the evidence that Moses and Adam even lived?
· [#3] Where is the contemporary evidence that this individual named Moses had anything to do with the origin Genesis 3?” [my emphasis]
Lundahl (2022m) then responds to the second and third bolded questions:
· [#2] Where is the evidence that Moses and Adam even lived?”
“In the traditions from them, written and oral, as preserved in the collective memory of the Hebrews.”
· [#3] “Where is the contemporary evidence that this individual named Moses had anything to do with the origin Genesis 3?”
“Earliest known audience of Genesis considered Moses as the author.”
Lundahl (2022m) needs to provide archeological or other external evidence for Adam and Moses. Instead, he has little or nothing worthwhile to offer when he gives these flippant and baseless replies. Traditions, “collective memories”, and “earliest known audiences” are not reliable evidence of history. They may be nothing more than centuries of a lot of people believing in made-up stories and misinterpretations. Archeologists Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) discuss the archeological results on the origin of the nation of Israel and demonstrate that there’s no evidence that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and that the “collective memory” of the Israelites in Genesis, Exodus and elsewhere in the Old Testament is largely wrong. In particular, they noted that considerable progress in deciphering the historical origins of Israel only began once archeologists stopped taking the claims in the book of Joshua at face value (p. 105). Finkelstein and Silberman (2001, p. 118) concluded that Israel did not result from a massive Exodus from Egypt and the violent conquest of the Canaanites as indicated in Exodus, Joshua and other Old Testament books. The massive Exodus from Egypt never happened. Instead, Israel emerged from within the Canaanites. Mr. Lundahl needs to realize that just because a story is old and widely believed, this is no reason to label it as “history.”
The ancient Israelites are not the only group to have an “earliest known audience” with a fictional “collective memory.” Many Native tribes have traditions and “collective memories” about their leaders descending from gods. For example, the Zepotecs of Mexico believed that the most powerful members of their tribe descended from gods that lived in the clouds. Hawaiian kings also believed that they were descended from gods. Until the end of WWII, many Japanese thought that their Emperor was descended from the Sun goddess Amaterasu and the Kamikazes were willing to die for their religion. Today, a few Japanese still believe that their Empire is divine. Of course, there’s no reason to accept any of these claims.
References:
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.
Greenberg, D.L. 2004. “President Bush’s False ‘Flashbulb’ Memory of 9/11/01” Applied Cognitive Psychology, v. 18, pp. 363-370.
Neisser, U. and N. Harsch. 1992. “Phantom flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger” in E. Winograd and U. Neisser (eds.), Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of "Flashbulb" Memories, Cambridge University Press, pp. 9–31.