Untrustworthy Genealogies: Genesis and the Book of Mormon
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022; Footnote added November 25, 2022
Starting with Henke (2022dm), I am replying to responses that Lundahl (2022m) gave to a series of questions from Henke (2022b). In 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 along with the response that Lundahl (2022m) gave to the fifth question in bold from Henke (2022b):
“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?
· [#4] Why should we believe the genealogies in Genesis at all when Lundahl (2022d) admits that there are inconsistencies between the Septuagint (LXX) and the Masoretic texts? Although Lundahl (2022d) believes that Moses was the 8th from Adam, there’s absolutely no evidence or reason to trust this claim (Price 2017, pp. 59-92).
· [#5] Why should we believe the genealogies in Genesis, when someone can easily make up genealogies and effectively pass them off to millions of gullible people (e.g., Ether 1:6-32 in the Book of Mormon)? As seen in the Book of Mormon, any liar can claim to be an “eyewitness” to any event.” [my emphasis]
Lundahl (2022m) replies to the fifth question in bold:
“To this day, Mormons have not considered these genealogies as normally transmitted lore up to Joseph Smith, they still show they pass it off as something that was revealed to him. The purported normal transmission ceased around 400 AD and the last purported product of it in writing was then "miraculously" revealed to Joseph Smith. You do not need to bring it up again, it may be a dear speaking point to you, but as for this debate, I have already answered it several times over.”
As I have stated numerous times, of course, the Mormons don’t consider the genealogies in the Book of Mormon to have been “normally transmitted”! That’s the whole point! I have to keep repeating the Mormons’ arguments because Mr. Lundahl does not understand their point of view and how problematic it is for his unfounded assumptions about the reliability of the Bible. The Mormons think that the Book of Mormon is far more reliable than the Bible because it did not pass through centuries of numerous human hands and corrupt religious institutions. As I stated in Henke (2022b), and Henke (2022db), Mormons consider the “normally transmitted” copies of copies of copies... of the Bible to be inferior to the simple and “fool-proof” God-inspired transmission of the Book of Mormon: Golden Plates inspired by God à Moroni àJoseph Smith, Jr. à Public. Although I agree with Mr. Lundahl that Mormonism is fiction, he simply does not understand that Genesis is no more reliable than the Book of Mormon. Mr. Lundahl is also totally failing to realize that any “prophet”, “priest”, “king” or other powerful leader or group of people could have easily made-up genealogies about make-believe people that supposedly lived hundreds or even thousands of years earlier and call it “scripture.” Genesis 5 is no more probable than the Sumerian King List, which also has ridiculous lifespans.
I’ve even seen numerous examples of erroneous genealogies at www.Ancestry.com where the “parent” is born after the “son” or “daughter”, or where the “mother” dies years before the child is born. In other cases, a review of the public records indicates that many other individuals in the public family trees are out-of-place or have no evidence of existing. Yet, large numbers of unthinking people just insert these defective genealogies into their own family trees.
Lundahl (2022m) has repeatedly failed to deal with the huge knowledge gap in Genesis between when it was written and the time of the earliest known copies in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where’s the evidence that supports Moses supposedly writing Genesis? Genesis does not even list an author. It’s anonymous. How did Moses know that Aaron was his brother or how did Moses know the identities of his parents or his other ancestors unless it’s fiction or God told him as advocates of Hypothesis #2 claim?* How do we really know that Moses actually existed? Mormons would further claim that while the churches were miscopying and altering the Bible over centuries, the divinely inspired and eye-witnessed Golden Plates were safely in the ground and unaltered from the 5th to the 19th century AD.
*It turns out that Moses’ sister supposedly saw Pharoah’s daughter take Moses (Exodus 2:4). If this event ever happened, it could explain how Moses knew that Aaron was his brother.
Mr. Lundahl’s “first known audience”, “collective memory” and arguments about traditions are totally inadequate excuses for why anyone should think that Genesis is history. I total reject his weak excuses and so would many others. Mr. Lundahl, “you do not need to bring it up again, it may be a dear speaking point to you, but as for this debate, I have already answered it several times over.” Mr. Lundahl has to do better. We need reliable archeological and other external evidence of Adam and Moses. Dogmatic proclamations from traditions are not historical evidence of anything. Mr. Lundahl’s arguments for the reliability of Genesis simply aren’t good enough and even the Mormons know it. That’s why they trust the Book of Mormon more than the Bible with all of its “normally transmitted” human-produced imperfections and corruptions. Now, every time Mr. Lundahl mentions the knowledge gap between the time when the Golden Plates were supposedly created and when Joseph Smith Jr. supposed found and translated them, but that a similar gap supposedly does not exist for Genesis from the time it was written to the Dead Sea Scrolls, I’m going to keep challenging his view until Mr. Lundahl understands how he has no justification for trusting any of the baseless and undocumented claims in Genesis.
References:
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.