The Genesis Knowledge Gap and the Book of Mormon’s Gap
Kevin R. Henke
October 23, 2022
In Henke (2022bh) and Henke (2022b), I stated the following:
“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).
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.” [emphasis in original; my emphasis in italics]
Lundahl (2022t) is largely a response to my nine points. Actually, Lundahl (2022k) earlier responded to these same nine points when they were originally listed in Henke (2022b). In my essays (Henke 2022bh through Henke 2022br2), I thoroughly refuted the responses in Lundahl (2022k). From Lundahl (2022t), here are Mr. Lundhahl’s additional comments on my italicized point #1 about people lying and making up stories:
“Those two are very different. Lying involves making up a story, or rather a salient part of it, but making up a story is not automatically lying.
A liar, unlike a poet of fiction, wants to be believed, as to prosaic actual fact. In order to achieve this, he has to calculate what he is likely to get away with.
Those who don't see the difference are horrible art critics : they criticise sci-fi or fantasy for "it's so fake" (just because the setting isn't mundane, it would be something else if the reason for the comment were bad psychology or psychology mismatched with the facts about the character (I saw some Tolkien fans do that criticism with the Galadriel of Episode 3)). In fact, the fiction writer is not trying to convince people that things happened. He's trying to make them experience it as if it happened, that's another thing, but he's not trying to elicit the judgement after reading or watching that it is a fact. This gives him much more freedom, he doesn't need to consider what he "can get away with" but only with what he can paint in words.
Now, the whole point is, the liar who does get belief is limited to "what he can get away with" - if someone wants to argue early chapters of Genesis are a fraud, he needs to explain how it was successful. One line would be - as for book of Mormon or as for Silmarillion, if it had been seriously put forth as lost and recovered history, like the book of Mormon was, that at one point Genesis' early chapters were "lost and recovered history" - a status excellently suited for introducing frauds or passing off fiction as fact, unless the content actually contradicts something which already is a basic belief of some member of the audience. A Catholic would not believe the Book of Mormon if attending to the fact that the Church according to Matthew 28:16-20 needs to be present on earth from Ascension to Harmageddon. An Atheist would not believe the Book of Mormon if it contained miracles, and would usually also not believe it because it referred to a people as a holy people of Christians, a category to which he gives no special status (in theory).
That is why it is important that:
· a) we find no particular point at which early chapters of Genesis was "lost and recovered history" rather than "history" to the earliest known audience;
· b) we find bridges from those early chapters up to Christ all over the Old Testament (least detailed in the time between Daniel and Maccabees);
· c) we do not find Mormons changing the status of Book of Mormon from "lost and recovered history" to "history."
But if Henke wants to word it as "Mormons sucked at distinguishing history from fiction" he is simply misstating the very real case against Book of Mormon.
And he's forgetting that it never ever had the status of Spiderman or Rapunzel among Mormons. Or of simple normal transmission.” [my emphasis; italics emphasis in original]
In my previous essays (Henke 2022ij through Henke 2022im), I responded to the unbolded first part of the above quotation from Lundahl (2022t).
I have already refuted the claims in points a) through c) and the other above bolded statements from Lundahl (2022t) and, in some cases, numerous times. In point a), Mr. Lundahl is ignoring the knowledge gap associated with Genesis, which may be as long as 1,000 years between the time when Genesis was written and our old copies of that Old Testament book in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Henke 2022go and Henke 2022iL). We have no idea who wrote Genesis and how it may have been edited and altered during that gap. The “earliest known audience” scheme, which Mr. Lundahl frequently uses, is simply unreliable (Henke 2022b, Henke 2022bh, and Henke 2022gg). Mr. Lundahl also unjustifiably assumes that Moses wrote the anonymous book of Genesis and that a complete and reliable chain of custody of information existed between Adam and Moses (Hypothesis #1 of Henke 2022b). He doesn’t have a shred of evidence to support any of his flagrant assumptions (Henke 2022dn; Henke 2022dw; Henke 2022dx). The default position for any claim is skepticism (Henke 2022dv). Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that Genesis 3 actually happened and he has totally failed to do so (Henke 2022br).
The ”bridges” mentioned in point b) of Lundahl (2022t) are also useless because of the Genesis knowledge gap. There’s no evidence that Jesus or the writers of Daniel and Maccabees had any reliable knowledge about Adam or the origin of the book of Genesis. There’s also no evidence that Moses ever existed or that he wrote Genesis (Henke 2022dn; Henke 2022dw; Henke 2022dx; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001).
As for point c) of Lundahl (2022t), the Mormons would find this argument to be totally worthless. They see the origin and reliability of the Book of Mormon as being superior to the millennia of error-prone copying copies, of copies, of copies… of the books of the Bible. Here is what I said about the Mormon’s views of preservation of the Bible versus the Book of Mormon in Henke (2022bL):
“Even though the Mormons readily admit that Joseph Smith Jr. “miraculously” translated the Book of Mormon into English, they would argue that the original gold plates were an inerrant “history” finished by Moroni around the 5th century AD. The plates were then carefully preserved in the ground from the 5th to the 19th century until Joseph Smith Jr. recovered them. The Mormons would further argue that the “first known audience” of the Book of Mormon were the Jews that wrote the “history” on the golden plates and not the 19th century Americans. Joseph Smith Jr. merely found and translated this “history.” Supposedly, several eyewitnesses actually saw the original plates of the Book of Mormon that Moroni and others had written (Hinckley 1979). While Joseph Smith Jr. supposedly was able to translate the Book of Mormon into English through visions produced by magic seer stones, the Mormons would also point out that the books of the Bible also have a “miraculous order.” They would argue that the Holy Spirit “miraculously translated” Jesus’ Aramaic into perfect Greek for the original Gospels and that the writing of the Bible books often involved visions and not historical accounts, such as in Ezekiel and Revelation. Mormons would also claim that they have copies of Joseph Smith Jr.’s first English edition of the Book of Mormon. This is in contrast to the potentially corrupted copies of copies of copies … of Old and New Testament books dating centuries to perhaps even more than 1,000 years after the originals. Mormons then conclude that the chain of custody (Moroni directly to Joseph Smith Jr. and then directly to the public) and reliability of the Book of Mormon are far superior to what Christians and Jews could claim for the Bible. Although Mr. Lundahl and I recognize that the Book of Mormon is a fraudulent document and that Joseph Smith Jr.’s claims about its origin have no merit whatsoever, where’s Mr. Lundahl’s evidence that any book of the Bible is inerrant and totally trustworthy when all of the originals have been lost? Where’s Mr. Lundahl’s archeological and other evidence that Moses actually existed, wrote the Pentateuch and that our Hebrew manuscripts are exact copies of the originals when Tov (2001) and archeology books like Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) say otherwise? Because Joseph Smith Jr. and the Book of Mormon have deceived millions of people, why couldn’t the Bible? [emphasis in the original]
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.
Hinckley, G.B. 1979. Truth Restored: Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 156pp.
Tov, E. 2001. Textural Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd revised ed., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 456pp.