No Reason to Think that the Pentateuch was Well-Preserved from the Time of the Originals
Kevin R. Henke
October 24, 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). I previously responded in Henke (2022bj and 2022bn) and Henke (2022ij through Henke 2022ir) to his comments on the first five points in Lundahl (2022k) and Lundahl (2022t), respectively. Here are some of Mr. Lundahl’s comments on my italicized point #6 in Lundahl (2022t):
“It so happens, I gave some natural means against total corruption, which would work without God's interference. I only added God as - to us faithful, somewhat irrelevant in the debate with an unbeliever except answering a direct question - a guarantee against any corruption touching all extant versions of the text. But I gave natural means for the text to remain uncorrupt.”
I will be discussing the rest of Mr. Lundahl’s (2022t) comments on this point in my next essay, Henke (2022it). In Henke (2022bo), I had also responded to Mr. Lundahl’s earlier comments on point #6 in Lundahl (2022k).
No, Mr. Lundahl did not give any reasonable natural means for a text to remain uncorrupted over thousands of years. Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that a document does not need to experience “total corruption” for the meaning in the originals to be lost. In some cases, it only takes the removal or addition of a few words, or even a single word (like “not”) to completely change the meaning of the sentence. We know from manuscript evaluations that miscopying and the deliberate altering of texts were common with early biblical manuscripts, especially before the manuscripts were widely canonized as “scripture” (Tov 2001; Ehrman 2013). The corruption of 1 John 5:7-8 is a good example (Ehrman 2012, Box 2.5, p. 26). There’s simply no reason to think that the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic in the books of the Bible that we have today are identical or nearly identical to the originals from thousands of years ago. The available evidence does not support such wishful thinking by conservative Christians (again, e.g., Tov 2001; Ehrman 2013). This is why researchers must be skeptical of claims about texts being “well-preserved back to the originals” until these texts are actually demonstrated to be well preserved. We should not just gullibly accept the texts as being well-preserved until demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Henke 2022eu).
References:
Ehrman, B.D. 2012. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings: Oxford University Press, New York, NY, USA, 536pp.
Ehrman, B.D. 2013. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics: Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 628pp.
Tov, E. 2001. Textural Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd revised ed., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 456pp.