Over Time, False Stories Can Become False History
Kevin R. Henke
November 9, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I argued that people often lie, misinterpret and make up stories, and these are factors that undermine Mr. Lundahl’s “first known audience” scheme, which he uses in an attempt to separate history from fiction. In response, Lundahl (2022k) made the following comments:
“Let's go through Henke's principled objections to my theorem, "if the earliest known audience took it as history, it is a historic, not a fictional text" - here:
1. People lie and make up stories.
Those are two different things. A liar also makes up his story on some level, changing real for made up, where that is strategic for a purpose, but a poet makes up all of his story.
I think this is in fact the key principle Henke should ponder before answering any more. So much of his argument depends, so far, on equating Spiderman with Book of Mormon and with Russian reports on who it was who liberated Prague and how after most of WW-II was over.”
In Henke (2022bj), I gave the following response to Lundahl (2022k):
“Yes, poets often write total fiction and the author of Spiderman admits that it’s fiction. However, both Mr. Lundahl and I would agree that the Book of Mormon, Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are meant to be factual and not fiction and not poetry. The question then becomes, are they actually factual or just a lot of lies? To avoid being deceived by such lies, we need good evidence. The Mormons have no good evidence for the book of Mormon, Mr. Lundahl has none for Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are also highly untrustworthy.
It’s also important to recognize that liars in the religious and political realms may not simply take a real account and partially change it into something deceptive. They may totally make up a story so that there’s no truth in it whatsoever. As examples, I see no kernel of truth whatsoever in the Book of Mormon or in the Scientology Xenu story.
Mr. Lundahl also overlooks another critical point here. People often lie and make up stories for a variety of reasons. In the political and religious realms, money and/or power are often primary reasons for why politicians and religious leaders lie. In other cases, politicians may lie in an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution. In Henke (2022b), I further stated:
“The most common reasons for why ‘prophets’ invent false stories are for power and/or money. I think Kat Kerr invents stories to get attention and contributions. Joseph Smith Jr. used Mormonism to gain wealth and power, including the power to fornicate with whomever he wanted. No doubt, the ancient Israelite priests found the Pentateuch useful in gaining a lot of power and tithes and offerings that would otherwise have gone to the temples of Baal and other competing religions. The ancient Israelite priests were especially able to gain wealth and power when they had the support of Hezekiah and other powerful kings backing up their religion with force. As I explained in Henke (2022a), unlike the Talking Snake, we have external evidence that King Hezekiah actually existed.”
I think that Mr. Lundahl seriously underestimates how much disinformation is out there and how many millions of people often accept these falsehoods as fact. Interestingly, Lewis (1960, p. 159) makes an interesting statement that is generally correct:
“Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the world.”
One could quibble about the percentage of spoken and written material that turns out to be false. Nevertheless, Lewis (1960) is qualitatively correct here. The internet, newspapers, magazines, and the Bible are full of false information. So, lies are widespread and serious problems. The only way to combat lies is to be initially skeptical of every claim and to immediately demand evidence when the claim is first presented (Henke 2022dv; Henke 2022eu). This is where peer-reviewed science publications may help to provide reliable evidence and separate fact from fiction. Peer-reviewed science journals are certainly not inerrant, but when multiple peer-reviewed articles obtain the same results using different procedures, these results are generally more trustworthy than anything given by TV preachers or the Bible.” [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]
In my last three essays, I responded to Mr. Lundahl’s (2022v) comments on some of the unbolded sections in the above quotation from Henke (2022bj). Lundahl (2022v) then responds to my bolded sentence in the above quotation:
“Whether she does or not, they are not presented as history, but as prophecy, straight off. "I saw a vision" or "I was in heaven" are not historic claims, they are prophetic claims. For a claim to be properly speaking historic, it has to be something witnessed by people, transmitted by people and ending up telling someone who didn't see it what people saw with eyes and ears in normal circumstances. Not in a vision. However, it is a historic claim that Kat Kerr has made a prophetic claim.
Part of my case is, no part of Genesis, except the six days account (ended in at latest in the text chapter 2 verse 4) has been presented as prophecy.”
Individuals may make up stories that supposedly occurred in the past, are supposedly happening now, or will happen in the future (“prophecy”). These lies are only limited by the human imagination, and it’s very possible that some of these deceitful stories about the past and present could be written down and become widely accepted as “history” in the future. As I stated many times before, the story of William Tell probably originated as a myth in Scandinavia, but many people later incorrectly believed that it was an account from Swiss history (Henke 2022ek; Head 1995; Hughes 2012; Mitchell and Mitchell 1970; Warnick 2004). In this debate, I have argued that for a story to actually be identified as history, it must be confirmed by external evidence. Unlike Mr. Lundahl, I argue that claims and traditions about supposed “eyewitness testimony” in the unverifiable remote past are not good enough evidence to identify a story as “historic.” This would include most of the claims in the Bible.
In the above quotation, Lundahl (2022v) again refers to Hypothesis #1 in Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b) and makes the following completely unsubstantiated claims about Genesis:
“Part of my case is, no part of Genesis, except the six days account (ended in at latest in the text chapter 2 verse 4) has been presented as prophecy.”
Mr. Lundahl has no evidence whatsoever that any of the supposed “eyewitnesses” mentioned in Genesis actually existed or that they actually witnessed any of the stories mentioned in the book. He has no evidence that Moses ever existed or ever received any reliable written documents and oral traditions going back to Adam. In Henke (2022ew), I further compare the four hypotheses from Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b), and argue that Mr. Lundahl’s favorite Hypothesis (#1) is arbitrary and worthless, supernatural-based Hypothesis #2 isn’t any better and that either Hypotheses #3 or #4 are very likely:
“Although both conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews know that Genesis 1:1-2:14 must have come from God, notice that there is no verse in Genesis 1:1-2:14 indicating that Moses “was in the spirit” or that he had a dream or vision when he saw the creation. Moses or any other author isn’t even mentioned anywhere in Genesis. The context by itself indicates that either Genesis 1:1-2:14 is a work of fiction or a revelation from God. There are also plenty of other verses in Genesis, where there were no human witnesses and the information must have come from God or an angel according to both conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews. For example, how did Moses know about the conversation between God and the angels in Genesis 11:6-7 unless God or one of his angels told someone? Advocates of Hypothesis #1 have to arbitrarily divide up Genesis into sections obtained by visions/God speaking and other sections originating from unsubstantiated, fallible and human-transmitted records. Advocates of Hypothesis #2 would argue that supporters of Hypothesis #1 are no different than those that divided up Genesis into J, E, and P sources. Supporters of Hypothesis #1 simply have no evidence whatsoever that Moses had any human written or oral sources for Genesis.
Advocates of Hypothesis #2 could also argue that God could have given Moses the information in Genesis 5 just like the ghost of St. Philomena gave her birth date to a 19th century nun without any of the information being passed down through the centuries by fallible-human hands [Henke 2022es]. Of course, secularists would argue that Hypothesis #2 has no more evidence than Hypothesis #1. If Mr. Lundahl had been using the Method of the Multiple Working Hypotheses as he should have been doing (Strahler 1999, pp. 19-20; Henke 2022eu), he would have no reason to favor Hypothesis #1 over #2. To be exact, he would be favoring Hypotheses #3 and #4.”
Mr. Lundahl offers nothing but groundless speculation about the origin of Genesis. He also ignores the Genesis Knowledge Gap, where we simply do not know how the book might have been reedited and manipulated between the time it was written and our earliest known copies in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Henke 2022iL). This manipulation explains why Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch obviously had multiple authors (Finkelstein and Silverman 2001, pp. 10-14). In summary, Mr. Lundahl’s favored Hypothesis #1 is no better than Hypothesis #2, and both #1 and #2 are far less probable than either Hypothesis #3 or #4 (Henke 2022b).
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.
Head, R.C. 1995. “William Tell and His Comrades: Association and Fraternity in the Propaganda of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Switzerland” The Journal of Modern History, September, v. 67, n. 3, pp. 527-557.
Hughes, S.C. 2012. “The Limits of Cultural Nationalism: Italian Switzerland from a Risorgimento Perspective”, Nations and Nationalism, v. 18, n. 1, pp. 57-77.
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.
Mitchell, R.E. and J.P. Mitchell. 1970. “Schiller’s William Tell: A Forkloristic Perspective”, The Journal of American Forklore, January – March, v. 83, n. 327, pp. 44-52.
Strahler, A.N. 1999. Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy: 2nd ed., Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY, USA, 552 pp.
Warnick, R. 2004. “In Search of William Tell”, Smithsonian Magazine: August, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/ (accessed July 24, 2022).