Ask a Theologian IV

[Plotinus]

I realize that you are getting tired of OT questions and maybe a Hebrew scholar could answer, but:

Genesis 1 says that the seed of all grass and herb's was planted. In Genesis 2, it says that they had not yet sprang up to maturity.

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

That doesn’t look to me like a statement that seeds had been planted but had not yet come to maturity.

The fact that God prepared Eden as a dwelling place has little bearing (no pun intended) on the Earth as a whole, and seems to be a seperate "creation".

I don’t see anything in the text of 2:4-onwards to suggest that there had been an earlier creation. On the contrary, 2:4 itself tells us that we’re about to hear how the world was created, not how some small bit of it was populated:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.

And it goes on to say:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground…

And yes, of course you can say that it’s only talking about the area that was going to become the garden of Eden, and everywhere else was as lush as 1:12 suggests. And you can claim that the description of the creation of human beings which follows refers to a different set of human beings from ones who were created in 1:27. However, (a) there’s no indication whatsoever of this in the text – no hint of any acknowledgement, for example, in the 2.4-onwards story of the 1:1-2:3 story, which is implausible on the supposition that they were originally intended to be part of a single, unified narrative; and (b) it’s not a question of what’s possible but of what’s probable. Most experts think that the hypothesis that these are distinct creation stories which have been later stuck together explains the text as we have it better than the hypothesis that they were always a single, unified story. You can twist the words around as much as you like to make them consistent on some reading, but all that shows, if anything, is that they could possibly constitute a single, unified story. It doesn’t show that this is the superior hypothesis.

That aside; placing Adam in the garden was not a different creation, it is more descriptive of where the creation took place especially for Adam. In fact putting the trees of "life" and "knowledge of good and evil" just shows that they were unique to Eden and not all over the earth. Adding more fruit trees to even offset the fact that one should not eat of the two unique trees in Eden was also done at the same time. I realize that my "English" understanding may keep me from grasping the Hebrew meaning, but that is how I see it.

Is the Hebrew actually very different from that?

I don’t quite follow the argument you’re making here, but in any case, I’m definitely not the person to ask about the meaning of Hebrew.

some good points, thx Plotinus, just 2 more

"In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth" suggests whatever Heaven and Earth are, they were made in the beginning... But the following text appears to describe how God made Heaven and Earth and they dont show up in the story "in the beginning". Heaven appears on the 2nd day and the Earth is revealed on the 3rd day, both are preceded by the darkness on the face of the deep - the waters covering the Earth (dry land). This has led some people to say Heaven and Earth were made in Gen 1:1 and then again in the following text.

Was Heaven and Earth made twice, in Gen 1:1 and again on the 2nd and 3rd days? Or should Gen 1:1 be read as setting up the following text, like "In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth and here's how he did it..." Or, "In the beginning of God's creation of Heaven and Earth, the Earth was without form etc... How do theologians deal with the water covered world in Gen 1:2 preceding creation if this is about the universe?

MagisterCultuum answered the first part of this correctly, as far as I know. As to the second, there was a controversy about this in the later part of the second century CE, which as it happens I wrote a little about a few years ago. Christian theologians at this time seem to have tentatively accepted the Platonic view that the creation of the universe required a creator, a set of Forms which he used as a blueprint, and matter for him to create it out of. We find this in Justin Martyr, for example. But it was problematic for them because it implied that the universe had three causes, not one. It was simple enough to locate the Forms within God’s mind, because pagan Platonist philosophers had already done this. But that still left matter as a sort of rival to God. Justin seems to envisage matter as a pre-existent stuff which God moulded.

A couple of decades later, a Christian painter named Hermogenes made this view explicit and argued that matter really did exist eternally, and God merely shaped it into the universe. This was on the basis that God could not have created matter out of himself (because God cannot be divided); he could not have created it out of nothing (because that is impossible); so it must have existed already.

Tertullian argued against this on the grounds that if matter were uncreated and eternal, then it would have some of the attributes that God alone has, and so this view contradicts monotheism. However, this leaves the question of how God did create matter, and how it relates to the activity described in Genesis.

Basically two views seem to have developed. The first is that of Justin’s pupil Tatian. He suggested that God brought matter into existence first, and then created the universe out of it. So he envisages two acts of creation, although they are different kinds of creation and are described using different Greek words. The account of Genesis 1 would therefore presumably describe the second act, being set after the first.

The second view is that of Irenaeus. He suggests that God summons matter out of himself – but unlike the theory mooted by Hermogenes, that matter is made from God’s own being, Irenaeus is also clear that matter is created and not divine. The idea seems to be that God creates matter and shapes it into the universe in one fell swoop.

This has the advantage of being a rather neater account than Tatian’s, but it’s true that Tatian’s is easier to reconcile with the biblical picture of something existing before God fashioned the heavens and earth out of it. However, for the most part, these authors weren’t much engaged with the account of Genesis 1. If you read Tertullian’s book against Hermogenes that I linked to earlier you’ll see that there’s very little mention of Genesis for some twenty chapters. As it turns out, Hermogenes did argue that the fact that Genesis describes a formless earth before God’s creative activity did support his view that matter was eternal. Tertullian retorts that if this primordial stuff is called “earth”, then it is not matter. Tertullian’s view is that Genesis 1:1-2 is teaching that God created the heavens and the world, but he first created them in a state of formlessness, and went on to impose order upon them.

Now here's one of my problems , we're told of a water covered world in darkness (Gen 1:2) before God's wind or spirit blew, hovered, or fluttered across the face of the deep and before God said, "let there be light". This light is the first act of creation, and what did it do? Began day and night... God's spirit did something to make a water covered world in darkness spin near a star. Sounds like a celestial collision to me, one that gave a proto Earth covered in water lands and the seed of life. I'd even expect the impactor(s) to have life if it survived.

The problem there is that neither the book of Genesis nor any other part of the Bible shows the slightest knowledge of the earth’s rotation; indeed if any cosmic model is assumed by the Old Testament it’s the tabernacle-shaped flat earth that we also find in other ancient Middle Eastern texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it’s quite explicit that day and night is caused by the sun flying over the surface of the earth during the day and then hurtling through a sort of huge tunnel beneath it during the night. So there’s nothing in the Genesis account to suggest that the author had in mind God causing the earth to spin, let alone that this was accomplished by smashing another celestial body into it. (Besides which, the earth’s rotation was certainly not caused by such a collision.)

As for the Flood, I believe people all over the world watched it sink. Or more accurately, the seas rose. And we know it happened, the end of the ice age saw coastal flooding and survivors had to move inland. Was it slow or did seas rise in rapid bursts? It was the latter... From chunks of Antarctica breaking off to glacial dams in the N hemisphere releasing vast torrents of cold freshwater pouring into the oceans (the Black Sea was flooded a bunch of times from Siberia before the Mediterranean finally breached the Bosphorus ~7500 years ago). But our story comes from the Persian Gulf, and it was an exposed riverbed and delta during the ice age. The fountains of the deep refers to the oceans, that was the source of the flood. Sounds more like a wave than a gradual rise in sea levels. Maybe an impact, we know they happen too.

Hypotheses such as this don’t seem very likely to me, and I don’t think they’re required to explain the texts. For one thing, a flood caused by a rise in sea levels brought about by glacial melting at the end of an Ice Age simply wouldn’t be fast or catastrophic enough to inspire stories like Noah’s Flood. If sea levels rose like that then it would be gradual and people would simply abandon their settlements slowly and move further inland over the generations, as apparently happened when the Bosphorous broke and flooded into the Black Sea – assuming that this is what happened. Anyone who’s tried to fill a pond with a hosepipe knows that this is a slow process.

On the other hand, we know that the Tigris and Euphrates were, like the Nile, prone to flooding; but unlike the Nile, these floods were not regular and they were not welcome. They could devastate large areas and destroy settlements. Moreover, there is archaeological evidence that such floods did occur and cover whole cities in Mesopotamia; the famous excavations at al-Ubaid, near the ancient city of Ur, revealed eleven feet of silted mud below the later stages of city building but above the earlier ones. That indicates that there was a settlement there, it got destroyed by a flood which deposited a huge amount of silt, and later on people returned and built there again. Note two things: first, that is incompatible with a flood caused by rising sea levels; and second, events of this kind are quite enough to explain why the Sumerians might have had stories about devastating floods. I would say that perhaps there was no single “Great Flood”, but a people living in a floodplain naturally developed stories of one. Or, if there really was a single devastating flood which gave rise to the later stories, it was surely most probably a riverine flood of this kind, where one or even both rivers burst their banks in an unusually dramatic and powerful way and flooded an unusually vast area for an unusually long time, destroying cities and farmland and uprooting a generation before the waters receded and people eventually rebuilt their civilisation. A flood of that kind seems to me more in accordance with the devastation and the speed which Genesis and the other ancient flood myths talk about.

 

[timtofly]

That doesn’t look to me like a statement that seeds had been planted but had not yet come to maturity.

Spoiler :

I don’t see anything in the text of 2:4-onwards to suggest that there had been an earlier creation. On the contrary, 2:4 itself tells us that we’re about to hear how the world was created, not how some small bit of it was populated:



And it goes on to say:



And yes, of course you can say that it’s only talking about the area that was going to become the garden of Eden, and everywhere else was as lush as 1:12 suggests. And you can claim that the description of the creation of human beings which follows refers to a different set of human beings from ones who were created in 1:27. However, (a) there’s no indication whatsoever of this in the text – no hint of any acknowledgement, for example, in the 2.4-onwards story of the 1:1-2:3 story, which is implausible on the supposition that they were originally intended to be part of a single, unified narrative; and (b) it’s not a question of what’s possible but of what’s probable. Most experts think that the hypothesis that these are distinct creation stories which have been later stuck together explains the text as we have it better than the hypothesis that they were always a single, unified story. You can twist the words around as much as you like to make them consistent on some reading, but all that shows, if anything, is that they could possibly constitute a single, unified story. It doesn’t show that this is the superior hypothesis.



I don’t quite follow the argument you’re making here, but in any case, I’m definitely not the person to ask about the meaning of Hebrew.



MagisterCultuum answered the first part of this correctly, as far as I know. As to the second, there was a controversy about this in the later part of the second century CE, which as it happens I wrote a little about a few years ago. Christian theologians at this time seem to have tentatively accepted the Platonic view that the creation of the universe required a creator, a set of Forms which he used as a blueprint, and matter for him to create it out of. We find this in Justin Martyr, for example. But it was problematic for them because it implied that the universe had three causes, not one. It was simple enough to locate the Forms within God’s mind, because pagan Platonist philosophers had already done this. But that still left matter as a sort of rival to God. Justin seems to envisage matter as a pre-existent stuff which God moulded.

A couple of decades later, a Christian painter named Hermogenes made this view explicit and argued that matter really did exist eternally, and God merely shaped it into the universe. This was on the basis that God could not have created matter out of himself (because God cannot be divided); he could not have created it out of nothing (because that is impossible); so it must have existed already.

Tertullian argued against this on the grounds that if matter were uncreated and eternal, then it would have some of the attributes that God alone has, and so this view contradicts monotheism. However, this leaves the question of how God did create matter, and how it relates to the activity described in Genesis.

Basically two views seem to have developed. The first is that of Justin’s pupil Tatian. He suggested that God brought matter into existence first, and then created the universe out of it. So he envisages two acts of creation, although they are different kinds of creation and are described using different Greek words. The account of Genesis 1 would therefore presumably describe the second act, being set after the first.

The second view is that of Irenaeus. He suggests that God summons matter out of himself – but unlike the theory mooted by Hermogenes, that matter is made from God’s own being, Irenaeus is also clear that matter is created and not divine. The idea seems to be that God creates matter and shapes it into the universe in one fell swoop.

This has the advantage of being a rather neater account than Tatian’s, but it’s true that Tatian’s is easier to reconcile with the biblical picture of something existing before God fashioned the heavens and earth out of it. However, for the most part, these authors weren’t much engaged with the account of Genesis 1. If you read Tertullian’s book against Hermogenes that I linked to earlier you’ll see that there’s very little mention of Genesis for some twenty chapters. As it turns out, Hermogenes did argue that the fact that Genesis describes a formless earth before God’s creative activity did support his view that matter was eternal. Tertullian retorts that if this primordial stuff is called “earth”, then it is not matter. Tertullian’s view is that Genesis 1:1-2 is teaching that God created the heavens and the world, but he first created them in a state of formlessness, and went on to impose order upon them.



The problem there is that neither the book of Genesis nor any other part of the Bible shows the slightest knowledge of the earth’s rotation; indeed if any cosmic model is assumed by the Old Testament it’s the tabernacle-shaped flat earth that we also find in other ancient Middle Eastern texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it’s quite explicit that day and night is caused by the sun flying over the surface of the earth during the day and then hurtling through a sort of huge tunnel beneath it during the night. So there’s nothing in the Genesis account to suggest that the author had in mind God causing the earth to spin, let alone that this was accomplished by smashing another celestial body into it. (Besides which, the earth’s rotation was certainly not caused by such a collision.)



Hypotheses such as this don’t seem very likely to me, and I don’t think they’re required to explain the texts. For one thing, a flood caused by a rise in sea levels brought about by glacial melting at the end of an Ice Age simply wouldn’t be fast or catastrophic enough to inspire stories like Noah’s Flood. If sea levels rose like that then it would be gradual and people would simply abandon their settlements slowly and move further inland over the generations, as apparently happened when the Bosphorous broke and flooded into the Black Sea – assuming that this is what happened. Anyone who’s tried to fill a pond with a hosepipe knows that this is a slow process.

On the other hand, we know that the Tigris and Euphrates were, like the Nile, prone to flooding; but unlike the Nile, these floods were not regular and they were not welcome. They could devastate large areas and destroy settlements. Moreover, there is archaeological evidence that such floods did occur and cover whole cities in Mesopotamia; the famous excavations at al-Ubaid, near the ancient city of Ur, revealed eleven feet of silted mud below the later stages of city building but above the earlier ones. That indicates that there was a settlement there, it got destroyed by a flood which deposited a huge amount of silt, and later on people returned and built there again. Note two things: first, that is incompatible with a flood caused by rising sea levels; and second, events of this kind are quite enough to explain why the Sumerians might have had stories about devastating floods. I would say that perhaps there was no single “Great Flood”, but a people living in a floodplain naturally developed stories of one. Or, if there really was a single devastating flood which gave rise to the later stories, it was surely most probably a riverine flood of this kind, where one or even both rivers burst their banks in an unusually dramatic and powerful way and flooded an unusually vast area for an unusually long time, destroying cities and farmland and uprooting a generation before the waters receded and people eventually rebuilt their civilisation. A flood of that kind seems to me more in accordance with the devastation and the speed which Genesis and the other ancient flood myths talk about.

Here is the Young's literal:

And the earth bringeth forth tender grass, herb sowing seed after its kind, and tree making fruit (whose seed [is] in itself) after its kind; and God seeth that [it is] good;

Here is the translation you gave:

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Your translation makes the plants and trees plural giving the emphasis that it was what was created.

The literal translation just says that the seed and fruit itself was created.

 

[Berzerker]

He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing

What does Job 26:7 mean wrt hanging the Earth on nothing?

 

[kiwitt]

Let us assume that Jesus is God or God's son. Either way he is pretty special, right? Now they say he died for our sins and that was his big sacrifice to save mankind. Well I put it to you that as Jesus is God or God's son, that wasn't much of a sacrifice as he was going to go to heaven straight away anyway, because of his Godly status anyway.

Now if we are going to say, well it was pretty painful to be crucified and all that. However, thousands, if not not more, have given their lives in more painful ways so others can live, it makes Jesus' sacrifice even less so again.

So what makes his sacrifice so special, in comparison and with this point of view ?

 

[ParkCungHee]

Let us assume that Jesus is God or God's son.

That's Heresy!

 

[Plotinus]

Here is the Young's literal:

And the earth bringeth forth tender grass, herb sowing seed after its kind, and tree making fruit (whose seed [is] in itself) after its kind; and God seeth that [it is] good;

Here is the translation you gave:

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Your translation makes the plants and trees plural giving the emphasis that it was what was created.

The literal translation just says that the seed and fruit itself was created.

I struggled for a long time to understand why you thought that the literal translation you quote supports your interpretation. Then I realised that you're mentally adding hyphens into it. So you're reading "herb sowing seed" as "herb-sowing seed", and you're reading "tree making fruit" as "tree-making fruit". And you're concluding that what is created in this sentence is not the herb or the tree but the seed and the fruit. Is that right?

I spent some time this afternoon going through quite a large number of commentaries on Genesis, and not a single one even countenanced such an interpretation. They drew attention to various features of this verse. One is that, here, God does not create vegetation directly, but causes the earth to produce it. The point was made that behind this may be lurking the tendency in many cultures to venerate or worship the earth as the producer of crops; the biblical author agrees that the earth has this generative power, but makes it absolutely clear that it has it only because God grants it, and that the earth is therefore not a worthy object of veneration. (Something similar happens with the creation of the sun and moon, which the biblical author does not name but merely describes - perhaps to avoid using the names under which many people worshipped them as gods, thereby demoting them from objects of veneration to mere lamps moved about by the one God.)

Another important feature here is that the verse distinguishes between two kinds of plants. There are "plants" or "herbs" that produce seed - i.e., just as God gives the earth the power to produce plants, he also gives the plants themselves the power to produce seed. So this is an anticipation of 1:28, where God instructs his creation to be fruitful and multiply. The second kind of plants are the "trees" which also produce seed, but only via fruit.

However, I could find no trace of any suggestion that the meaning of this verse is that God caused the earth to produce not the plants and trees themselves but the seed and seed-bearing fruit that would later germinate into them. I am reluctant to fling translations back and forth between two people who cannot read the Hebrew, because that is just an argument of the ignorant. Someone who can actually understand it will have to pronounce on the grammar of this verse. But given that I can't find even a suggestion of your interpretation in any secondary literature on this verse, I feel fairly well justified in supposing that it's not a possible interpretation. "Sowing" and "making" in the translation you cite are active participles, not parts of adjectival phrases.

He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing

What does Job 26:7 mean wrt hanging the Earth on nothing?

It means that God does not put the earth on anything. The "north" is the high point of the sky, around which it revolves. The point is that God is capable of setting up the sky like a vault without requiring any pillar or anything in the middle to hold it up. Similarly, the earth is not suspended from anything or placed upon anything. God alone supports these things and does not rely upon anything else to prop up his creation.

Let us assume that Jesus is God or God's son. Either way he is pretty special, right? Now they say he died for our sins and that was his big sacrifice to save mankind. Well I put it to you that as Jesus is God or God's son, that wasn't much of a sacrifice as he was going to go to heaven straight away anyway, because of his Godly status anyway.

Now if we are going to say, well it was pretty painful to be crucified and all that. However, thousands, if not not more, have given their lives in more painful ways so others can live, it makes Jesus' sacrifice even less so again.

So what makes his sacrifice so special, in comparison and with this point of view ?

You're thinking of "sacrifice" in the purely secular sense of giving something up. Certainly if Jesus knew he was going to be resurrected and sit at God's right hand then he wasn't making a great sacrifice by being killed (assuming that he did know these things, which even if he was God isn't necessarily the case). But that doesn't mean that his death wasn't a sacrifice, or meaningfully like a sacrifice, in the religious sense. I think that when Jesus' death is described as a sacrifice in the New Testament it's meant, to some degree, as a metaphor - what makes it is a sacrifice is the fact that it performs the same function as a sacrifice, namely connecting people to the divine and allowing them to be saved. And for someone like the author of the letter to the Hebrews this means that the Old Testament sacrifices are actually a type or foreshadowing of his death, which is therefore the perfect sacrifice. But as I say, it's a sacrifice because of its function, not because of any particular mental state on Jesus' part.

 

[timtofly]

Thank You Plotinus. I am an AV guy and when Magister kept throwing in the Young's it got me thinking. I never saw it before either as how I described it. But in all these Genesis questions, I had to ask. I always thought that it miraculous that plants and trees grew for a day, (if you take things literally) before the Sun was formed.

Seems having the seed only in the ground would make sense, especially in light of the next chapter, but I guess we will never know. Seems every one just assumes the accepted way and that is fine.

 

[Berzerker]

It means that God does not put the earth on anything. The "north" is the high point of the sky, around which it revolves. The point is that God is capable of setting up the sky like a vault without requiring any pillar or anything in the middle to hold it up. Similarly, the earth is not suspended from anything or placed upon anything. God alone supports these things and does not rely upon anything else to prop up his creation.

How does that jive with this?

The problem there is that neither the book of Genesis nor any other part of the Bible shows the slightest knowledge of the earth’s rotation; indeed if any cosmic model is assumed by the Old Testament it’s the tabernacle-shaped flat earth that we also find in other ancient Middle Eastern texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it’s quite explicit that day and night is caused by the sun flying over the surface of the earth during the day and then hurtling through a sort of huge tunnel beneath it during the night. So there’s nothing in the Genesis account to suggest that the author had in mind God causing the earth to spin, let alone that this was accomplished by smashing another celestial body into it. (Besides which, the earth’s rotation was certainly not caused by such a collision.)

How did the Earth acquire its spin without a collision? Most astronomers (all?) believe the Earth has suffered from at least 1 massive impact, large enough to form the moon and possibly another about 4 bya when the moon was plastered by debris leaving its "face" staring at us ever since. And they believe this collision spun the Earth, gave it a new "sky"... How did Job know the Earth hangs on nothing?

Gen 7:11

11In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, in this day have been broken up all fountains of the great deep, and the net-work of the heavens hath been opened

Gen 8:3

3And turn back do the waters from off the earth, going on and returning; and the waters are lacking at the end of a hundred and fifty days.

The fountains of the deep break open and the waters returned to the deep, and God promises it wont happen again. That doesn't sound like a flooding of the Tigris/Euphrates, it sounds like a wave or tsunami.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Roughly when did the earliest Christian missionaries appear in China?

 

[Jehoshua]

The earliest known record of christian missionaries in China is the Nestorian Stele, it records the arrival to the Tang court in Chang'an (modern Xi'an) of missionaries from the Church of the East in the 7th century A.D.

 

[jUmpSt0p]

Perhaps more importantly, though, I know why Christians believe what they do. Most Christian doctrines just developed through the normal processes of history. The fact that people believe them can be explained very well without having to suppose that they are actually true. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity became orthodox in large part because the emperor Theodosius I decreed it. If he hadn't, then Arianism might have become orthodox, and it would be heretical to say Jesus was divine.

Hey Plotinus. I've been slowly, over the course of (not even sure) 2-3 years, reading through some of your many posts on all 4 of these 'Ask' threads. I'm truly in awe of all your efforts.

I have a question, relating to the quote above (which is from way back in the original thread.) Actually, it's more of a request.

You mention how most Christian doctrines developed through the normal processes of history. This is something I've understood about people's beliefs for a while. Once you understand (something of) how human belief systems work, and are passed down, it becomes easy to see that 'Christianity' as a term hardly means anything.. Put two 'Christians' from different backgrounds together & let them discuss their beliefs, and like as not they will barely agree on anything.

Anyway, my hope was that you could make a post summarizing how some of Christianity's (or Judaism's) most important/widely held beliefs were influenced/decided by normal forces of history, as opposed to anything that's actually put forth in the Bible.

Basically, I was hoping you could do exactly what you did in that quote above, when you explain how "the doctrine of the Trinity became orthodox in large part because the emperor Theodosius I decreed it."

If you could take a few (or more than a few, if it please you) other examples like that, and summarize them together in a single post, I would be extremely grateful!! Would be a bonus if you could include the dates.. I believe the date for Theodosius's gambit is 380-381..

Cheers.

 

[Plotinus]

It means that God does not put the earth on anything. The "north" is the high point of the sky, around which it revolves. The point is that God is capable of setting up the sky like a vault without requiring any pillar or anything in the middle to hold it up. Similarly, the earth is not suspended from anything or placed upon anything. God alone supports these things and does not rely upon anything else to prop up his creation.

How does that jive with this?

The problem there is that neither the book of Genesis nor any other part of the Bible shows the slightest knowledge of the earth’s rotation; indeed if any cosmic model is assumed by the Old Testament it’s the tabernacle-shaped flat earth that we also find in other ancient Middle Eastern texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it’s quite explicit that day and night is caused by the sun flying over the surface of the earth during the day and then hurtling through a sort of huge tunnel beneath it during the night. So there’s nothing in the Genesis account to suggest that the author had in mind God causing the earth to spin, let alone that this was accomplished by smashing another celestial body into it. (Besides which, the earth’s rotation was certainly not caused by such a collision.)

How doesn't it? I don't see any contradiction. In both cases the earth is viewed as a flat plane with the sky over it like a vault. The point of the Job passage is that there is nothing supporting the sky - at least nothing in the middle, like a tent pole - and there is nothing underneath the earth holding it up, either, because God can do these things without needing props.

How did the Earth acquire its spin without a collision? Most astronomers (all?) believe the Earth has suffered from at least 1 massive impact, large enough to form the moon and possibly another about 4 bya when the moon was plastered by debris leaving its "face" staring at us ever since.

Astronomers believe that a planetary impact caused the moon to form, yes - but not that this explains the rotation of the earth. After all, all planets and moons in the solar system also rotate, and almost all of them do so in the same direction. Yet clearly all of these rotations can't have been caused by impacts of this nature - why would they all be rotating in the same direction and indeed in the same plane? Exceptions such as Uranus may well have been caused by impacts of this nature, but the fact of rotation in the first place is easily explained by the solar system's origins as a huge disk of material orbiting the sun. Gravity caused this to coalesce into various discrete bodies, which continued to orbit the sun in the same direction and also spin in that direction as well. Impacts between these bodies have their part to play in the story of how it all ended up looking as it does today, but the fact that planetary bodies rotate doesn't need such impacts to explain it.

The moon always shows the same face to us because it is in "captured" or "synchronous" rotation in relation to the earth. This is caused not by any impacts but by tidal forces between the two bodies, and it's a feature of most natural satellites throughout the Solar System, as well (unusually) of both Pluto and Charon, which are tidally locked to each other.

And they believe this collision spun the Earth, gave it a new "sky"... How did Job know the Earth hangs on nothing?

Job didn't "know" anything. The text says there's nothing underneath the earth to support it. The fact that, as it happens, there really isn't anything underneath the earth to support it is sheer coincidence that only appears significant if you overlook the fact that everything else about the Old Testament cosmological model is wrong.

The fountains of the deep break open and the waters returned to the deep, and God promises it wont happen again. That doesn't sound like a flooding of the Tigris/Euphrates, it sounds like a wave or tsunami.

I wouldn't say it sounds a great deal like either of them. Nevertheless, versions of this story had already been told and retold for literally thousands of years before the book of Genesis as we know it was written. It would be futile to expect the details of the story to match anything that really happened, assuming that any single historical event ever underlay it. I'd say that it would be quite plausible for marine elements to enter the Hebrews' version of the story given that they lived near the sea, in close proximity to Phoenician ports; it doesn't follow from that that the original flood, thousands of years earlier, on which the story was based was one that involved the sea rather than rivers. Once again, it's a matter of explanatory power. The existence of flood narratives like the one in Genesis throughout the Middle East can surely be explained quite satisfactorily by the fact that the people who founded civilisation, built the first cities, and invented writing in that area - indeed in the whole world - lived in between two rivers on an enormous mud flat that regularly flooded and destroyed their settlements. That's more than enough to explain why stories about devastating floods might have proven fairly popular in these cultures. Speculating about tsunamis doesn't explain anything that isn't already explained.

Roughly when did the earliest Christian missionaries appear in China?

The earliest known record of christian missionaries in China is the Nestorian Stele, it records the arrival to the Tang court in Chang'an (modern Xi'an) of missionaries from the Church of the East in the 7th century A.D.

That is correct. The stele names Alopen as one of the first missionaries and dates his arrival to AD 635.

Hey Plotinus. I've been slowly, over the course of (not even sure) 2-3 years, reading through some of your many posts on all 4 of these 'Ask' threads. I'm truly in awe of all your efforts.

I have a question, relating to the quote above (which is from way back in the original thread.) Actually, it's more of a request.

You mention how most Christian doctrines developed through the normal processes of history. This is something I've understood about people's beliefs for a while. Once you understand (something of) how human belief systems work, and are passed down, it becomes easy to see that 'Christianity' as a term hardly means anything.. Put two 'Christians' from different backgrounds together & let them discuss their beliefs, and like as not they will barely agree on anything.

Anyway, my hope was that you could make a post summarizing how some of Christianity's (or Judaism's) most important/widely held beliefs were influenced/decided by normal forces of history, as opposed to anything that's actually put forth in the Bible.

Basically, I was hoping you could do exactly what you did in that quote above, when you explain how "the doctrine of the Trinity became orthodox in large part because the emperor Theodosius I decreed it."

If you could take a few (or more than a few, if it please you) other examples like that, and summarize them together in a single post, I would be extremely grateful!! Would be a bonus if you could include the dates.. I believe the date for Theodosius's gambit is 380-381..

Cheers.

Thanks - but that's quite a big ask! Are you basically asking for a history of doctrine? Because you would probably be better off having a look at a book of doctrinal history for that, unless there's some particular doctrine you want to ask here about. Giving an account of the historical development of all of them here would be too time-consuming even for me!

 

[jUmpSt0p]

Thanks - but that's quite a big ask! Are you basically asking for a history of doctrine? Because you would probably be better off having a look at a book of doctrinal history for that, unless there's some particular doctrine you want to ask here about. Giving an account of the historical development of all of them here would be too time-consuming even for me!

Sorry, not all of them, certainly... Maybe just a few of the big ones, or more obvious/famous ones?

Or some that are at least easily summed-up, as per the Theodosius example?

Even just 4 or 5 would be great..

 

[Berzerker]

thx again Plotinus, if you dont wanna respond thats fine since you already covered much of this... But of all those floods the people of mesopotamia sufffered from the north, the only flood story that made it into Genesis describes it as coming from the fountains of the deep followed by lots of rain. And there is just one Flood because God said it would never happen again (cant say that about large seasonal floods). That is a reference to an extraordinary event, either a series of massive tsunamis triggered by an impact(s) or maybe a collapse of the southern ice sheet (now I'm speculating ).

There is mounting evidence that sea levels did not rise gradually, from Antarctica and other ice shelves falling apart to the various glacial lakes primarily in the northern hemisphere, sea levels jumped 1-5 ft or more many times based on how the ice and water was being released into the oceans and basins. One large release appears linked to Antarctica ~14,600 years ago (A Tlingit myth places their Flood 14,000 years ago, and they might have been around to see the Bering land bridge go under), a chunk of the ice sheet detached (or slid causing massive tsunamis) and melted causing sea levels to rise ~70 ft within ~2 centuries, I suspect it was far faster. Thats enough to submerge most of Florida, or the Persian Gulf region, or some other low lying land mass like the Sunda Shelf.

And just imagine the terror as the oceans breach coastal ridges protecting inland basins, there's now doubt in my mind Noah's Flood goes back to the real life experience our ancestors suffered as sea levels rose ~400 ft from ~15-7kya. One episode during that period stood out enough to become "The Flood" appearing in Genesis and it describes the ocean flooding the land. That might explain why the Ark ended up near Ararat instead of downriver, the Japanese tsunami left boats on top of buildings - further inland.

Do you think Pluto and Charon were split in two? For the armchair astronomers out there, Saturn's rings point to Pluto near perihelion and they share very similar ascending nodes. The point about the Moon is that the side facing us now was the side facing the proto-Earth when it suffered a collision ~4 bya large enough to send mountains into the Moon. Thats why the man stares back at us, the Moon is "lopsided" because the side facing us got hit with heavier material after it formed.

That collision would have altered this world's orientation in space and would explain why the first life and landmasses began shortly afterward, and why we have so little material (other than water) from before that time period. Genesis describes a water covered world acquiring land, life and spin near a star. The oldest proof we have of oceans is 4.3 bya, and I suspect we'll find even older proof. But life and plate tectonics date to ~3.8-9 bya, shortly after a period of intense bombardment astronomers are trying to explain with migrating outer planets disrupting "asteroids". But it did happen, the proto-Earth got hit about 4 billion years ago and we have evidence it already had plenty of water.

Sorry, I'm off the topic. But I imagine theologians would be very interested in how the science can help us interpret the world's creation stories, oral histories and "mythic" times... I'm fascinated to see in Genesis a story of creation that does a decent job of matching what we know about "Earth" history, and that the same basic story is told the world over...

 

[Plotinus]

Sorry, not all of them, certainly... Maybe just a few of the big ones, or more obvious/famous ones?

Or some that are at least easily summed-up, as per the Theodosius example?

Even just 4 or 5 would be great..

Well, that's still a lot! I think the development of the doctrine of the Trinity is the best and clearest example. One could give parallel examples with the doctrine of the incarnation - for example, one could say that Nestorianism became heretical because Cyril of Alexandria and his supporters arrived at Ephesus in 431 before John of Antioch and his supporters, and basically hijacked the council. On the other hand, one could say that that hijacking would not have received any subsequent support if most people had not thought that Cyril was right. It is very hard to give a historical account of this kind that really undermines belief in the doctrine, as it seems you want, because believers in the doctrine can always explain the historical development. For example, John Henry Newman argued that although doctrines always develop, there are clear criteria by which one can distinguish between legitimate development and real change, which means that even though a doctrine may have reached its current form through a historical process, that doesn't mean it's wrong. After all, just because it took them a long time to work out what the Trinity was all about, that doesn't mean it was all made up, any more than the fact that it takes scientists a long time to work out what various scientific laws are all about means that they're wrong. It's just a different process.

For that reason I think it's hard to make a historically-based case against beliefs of this kind. Where one person sees the vicissitudes of fate and the caprices of civil rulers, another will see the hand of God. And indeed even in the example of the Trinity, one can make a historical case for its being a lot less capricious. After all, Theodosius' predecessors had spent their time promoting Arianism and trying to suppress the Nicene cause, and yet the Nicene cause had continued to prosper. When Theodosius reversed these policies, the Nicene cause triumphed and Arianism virtually melted away within a decade or two, at least within the Roman empire. That might suggest that Arianism was never very popular and that the Nicene view, or something like it, was always going to win out in the end anyway. I don't know whether that's true, but it's a perfectly plausible view. So again, one can't make a knock-down case of the kind you're suggesting. One might try to point to examples from Catholicism, where the church has basically said "We're going to believe this from now on," such as when Pius XII formally and infallibly defined the dogma of the assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1950. One might say that there's an example of where everyone had to believe it just because the Pope had said so, and he might equally well have said something different. But of course a Catholic would say that the Pope invoked the infallibility of the church itself when making that pronouncement, so it couldn't have gone differently and did not rely on his judgement, let alone his whims.

thx again Plotinus, if you dont wanna respond thats fine since you already covered much of this... But of all those floods the people of mesopotamia sufffered from the north, the only flood story that made it into Genesis describes it as coming from the fountains of the deep followed by lots of rain. And there is just one Flood because God said it would never happen again (cant say that about large seasonal floods). That is a reference to an extraordinary event, either a series of massive tsunamis triggered by an impact(s) or maybe a collapse of the southern ice sheet (now I'm speculating ).

There is mounting evidence that sea levels did not rise gradually, from Antarctica and other ice shelves falling apart to the various glacial lakes primarily in the northern hemisphere, sea levels jumped 1-5 ft or more many times based on how the ice and water was being released into the oceans and basins. One large release appears linked to Antarctica ~14,600 years ago (A Tlingit myth places their Flood 14,000 years ago, and they might have been around to see the Bering land bridge go under), a chunk of the ice sheet detached (or slid causing massive tsunamis) and melted causing sea levels to rise ~70 ft within ~2 centuries, I suspect it was far faster. Thats enough to submerge most of Florida, or the Persian Gulf region, or some other low lying land mass like the Sunda Shelf.

And just imagine the terror as the oceans breach coastal ridges protecting inland basins, there's now doubt in my mind Noah's Flood goes back to the real life experience our ancestors suffered as sea levels rose ~400 ft from ~15-7kya. One episode during that period stood out enough to become "The Flood" appearing in Genesis and it describes the ocean flooding the land. That might explain why the Ark ended up near Ararat instead of downriver, the Japanese tsunami left boats on top of buildings - further inland.

But older versions of the same story do not mention the ocean at all. This is how the Epic of Gilgamesh describes it:

Just as dawn began to glow
there arose from the horizon a black cloud.
Adad rumbled inside of it,
before him went Shullat and Hanish,
heralds going over mountain and land.
Erragal pulled out the mooring poles,
forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow.
The Anunnaki lifted up the torches,
setting the land ablaze with their flare.
Stunned shock over Adad's deeds overtook the heavens,
and turned to blackness all that had been light.
The... land shattered like a... pot.
All day long the South Wind blew ...,
blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,
overwhelming the people like an attack.
No one could see his fellow,
they could not recognize each other in the torrent.
The gods were frightened by the Flood,
and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.
The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.

You can see the whole text here. Now this is, apparently, an older version of the story than the one found in Genesis. There is no mention of the sea. The floodwaters come from a black cloud (rain) and overflowing ditches (swelling river). Isn't it therefore reasonable to suppose that this story was originally about a freshwater flood and that the version the Hebrews told subsequently added the bits about the sea?

I would also add that this story dates the flood to a time when people were settled and practised irrigation-based agriculture - the reference to ditches makes this clear. The ancient Mesopotamians began to practise agriculture of this kind between 6500 and 6000 BC. (Previously they had mainly lived on the fringes of the area, where rainfall was enough to water what crops they had.) That is well after the time of the rising sea levels that you cite. It would follow that if we take the details in this story seriously, it must be dated to no earlier than the mid-seventh millennium, and that is too late for it to have been caused by rising sea levels of the kind you mention. (In fact, the sea was retreating as far as the Sumerians were concerned, since the coastline of the Persian Gulf was much further inland than it is now.) You might say that the reference to irrigation ditches in this story is an artifact of the later date of this version of the story, and that the author or speaker, or his source, has assumed that the flood occurred in similar social and economic conditions to those found in his own day, and that the real flood actually occurred long before there were irrigation ditches. That is possible. But then you would have to apply the same logic to the Genesis version of the story too, and accept that there's no reason to assume that the details given there such as the references to "fountains of the deep" tell us anything about how the historical flood actually happened.

As I said before, this story had its origins on an enormous flood plain where archaeological evidence shows people were subject to devastating floods. Of course they had a myth about a terrible flood. You don't need to postulate any other events to explain the existence of that myth. Yes, maybe sea levels rose in extreme antiquity (although I think the dates you're talking about are far too early to be reasonably linked to the flood stories we know, which are much later); maybe there were occasions when the sea broke through somewhere and caused a great flood rather than simply creeping slowly year by year upwards. But the flood story is already perfectly well explained without needing such a hypothesis. As it stands, such a hypothesis is just fantasy unless you can give a good reason why the flood story should be linked to these hypothetical, very ancient floods rather than to the actual floods that we know happened to the people who originated this myth. If A is explained perfectly well by B, and we know that B happened, what's gained by postulating C?

Do you think Pluto and Charon were split in two? For the armchair astronomers out there, Saturn's rings point to Pluto near perihelion and they share very similar ascending nodes. The point about the Moon is that the side facing us now was the side facing the proto-Earth when it suffered a collision ~4 bya large enough to send mountains into the Moon. Thats why the man stares back at us, the Moon is "lopsided" because the side facing us got hit with heavier material after it formed.

That collision would have altered this world's orientation in space and would explain why the first life and landmasses began shortly afterward, and why we have so little material (other than water) from before that time period. Genesis describes a water covered world acquiring land, life and spin near a star. The oldest proof we have of oceans is 4.3 bya, and I suspect we'll find even older proof. But life and plate tectonics date to ~3.8-9 bya, shortly after a period of intense bombardment astronomers are trying to explain with migrating outer planets disrupting "asteroids". But it did happen, the proto-Earth got hit about 4 billion years ago and we have evidence it already had plenty of water.

Sorry, I'm off the topic. But I imagine theologians would be very interested in how the science can help us interpret the world's creation stories, oral histories and "mythic" times... I'm fascinated to see in Genesis a story of creation that does a decent job of matching what we know about "Earth" history, and that the same basic story is told the world over...

I'm sorry to say it, but I'm afraid I regard this as pure fantasy. You say yourself that you're "fascinated to see in Genesis a story of creation that does a decent job of matching what we know about 'Earth' history", and I think that means you just read into the text things that aren't there and couldn't possibly be there. Genesis absolutely does not describe a world acquiring spin near a star. The authors of Genesis did not have the slightest conception that the earth was spherical, that it spins, or that the sun is a star. I do not understand what you gain by reading Genesis in such a way - it is quite obviously not the intention of the author. There is quite obviously no way that the author of Genesis could have known things of this kind, let alone know about cosmic impacts billions of years ago. If you were to say that you think Genesis matches what science tells us because you believe that Genesis is divinely inspired and that its author was given this information direct from God, then I could understand where you're coming from. I could understand why you think the text contains these ideas, because you would have a mechanism to explain how they got there. And we could reasonably discuss how plausible that is. As it is, you're just reading into it these supposed similarities to modern cosmology but not giving any such mechanism to explain it, which means that it's no more meaningful than seeing pictures in the clouds.

 

[burleyman]

I've just read a piece by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen. He says ' No competent theologians or philosophers - not even the atheist ones - have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe ... if he exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.' Do you agree with this? Also, is it consistent with the doctrine that Christ's nature was both fully human and fully Divine? Jesus Christ existed in this universe, so how can He be fully Divine if God does not exist in this universe?

 

[Plotinus]

I've just read a piece by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen. He says ' No competent theologians or philosophers - not even the atheist ones - have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe ... if he exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.' Do you agree with this?

I think this claim is running two different ideas together. It's one thing to say that God is an object within the universe. It is another to say that he did not create the universe. I would say that pretty much all Christian theologians hold that God is the creator of the universe (at least in some sense) - at least all theologians who understand "God" as an objective name, as opposed to just an idea. So in that sense, Mullen is right. However, not all theologians have said that God is not an object within the universe. Process theologians are the obvious exception, as are the Socinians and, I would say, any theologians who hold that God is within time (such as Richard Swinburne).

When it comes to philosophers, I'm sure that there are many who would regard God as something within the universe, at least in some sense. The Stoics did. So, in some sense, did Hegel, at least as far as I understand him, which is not far. Moreover, there have been philosophers who would have denied that the universe is created at all, most notably Aristotle, who certainly believed in God.

Of course, one can get away with anything if one says that no competent theologians or philosophers have ever said something, because if any counterexamples are produced one can simply deny that they're competent.

Also, is it consistent with the doctrine that Christ's nature was both fully human and fully Divine? Jesus Christ existed in this universe, so how can He be fully Divine if God does not exist in this universe?

That is a good retort, and one might expand it to say that if Christianity is an incarnational religion then at its very heart is the conviction that God is within the universe and indeed is material, at least in some sense. However, the classical answer to your question would be that although it is true that Jesus is God and Jesus is (or was) within the universe, he was within the universe in his capacity as human. The divine "part" of him was not, strictly speaking, within the universe. Only the "human" part was. But the divine part could be said to be within the universe, and even to be identical with the human part in some sense, because of its relation to it. Just as I can, in some sense, say "I'm in Whiterun" because the character I am controlling in the game Skyrim is there, even though in another sense I'm quite clearly not there, and am in fact sitting on the sofa. There is a sense in which I identify with my character, because of the relation that exists between me and the character. On classical christology, the relation between the second person of the Trinity and the human Jesus is similar in kind to that, although much stronger, to the extent where one can straightforwardly say that the second person of the Trinity is in walking about in Galilee or dying on the cross, even though in another sense he is not.

 

[_random_]

Process theologians are the obvious exception, as are the Socinians and, I would say, any theologians who hold that God is within time (such as Richard Swinburne).

What are the general arguments for that perspective? I should probably know this, since I've had The Christian God lying on my nightstand for some time, but I'm pretty new to academic literature, so it's a rather thick read.

 

[Berzerker]

But older versions of the same story do not mention the ocean at all. This is how the Epic of Gilgamesh describes it:

All day long the South Wind blew ...,
blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water

Whatever it was, it came from the south and didn't take long... But Genesis makes it clear, the source of the Flood was the ocean. So they either made it up or they had access to a version that identified the ocean as the source.

I'm sorry to say it, but I'm afraid I regard this as pure fantasy. You say yourself that you're "fascinated to see in Genesis a story of creation that does a decent job of matching what we know about 'Earth' history", and I think that means you just read into the text things that aren't there and couldn't possibly be there. Genesis absolutely does not describe a world acquiring spin near a star. The authors of Genesis did not have the slightest conception that the earth was spherical, that it spins, or that the sun is a star.

I dont know what the author(s) knew but I do know Genesis describes a water covered world in darkness acquiring spin closer to a star. God called the Light Day and the darkness Night and God separated these, we know what causes this phenomenon. And its also clear the author described a world (covered by water and darkness) before Heaven and Earth are "created". Why is that? Why did the author of Genesis make the effort to explain that a dark, water covered world existed before God gave it day and night? Thx again...

 

[timtofly]

What are the general arguments for that perspective? I should probably know this, since I've had The Christian God lying on my nightstand for some time, but I'm pretty new to academic literature, so it's a rather thick read.

In the post above your's Plotinus said that Aristotle belived in God, but that God did not create the universe. Time is as much part of the universe as anything else to the human perspective. Most theologians just hold to the concept that God is not bound by the universe, neither by time.

My question on the matter, is: I cannot be the first one to propose that time started when Adam was cursed. No one has ever mentioned it in a theological reference? IMO time is a restriction just like decay and entropy. God did divide night and day, but that is not time itself. That is not even rotation. If God was on one side of the planet showing light the back side of the planet would still be "in the dark". In fact it was not even until after the Flood that seasons were needed. The earth rotated on a perfect axis, until the deluge and the fountains of the deep changed the mantle to it's current position. If one looks at the satalite image of the earth, it looks like the crust (in the oceans) just sank to where they lie today.

Whatever it was, it came from the south and didn't take long... But Genesis makes it clear, the source of the Flood was the ocean. So they either made it up or they had access to a version that identified the ocean as the source.
I dont know what the author(s) knew but I do know Genesis describes a water covered world in darkness acquiring spin closer to a star. God called the Light Day and the darkness Night and God separated these, we know what causes this phenomenon. And its also clear the author described a world (covered by water and darkness) before Heaven and Earth are "created". Why is that? Why did the author of Genesis make the effort to explain that a dark, water covered world existed before God gave it day and night? Thx again...

The first thing that God said was earth. It was without form and void and surrounded by water. The first separation (of water) was a canopy, but scientist reject this, because they have never seen anything like it. The second separation was dry land. When the Flood of Noah came, it was a deluge, when the canopy broke apart. It was a flood when the crust sank down into where the water once was. Humanity was perfect before the fall except for the seed of Adam through Seth. In the 1500 years between Adam and Noah, it is quite plausible that human achievment was capable of creating the Wonders of the world and the stories of the "gods" that lived on earth.

There are stories of a Noah, of a Zoroaster, of a time of great flooding. There are the existence of Noahide laws that were needed after a tremendous upheaval. There was even a record of the earth being again divided land wise several hundred years after the Flood. The earth was still settling down, and the continents were still moving around.