English Bible Written by Foreigners?

I sat up last week when the morning service announcements were read out at our church. For it was announced that at the evening service, this graduate, whom I will refer to as Charlie, will be giving a talk about Creation. I was alerted. Creation is right up my street, and I was already interested on what kind of opinion Charlie will have to share on it.

And so that evening I made a special effort to cycle to our church at North Ascot. But my misunderstanding on the time the service actually commences meant that I arrived more than thirty minutes early. This half hour was designated for pre-service coffee and cake refreshments, and having had tea at home earlier, it felt to me to be a good idea to take a stroll into the North Ascot residential estate for the threefold reason of digesting my last meal, doing some extra exercise, and killing excess time. Fortunately the weather was fair, dry and warm, appropriate in Southern England on a typical June Sunday.

Our church at North Ascot.

About fifty metres further along the sidewalk, another regular church member was approaching in the opposite direction. It was unusual for him to be alone, not having his wife accompany him was not the norm. As we were about to pass each other, I smiled up to him and bade good evening. Instead of acknowledging my greeting as any polite gentleman would do to someone he knew well, he grimaced as he held his silence and walked on towards the church building, as he would to anyone he doesn't like. As for me, to forgive plays an important role in my walk with God. Jesus taught it, even to the extent that if a brother sins as much as seven by seventy times, he must be forgiven that many times, even whether it's 77 or 490 times a day! (Matthew 18:21-22). Even when considering physical health alone, to forgive will spare the merciful person from a multitude of illnesses.

I approached the road junction at the middle of the residential estate, where I paused to look around. Indeed it was quite a posh area, a layout of privately-owned homes, inhabited by predominantly middle class residents. However, the quietness of the traffic-free streets was sad in a way but of no real surprise. Back in my boyhood days it would have been common to watch boys playing football or cricket (without allowing the ball to break a window), while the girls were out playing hopscotch, house or schools. Kid's voices echoed through the street, from time to time a scuffle would erupt, and occasionally a boy could be seen running or walking back home in tears. Such was the rough and tumble of growing up, the excess energy well and truly spent, and given little or no chance for obesity to set in.

But as I stood at the road junction on a typical early Summer Sunday tea-time, the stillness and the quietness of the estate had somehow gotten to me. Imagining every family sitting in front of the TV, their teenage sons shut in their own bedrooms and glued to the play station, Facebook or whatever, the well-known but unbiblical phrase The Englishman's Home is his Castle looks very appropriate in North Ascot. And much more so as I passed one residence as I made my way back to the church, what seems to be some argument taking place at the front door between a female householder and a caller.

The grimacing pedestrian I passed earlier lives on or near the estate. Very English, as I have known him for a number of years, he has a tendency to look up in awe to graduates but despises commoners who may hold different opinions. He has already condemned me to an eternity in Hell - not because of any possibility of deliberately rejecting Jesus Christ as Saviour, but because I am not in the middle-class academic realm, and therefore my own tendency to hug other men is seen by him as a transgression of Englishness.

Crazy, isn't it? In truth, I wish that the risen Jesus of Nazareth would materialise in front of me and give me a long embrace, his nail-scarred hands tapping gently on my back and giving it a gentle stroke as he showers me with love and affection. I guess I have to wait until the afterlife before I can have that experience. Instead, I belong to a church which within includes a few middle-class eccentrics and academic weirdos, who either cannot accept the Bible as literal history or finding difficulty in doing so. As was the case with Charlie, whom the grimacing pedestrian adores.

Charlie is quite an academic in his own right, whose graduation on Middle East political history has enabled him to write books on the subject, although at this point in time still awaiting publication. With myself believing him to be one of many patriots who voted for Britain to leave the EU, I also have an awareness of the possibility of him being a supporter and follower of Jacob Rees Mogg, sometimes addressed as Moggy, the posh Conservative politician and fanatic Brexit supporter and a patriot with an Etonian and Oxford University Alma Mater, and having a plum tone of voice to boot. Such an ideal Englishman adored by many within the Centre-Right wing political circles, and whose active Roman Catholic faith has attracted comments from his critics as one politician being disillusioned with his imaginary pixie in the sky.

With his academic and political standing established in my mind, I listened carefully to Charlie's preach, and as I have previously suspected, he did not take the first chapter of Genesis as literal history, but as a poetical form parallel to an ancient Mesopotamian tablet, the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian text very similar to the Gilgamesh Epic, also from Babylon, the latter I'm more familiar with. The Enuma Elish and the Gilgamesh Epic are both very similar in context in a sense that they both relate to Biblical events as recorded in Genesis, the first dealing with Creation whilst the latter is about Noah's Flood. Both were to do with warring gods, bickering deities who initiated Creation out of war and revenge rather than a demonstration of God's love and Creative powers. Furthermore, secular academics have placed the Gilgamesh Epic above Genesis in literature status, insisting that Genesis was copied from the Epic, therefore granting the Babylonian text as having greater authority than the Biblical narrative. Therefore it was of no surprise when Charlie placed the Enuma Elish at equal standing with the Bible as being poetical and non-historical in context.

Fragments of Enuma Elish tablet

The Enuma Elish was something new to me, and in a way I thank Charlie for opening up a wealth of knowledge at my disposal. Checking on the Internet, it looks as though Charlie composed his preach from author Pete Enns, who has written books on Biblical history, as well as blogs to the website Bio-Logos, a site centred on Theistic Evolution, or as they refer to as Evolutionary Creationism. One of Pete Enns' articles is about Enuma Elish, and it looked to have been the bedrock for Charlie's sermon.

I have had a good look through several articles presented in Bio-Logos, and I came to the realisation that this website is more approachable than Creation Ministries International website, the latter which tend to have a cutting edge with its articles and general presentation, as if constantly defending itself from heavy opposition and even mockery from the secular world. Creation Ministries International has always been highly critical of Bio-Logos for compromising with Darwin's theories, with no fewer than 550 articles one way or another firing criticism at the website.

But despite Bio-Logos more gentle approach to the reader, I cannot accept Theistic Evolution as a bedrock for Biblical Creationism, at least for one very important reason. That is, if Theistic Evolution is a reality, then Adam and Eve had parents, and maybe thousands of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, and cousins too who all died natural deaths. If death was already at work among men before the fall, then that totally invalidates the Atonement made by Jesus Christ on the Cross, and also invalidates the Resurrection. That means that Christ is powerless to save us and our faith remains futile. Christ atoned for us because of the sin of our first parents, the sole head couple of all mankind. There is no alternative.

It is true that the course of creation as narrated in the first chapter of Genesis poses problems. For example, the land and the seas was created on the second day, the sun, moon and stars came to being on the fourth day, after all vegetation was created on the third day. Therefore where the source of light was from day one and how the dividing of day from night which occurred on the same day came to be, we are not told. But it is taught, and therefore to be accepted with faith. Later, God himself endorses and confirms the historicity of his literal six-day Creation to the Hebrews by ushering in the Sabbath day as the Fourth Commandment in the Decalogue, explaining a literal six-day creation followed by his rest on the seventh. I would go on to say that, after the completion of day six, the forces of Creation during those six days are not in force now. From day seven, which was in itself God's day of rest, the forces of creative power ended and it has not been in operation ever since to this day.

With the historicity of Genesis held to question, here is another opportunity to demonstrate the historicity of Holy Scripture by means of simple arithmetical calculations. In this case, there is another mystery which seemed to remain unexplained, and that is the mystery of Melchizedek, the king of Salem at the time of Abraham. Therefore, what does the writer of Hebrews mean when he says that this priest "is from everlasting to everlasting, without father or mother, he remains a priest forever."-? (Hebrews 7:3). Do we have two priests at work on our behalf, Melchizedek and Jesus Christ?

It was by coming across a Jewish quote about a Hebrew tradition saying that Melchizedek was actually Shem, the son of Noah, and of whom Noah blessed the Lord, the God of Shem (Genesis 9:26). So I decided to look into this. So with just pencil and paper, I was able to work out that two years after the Flood, Shem became the father of Arphaxad at the age of a hundred years (Genesis 11:10-26). In turn, Arphaxad became the father of Shelah at age 35 years. After this, Shelah became the father of Eber at thirty years of age (Eber is the original name from which the word Hebrew arose). And so right down to Abraham. By adding the ages of each father at his son's birth (and not their full age), Shem was already 390 years old when Abraham was born, and when the two met after rescuing Lot at the battle of the kings, Abraham was between 80-84 years of age, making Shem between 470-474 years of age. By the time Abraham died at the age of 175 years, Shem was 565 years old, and actually lived on for another 35 years until he himself died at age 600 years, according to Genesis 11:10, with the first 100 years already lived before the Flood.

This is where being without parents made sense to Abraham. After the Flood, Noah himself lived for a further 350 years after the Flood, making a total lifespan of 950 years - the first 600 years during the antediluvian age. When Noah died 350 years after the Flood, Abraham was already alive and he was already 60 years old. This was more than twenty years before Shem met Abraham to receive the tithe. The chances of Abraham ever meeting Noah, I guess, would have been very slim, if not at all, as Abraham did not travel that north. In fact, at 60, he was still in the Mesopotamian area, as he did not enter Canaan until 75 years old (Genesis 12:4-5). There would be no logical reason why Noah would have migrated from near Mount Ararat in present Eastern Turkey if, according to Scripture, he had planted a vineyard there. What I can make of it all, Shem being the same man as Melchizedek makes good sense and therefore re-enforces the historicity of the Bible, especially Genesis.

Which brings me to ask why, in the fifth chapter of Genesis, each patriarch, including Noah himself, was concluded with the words, and he died? For example:
When Seth lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh. And after he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived for 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether Seth lived for 912 years and he died. (5:6-8).

But in chapter 11:10-32, with a full list of post-diluvian patriarchs, not one was concluded with the words, and he died. By doing the reckoning as discussed above, it became clear that all the post-diluvian patriarchs were still alive during Abraham's lifetime. This may explain the difference between chapter five and chapter eleven, where in the latter, the words and he died does not appear.

By doing a little bit of calculating, I can verify the historicity of the Bible, and not relegated into the realm of myth or mere poetry. I think it is a grievous error to mythologise Genesis, or come to that, any part of the Bible. But so unfortunate it is, when Englishness has that knack of playing down the historicity of Holy Scripture in order to exalt himself on a national level, is to play the role of supremacy, even if it is possible, to exalt himself above God. As I have come across over and over again, the Englishman has a tendency to think of himself above all foreigners in all nationalistic, cultural and academic circles. It may not be done deliberately or openly, although there are far-right groups who do just that. Rather, it lies in the subconscious. The Englishman cannot help thinking the way he does. Although I cannot claim to be a mind-reader, these set of ideas seem to play well with the grimacing pedestrian's rudeness.

The Bible is not an English book. None of it was written by the English. Instead it was written by foreigners, almost entirely by Jews living in the Middle East, and then much later translated into English. Maybe, just a thought, if the English such as the grimacing pedestrian, had a far greater awe and reverential respect for the historicity and truthfulness of the Bible than the awe he has for a fellow academic, then who knows, Darwinism may not have got to where it is now.