Professor Samuel Rolles Driver’s (1846-1914) The Book of Genesis With Introduction and Notes. 1907 Edition (London. Methuen & Co., Westminster Commentaries) makes quite clear that man’s origins in a blissful Edenic Paradise are NOT supported by the findings of Science. His book must have caused a Christian World some distress.
Driver:
“In fact, no archaeologist questions that the biblical cosmogony, however altered in form and stripped of its original polytheism, is, in its main outlines, derived from Babylonia.” (p. 30)
“We have in the first chapter of Genesis the Hebrew version of an originally Babylonian legend respecting the beginning of all things…” (p.31)
“The evidence of archaeology, geology, biology, and allied sciences points to the conclusion that man so far from having begun his existence upon the globe in the happy surroundings of an Eden, has slowly emerged from a state of savagery, in which he was, externally at least, little removed from the brute creation. His primitive condition was not one of harmony and happiness, but of fierce conflict against opposing forces. Pain and death prevailed upon the earth before man made his appearance, and have, it would seem, been prime factors in his evolution.” (p. 36)
Any comments?
I so agree. Is it Steven Pinker whose analysis put our present state of affairs as the best since we took up gardening?
But he was not romantacizing the preagricultural revolution scene either. The death rate was high. The food was easy, but if it became scarcer the death rate increased.
Others questioned his results, saying foraging humans were peaceful. I imagine the peaceful forager scenario working only if nature killed of enough humans through disease to keep us from outreproducing our food supply.
I have never understood why the idea that we evolved from primates is any less appealing than the idea that we were formed directly from mud (or, in the case of women, from Adam’s rib). I suspect that the hangup is the odd phrase that humans (presumably at least men) are created in the image of God. The idea that the God who created everything would have characteristics of one minor aspect of creation seems inherently unsupportable. It raises many questions, all of which have only bad answers. Does God have feet? Where would he put them? Does God sweat? Does God eat, with the inevitable consequences? Taken literally, the idea simply makes no degree of sense at all, but I suppose it feeds the ego of those who believe it that they are special merely by the fact that they are people.
The idea that the God who created everything would have characteristics of one minor aspect of creation seems inherently unsupportable.
Yet the history of Christian thought is much funkier than we are taught in Sunday School. There were very late traditions that maintained that yes indeed, God had a body! Go ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for a paper on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of 399 CE. This interesting episode is usually subsumed under discussions of the 1st Origenist Controversy since the anti-Origenist side used it as a cudgel against their opponents but it is well worth investigating in itself.
Also see Biblical scholar Mark S Smith’s study ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for a fascinating discussion of the embodied divine in the Jewish traditions. Yep, sometimes God had feet! And the idea of the Imago Dei did include for some at least a more concrete embodied aspect than the abstract immaterial conception that won out in the end.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)