Yeah, it’s a very long video. I’m probably overly excited about it, because what are the chances that a world-renowned scientist would grant his FIRST interview to an unknown apologetics ministry at a relatively small church?
What the Black Sea hypothesis does have correct in my view is the timeframe. 50,000+ years seems difficult to believe that a story would have endured and be memorable to the world’s peoples. But we don’t know for sure.
What I do agree with Dr. Ross most strongly on is that the flood should be taken as historical. That doesn’t mean it was global in the sense that we think of it today. That doesn’t mean it created the Grand Canyon. But it means that it was a true historic event. Here’s a clip of Dr. Ross explaining this motivation for his book.
Why is this important?
1 - Jesus and Peter seemed to speak of the flood as historical
2 - Many traditional cultures speak of the flood as historical, and when we share this belief, it provides a powerful in-road to the Gospel
3 - Even when “myth” is involved, we can better understand the cultural beliefs of the world’s people when we believe that they are rooted in fact, instead of relegating everything to fable
Okay, but the evidence doesn’t support that hypothesis (population genetics, archaeological sites), so I’d say that Ross’ model is just wrong.
Well, the Church Fathers were also geocentrists. And nobody before the 1700s or 1800s had any reason to question the typical global flood idea. Which is why we probably have
They, and certainly their audience would not have known any different and when a culture has this collective cultural memory, referencing that event regardless of the details can help make effective points.
So this is pretty similar to how YEC point to all these flood stories as evidence for a global flood, but you need to specify and zoom in to the details. Which cultures? What do their stories describe?
Consider these examples:
Example 1: Cascadia Earthquake & Tsunami
Multiple tribal stories describe:
Ground shaking violently
Ocean withdrawing far out
Massive wave returning
Geological evidence:
Magnitude 9.0 earthquake, January 26, 1700
Japanese tsunami records confirm date
Buried forests, turbidite deposits
Key detail: Earthquake THEN tsunami sequence
Does this match Noah’s flood? Wrong mechanism (no rain), wrong date (1700 CE), earthquake not mentioned in Genesis
Okay obviously that was a more recent story, let’s go back to a story that predates the Bible by a long shot, the oral tradition of the Klamath Native American tribe:
Example 2: Mount Mazama/Crater Lake (~7,700 years ago)
Mountain exploded in battle between gods
Mountain fell in upon itself
Rain filled the hole
Geological event:
Catastrophic VEI-7 eruption
Caldera collapse
Lake formed in crater
50+ feet of pumice deposited
Key detail: Volcanic eruption, not rainfall flood
Does this match Noah’s flood? Volcanic (not hydrological), wrong mechanism, mountain collapse described
Example 3: Australian Aboriginal Traditions (~10,000-7,000 years ago)
Multiple Aboriginal groups describe:
You could walk to that island
Old hunting grounds now underwater
Water came up slowly over many lifetimes
Geological evidence:
Post-glacial sea level rise: ~120 meters
Continental shelf was exposed, habitable
Submerged archaeological sites confirmed
Rate: ~1 meter per century
Key detail: GRADUAL rise over millennia
Does this match Noah’s flood? Too slow (centuries, not 40 days), no ark needed, wrong mechanism. But you know where we do see details very similar to the Bible’s story? In the Ancient Near East.
Example 4: Mesopotamian Flood Traditions
Gilgamesh Epic + other Mesopotamian stories:
Divine warning, boat building, massive flooding
Most similar to Genesis account
Pre-dates or contemporary with Genesis text
Geological/Archaeological evidence:
Multiple flood layers at Ur, Shuruppak (4000-2800 BCE)
Tigris/Euphrates prone to catastrophic river flooding
Flat alluvial plain = widespread inundation
Key detail: regional (Mesopotamia)
Does this match Noah’s flood? Possibly a massive regional flood, and “universal” for anyone who would have barely survived one of these local, but civilization-destroying floods.
I don’t think this is a great argument. If we are going, “well the Bible told about a real event that happened, therefore the Gospel is true,” then we should believe all the other stories I mentioned here. I mean we might as well follow the pantheon of gods the Klamath tribe speaks of, their story was passed on orally for over 7,000 years and it describes a real event that occurred!
I understood that differently. He said it provides an in-road to the gospel, not proof that it was true. On the flip-side, Is it a great argument to claim the Bible is pervaded by myths and falsehoods and made up stories except this stuff about Jesus I think you should believe in? How would you respond to this?
The strongest argument will always be Jesus’s reference followed by Church tradition. Both can be rejected or rationalized away but that doesn’t sit comfortable with a lot of people. Nor is “all this stuff is made up” a good in-road to “God was born as a carpenter in Nazareth and died for your sins.”
And one does not have to believe any ancient myths were handed down or remained accurately over thousands of years. That is just grotesquely improbable. Even for the Genesis flood accounts even if they happened exactly as narrated they would not be handed down accurately for thousands of years. Christians can maintain the Biblical accounts are accurate simply because God inspired these sacred scriptures and made sure we have accurate details. Nothing more is needed to make this claim and hold this position.
Vinnie
Those are two different categories – and the Bible doesn’t have any of the latter.
Simple – you look at what kind of literature is involved. The Gospels are biography.
Claiming the genre of the apparently historical narration in countless places in the OT is myth or dramatized fiction but the gospels are somehow accurate history is going to immediately raise special pleading alarms for most people. Ancient bios allowed for an extremely high degree of fictitious latitude compared to modern standards. Claiming the gospels are ancient bios really doesn’t say as much as many apologists think it does. Nor do the gospels have to be strictly limited to ancient bios. If they decided to make up their own type of literature roughly based on ancient bios that is also possible. One has to examined the documents internally, not just label them a genre as if that tells us something about the veracity of specific stories. There are well credentialed and well respected scholars who will tell you large swathes of the gospels are post easter creations with a historical core. We can disagree with them but then we have to form arguments that in my mind boil down to (aside from miracles being possible or not) Either 1) God intentionally came to earth and patterned himself after Jewish history (a lot of which many of us here seem to think is myth and made up aside from some kernel of history in the stories), or 2) the Christian writers dressed him up as such after the fact. As a Christian I have no issue believing the former but from a purely objective, historical standpoint, it is difficult to say that I have extremely strong historical evidence that would allow me to prove 1 vs 2. Or that maybe Jesus saw himself in this way and the Gospel authors ran with it, adding to it. Once we let myth take an inch, it wants a mile. We should be sensitive to this when discussing with literalists which is what the entire gist of my post was meant to convey. @pevaquark also mentioned Church father’s geocentrism. Sure, they got stuff wrong. They also compiled our Bibles, copied them and carried on the apostolic tradition for us and continued the Church. So if they all strongly believed something, it’s a good place for Christians to start. They may get things wrong, as does the Bible, but I still prefer approaching both with an initial hermeneutic of trust. It is the last resort to dismiss scripture and tradition for me. Sometimes the evidence favors it and sometimes the evidence only suggests it we are wearing blinders without knowing it.
My point is most people read this Bible and simply see narrative. On day 1 God did x, God appeared to Noah and told him to build a boat, Jesus healed a blind man. The tomb was empty. It all looks like story and historical narration. Genre is important but what passages are what genre and can be true with all the details being fictitious. is just someone’s opinion. It also seems certain works become myth in the Church when we need them too which is the right thing to do but to deny our hands are forced here would be disingenuous to me.
Also, I find plenty of falsehoods in the Bible. It has contradictions in a number of places. God uses it and its message comes through either way. Some Christians are so entrenched in inerrancy they would rather it die the death of a thousand qualifications and move the goalposts forever than just say yeah, the book has errors and incorrect stuff in it. Barth puts it a bit softer than me but I agree with this:
“The Bible has proved and will prove itself to be a true and fitting instrument to point man to God and his work and his words, to God who alone is infallible. Since the Bible is a human instrument and document, bound and conditioned by the temporal views of nature, of history, of ideas, of values, it to that extent is not sinless, like Jesus Christ himself, and thus not infallible, like God. No wonder that seen from the perspective of the worldviews and the concepts of other ages; the question may arise whether we have to conclude that the Bible is not solid. I should never say such a thing, but would admit rather the occurrence of certain, let us say, tensions, contradictions, and maybe if you prefer, “errors,” in its time-bound human statements.” – Karl Barth
Vinnie
This may be somewhat controversial, but I don’t think situation #2 should be a problem for Christians. My convictions relies on the fact that whatever happened post-death of Jesus radically changed the disciple’s perceptions of Jesus. Whatever happened, it was their A-ha! moment. Similar to Saul on the road to Damascus, I think that event allowed for Saul to see the whole story of Israel and its culmination/fulfillment in Jesus. Back to the disciples: it really seems that their belief in the Resurrection took them over the edge. Maybe their expierences with Jesus and his teachings weren’t enough for them to believe he was the Messiah. However, since they have had this belief in the Resurrection, they are able to see the whole picture of Jesus’ ministry. So for the writers of the Gospels, I believe it was their conviction to make the Gospels as clear as they can to their audience to proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah. So maybe they did throw OT allusions into Jesus story, maybe they did move around some of Jesus’ teaching or had him quote OT passages that related back to the Messiah. I am not bothered by this because I understand this as the Gospel writers trying to make the message clear. Future generations weren’t gonna necessarily have a personal expierence of the bodily Jesus post-Resurrection. They designed the message to be so clear as to hopefully give their readers that same A-ha! moment (ultimately by the Holy Spirit). Obviously there isn’t a way to know whether or not they created certain narratives or simply edited other portions for the sake of theological understandings. But for me, I trust the conviction of the disciples who believed something did happen on that Easter Sunday that changed their whole outlook on who Jesus was. That new hermeneutic lens is what I believe led to the creation of the Gospels.
Yes, that is the picture drawn by the gospels and Acts.
Gospels tell that the disciples did not understand and Jesus told that the Spirit of God will guide them to understanding afterwards. Their lives and apparently also the way how and what they preached changed after the Pentecost (Acts 2). Later, the addition of pagans to the community of believers affected the interpretations, at least to some extent (for example, Acts 15).
The gospels were written after that, so the gospels reflect the new perspectives.
I believe it reflects what the Holy Spirit let them understand but I can understand that a historian that tries not to depend on beliefs and supernatural may come to a different conclusion.
John 20:31 tells:
“But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (NIV)
That, together with the ‘Methods section’ of the Gospel according to Luke (Luke 1:1-4) reveal much about the nature of the gospels.
The gospels tell moments from the life of Jesus (biographies in that sense) but they are quite selective in what they tell. They had a purpose and that affected what they told and what they left out. Traveling teachers probably told some of the teachings in multiple places, which may add diversity to the stories, depending on what version of the teaching the author decided to include into the gospel.
Texts that tell about the acts of God are challenging to interpret if the historian needs to limit the approach to the ‘normal’ laws of the material world. Personal opinions, faith or lack of belief in supernatural, necessarily affect how the reader sees the texts, even if the historian tries to be as neutral as possible.
Hmmm. That last paragraph looks completely contradictorily paradoxical. Fine until we get to what Christians can maintain.
I’m not a non-knowledge believer, but I can make Jesus work as incarnate God to a fair degree. He believed the myths. He was sinless. Not anachronistically educationally, enculturatedly infallible.
[And all sinless means is that he always followed his divine nature’s moral compass. Through the morass, his inextricable morass, of human ignorance. That which is not assumed, is not redeemed.]
What do you call a pious fraud like The Book of Daniel?
I’ve never yet encountered anyone who wasn’t actually pleased to find out that the Bible is far more complex than just the rule book that so many make it out to be (except fundamentalists who treat it like a rule book). It’s been gratifying how many people grasp that different parts are written different ways – especially since it’s pretty obvious that different parts are written in different ways!
Absolutely – but it has to be trust that the Bible is what the different types of literature make it.
I don’t doubt there was a greater understanding after the resurrection, especially after Christians were able to view what happened in light of the Hebrew Scriptures but I see it as a continuation of Jesus’s own self-revelation.
The chief apostle pronounces him the Messiah in a central story in the narratives. We have no reason to doubt this. If we doubt this we might as well doubt every other story just the same. The apostles left behind their jobs and families to follow him all over and face hardship. They believed this already about Jesus and the things Jesus said (love me more than your father or mother, let the dead bury the dead) don’t work for anyone but God.
I reject this to be honest. The problem is I am not going to accept the portrayal of the disciples as complete imbeciles who misunderstood almost everything about Jesus as narrated in the Gospels. If anything looks like overstepping history or a literary device, this is it to me. Why is this portrayal accurate and not fiction whereas when Jesus says and does things in the Gospels that look like Jewish salvation history, that is rejected? Just picking and choosing. It’s not a fault of yours, but really par for the course in historical Jesus scholarship to muddle through traditions and make things up without a clear methodology.
I’d say its more likely the portrayal of the disciples in the gospels is overdone and a literary device and the resurrection of Jesus vindicated their trust and belief in a rabble rouser who grew up in Nazareth and said blasphemous things claiming to be God. The same individual they already chose to leave family life and work behind to follow. You don’t leave your career or family because someone might maybe be a good teacher or possibly the Messiah. You leave because you found the individual whom following supersedes everything else. That is the only coherent reconstruction in my mind. But I can see how 2nd Temple Galilean Jews initially struggled with a man making divine claims. Jesus was accused of blasphemy a number of times.
Vinnie
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