In a comment on my recent post about the flat-earth cosmology assumed by the author of the Gospel of Matthew, one reader of this blog suggested that there is a mountain from which one can see all the kingdoms of the earth – on the moon! That, it is presumed, is where Satan took Jesus in the story in Matthew 4. Apparently for this individual, no lengths are too great to go to in order to defend his presuppositions from the evidence of the Bible itself. It is perfectly fine to sacrifice Jesus’ humanity, or to have Satan provide him with a rocket ship and oxygen – or does this perhaps explain the reference to Jesus having already “gone up to heaven” in John 3:13? It is OK to posit that Matthew had a telescope and knew about mountains on the moon, and then this technology and the resulting knowledge was lost until the time of Galileo, when the idea that the moon’s surface was “imperfect” like the Earth’s caused quite a stir. The most painfully ironic part is of course that the individual who is going to these lengths to avoid the plain sense of the Bible presumably considers himself a “Bible-believing Christian”.
As a Christian who is a vocal advocate of “Biblical errancy”, I’m in it for one reason alone: the honesty. I spent a long time coming up with creative “solutions” to problems of my own making, based on my as yet unexamined presuppositions about the Bible. Those who engage in such arguments are not stupid – on the contrary, one has to be quite astute to come up with clever harmonizations and explanations to avoid the obvious meaning when the obvious meaning is wrong. This, however, should make anyone who knows even the first thing about Christianity suspicious. A classic emphasis of the Christian faith is that it is not something only the intelligent can adhere to. Yet one needs to be able to do intellectual somersaults in order to maintain Biblical inerrancy. A child-like faith, on the other hand, is not one that simply accepts everything – those who think it means that have presumably forgotten what it was like to be children. On the contrary, a child-like faith will be simple and honest, and blurt out that the emperor has no clothes on when all the adult adherents of Biblical inerrancy, or imperial clothedness, are quietly persisting in denial.
Before ending this post, I’d like to thank the site Cursor for picking up on my post about the peanut butter and banana arguments (which, for those who are unfamiliar, is yet another group of “arguments” by the anti-evolutionists that could easily be mistaken for parodies of the sorts of arguments they use, were it not for the fact that their own spokespeople are clearly behind them. The parodies of these self-parodies, including my favorite – the pineapple argument – are well worth watching for the laughs that will inevitably ensue). Thanks for sending hundreds more visitors my way!
Finally, those following the discussions of the Talpiot tomb mentioned in my last post will want to read the further contributions by Joe Zias, James Tabor and Princeton Theological Seminary.
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