Yesterday, we had an interesting conversation about the Genesis Flood. In response, a reader wrote:
When did this all get written down? I read the OT a few years ago again (right after the pandemic). I get a real sense that this was likely written “a while back”. But not pulled together until Babylonian exile.
My hazy remembrance is that Torah assumes the form we have it in around the time of the Exile (so in the 500s BCE.) But don’t trust me on that and, honestly, take a lot of the speculation about the formation of the canon with a huge grain of salt. There’s a lot we don’t know and will never know. It is notable that, even in Jesus’ time, there is still not consensus among Jews about what even counts as Scripture. Generally, the activating enzyme for settling such questions appears to be Gigantic Societal Crisis: the Exile, the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome, the Reformation (in the case of the Catholic canon). The natural habit of both Jews and Catholics is “Don’t define stuff unless you absolutely have to.” Crises provoke both groups to want to nail everything down and get it all defined because ambiguity and uncertainty are not helpful in a hurricane. But when the storm is past, both groups tend to get back to speculation, ambiguity, and diversity of opinion. “Two Jews, three opinions” is true of Catholics too, because Israel is the olive tree and we are grafted in.
And another reader wrote:
I found Joel Baden’s course, “Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors” very interesting. A bit challenging if one leans toward the fundamentalist tendencies. And, as you say, all of it has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
We are on much more solid ground with the NT than the OT. But even there we have gaps. Ultimately, we have to remember that the Bible is like a family photo album. People who complain “By what right did the Church decide what books were inspired and which weren’t?” is exactly like asking “By what right do you decide what pictures go in your family photo album?” It’s your family photo album! You decide what expresses who your family is, how you live, what you believe, what you love, etc. The Bible is, in the final analysis the books which first Israel and then the Church decided were to be read during their sacral ceremonies. The “new testament” is not, in the final analysis, a book but “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25). It is the books that were read in proximity to the celebration of the Eucharist that took their name from it. It did not take its name from them. The words of consecration were being prayed over the Eucharistic offering decades before they were written down and centuries before the Church then formally canonized those books (and others) into a body of books with bookends.
Another reader commented on Fundamentalist responses to the fact that the Flood narrative has various parallels in Mesopotamian literature.
I was educated, in part, from fundamentalist textbooks, and they actually highlighted this as evidence that the stories are true. I was, and to some extent remain, baffled when I encountered the bland assumption that multiple testimonies to something somehow discredit it. (Of course the further question is: which version is more authentic, if any is? And that’s where the fundamentalists fall down, because it seems highly unlikely that the Bible’s version is the one true original version, as they believe. But the mere existence of multiple accounts isn’t even a point against fundamentalism, let alone against Christianity as a whole.)
That has always been my take as well. When a thing is multiply attested by witnesses in every case except a biblical account, we take it is as evidence that something like what is attested happened. Only in the case of Bible stories does that somehow prove that nothing happened. This is particularly acute with the accounts of the Passion and Resurrection. The notion that trivial variations in the gospel narratives somehow cancel out the gigantic elephant of their commonality on the basic event of the Resurrection has always struck me the same way as a claim that variations in accounts of the assassination of JFK (three shots? four shots? School Book Depository? Grassy Knoll? Overpass?) prove that JFK was never assassinated at all. Even more incredible to me are those who argue that “Jesus never existed” because of the variations in the gospel narratives. It is a preposterous claim, reserved solely for Jesus. No other figure in antiquity has been afforded such ridiculous treatment.
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