Christmas with Pontius Pilate

We don't know what Pilate looked like, but the expression Greg Hicks
(from the old film The Robe) is making here seems very appropriate.

A middle-aged Roman prefect stumbles confusedly through an unfamiliar town square.

This is certainly not Jerusalem, he muses, observing the strange garb of the local inhabitants. A careful-thinking man, he does not panic, but tries to retrace his steps that evening. There had been the gift of fine wine from Antipas, perhaps enjoyed a little too willingly in the wake of yet another censorious message from Rome, a lapse of his customary self-discipline. Then on the way home, a swerve into that unfamiliar-looking alley to avoid that idiot rider who couldn't manage his own horse. There was a sort of flash, and disoriented feeling (had he hit his head?), and suddenly he stepped out of what he had assumed was the same cobble-stoned alleyway, only to find he was not in Jerusalem at all.

Nor anywhere in Judea, seemingly. The people here had strange features, and were of every ethnicity, like the diverse masses that poured into Jerusalem for Passover, yet there were faces strange to even his own fairly experienced eye. Some looked more or less Roman, some like the Germanic warriors Tiberius had brought back to parade at his Triumph, some like Egyptian or other African auxiliaries, and others more exotic still.

They were dressed in strange but festive garb, suitable for the cold weather, colder than Jerusalem had been, he now realized. He drew his cloak more closely around him as a frigid blast drove flurries of snow into his face, aquiline features narrowing in disapproval. He did not shiver, a habit cultivated to avoid appearing weak in front of his soldiers, but he knew he would need to find warmer clothing like theirs soon. That left the question of where he was, however, and how he'd get home.

His attention was quickly drawn by music, such music as he had never heard before. The rhythm and instruments were strange to his ears, but he could understand the lyrics well enough: Gloria in Excelcis Deo. "Glory to God in the Highest." But only part of the song was in Latin, the rest was garbled in some kind of barbarian, mumbling tongue full of consonant clusters, though here and there he heard loanwords borrowed from Latin and perhaps Greek. The tongue of some outlying province, then, which knew of the glory of Rome but perhaps did not yet bow to its authority. He should be careful; his obviously Roman garb and bearing might not earn him any good feeling in this place. And "deo" was a bit strange, "god" rather than "gods." Perhaps these people, like the Judeans, worshiped a singular deity. He'd never taken the time to learn the details of Judean religion, that was Antipas' forte, not his. The Judeans didn't like him, and he didn't care for them at all; they were difficult to manage, fussing with religious minutia at one minute, and attempting bloody insurrections the next, then crying to Rome if he so much as slaughtered a handful of them to teach them a good lesson. The Judean position had been a welcome promotion at the time, but he'd soon grown weary of the post, and Rome had not been pleased with his severe interpretation of proper governance. Perhaps they were all going soft back in The City Aeternal, losing the old patrician sternness just like they'd lost the war in Germania, though such rebellious thoughts were dangerous even in the secret palace of his own mind.

What he could not understand was where the music was coming from. To produce such a song would require a choir of reasonably well-trained singers, along with a small band of musicians. But his ears could clearly distinguish the direction of the music, and it seemed to be coming from the air. Perhaps it was a party on an upper floor? Some of the buildings here, he now realized, were taller than any he'd seen before. Gods knew what far-flung royal capital had he been transported to, no doubt in a deep wine-dream he'd regret in the morning, even if his slaves had gotten him safely home to bed.

He walked further down the street, avoiding the pedestrians who mostly ignored him, though several gawked as if they'd never seen a Roman before. He rounded the corner, seeking shelter from the wind, and drew in his breath at the sight that greeted him. A great conifer tree, like those of the forests of northern Germania, completely covered in dazzling lights. How they were contrived he did not know, but one of these would be the talk of Rome if it could be arranged. He drew closer, seeking to understand how it was lit and appointed.

At the base of the tree, he now saw, were some badly-done statues, enacting a scene of some kind, probably religious in nature. There was a baby in a tiny bed of straw, surrounded by improbably diverse livestock, with sheep jostling with cows and what was either a horse or a donkey for space. There was a man and a woman on each side of the baby, probably its parents, and then some other strange characters, with shepherd's crooks but dressed unlike any shepherds he'd ever been forced to take notice of. On the other side were three unusual figures, dressed in exaggerated finery and accompanied by an undersized camel, the kind with two humps from the northeastern provinces that were massive and intimidating in real life, around which the horses of his all-too-few cavalry units were irritatingly skittish.

The whole scene had an air of spiritual significance, both in its placement under the shining tree and with the careful placement of certain characters, as if it were the re-enactment of an important religious ceremony or myth. These mystery religions and their public rituals had become common in Rome and throughout the Empire, though the significance of this one escaped him and didn't particularly concern him. As he was turning his attention back to the tree, to his great surprise a woman tapped him on the shoulder. He glared in startled outrage at her for daring such a familiar gesture, and he a prefect of Rome, before remembering that this was a dream and he'd best play along in hopes of waking up as soon as possible. His wife often had vivid dreams, and claimed they sometimes came true later. Perhaps this was something significant as well. He forced himself to relax his features and looked sternly but inquiringly at her. The woman, who did not at all resemble his wife, with pale skin and hair redder than he had ever seen before, looked momentarily taken aback at his reflexive scowl, but now drew herself up and began prattling at him in her barbarian language with the occasional familiar-sounding word, seemingly both pleased and impatient. He understood nothing from her speech, but she began poking and prodding him toward the scene he had just been contemplating, and to his irritation he understood that she wanted him to stand off to one side and not move.

He did so, feeling very imposed upon by this strange dream, and in response she drew out a small, flat, black object and held it up in front of her, bending forward slightly and appearing to look through it at the scene, though it was solid as far as he could tell. He wondered if she was the designer of the display, and the black object was used for worship in her obscure cultus. It was aimed at him too, he thought, which meant he was being honored as well. Though he didn't hold with barbarian superstition, he decided to play the part, and drew himself up proudly. She made more pleased sounds at this and kept tapping the object in her hand, before straightening up and, to his utter astonishment, raising her thumb in the pollice verso gesture which condemned a defeated gladiator to death. With her beaming countenance completely at odds with the lethal sign, it occurred to him that this might mean something different so far from proper civilization as he clearly was, though it was hard to contemplate. This must be a distant province indeed.

She withdrew after being hailed by some other women, and Pilate took the opportunity to study the scene more carefully before withdrawing. He had assumed the figures were carved from stone and then painted in this rather lurid fashion, but now he saw they were fashioned from some light but tough material, so light that having barely brushed against it he knocked one of the rich kingly figures into its impossibly tiny camel, both falling over. No matter, a slave would take care of that. On the back, he now noticed, were affixed labels, in mostly-legible Latin script. He peered at each of them, and found some names were more or less familiar. "Ioseph" was seemingly their local corruption of the Latin name "Iosephus," for example, though the I was drawn with a foot, like "J". Idly curious, an unnatural mood for him, he came to the child, and lifted it to see what the label on its back might say. Having done so, he dropped the small figure in surprise and passed his hand over his eyes in disbelief. "Jesus Christ." Surely it couldn't be...?

His mind immediately flashed back to that horrible day. Iesus Nazarenus, the one they called Christus. The crowds had been all stirred up at his arrival for their annual celebration, one of several yearly that required the slaughtering of vast numbers of animals, then a few days later turned on him savagely and demanded his crucifixion. But this man was not just a fallen local celebrity. He was... different. The thought was uncomfortable, even years later.

His wife had behaved unusually that day they executed the man. She'd had another one of those dreams, but claimed it was about this Iesus, this Nazarene also called the Galilean, and that Pilate should have nothing to do with him. He'd interrogated the man himself, and to his surprise found that instead of a desperate criminal begging for the clemency of Rome, it was he himself who felt defensive. The one they now called Christus seemed to be walking a fine line between not giving him any legitimate, legal grounds for condemnation, yet also not asking for pardon, throwing the burden of the decision entirely on Pilate. He almost seemed to be inviting Pilate to make a self-sacrificing choice, an altruistic decision altogether at odds with Pilate's own studied pragmatism and enlightened self-interest. That was impossible, yet something deep inside him stirred when the man spoke.

The man hadn't said much, but his few words were efficiently profound, in a way any educated Roman could appreciate. Clearly the man understood philosophy. Pilate had nothing but contempt for those faux-hellenized sophists who called themselves professional philosophers, but this man wasn't like that. He knew some things about the nature of authority, too. Somehow, inexplicably, Pilate had felt proud that the man had said more to him than to Herod. Antipater hadn't gotten a word out of him, though he'd handled the whole impossible situation with more humor than Pilate had anticipated. Things had been better between them after that, for all Antipas' short-comings. But old Antipas was never very deep, nor interested in virtue; this Christus seemed to realize Pilate was a man who lived by a code, and was trying to subvert that code with a higher one. How strange that the natural response of "who do you think you are" seemed impossible to apply to him, even beaten bloody and dressed in tragic finery. The title of King seemed natural to him, yet he'd not boasted of it or even claimed it for himself, simply accepted it but explained it was a different sort of kingdom.

His death felt like a tragic waste. Pilate considered himself a cynic, not a man given to sentimentality, but Iesus Nazarenus had radiated dignity and peace, and a man like that who understood philosophy finding an early death at the hands of a reactionary mob had happened too many times in history already. Pilate hadn't wanted to be the enabler, and was angered by the chief priests' open leveraging of his uneasy standing with Rome. They knew how to stir up the crowds, knew how to get what they wanted, and in the end they'd gotten it from him, and an innocent man had died due to some religious dispute.

In the end he had washed his hands of the matter, of course. In fact he'd found it difficult to stop compulsively washing his hands, sometimes, for a long time after that. His wife said he still did it in his sleep. But when he thought of how the man looked, how he'd not attempted to convince Pilate to spare him, he felt vexed. The man had put him in an unfair position. It's like he wanted to die. Pilate had put a rather significant number of people to death in his day--too many, Rome kept complaining--but somehow this one was like a little burning, itching spark in his sense of moral rectitude that refused to be quenched by either persuasive logic or stone-faced stoicism. Glancing down at the infant-figure's painted face, he scowled deeply. So the Christus had his own cultus here too?

Recently he'd heard rumors of this sort of thing, private meetings and public gatherings of the ones mocked as "christianoi," little christers. It was deeply unsettling somehow. The Galilean had risen from the grave--metaphorically, he hastened to add to himself--though the christianoi all seemed to believe he'd done so in reality as well. Thinking back to the man's eyes, his own soldiers' report of the events that afternoon when everything grew dark... Pilate shuddered at the cold wind. Something was rising in the world, a strange premonition told him, that would shake even the measureless might of Rome to its foundation.

He'd had some of the soldiers who were there put to death, just to be sure. The Judean leaders had given them money, told them to spread rumors that the corpus christi had been stolen. That order had been harder to give than usual, more people dying in connection with the same strange incident, but the fact remained that the soldiers had totally failed in their duty to protect the grave site, and could not even offer a decent reason why. If they'd been able to produce one, perhaps this whole matter would have resolved itself peacefully. As it was, their ridiculous stories about an earthquake and shining figures--the true account, they insisted, not the one they'd been paid to spread--just made it worse. But the real unforgivable crime had been accepting the money. First the religious leaders openly manipulated him in public, and got away with it. Now they'd tried to manipulate the situation in private, bribed his own men, and even convinced them they could shield them from Pilate's anger. He wasn't about to let that kind of corruption spread through the garrison; those soldiers who had believed the lying priests had paid dearly for their naivety, and the lesson had been well taken by the others.

Pilate smiled grimly at the recollection of the priests' displeasure when he'd ordered the sign for the crucifix. "King of the Judeans" seemed an appropriate title, given that was nearly the only accusation they could muster against him. "Quod scripsi, scripsi" he had replied, "What I have written, I have written." One of his better comebacks, and it silenced them for the time being, though the troubles had only begun at that point and he'd lost good soldiers by the end of it. Though it was hard to say if it had really ended, now.

Discipline had improved since then, at least, though rumor had it that even a few of his soldiers now prayed to the Christus. "A fine god for a soldier," he murmured out loud, sarcastically. "A betrayed King who couldn't save himself." The infant figure stared up at him calmly, a mute refutation. A sphinx-like smile played about its lips, one that hadn't been there when the man himself had stood before Pilate, wounded and sorrowful. Yet also calm, and without the least trace of desperation. Almost as if he'd known... almost as if those reports that he'd been spotted a few days later, outside the city...

Pilate turned on a heel and strode away from the scene. The mighty tree, bejeweled and shining like the desert sky on a clear night, now seemed like a monument to Pilate's lapse in judgment. Its joyful aspect mocked him, as if the man who'd died in defeat had won, and Pilate had lost. He gritted his teeth. It wasn't fair. He'd saved himself, preserved public order. Duty to self came before any kind of altruistic nonsense, and duty to Rome above all. Sometimes innocent men died, that was how things were. People died and Rome endured, crawling forward like a mighty siege engine on the backs of slaves and corpses of men down the Viae Romanae from almighty Rome itself to distant barbaric lands like this one he now found himself trapped in. 

But better one innocent man die than the whole nation perish, was it not so? Roman Law even benevolently took pains to try to lessen the killing of innocent people, and Pilate felt on that day he'd really done more than was strictly necessary to defend the Nazarene, who didn't seem inclined to defend himself despite having not broken any real laws. He'd practically put his already unstable career in jeopardy over the situation, surely no more could be expected than that. One man's life didn't count for much, not in Jerusalem. If he'd expected more from Pilate, he'd only gotten his own death as a reward. Yet none of this soothed that little burning spark in his conscience, if anything it grew a little hotter now, turning his mood sour.

The tree was at one end of the town square, and as he stalked away from it he nearly jumped as a large bell rang out, a brief, repetitive cadence. It was some kind of signal, clearly enough, but did not seem like an alarm. Looking in the direction of the sound, he was surprised again to see a building marked with a large crucifix. Surely these barbarians did not do their crucifixions indoors? Even as a man accustomed to scenes of violence, he would not have relished being trapped inside a room with the gruesome spectacle and the accompanying sounds and smells. Drawn toward the white-painted structure despite himself, he ventured closer, and decided that could not be the case, as the building's white façade was entirely clean (blood always stood out on white, and slaves never managed to find and wash or paint over every single crimson splatter). It also had too small an entrance to drag a crucifix in, or let the sanguinary-minded crowds in to watch.

Peering inside, he found a mostly-empty room, lined with benches. Almost like a synagogis, where the more devout Judeans insisting on congregating every sabbath, except decorated strangely, and predominantly made of wood instead of more durable stone. He noted with unstoic pleasure that warm air was issuing from within, and wondered if in this cold clime they had architects skilled enough to run hot water pipes through the floor. Taking a few steps inside, he froze again. At the front, prominently displayed on the wall, was a crucifix. But this one had a man on it, and he had a sinking feeling that he knew who it was supposed to be. His eyes weren't what they used to be, but from this near distance he could see a sort of rendition of the thorn-crown one of the garrison's more cruelly inventive soldiers had placed on the Nazarene's head, in unsubtle mockery of his claimed kingship. It was not a good likeness of the man himself, granted, but only a good sculptor could bring that out, and the intent was unmistakable: it was a depiction of the Christus being crucified. Pilate could even see the little sign over his head, the one he himself had ordered.
I.N.R.I.
A shudder ran through him.

He stormed back outside into the cold, his mind raging in confusion. It was just one man. One man among so many that had been nailed to the wooden posts and died in agony. Gods, what was he supposed to have done? The crowd was about to riot. Couldn't the man see that? Why hadn't Herod figured out something? Why was it left up to him? Why did they insist on choosing the other Iesus, the one they called Barabbas, instead? Why did everyone else seem to think he had any other option? Why did none of the other decisions he'd made keep haunting him like this one?

Pontius Pilate rubbed his face with his hands, groaning for a moment, then mastered himself. He knew exactly why they'd chosen Barabbas. The Galilean had said it himself. His kingdom was not of this world. Rome, Judea, the political machinations of the Empire were not his concern. But they were Barabbas' concern. He'd led a riot over it, drawn blood. He'd done what the Judeans all wished they could do, all those who hated Rome and would have revolted in a heartbeat if the right leader presented himself. That's--he paused, a thought suddenly striking him. That's why they'd welcomed the Christus to Jerusalem like a hero and then turned on him so savagely. They thought he was coming to finish what Barabbas had started. Failing that, they had no use for him.

Pilate shrugged cynically. So be it. A man in leadership had to read the crowds and understand the needs of the time, or he deserved whatever failure he reaped. If the Nazarene had chosen to be their leader on that day, it would have taken more than the garrison in Jerusalem to stop them. The man himself had even said something like that. He was willingly dying rather than lead his own people to revolt and ultimate destruction by Rome. Pilate grasped at the straw of justification. Really, he had made the right choice then. If he'd refused to allow the crucifixion to take place, maybe the crowds would have convinced the Nazarene. Maybe he'd have had a full-scale insurrection on his hands. Maybe.

Maybe not, he admitted, thinking of the man's words and face. Maybe the man hadn't failed. Maybe in dying he'd accomplished something greater than he'd ever been able to achieve if he'd clung to life. After all, even in this distant place, they somehow knew of what had happened, and considered him a god of some kind. But Pilate hoped his own name would be forgotten in connection with the whole affair. He wanted nothing more to do with it. He trudged back through the light dusting of snow, back towards the alley he'd emerged from. He wanted to wake up from this dream, and face whatever troubles the ever-troubled city of Jerusalem would greet him with in the morning.

As he approached the alley, he noticed a man was standing suspiciously off to one side of the entrance. He was handing out to passersby some kind of membranei, a little folded pamphlet. As Pilate approached, the man blinked at his clothing and appearance, but offered him one with a smile. He said something in their garbled tongue, just two or three words, like a greeting, but Pilate could swear "Christus" was in the second half of it. Maybe he was just losing his nerve now.

Looking down at the tiny codex, however, his hand spasmed as he saw on the cover was a man, dressed in a white robe. His hands were outstretched, and clearly bore the stigmata of crucifixion nails. Across the top was written that name he now dared not speak, that of the Christus. The face stared into his. The eyes were different, yet the same. "You again! You everywhere!" he hissed, dropping the thing as if it had burned him. He fled down the alley, and collided with a light metal container which made a loud crashing noise as he fell over it.

They tumbled to the ground together, and as he flailed around in unseemly panic, he realized he was wrestling with bed sheets. A copper platter lay on the floor where he'd knocked it off the small bedside table in his somnolent struggle. The window was unfastened, and the cold midnight air was blowing in. He went to it and looked out at the old city, a few lonely torches guttering in the night breeze, trying to calm his breathing. Just a dream. His eyes wandered across the dark rooftops, drawn in the direction of that place they called The Skull.

"Quod scripsi, scripsi," he muttered, going back to bed.

Babylonian Cuneiform, Virtue Signalling, and Fungal Fake-Wheat

The other night I was preparing for a sermon, and got off on a whole rabbit trail which began with cuneiform and went all sorts of places. (The most fascinating intellectual inquiries always seem to pop up when one is trying to concentrate on preparing a sermon) What began as the discovering of some fascinating scholarship mixed with disappointingly juvenile conclusions about scripture, now continues as a question of how to get rid of the dirty bathwater but keep the baby, intellectually speaking.

1. Not Settling for the Bronze, Owning It

I had heard vague noises about a professor achieving momentary internet attention by deciphering an Akkadian cuneiform tablet only to discover it recounted a Babylonian flood account in which the ark was a massive upright cylinder, but discovered the man himself was actually quite fascinating. It turns out his name is Dr. Irving Finkel, he has a PhD in Assyriology, and a glorious beard to match.

I happened upon Dr. Finkel not via the "real noah's ark" controversy, but after a post one of my seminary professors shared on FB, of a Dr. Jeremiah Peterson doing cuneiform in the original fashion, on a circular, wet clay tablet with a square stylus. It's a beautiful thing. I can't link to his video but here is a screenshot. Apparently he makes these for sale as well, though a quick search didn't reveal any links to an online shop.

This piqued my interest (which is admittedly highly piquable), and headed me off in search of more information, the rabbit trail I mentioned at the beginning. Dr. Finkel turned up early in the process, due to his enviable position as Assistant Keeper for the part of the British Museum which houses 130,000 cuneiform tablets, which he gets to read and keep track of. I don't know who the primary Keeper of the Tablets is, perhaps the position is honorarily kept open for Ashurbanipal himself)

Dr. Finkel should be experienced by everyone, so here he is. Skip to 1 minute in to get past the perfunctory student intro before Dr. Finkel starts speaking.

(Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, get on this guy's level)


I especially appreciated his asides on education (Babylonian cuneiform lessons involved a schoolmaster with a cudgel who would smack students on the head if they'd not been diligent, a practice Dr. Finkel believes should be brought back in modern schools "to make people learn something") and on cuneiform tablets as a superior method of information storage (in the far future everything from the digital age and indeed the age of print could conceivably be lost, being printed on perishable paper or stored electromagnetically, but in that distant future all the cuneiform tablets will be more or less exactly as they are today)

2. Avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis

Dr. Finkle is a gentleman and a scholar by all appearances, but in his lectures and writings he does lapse into unbeardsmanlike conduct. Celebrating his own discovery of a new Babylonian flood account (apparently the only one to mention the animals going in "two by two" as in the Biblical account) he ran straight into the same error so many secular scholars of antiquity fall into, that of discovering something with connections to the Biblical account and then immediately assuming he's figured out where the Bible writers got their ideas from and proclaiming it as the new definitive "real story behind the Bible." It happens pretty much every time. Anything people manage to discover from antiquity that agrees with the Bible on particular points is automatically regarded as the original, and the authors of scripture must have been copying it.

This kind of modernist intellectual arrogance is common among the more charismatic scientists and professors (I did not choose the examples of Bill Nye and NdgT at random, though much of their own sciencing is in fact Science cosplay), who being good modernists in a post-modern era have a religion of artifacts and lab coats and the distinguished trappings of old-school academia.

This "science is frickin' awesome" movement has been a loud and enthusiastic voice online against a scriptural worldview for years now, although I believe the Trump election is sort of a convenient social landmark which demonstrates the conclusion of that era and the beginning of a different phase, in which many people have finally realized people they used to view as ideologically neutral are actually all pitching narratives at us, and circle their respective wagons. (not necessarily a better situation, but a different and perhaps less naive one)

In general, educated people know better than either to listen to every single thing scientists say, or to refuse to believe any of it, but there's not much at stake either way. For Christians this process is complicated by the fact that we value science as a method of understanding creation, yet recognize that many doing the science come at the process with atheistic premises which clash with a scriptural worldview and both consciously and unconsciously promote these via their efforts. (The scientific method is a great tool for exploring and understanding our physical universe, and even has built in self-correcting mechanisms, but it's naive to pretend that any process which involves humans is not influenced by their premises coming in.)

So for believers there are two mistakes we can make at this point. The first is to throw out whole fields as "tainted" (something people might call fundamentalism, though everyone is doing it these days) or, convinced that sufficiently well-trained experts can successfully set aside their worldview premises and produce raw truth, try to "balance" our faith with these findings (the source of much liberalism in the church).

1. Virtue Signalling: "You have been Weighed on my Scale of what's Okay and what's Not Okay and found Wanting"

The first mistake arises very naturally from a prior mistake, which is to identify one's duty as a believer as finding reliable sources of information (websites, authors, pastors, etc) and passively absorbing them. Then, when a pastor says something wrong, or an author "goes liberal," or "gets too right-wing," people start viewing them with increased wariness, and will perhaps eventually throw them out, and look for someone who will hold fast to an ever-narrowing and more specific range of convictions espoused in certain ways.

Those who go about things in this way, and they are very numerous, often make statements or symbolic actions which have the primary purpose of communicating to other people where they stand on a particular issue. This is called "virtue signalling," in case you've heard the word thrown about recently. They may loudly condemn, or try to convince everyone to stop listening to, a pastor who takes a position with which they don't agree. But they won't write a book with sound theology, or usually even explain what specific things are invalid about the pastor's views and how they determine that. They just want to make sure they've expressed that they're a good person for publicly praising and condemning the appropriate things.

Of course, there are always lies being promoted, and plenty of pastors and books and sources of ideas which shouldn't be trusted. But in the world of ideas, there are a lot to go around. We don't want to narrow our minds to keep all unsafe ideas out, we want to be more discerning, knowing how to navigate the world of ideas safely and effectively, steered by a deep understanding of scripture. This takes time and effort, confidence and humility. But if our goal is to make ourselves more able to see and understand the underlying claims or premises of whatever information is being shared with us, whether through a book, or a TV show, or a sermon, or a scientific article online, rather than to decided if this is "good" or "bad" and then announce to everyone our acceptance or condemnation of it, we're probably on the right track to Jesus' command to be not only innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.

2. Progressing from Scripture while trying to Bring it along too.

The second mistake may arise from a desire to avoid the first. Recognizing that the world of ideas is primarily not a bunch of atheistic professors trying to sarcast the faith out of their naive students, but often nice or at least very intelligent people on a quest for knowledge who have never accepted the premise of theism, many Christians want to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that beloved teachers and/or impressive scholars teach that which cannot be reconciled with scripture, with their own conviction of the truth of scripture.

When these two convictions clash, however, it is very often scripture which is expected to conform. The basic (and nonscriptural) idea of progress or progressivism (using it loosely here), that humankind is moving forward from error to enlightenment, makes it tough to hold to any unchangeable standard, because for progressively-minded people such a standard, no matter how brilliant and true in its day, would necessarily be becoming slowly but inevitably outdated and untenable. Evolution is in many ways not merely a theory of the development of the biological life we see around us, but a whole worldview of itself; the idea that things can and will improve as they change over time, and that we all partake in this process not only biologically but societally, morally, etc.

Progressives with a more favorable view of Christianity's influence on the world may say things like "Christianity got so many things right, but we can do better," while others may view it more negatively, but either way the question is not of truth, but of progress. For them the question would be: Is Christianity getting us where we want to go? If not, we can move on from it.

Interestingly, the majority of American Christians seem to have ingested this worldview of progressivism to varying degrees growing up, usually more and more the younger they are, and it has led to a fascinating array of paradoxes in their own beliefs. I see many people trying to say morality is derived from God, while simultaneously updating their own moral sensibility according to secular trends (of the month), without noticing any contradictions. (An extreme example was one person telling me that if Jesus were to do the things He did in the gospels today, some of it would be sin, though it wasn't at the time because people didn't know any better.) This is of course untenable, both in terms of consistency of faith or even rational thought, but reason speaks calmly while trends shout enthusiastically.

3. One Solution: Look to the Wheat and the Tares

If we seek to avoid both of the preceding mistakes--living in a sort of perpetual Inquisition and virtue signalling our allegiance to the increasingly few sources of information which "can be trusted", or else trying to cram secular academia and moral philosophy into the throne alongside scripture and serve both masters--we must do what Odysseus could not, and find a way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Like him, for most of us pragmatically speaking it may be a matter of veering closer to one or the other, with the goal of making it through as unharmed as possible.

Yet I think the concept of "the wheat and the tares" can be applied here to good effect.

Jesus tells a fascinating parable in Matthew 13:24-30: A man sows his field with good seed, but "an enemy" comes and sows "tares" in the field. Interestingly, this isn't noticed until the heads of grain start appearing. ("when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also") This lends credence to the theory that the word translated as "tares" in the KJV (Simply "weeds" in the NIV and ESV) is a reference to a kind of plant called Darnel, which very closely resembles wheat until the grains ripen. (At least according to wikipedia, in the Roman Empire sowing Darnel in someone's field was illegal. So Jesus may have been referencing for His parable a destructive practice common enough to be banned, a scenario with which his listeners would have been familiar)  Darnel is susceptible to fungal infection, and the particular kind of fungus which infects darnel is toxic and causes drunken-like nausea, which can be fatal. Sowing darnel in someone's wheat field was literally small-scale biological warfare, and hard to remedy, though in this case the owner of the field has a wise solution.

(Note: Jesus Himself explains what He meant by the parable in the same chapter. I'm not suggesting this is an alternative meaning, this is just an application which I find helpful in my quest for wise discernment vs. either judgmental over-rejection or naive over-acceptance)

Wheat, top, vs Darnel, bottom. Once threshed, the grains are hard to tell apart.
Credit: http://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.tw/2016/07/more-crop-mimics.html

Applying this parable to the world of ideas, the parallels immediately jump out. Truth is there for us to grasp, by observing the reality of God's creation and by accepting the special revelation of scripture. However, the Enemy has sown lies throughout the fields of human knowledge (and corresponding heretical ideas throughout the Church), lies which seem like truth--until they bear their false fruit, which leads to toxin-induced drunkenness and death.

What can we do to root out these dangerous untruths? The parable has the servants suggest that the false wheat can literally be uprooted--pulled out from among the true wheat. This is the first mistake mentioned above--over-zealousness in trying to keep ourselves from being in contact with any "tainted" sources of information. The master explains the problem with this in his reply--in doing so, you will throw out much real truth in the process. This is not the right stage for sorting them out, it's too early. But one does not simply accept this false wheat along with the true wheat, which would be the second mistake. Instead, having been taken in, now the wheat is sorted. True wheat is taken into the barn, fake wheat is burned to ashes.

This happens before the wheat is threshed. Thousands of tiny darnel and wheat grains look similar, and once mixed together can't be easily sorted out. But the clusters of grain look different on the different plants, as the picture above shows. Once you internalize ideas (I.e. "Once you take them into your barn," but as Spurgeon would say, there's no need to push a good metaphor/illustration to exhaustion), it can be quite difficult to figure out which ideas you got from what source. The process of distinguishing truth from falsehood does need to happen in the context of where you received the information. The facts, context, and situation all matter; there is no "hypothetical wheat." (And the task of discernment is greatly helped by recognizing how to reject false hypotheticals and "setting aside X" arguments where X is relevant.) If you do find that a certain field pretty much always produces false wheat, it makes sense not to spend most of your time searching for true wheat there.

(Though indeed it's not an entirely one-sided process; our Friend seems to delight in sowing real wheat seed in the night among what the Enemy considers a safe field of tares.)

In summary, the wheat and false-wheat are to be harvested together: we take the good and bad ideas together as they come. It can be tough to distinguish them at first, but we can tell them apart since their fruit is not the same. This is the role of discernment. Not to pull up and throw away anything that looks like a weed before any fruit is ripe, nor to internalize all ideas and try to sort them out later, but to know the difference between true and false wheat by the fruit they bear, and take what is true and discard what is false.

Psalm 119:66 - "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments."

Overlooked Parts of the Christmas Story

Merry Christmas from Taiwan!

As I teach the Christmas story repeatedly over these weeks, some bits of the story that are often overlooked or misinterpreted based on popular art and tradition rise to the surface. Here are some of them which you may find interesting. Most of this can be found in other articles being circulated, but I thought it would be nice to have it all together in one post.

1. Why was there no room for Mary and Joseph?

It wasn't just a busy night in Bethlehem and Barliman ben Butterbur happened to be all full up at the Prancing Pony--Mary and Joseph weren't the only ones who had to go back to their hometown for the census. The place was packed with travelers, and there would have been other members of Joseph's extended family traveling back to Bethlehem too, since that was their ancestral hometown as well. 

There's no indication from Luke that Mary was in labor as they arrived and Joseph was running around in desperation knocking on doors; it simply says that while they were there (i.e. had already arrived) the time came for Jesus to be born. (Luke 2:6) So the scenario described is less suitable for a dramatic scene in a film, but much more true to life, with the young couple arriving in town with Mary pregnant, yet finding it so crowded due to the large influx of census-takers that they couldn't have their own room and had to make do with a secondary space.

"No room" means no room of their own, then, and not "no units available for rent," since 1) that's based on a medieval idea of inns and is probably the wrong translation of the Greek for such inns as existed at the time:

2. Not an Inn, nor an isolated Stable in a Cave

As is becoming more common knowledge, the famous "no room at the inn" line is not the best translation, and the Greek word used probably refers instead to the guestroom of a family home. 

Some evidence in support of this would be 1) Mary and Joseph didn't have the money for something like an inn for traveling merchants (as evidenced by the fact that they had to use a pair of birds for the dedication sacrifice for Jesus instead of a lamb, only allowed when one is very poor), and 2), given the circumstances and the culture of the time (and lack of phones or internet or effective postal system to let someone know you are coming, it must be remembered), it's much more likely they have first gone to find and try to stay with Joseph's family in Bethlehem. (Some have suggested at that time it was more or less a cultural obligation for them to do so)

With the place packed out with incoming family, however (who would likely have gotten there first before Joseph and very pregnant Mary coming in from up north), there was no room in the house's little guest room for Mary to have a baby, so they moved to the front area of the main room, where the ladies could help Mary. In the cramped and intimate quarters of a 1st century Jewish home, animals often sheltered inside the house in an area by the door, and a stone manger with soft straw would be a secure place to lay a baby to keep him out from under the rest of the family packed into a small house.

A good chart which shows how things might have looked,
obtained from this article which has a good quick rundown
on the reasons why Jesus wasn't born in a roadside inn
or a stable full of animals away from other people.

For more information, see this really good article, which brings up both the Greek translation issues and also the humorous reminder that, at very least, had a bunch of Jewish shepherds found Mary and Joseph in a stable by themselves with a newborn infant, they would have been horrified and insisted the three come back with them so their wives could care for Mary and the baby.

The manger situation was probably about like this.
A secure stone trough in a nook by the front entrance.

3. A Lengthy Stay in Bethlehem?

Mary and Joseph didn't go back up to Nazareth until Mary was ceremonially clean again after 40 days, and they had done the dedication offering for Jesus at the Jerusalem temple, and Luke 2 mentions that only after visiting the temple do they head back north to Nazareth in Galilee. So they must have stayed around Bethlehem for at least 6 weeks.*

This is yet another piece of evidence that they stayed with family, as either being stuck in a stable with a newborn for several weeks or trying to pay for a room in an inn for that long (plus food, etc.) would be highly problematic for the poor young couple.

*- On the other hand, based on the account of the Magi visit in Matthew 2, it can be argued that the flight to Egypt may have occurred very soon after Jesus' birth. That would mean that the time in between Jesus' birth and settling back in Nazareth again after the temple visit would largely have been spent in Egypt instead. (We'll look into this below)

4. Simeon and Anna

Why does the Bible especially mention how old Simeon and Anna were? The two aged prophets at the temple, who rejoiced to see the birth of the Messiah, were old enough to have lived in Pre-Roman Israel. After the Maccabean revolt, Israel was its own nation again for a few generations, until Rome finished defeating/absorbing the old Seleucid Empire (previous rulers of Israel, whose desecration of the Jewish temple led to the revolt and subsequent cleansing of the Jerusalem temple which Hanukkah celebrates).

Thus, for over 100 years between kicking out the Hellenistic Seleucids and being brought into the Roman Empire, Israel was autonomous and ruled by an Israelite king. Both Simeon and Anna grew up in the last days of this temporarily restored Kingdom of Israel, so the idea of their waiting for the consolation of Israel (Simeon)/redemption of Jerusalem (Anna), and God's promise to Simeon that he would not die until he saw the Messiah, the true King who would reign on David's throne, is especially meaningful. They had seen a glimpse of Israel restored, only to be subjugated yet again by a foreign power. They longed for the coming of the Messiah who would bring political and spiritual restoration.

Aslan has come, winter will soon be over.

5. Magi/Wise Men/Three Kings: Not there with the Shepherds, But also not 2 years later?

It's clear that the Wise Men or Magi are not identified by Matthew as kings, but the Greek term used refers to something more like royal alchemists/astrologers. Matthew never says there were three, and they certainly didn't set off across the desert by themselves on camels, but would have been at least a small caravan, probably a rather large one. They must have been at last somewhat impressive because they got to speak directly to King Herod, who was willing to enlist the help of scribes and priests to answer their question.

One theory of their arrival time suggests that they were probably not there on the night Jesus was born, nativity scenes notwithstanding, but became aware of it due to "his star at its rising" and made a long trip to Israel to come pay their respects, arriving when Jesus was around or less than 2 years old, basing this off of Matt 2:16.

One major problem with this view when investigated carefully is that the Magi do indeed find Jesus in Bethlehem, but we know from Luke that his family returned to Nazareth after Mary was ceremonially clean again, about 6 weeks after Jesus' birth. However, the text of Matthew 2 is not written in such a way to suggest that the Magi went to Bethlehem, then the star led them up north to Nazareth instead.

Note that scripture doesn't directly say how old Christ was; it's possible the star/sign appeared early, and part or nearly all of the journey was made before He was born. Matthew does specifically mention that Herod specifies children 2 years old to be eliminated, and does this based on the time he had ascertained from the Magi. So what we know is that Herod believes the Magi to be searching for a very young child or baby in a village with a few hundred people. (WF Albright estimated around 300 people, I don't know if he allowed for an influx due to the census) In this context it's unlikely that 2 years was a precise estimate, but was based on the Magi's inability to be sure of the age of the child they would find, only their knowledge of how long they'd been aware of the star.

One objection to the baby Jesus - Magi view is that Matthew says He was already in a house, not an inn or stable. However as we have seen above, the strongest evidence is that Jesus was born in the house of some relatives of Joseph, in the side area were animals were kept, because there was no place for them in the room for guests. So this is not actually a problem but perfectly in line with what the evidence suggests.

There is also the Flight to Egypt to consider. When did it occur in the context of these other events?

One view I saw reconciled the timeline by having the Magi arrive very soon after Jesus is born, then Joseph being warned in the dream and the family fleeing to Egypt after leave. They are in Egypt for a month before Herod dies (as others have suggested, the gifts of the Magi arrive just in time to finance this excursion), and go to Jerusalem to present Jesus at the temple after returning from Egypt. Luke, with a different focus, in 2:39 simply tells us that they return to Nazareth after this, while Matthew 2:22-23 explains more about Joseph's motivation for doing so.

Another possibility which allows for the young Jesus - Magi view would be that after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the family stayed until it was time to visit the temple and after that went to Nazareth. Back in Bethlehem a couple years later for whatever reason, perhaps visiting the same relatives, the Magi are led to them, and they then flee to Egypt until Herod dies, returning back to Nazareth much later than planned with a very interesting story of why they were gone so long. This requires positing a subsequent visit from Nazareth to Bethlehem which coincides exactly with the Magi visit, something Matthew doesn't seem to indicate, but it would explain why Luke doesn't bother including the Magi-Egypt story between the birth and temple visit, as the entire incident happened later and Luke is focused on the future important temple visit when Jesus is 12 instead.

 (For more on the Magi, here is an article about the history of the Magi as a religious/political order, and how it may have been Daniel's prominence in Babylon that brought Hebrew prophecy to their attention. Some of it is just speculation, but the background information is interesting)

It's likely the Magi were from Parthia. A rowdy bunch.
When not perfecting their horse archery, their Magi were
inventing primitive DC batteries to achieve gold electroplating,
giving rise to the legends of alchemy and gold transmutation
which their European counterparts later tried to re-achieve

6. The Star: A long-term, non-obvious, and highly specific astronomical phenomenon

What exactly was the star that the Magi saw has been the subject of much speculation, but it must have been an astronomical phenomenon that the Eastern star-gazers noticed and saw significance in, yet not so locally obvious that hordes of people descended upon Bethlehem to see what was going on. It was clearly nothing like artistic depictions of a massive "Christmas star," since if a natural phenomenon it would be a supernova of unprecedented magnitude, frying the earth dead with gamma rays, and if supernatural and that obvious, Herod wouldn't have needed to resort to ruthless measures to find the child Messiah, as half of Jerusalem would have turned up wondering why a glowing orb was illuminating that specific house.

Matthew does say that the star that they had seen when it rose (at the beginning of their journey, Matt 2:1-2) later went before them to the house where Jesus was, once they were already in Israel (Matt 2:7-11). It is difficult to imagine what kind of astronomical phenomenon can be described as a star that rises, yet can also come to rest over a specific house, to their great joy and rejoicing. 

The imagination can provide all sorts of images without any way of verifying them scripturally. The trouble with these kinds of images is that they substitute a non-scriptural picture for one that simply doesn't exist, since we lack the information to do anything but speculate:

A group of foreign magi and their retinue, bearing scrolls with the writings of Daniel, one of their honored predecessors, arrive in a splendid caravan coming down the mountain from Jerusalem, after Herod's response from the chief priests and scribes indicates Bethlehem is the right place. They turn west off the main road, as people gawk at their passing. It is evening, and the sun has begun to set. Very familiar with the movements of stars in the night sky, they can see the star they have followed from the East for so many nights, as it drops from higher in the sky, barely visible, toward the dimly illuminated and rapidly darkening horizon. They follow it into the village, and the star becomes increasingly visible as it drops in the sky, nearing the roofs of the low houses clustered together. Feeling they are near the culmination of their quest, one magus dismounts, the others joining him, and they leave the bulk of their caravan behind them, going down the narrow, dirty street on foot. The star is directly ahead of them now, and does not move to either side as they continue on, but remains twinkling steadily over one house at the end of the lane. From the darkness within the small dwelling, the light of a solitary lamp escapes from the doorway. As they draw so near that from their point of view the star seems to descend and touch the roof, among murmuring voices inside they suddenly hear the cry of a baby...

This could be a bit like what happened, or totally off, but at least, let's know to what extent the pictures and popular traditions we have inherited through many ages of artistic license adhere to the truth of God's word. A careful investigation of the birth of Christ is a great way to honor Him in this season when we celebrate His birth, the Divine invasion, the beginning of the final defeat of evil and the restoration of our relationship to God.

By His Grace, and until His Coming, Merry Christmas!

Do you have any more interesting observations or information on the account of Jesus' birth? Did I leave anything out in comparing the Baby Jesus vs. Young Jesus Magi visit theories? Leave me a comment below and let me know!

To Babel and Beyond: A Brief Early History of Man, Biblical Version

Intro: Alternative Histories

A lot of modern Christians exist in a weird sort of parallel universe, historically speaking. We basically take for granted accounts of modern history provided by secular historians, going back until perhaps the medieval era where we find some divergence. (Were the Dark Ages really a benighted era for Europe, or a tumultuous but progressive time of rapid growth for the Church and repelling of jihad, unfairly characterized by post-enlightenment scholars trying to emphasize the achievements of earlier and/or later eras?)

Beyond that, Roman history is pretty much agreed upon, with some A.D. quibbles about whether this or that persecution was accurately described by the church. Go back as far as the Bronze Age, however, and periods of history described in Scripture, and controversies erupt. Go back still farther, and completely alternate histories emerge, until eventually you have two entirely divergent explanations for the existence of humanity and human civilization, which are both rooted in and provide a basis for a deeply divided worldview which can be seen in every level of society today. (either God made us good and we went bad, and all that that entails, or we evolved from apes and are still progressing towards something greater, and all that that entails)

In this post, I want to lay out an example of what a history of early mankind might look like from a Biblical perspective, based on the authority of scripture and linked with the discoveries of modern archeology/anthropology. (There have been a number of serious attempts to match up Biblical history and chronology with the Bronze Age history and dates determined by scholars. I'm just broadly focusing on an earlier time frame than that, mainly to show how you can start from the Biblical account and find that much of the data lines up automatically with it)

Bear in mind, "antiquity" for people like the Romans was
as far back in history as the Romans are for us.

Early History of Man: Bible Version

With the supposedly overwhelming authority of "Science" preached at us every day, we can find it hard to give the events described in the Bible the same weight as we do the pronouncements of archeology or anthropology, even when they construct entire eras of proto-civilization from surprisingly scant pieces of evidence, evidence which sometimes itself was even faked. I'm not saying there is no real science taking place, but often the real artifacts, discovered and catalogued according to (actual) science, the method, are described using almost entirely imaginary scenarios according to Science, the secular humanist belief system for which many faithful atheists profess their love and devotion. These stories can be drastically revised with the discovery of a single new piece of evidence, and frequently are (or aren't, despite the contradicting evidence) but somehow we are expected to consider them as authoritative and the Bible as a book of myths. Lacking an authoritative scriptural narrative, that might be all we could expect, but it's both amusing and frustrating that we're expected to toss out the Bible which is continually found to be more reliable, historically, and instead bow to a secular narrative which changes with the wind and trends.

Scholarship being what it is, and theologians being who they are, my dream of one day seeing a solid attempt by the Church to put forward a coherent timeline of the early history of man (in keeping with the evidence and data we see around us, just separated from their surmised alternative secular explanations) is probably inherently impossible. It would collapse in heated arguments, mostly about minor details.

But here I'd like to at least lay out what we do know, from the Genesis accounts, and then flesh in some details based on things we've discovered, to paint a brief picture of the road from Adam to Babel and beyond.

1. Earliest history

I will begin with Adam and Eve having to leave the garden. (Despite the popularity of attempting it, there's not much point in trying to guess where it was; the great flood would certainly have altered the landscape and course of rivers too much to go by what we see now) After they were forced out, their descendents formed two rival camps; the descendents of Seth, and those of Cain. That we do know from Scripture. We have no reliable knowledge of what this period of history looked like, since nothing survived the flood and if it did we'd have trouble knowing whether it was pre or post flood. We have Scripture's account, however, that it was violent, lawless, and increasingly evil.

Humans had become very numerous before the flood (based on the numbers in Genesis, there were almost certainly hundreds of millions of people and possibly many more) and that global catastrophe had not yet restarted everyone around Ararat and then the plain of Shinar in Sumeria. Since everyone apparently spoke the same language up until Babel, and had hundreds of years of life to explore the world, it's probable some of the remnants of remote and ancient cities for which modern science has little explanation were from this time. (There's evidence to suggest Phoenicians got across the Atlantic, and we still don't know how the Egyptians and Romans managed some of their construction feats, so there's no reason to assume pre-flood people were less capable, especially if they had hundreds of years to master their craft.)

An important factor to remember is that while Scripture says that all human life on earth perished in the flood, and that the "fountains of the deep" opened, clearly a destructive event and probably related to this discovery, it doesn't say that every inch of the earth's surface was thoroughly pulverized. It's possible that in some places, the water would have simply risen rapidly and covered everything, leaving behind what had originally been there. Devoid of life, almost certainly heavily damaged, but not necessarily destroyed. (if a shipwreck can survive at the bottom of the sea for centuries, and a huge tsunami ravages but doesn't "disappear" a modern city, then an ancient city of stone would not vanish after about a year underwater or suddenly be reduced to pebbles when hit by incoming water either, though it might be buried under mud or rubble, as indeed people have discovered some were. It would be interesting if advances in technology reveal more deeply sunken cities around the world)

The picture of early human history currently presented by secular anthropology doesn't really fit what we see around the world, but a pre-ancient world full of cities of people who suddenly vanish, and civilizations emerging abruptly in the Middle East and then soon elsewhere around the world, each with stories of a great flood, does fit the picture rather well.

2. Post-flood

The flood narrowed the total human gene pool down considerably, to Noah and his three sons and their wives. Currently, genetic science claims human genetic diversity reflects the mixture of three "pre-human" contributing sets of DNA; I can't help but wonder if we're actually seeing the genetic legacy of the three sons of Noah. Or their wives, if you want to get mitochondrial. Conversely, since all of current human diversity is from those three sons and their wives, 6 people out of however many were alive at the time (probably a huge population, as mentioned above), it's not surprising we occasionally find some prehistoric (in the literal sense: before recorded history) human remains that look quite different than anyone on earth does today. The "hobbit" bones found in Indonesia, and all the "primitive" skulls (some with bigger brain cases than the average modern human) found in various places, make sense if you imagine the incredible human diversity that must have existed before the flood. What are now explained as pre-human ancestors probably are remains from those other humans.

In terms of the flood event itself, from Noah on there is much evidence of man's expansion from a new beginning. Fascinatingly, despite all the attention given to Sumer, there is quite a bit of evidence that much of "modern" human civilization started right near where the ark is thought to have come to rest in Southeastern Turkey; horses were first domesticated around there, and wheat and corn strains can be traced back to their ancestral cultivars around the same area. (For example, from Wikipedia: "Genetic analysis of wild einkorn wheat suggests that it was first grown in the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey.") That only makes sense, if humans got off the ark and started rebuilding what was lost in the flood, and planting crops and vineyards. There's also an amazing, very ancient ruin, described as possibly the world's oldest temple, less than 300 miles from the Mountains of Ararat, which features massive stone slabs covered with lifelike relief carvings of animals. Scholars are confused because they date it to a time supposedly before the existence of metal tools or even pottery. (Right.. that's the description of someone clinging to a false timeline)

Later, the account of Babel suggests that humans didn't spread out after the ark, but stayed together. (it would make sense; the task of rebuilding civilization would require everyone) Since God had told them to spread out and fill the earth, however, the idea of a pan-human civilization that clustered in one place and built a tower to the heavens was not in the plans. We don't know exactly what method God used to confuse and divide the languages (as a linguist I'm quite curious). I've seen creative theories on neurolinguistic viruses, given that the world's population were all concentrated in one place. It's impossible to know of course, but fun to think about, and it will be interesting to see if advances in neuroscience and linguistics don't provide explanations for how it could have occurred. Either way, we can see the division of Babel is still there today. You can observe language fragmentation happening naturally anywhere (to an extreme degree in places like Papua/New Guinea or the Caucasus Mountains), and the trend has only recently been overcome in the developed world by national education policies (China has an uncountable number of local dialects, Mandarin is just the artificially-enforced national language), and the prevalence of TV and the internet.


Shinar, where the tower of Babel was located, is in the Fertile Crescent (sometimes referred to as the "Cradle of Civilization"). Archeologists/anthropologists describe two basic centers of culture, one around what is now Eastern Turkey, and one down in modern day Iraq, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The latter contains what some consider the oldest city in the world, Eridu, which is a very probable site for the Tower of Babel itself, with a very old, huge, and incomplete ziggurat. (Sumerian mythology even claims it to be one of the first 5 cities built -before- the Flood. Perhaps that simply a boast, or perhaps the name was remembered and used again)

One of the ancient mounds at Eridu

Another fascinating site, Çatalhöyük, is about 500 miles west of the "Mountains of Ararat" where the ark landed. It is one of the most ancient settlements ever discovered, has unique architectural properties, and is quite unusual in that there are no streets; houses are clustered together, honeycomb-style, and the roofs are used for travel. In the linked article, they comment that, unusually, the dozens of bodies buried under the floor of each house are unrelated to each other. Also the houses had white plaster walls, some covered in elaborate artwork. It makes you think... might those wandering out in the years after the flood have formed at least one memorial city for the countless lost lives? The corpses would not vanish into thin air, remember. If it's true that there were hundreds of millions to billions of people alive before the flood (as the Genesis numbers suggest), not to mention all the animals, you'd doubtless find corpses all around, left by the receding waters (or collected into drifts here and there, mixed with debris). The roof-walking habit might have been an adaptation to the post-flood period, to avoid the rotting vegetation and corpse-ridden ground as much as possible, or even be based on an ark-like idea of a common deck surface with hatches leading below to the various compartments, as there were only a few people alive at the beginning and Noah had spent a very long time building the ark and would have been the most experienced person around and in charge while he was alive (and sober).

See, it's easy to form plausible-sounding conjectures from the evidence available, going from what you believe the conditions of the time and context to have been. I have no idea if that's even close to the reality of that ancient city, but what I just did is no different from what secular anthropologists do, except I am basing my theory on a scriptural context. (Basically I have more reason to be confident in my hypothetical interpretation of the data than I do theirs)

But is it a coincidence that the "world's oldest temple" and "world's most ancient settlement" are located within a few hundred miles of the ark's resting place (and even closer to each other), and the "world's oldest city" is in Shinar with a huge, unfinished ziggurat nearby a natural supply of pitch? It's unreasonable to insist it must be, when it conforms so closely to the pre-existing Biblical narrative. (Unless you are like an atheist I once argued with, who said a certain thing couldn't possibly be true, because if so that means God did it.)

3. Post-Babel

With regards to the Flood and Babel, Sumerian mythology has such obvious references to these events that many scholars believe the Bible borrowed its accounts from them. (Since the content of what existed of the Old Testament was oral at that point, and there are some similarities of style between the two, it's just as reasonable to conclude that everyone knew these events had occurred in fairly recent history and had their own versions of the account. The Sumerian account is "aggrandized," however, and mixed with stories of their gods; the Biblical record reads like a very sober and straightforward account of the event by comparison. Entirely aside from faith in scripture, it very much reads like the Biblical account is the original, and the Sumerian account is the flowery, mythologized version)

The genealogies in Genesis 10 provide a tantalizing picture of humans spreading out after the Flood/Babel, though unfortunately we don't have enough information to put all the pieces together. Some people are specifically pointed out as the ancestors of certain peoples, mostly those relevant to the Hebrews, being in their vicinity. One clear example occurs for Greece, where one grandson of Noah (Javan) is used consistently in Hebrew scripture as the word for Greece. One of Javan's sons is named Tarshish, the name of a location referenced repeatedly in scripture (notably as the place to where Jonah tried to flee). It is not known for certain whether this is the city of Tarsus in modern Turkey (where the Apostle Paul was from) but it's likely, and the city is ancient enough for this to be the case. There is also a grandson named Cush, which is the ancient civilization of Ethiopia, also Ashur - Assyrians, and Aram - Arameans, whose language, Aramaic, was the common local language during Jesus' life.

Beyond the grandsons, whose nations can be identified, many further descendents can be as well.
(There is also much conjecture... for example some think the Sinites are the ancestors of China)

Based on the grandsons of Noah, one can basically populate the ancient world from SE Russia to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia, and from Greece and southeastern Europe to Persia, in other words the entire Near East stretched farther north and south. Every grandson corresponds to a known location. (Observe how different this is from the imaginary and mythical lands of other ancient religious accounts)

Of those groups that wandered off to further points of the globe, we don't know the account of their travels, but interestingly in the secular account of history you suddenly have the roots of the great world civilizations all popping up in different places in the same era. It works out that from Babel in the Fertile Crescent, the meeting place of Europe, Asia, and Africa, descendents spread out and traveled until they found good places to settle down and start working on a minor version of what everyone had been attempting in Sumeria, such as the Indus and Yellow River valleys. (There is a Great Flood story in ancient Hindu scriptures, and in Chinese legend as well)

Egypt, one of the oldest civilizations of all, was around basically from the beginning...

"Egypt is called Mestraim by the Hebrews; and Mestraim lived not long after the flood. For after the flood, Cham (or Ham), son of Noah, begat Aeguptos or Mestraim, who was the first to set out to establish himself in Egypt, at the time when the tribes began to disperse this way and that…" Eusebius, 4th AD historian.

(Of course Eusebius is writing many centuries after the event. As I mentioned at the beginning, antiquity has its own antiquity... the Greeks and Romans idealized the distant past as we sometimes idealize their time)

4. A word about Old Testament chronology

On the topic of Egypt, a problem arises: there is not enough time in apparent Biblical history for well-chronicled Egyptian history to have occurred. For a good treatment of that subject which basically assumes Ussher's dates (a very young earth), go here. That article acknowledges there is no way to get from Ussher's early date of the flood/creation to a reconciliation with Egyptian history, even as it holds to the very young earth theory, and suggests the minimum required missing years might be found here and there throughout the chronology.

However, the problem is resolved if we acknowledge the practice of "telescoping" in Hebrew genealogies, as described here in pretty good detail. Some have difficulty stomaching the idea that the Bible could be inerrant if the genealogies are constructed differently from their own ideas about them, but I think it's important to remember that the Bible is inerrant in the original texts, and those texts written not by modern people but by ancients who had some different literary habits than we do; being carried along by the Spirit to write inerrantly does not mean the end product would look exactly as it would look were they to be written in English today, and that is nothing that should make us nervous. Also, note that telescoping the genealogies only moves the date of creation back by a few thousand years, as compared to the trillions of years that evolution demands. It is not an attempt to accommodate secular creation theories, merely an acknowledgement of Hebrew chronological practices.

As a creationist who has studied linguistics and biblical languages, I have no problem with the idea that the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament followed their usual practice of 'arranging' genealogies, just as the gospel writers sometimes rearranged the chronology of Jesus' ministry to emphasize certain points. Putting back in the unselected generations adds in a satisfactory amount of time to allow for the development of modern civilization from antiquity -in accordance with the Biblical account, not springing from alternative, evolution-based secular theories- which means we don't have to pretend in faith not to see the pyramids, but also aren't conforming our biblical interpretation to secular chronologies, which see a 10,000 year earth as identically ridiculous to a 6,000 year earth, considering the vast depths of time needed for non-life to become life (no amount of time is enough) in their Creator-less models.

So although I am open to any valid evidence that does not go against the authority of scripture, as of right now, the creationist + expanded genealogy timeline is the opinion I hold and feel best interprets scripture in the light of what we know while holding it as inerrant. It also allows for the Great Flood being a global event, as scripture clearly attests, and not localized. If the flood was only local, then ancient civilizations like the Maya can be getting their start right alongside Hindu and Chinese civilizations, people already being over there, without needing extra time to populate Central America. If it was global, as the Bible attests, and humanity had to start over from Ararat, you need time after Babel for people to migrate all the way to the New World and build up enough population to begin thousands of years of Mayan city-building and civilization. The best dates for those civilizations in fact reflect the latter situation, with Near East civilizations being the oldest, followed by other Asian civilizations, followed by ancient New World cultures and others.

On the other hand, maybe they just sailed straight over... (Kon-Tiki)

5. In Closing

For more on the grandsons of Noah and their descendents and where they went/who they became, there are lots of different theories that can be found by googling, but not much of real value; many of the theories are pretty tenuous, based on guesses about names and place/people group names they sound like. The truth is that, beyond the grandsons in the genealogy, which can mostly be strongly identified with places within the ancient near eastern world, we can't say how the rest of the globe was peopled by their descendents. We do know that nothing took as much time as is usually demanded by secular scholars, who with long ages to fill, have people spending thousands of years without upgrading their flint points. (The Darwinian "long, slow, steady" evolution idea and its roots in gradualism, has influenced all of secular academia. A look at the real world reveals things are more like grains of sand falling on a pile, where steady change actually produces sudden avalanches and snowball effects on a regular basis.)

One good thing is that as we are increasingly able to catalog sources of ancient material and written documents (if the neo-caliphate doesn't blow them up first), and communicate those findings over the internet, we are able to uncover knowledge about the ancient world perhaps unknown since deep in antiquity. As we learn more, the Biblical account is proven more and not less reliable. It may be that in the coming days, even the mystery of people movements away from Babel and to the ends of the earth may begin to be solved.


I hope that was interesting. Feel free to leave a comment if you think I'm missing something or you know of additional info that would be helpful to throw into the mix.