Undeception

Critics of source criticism will inevitably be directed to stories such as the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 or the story of a patriarch’s attempt to pass off his wife as his sister when passing through a powerful man’s territory. These types of scenarios are referred to as doublets, which are said to be evidence of multiple traditions combined into one.

The argument for multiple sources based upon doublets used to strike me as a little odd: why would whoever edited the sources together leave information so blatantly contradictory, or at very least in tension? Is it just that people nowadays are finally smart enough to notice?  Apparently, the redactors were either too stupid to notice the tensions, which no one seems to want to suggest outright, or the tensions are based on a misunderstanding of one or more of the texts in question.

In a recent post at Religion at the Margins, Thom Stark explains why there is a good alternative for explaining doublets (and triplets, etc.):

Redactors compiled source materials not as a modern would, in order to weave a seamless, consistent narrative, but rather to bring together various traditions into one body. Their reasons for doing this were often political. As one people with one set of traditions came together with another people with another set of traditions, redactors would combine the traditions so that the new unity of the two peoples is reflected in the new unity of their various traditions. This political motivation is seen especially in the combination of traditions from the Yahwist and the Elohist, reflecting the period after the fall of the Northern Kingdom when many Israelites migrated south to live among their Judean kinsmen.

As a case in point, Thom singles out the conflicts in the Flood narratives and the way scholars have tried to extract the two traditions that were integrated into the one story we have: he gives links to the composite version and a side-by-side comparison that scholars have come up with to make the best sense of the elements in friction, such as the number of animals taken on board, the names by which God is referred to, and others.

Now, as is clear from the reading, if the redactor of these two traditions thought the texts weren’t contradictory, then he really must have been stupid! But source critics don’t think the redactor was stupid. The redactor’s purpose was not to combine the sources into a coherent, internally consistent narrative, but rather to combine the narratives in a way that allows them to maintain their distinctiveness while at the same time uniting them. Redactors cared about their source material, not because they thought it was “inerrant,” but because the source material reflected the traditions of the peoples. When the post-exilic redactor compiled these two flood narratives, he was doing so on behalf of two traditions both of which continued to be represented by the inhabitants of a post-exilic Judea.

This is something Thom talked about in Human Faces: that our expectations of inerrancy are not nearly as old as the texts themselves. The Jewish religious authorities long before Christ accepted both Kings and Chronicles, both Ezra and Jonah, apparently without being too bothered by the contradictions in history and theology within them.

Deane Galbraith chimes in with his own reflections on Thom’s post, helpfully quoting a 1981 article by Jack Miles:

It is the [modern] critics’ inability to imagine an aesthetic of disorder, or of deliberately mingled order and disorder, that may separate them most sharply from the ancient writers and editors they study. As they acquire this ability, perhaps by relinquishing what in modern times has been their quasi-religious vocation, they may find that they have less taste for the harmony and smoothness that historical scholarship would impose on the text.

Obsessing over purity can be hazardous to one's health.

I’m afraid that this contention that the ancients could live with more tension and uncertainty about historical details than we nowadays prefer will not make enough inroads among modern Christians who have swallowed modernism hook, line, and sinker. They have vilified post-modernism so much that they won’t recognize in it the cure for the disease they are trying through desperate apologetics to overcome: no, we don’t have all the facts, can’t look at everything as objectively as we’d like, undoubtedly get even key points of our theology wrong, and our sources of knowledge are likely screwed up even in important areas — but that’s ok. We live with the tension by making the best we can of what is available to us, and as Christians, we trust God with the rest.

John MacArthur, esteemed Fundamentalist pastor and author, thinks that 2 Peter 3.3-7 was written as a prophecy condemning modern geology and the principle of uniformitarianism.

Most importantly, I want to remind you that in the last days scoffers will come, mocking the truth and following their own desires. They will say, “What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created.”

They deliberately forget that God made the heavens by the word of his command, and he brought the earth out from the water and surrounded it with water. Then he used the water to destroy the ancient world with a mighty flood. And by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed.

He’s not alone, of course. We’ve heard this for years, but recently a friend brought to my attention that he’s still spreading this pathetic exegesis to his followers.

Uniformitarianism, or gradualism, is simply the assumption that the laws governing nature in the past are the same as the laws of nature we see today, and thus that the universe’s present configuration is explicable by immutable laws of nature. In geology it is usually juxtaposed against catastrophism, the idea that violent cataclysms (such as earthquakes, usually) are necessary to account for key aspects of modern earth’s geophysical features.

MacArthur (who should make use of some basic training in one of the scientific disciplines) writes in a couple recent blog posts (1, 2) that the basic scientific principle of uniformitarianism is anti-Christian and contradictory of Scripture.

This is patent nonsense. 2 Peter has nothing whatsoever to do with warnings of people who would some two thousand years later believe that the way nature works at its basic levels remains uniform over time. The claim that 2 Peter 3 was written as a long-preemptive attack on the concept of uniformitarianism is an old creationist saw based on clumsy hermeneutics and dispensationalist eschatology, blindly keying off the buzzword “flood”.

Perhaps the worst offense in this interpretation is the assumption that it’s talking to us rather than addressing something meaningful to the original audience. 1 Peter 1.20, Acts 2.17, Hebrews 1.2, and James 5.3 all clearly indicate that these early Christians believed they were already in the “last days” during the time of — probably long before — 2 Peter was written. The point is that 2 Peter, when talking about “the last days”, was actually addressing a specific belief that was occurring at that time and not “prophesying” the rise of modern geology. As always, we must properly contextualize this text in order to recover the author’s intent.

2 Peter was not trying to counteract the denial of a particular past cataclysm (a global flood), but rather a denial of God’s eventual judgment through cataclysm. Conservative and liberal scholars agree that this book was among the last in the NT written. The earliest believers obviously believed they were in the “last days” and were beginning to succumb to the ridicule of the skeptics and the doubts of the disillusioned. 2 Peter 3 is an attack on the conclusion that God would not intervene drawn on the undeniable basis that He hadn’t done so nearly as soon as expected. The author of 2 Peter was doing his level best, from chapter 1 on, to establish that the delay in judgment (3.9) did not indicate the irrelevance of righteous living in anticipation of the eschaton even despite modified expectations of its imminency.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with gradualism or the Flood of Noah. But we should notice that the Flood’s global nature seems to have been assumed. If that is true, the author was clearly misinformed. But then again, we already know his sources weren’t the most reliable: he borrowed from the Epistle of Jude, an obscure text whose author quoted the pseudepigraphical 1 Enoch as an accurate record of prophecy as uttered by the “seventh from Adam”, Enoch.