YEC, is the universe expanding?

[gluadys]

If Genesis 1 spells out six phases for us, and tells us which events are within each phase, and each phase is ordered numerically, they must be in that order. If Genesis 2 would mean to say God created plants after man, it would be a glaring contradiction and cause the bible to be fallible and not trustworthy from the very first book of it. And since Genesis 1 is the very first chapter, it sets a reference for the following chapters. Each consecutive chapter must agree with the previous chapters.

Really? Why must this be the case when we know the biblical manuscripts were not assembled into their current order until long after they were written and many parts were written without there being any intention that they be correlated with what now precedes them. Genesis 2 is a case in point as most scholars agree that it was originally written before Genesis 1 was. So there is no reason it had to agree with it.

It seems to me that you are pulling hermeneutical rules out of thin air.

 

[ivebeenshown]

Really? Why must this be the case when we know the biblical manuscripts were not assembled into their current order until long after they were written and many parts were written without there being any intention that they be correlated with what now precedes them. Genesis 2 is a case in point as most scholars agree that it was originally written before Genesis 1 was. So there is no reason it had to agree with it.

It seems to me that you are pulling hermeneutical rules out of thin air.

I have never in my life heard of Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1.

They were one continuous text and the chapter labels were added later for our reference... but Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1 sounds like something you have pulled out of thin air. I'm sorry, but that sounds ridiculous, especially without any sources for such a bold claim. I hope you understand why that sounds so absurd to me. Surely I would have heard of that before...

 

[Mr Dave]

I have never in my life heard of Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1.

They were one continuous text and the chapter labels were added later for our reference... but Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1 sounds like something you have pulled out of thin air. I'm sorry, but that sounds ridiculous, especially without any sources for such a bold claim. I hope you understand why that sounds so absurd to me. Surely I would have heard of that before...

Read this article. Priestly Vs. Yahwist, Page 2 of 2 - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com
The Yahwist account was written before the Priestly. It is certainly no "pulled out of thin air" but the Yahwist was written approx. 500 years before the Priestly. Eco-Justice Ministries - Two Creation Stories in Genesis

 

[Papias]

IB wrote:

I have never in my life heard of Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1.

They were one continuous text and the chapter labels were added later for our reference... but Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1 sounds like something you have pulled out of thin air. I'm sorry, but that sounds ridiculous, especially without any sources for such a bold claim. I hope you understand why that sounds so absurd to me. Surely I would have heard of that before...

It is an all too common, yet always saddening thing to see how time after time, fundamentalist Christians are so unaware of entire fields of work, often in Christianity itself but also often in practically any other area, especially science. I think a lot of it is due to the very censored range of information sources they are allowed or allow themselves. Many people see vistas of information, and see a tiny percentage of this vista as all that is allowed to be seen by fundamentalist Christians, and are floored by statements like that above.

While an incredible misunderstanding of evolution is perhaps most common, the history of the Bibles is way up there too, as it basic sociological information and so on as well.

IB, please understand that I don't mean that as an attack, but to point out how common and huge a problem this is. When Christians go out into the world with that level of ignorace, it makes it look like Christianity has no basis and can only be supported by a masssive distortion of the one's worldview and information.

Statements like "I have never in my life heard of Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1." sound, to even a sophomore student in a real bible study program, like a mechanic saying "I have never in my life heard of the idea that gasoline powers cars.". The other day I was talking with a PASTOR no less, who "teaches" his flock every sunday, who has been through seminary and 15 years of preaching after that, who said "really? I've never heard that there is any doubt that Paul wrote 1st Timothy. Where could such an idea have come from?".

Gaaah.

Papias

 

[Assyrian]

Keep in mind IBS is 20, that the bible doesn't mention much about the documentary hypothesis itself, that there may not be that much discussion of the hypothesis in the Christian circles he is in, even less likely that there is discussion of relative ages of the different documents. Why hasn't IBS heard about Genesis 2 being written before Genesis 1? I would say he just has

I think we need to understand the suspicion towards the documentary hypothesis in conservative circles, apart from the fact it overturns traditional assumptions of Mosaic authorship on the basis of different chapters using different names for God, well I use different names for God in different circumstances. The documentary hypothesis has evidence supporting it, but nothing like proof. Secondly, it came out of a liberal scholarship that was also busy demythologising Jesus. Of course the claims liberal scholarship made about Genesis were going to be taken with suspicion. Not that you haven't had conservative scholarship looking at these questions too, but most people in conservative churches, most pastors even, where content with leaving questions like that to academic scholars and getting on with the real job of following Jesus and studying what his word says, not how text was edited. Interestingly, we now have a home grown conservative version of the documentary hypothesis doing the rounds, the tablet hypothesis, saying Genesis was made up of different documents, more or less the same documents as the documentary hypothesis pointed out.

 

[Papias]

Keep in mind IBS is 20,

Ya know Assyrian, I hadn't noticed that. That changes a lot of the thought in my post. I have to say that I have no basis for much of my surprise now.

When I was 20 I certainly had little understanding of the views of scholars on the origin of the Pentateuch in relation to the Exile, or of the New Testament canonical convolutions of the 2nd-4th centuries (not to mention authorship), or even of the differences between the many bibles that different Christian religions have today (I don't even think I knew much about the Mormon Bible).

My understanding of science was much more patchy than now, and for evolution was, I think, a bit Larmarckian, and the same incompletion goes for a lot of other scientific fields. IB could well be better informed than I was at 20.

Papias

 

[Assyrian]

Not that either of us are saying "ooh look at us all so much older and wiser..."

 

[Mr Dave]

Not that either of us are saying "ooh look at us all so much older and wiser..."

Yeah what's wrong with being 20 haha.

 

[Assyrian]

As George Bernard Shaw said, youth is wasted on the young

 

[Papias]

Assyrian wrote:

Not that either of us are saying "ooh look at us all so much older and wiser..."

Right. IB, I apologize if anything I wrote sounded like that. I'm sure there are plenty of things that most younger people are more knowlegeable about than I.

Papias

 

[ivebeenshown]

Oh, no problem. Do know that from a very young age I was captivated by dinosaurs and watched countless documentaries about the history of the earth and evolution. I had never in my life fully accepted Jesus as the truth and the life until earlier this year. So throughout high school, I did learn and accept the 4.5 billion year timeline.

I believe God is all-powerful and that undermining the genealogy of Genesis would severely discount the rest of the bible. Adam was a very real person. Hebrews 11 even begins its list with Cain and Abel and includes Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, all equally real people.

I read both of those links, Mr. Dave, and they simply state that one was written before the other without citing any sources as to how exactly they know that. Why should I trust that account, when the bible has them as Genesis 1 then Genesis 2?

 

[Mr Dave]

It has been understood for well over one hundred years now that this is the case. I quote from G. Wenham in a 1999 article in the journal Vetus Testamentum. P is the Priestly source, J is the Yahwist. This is scholarly jargon for these things.

"For the last hundred years it has been received wisdom in Old Testament scholarship that P is the latest of the pentateuchal sources or redactional layers. Yet before Wellhausen [in Geschichte Israels, 1878] established this as the consensus view, it was generally held that P was one of the oldest sources. Since Dillman [Die Genesis, 1886] few scholars of stature have maintained the priority of P."

For well over one hundred years, Biblical scholarship has held the view that P is the newest and that J (as of Genesis 2) is much older, and it is for even longer that it has been known that several sources were brought together in the formation of the Pentateuch. There were no sources for how we know that Genesis 1-2 are different sources because it is a given in Biblical Scholarship and has been for an extremely long time.

Referencing how the author of the article knows this would be like a biologist referencing how they know that there are cells in the human body, it's just a given.

I can get in touch with people, more knowledgeable than I in pentateuchal history, but I suggest that you follow the advice given in one of the previous posts that you look into Biblical Scholarship and don't rely solely on what you are told in your Christian circle.

 

[ivebeenshown]

My only 'Christian circle' is the bible itself. Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken, yet in trying to assert that Genesis 2 is before Genesis 1 that is breaking the scripture.

Has this view of 'p' and 'j' been accepted since before Jesus?

 

[Papias]

Has the exclusion of the book of 2Maccabees been accepted since before Jesus?

 

[Assyrian]

My only 'Christian circle' is the bible itself. Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken, yet in trying to assert that Genesis 2 is before Genesis 1 that is breaking the scripture.

How is that breaking scripture? Think about the book of Psalms, is it breaking scripture to suggest Psalm 137 'by the Rivers of Babylon', was written during the Babylonian Exile while Psalm 23 was written centuries before by David? Psalm 90 say it was written by Moses. Yet all of the psalms written centuries apart were not compiled until after the Jews returned from Exile in Babylon, it had to be after that because the book also includes the post exilic Psalm 126:1 'When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion'. Figuring out when the various part of the bible were written and compiled into books does not make them any less the inspired word of God, it just means God inspired the editor too.

Has this view of 'p' and 'j' been accepted since before Jesus?

Would ancient tradition be more reliable than modern scholarship? If i recall correctly, the bible is pretty ambivalent about tradition. But it does recommend searching scriptures and girding up the loins of our minds.

 

[Mr Dave]

My only 'Christian circle' is the bible itself. Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken, yet in trying to assert that Genesis 2 is before Genesis 1 that is breaking the scripture.

Has this view of 'p' and 'j' been accepted since before Jesus?

Jesus said the scripture cannot be broken, so what? I'm not trying to 'break' scripture, I'm just trying to inform you that it is more complicated than 'many years ago Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, full stop.'

The view of P and J in those explicit terms has been around for at least 250 years with Jean Astruc's work "Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paraît que Moïse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse."
Please note this is not the same as saying that no-one had ever thought that Genesis is comprised of multiple works until 1753. As to the details of this view, I do not know, it is getting beyond the realms of my knowledge of the subject.

 

[Mr Dave]

Has the exclusion of the book of 2Maccabees been accepted since before Jesus?

 

[Assyrian]

Was 2Maccabees included before Jesus?

 

[Mr Dave]

Was 2Maccabees included before Jesus?

'Tis in the LXX.

 

[Assyrian]

Jesus said the scripture cannot be broken, so what? I'm not trying to 'break' scripture, I'm just trying to inform you that it is more complicated than 'many years ago Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, full stop.'

The view of P and J in those explicit terms has been around for at least 250 years with Jean Astruc's work "Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paraît que Moïse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse."
Please note this is not the same as saying that no-one had ever thought that Genesis is comprised of multiple works until 1753. As to the details of this view, I do not know, it is getting beyond the realms of my knowledge of the subject.

That is fascinating I didn't know the Documentary_hypothesis predated Wellhausen, a quick Google shows some of its history, Wiki traces some of the ideas back to the 17th century
Documentary hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
while Who wrote the 5 books of Moses? (a.k.a. the Pentateuch, the books of the Law, the Torah)
has an 11th century Rabbi raising some questions.