Genesis as Mytho-History and Scott Clifton Conversation

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we are going to discuss an article in response to some of your work on Genesis as myth – mytho-history. So much of that can be found on your Defenders series on this topic. But we will synopsize today and respond to some criticism in an evaluation. Before we begin, though, I’ve got to mention something that has really excited Facebook and social media, and that is your dialogue with Emmy-winning actor Scott Clifton.

DR. CRAIG: Ah, yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: We’ve known Scott for a long time. He’s wanted to dialogue with you for a long time. He wanted some of his own questions answered. He’s had YouTube videos and so on. People were excited about the fact that you got a chance to dialogue with him on Cameron Bertuzzi's Capturing Christianity channel.^[1]

DR. CRAIG: I really enjoyed it. I have to say that he was not only open and congenial and easy to talk to, but that the objections that he was raising were every bit as good as those that are raised by many professional philosophers in their publications. In fact, I think that probably some of them did reflect objections that are out there in the literature. So it was a very good discussion. I enjoyed it just as much as the dialogue I had with Alex O’Connor. In both of these cases you have people who are not professional philosophers but are very engaged and intelligent lay people. It was a pleasure to have this conversation with him.

KEVIN HARRIS: He's got a knack for it.

DR. CRAIG: He has a good mind, I think. I hope that it's convicting to many Christians who watch that dialogue and who are not similarly engaged intellectually with their faith. I think it's a real lesson for us that if this agnostic can be so engaged with the questions of God and religious faith then how can we be intellectually lazy and not explore them ourselves?

KEVIN HARRIS: Exactly. You discussed the kalam for the most part.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's right.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more thing on this that has always concerned me. He's got one of these atheist testimonies that I call it a testimony in reverse. We hear of so many due to people asking them questions that they couldn't answer, beating them up intellectually, and things like that and so they begin to study and become very proficient in knowing why they believe what they believe. Well, the same thing happened to him, as I understand, in reverse when he was young – probably middle school, junior high, early high school – he encountered a bunch of evangelical kids who were very zealous and they beat up on him with apologetics. They knew their apologetics. He was frustrated and a little humiliated that he couldn't answer them, and so he started to study so that he could debate them and to refute them. That's not what we wanted to happen.

DR. CRAIG: No. No, it isn't. That's a shame. You know, that reminds me of Shabir Ally, the Canadian Muslim apologist. The same thing happened to him. He shared with me that as a young man he got into conversation with Christians and found that he couldn't defend Islam. He was completely unarmed, and so that caused him to throw himself into Islamic studies. And now he's a popular Muslim apologist. So sometimes it works the other way.

KEVIN HARRIS: I guess in that case a strategic prayer would be, “Lord, please reverse the effects of that somehow and get him to the truth.” I think that perhaps that would be a strategic prayer because there's nothing wrong with shoring up in the face of opposition and things like that, but you want to get at the truth and not just be able to keep people at bay or to answer them.

DR. CRAIG: One other thing worth emphasizing that's important here is you don't need to believe in the soundness of the kalam cosmological argument in order to be a Christian. There are plenty of Christians who don't agree with the kalam cosmological argument. So his skepticism about that argument shouldn't be a barrier to belief in God or to Christian faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. We're really glad for you to have had this dialogue at long last with Scott Clifton. You know, he's almost as good looking as I am [laughter]. This article that we're going to look at is from James Rochford.^[2]

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: He teaches classes in theology, apologetics, weekly Bible studies. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is where he's from. He got his Masters in theological studies. He has interacted with your work on Genesis as mytho-history, and he's like so many of our friends who just sing your praises and thank you for the input that you've had in his life but then spells out his disagreement.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. And I'm really glad that you picked this blog to have a podcast on because I am vitally interested not merely in the reaction of Old Testament scholars to my proposal but to the reaction of pastors like James and laymen because I am very concerned about the impact of my work on the historical Adam on the church. So I'm glad to have the chance to discuss his reservations.

KEVIN HARRIS: His opening statement is (it's a long article, we're just going to look at the introduction):

It is in this spirit [of his admiration for you] that I must voice my deep disagreement with Craig’s recent conclusions regarding the opening chapters of Genesis. Craig has defined Genesis 1-11 as being in the genre of mytho-history. I find this to be seriously mistaken, and contend that this view will have a massive impact on the church, and not for the good.

To continue, one part that he agrees with you is that you affirm Adam and Eve were real historical persons.

DR. CRAIG: And the universal progenitors of mankind. That's important.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yes.

And yet, Craig understands Genesis 1-11 to be in a genre called “mytho-history.” I reject his genre analysis. But before I commit to arguing against this assessment, I hope to accurately articulate it.

So here it is, Bill. Lay people are really in this category. When they hear the word “myth” . . . “Mythbusters” – a popular TV show. So let's talk immediately about what we mean by “myth.”

DR. CRAIG: That's critical. I notice that James Rochford himself is the author of a book entitled Evidence Unseen: Exposing the Myth of Blind Faith. And that's precisely the use of the word “myth” that I object to and am not talking about. I'm using the word “myth” in the way that professional scholars of folklore use the word “myth,” namely to be a traditional sacred narrative that attempts to ground the present institutions and values of a culture deep in the primordial past. I think that there are a number of family resemblances that folklorists have identified for this type of literature, and that when you look at Genesis 1-11 you find that these family resemblances are shared in abundance by Genesis 1-11.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says, quoting your work,

Myths, by contrast, should “not be synonymous with falsehood.” Rather, a myth has several key components [that you have just talked about].

To summarize succinctly, Craig defines myths as “sacred narratives which seek to explain how the world and man came to be in their present form.”

Has he got that assessment right?

DR. CRAIG: Well, in a rough sense, sure. They're also traditional, and it's not just man and the world but cultural institutions, the prevailing religious cult, and other sorts of things. They also are often fantastic in the sorts of events they describe. In the book I list about nine of these family resemblances (as they're called) of myths, and then explore the degree to which Genesis 1-11 exhibits these.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. These four characteristics of myth – four criteria – he thinks that they are too broad and that they say nothing. Those four would be:

First, a myth is a linguistic composition. . . . Second, it is a sacred narrative to the community. . . . Third, myths are traditional and old. . . . Fourth, these sacred narratives seek to explain how the world and man came to be in their present form.

But he says this refers to nearly all religious literature. What is his objection here? He thinks this is too broad. He says that these criteria say nothing.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. He says this would refer to nearly all religious literature, and that's clearly mistaken. For example, let's take religious literature that we and our audience are most familiar with – the Bible. These four traits would not describe the Gospels, for example, which belong to the genre of ancient biography. They wouldn't describe certainly the epistles of Paul in the New Testament which are epistolary literature. They wouldn't apply to the book of Revelation which is Jewish apocalyptic. Turning to the Old Testament, these criteria would not apply to the Psalms (poetry) or to the Wisdom literature like Proverbs. It wouldn't apply to the historical books of the Old Testament like 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles. In fact, these criteria wouldn't even characterize the remainder of the book of Genesis after chapter 11. Genesis 12 to 50 definitely don't belong to this genre. So James is simply mistaken in saying that these criteria would apply to all religious literature. That's clearly mistaken. And in offering this criticism, it's worth noting that he's not criticizing me. He's criticizing professional folklorists. He's saying that these professional scholars of myth and legend and folktale literally don't know what they're talking about. And I find that highly implausible. I think they certainly do understand what myths are, and they're able to identify them through these family resemblances. Now, the four that James mentions in his blog are only four out of the nine, but they are some of the most important, and as I've already said I think we can see how they would serve to apply to certain kinds of religious literature but certainly not to all.

KEVIN HARRIS: He's very clear again that,

Craig is clear that mytho-history doesn’t refer to falsehood. In an interview, he stated, “Nobody is saying that Genesis is fiction. At least, I’m not!” However, in all honesty, it is quite difficult to nail down precisely what Craig means by mytho-history.

This seems to be his main complaint. He just thinks it's too broad. He continues, quoting you,

Genesis 1-11 are plausibly to be understood as Hebrew myths with an interest in history.

DR. CRAIG: Right. I do not say that these are pure myths. Rather, I adopt the terminology of the great Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen who identified a special genre of ancient literature that he called “mytho-history.” It is a type of writing that involves historical events but these events are cloaked with the figurative language of myth and therefore do not need to be interpreted in a literalistic way. Jacobsen thought that this genre of literature applied to Genesis 1-11, and quite a few evangelical scholars would agree with him on this.

KEVIN HARRIS: Again, he says his main complaint,

We honestly aren’t trying to be obtuse, but what exactly does he mean by this? To what extent is Genesis interested in history?

How does the historical part connect to the myth part?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that the historical interest comes out most clearly in the genealogies. The genealogies are like the backbone of the primeval history of Genesis 1-11. They structure these stories chronologically. So you do not have simply a pool of unrelated prehistoric stories in Genesis 1-11. Rather, they are ordered chronologically by these genealogies into a primeval history. And that's where the interest in history emerges most clearly. These genealogies meld seamlessly into the patriarchal history beginning with the call of Abraham which is indisputably concerned with historical writing. That's where I think we see the historical interest. Now this classification of these narratives does not allow us to clearly distinguish within the narratives, “these verses are mythical and these verses are historical.” It's not meant to provide that sort of focus. I think we have to be willing to live with a certain ambiguity when it comes to these narratives, but I do think that the narratives clearly embody some central theological truths that are very important and that I list in the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: He quotes you as being very candid and saying,

It’s probably futile to try to discern to what extent the narratives are to be taken literally—to identify which parts are figurative and which parts are historical.

I don't know. I get the idea that he wants more specifics, and wants to be able to defend the elements of Genesis and the stories in Genesis as historical. He doesn't want it to be this vague. And you say that's kind of hard to do.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Exactly. There's no reason to think that we should be able to make those kind of clear discriminations if this analysis of the genre is correct. I would wonder what is James’ alternative? Is his alternative to simply treat these as historical writing? Well, I think that that would be a category mistake. They don't belong to that genre of literature. So whether you like this type of literature or not, that's a quite independent question of whether or not Genesis 1-11 does bear these family resemblances of myth and therefore ought to be classified in that way. One of the things that I would like to emphasize, too, is that there's a clear distinction between truth and authority. The Christian philosopher Michael Ray has made this quite evident. There's a distinction between truth and authority. There are many things that are true that are not authoritative. For example, it's true that if I were to open my desk drawer I would find a ballpoint pen. But there's nothing authoritative about that. By contrast, there certainly are authoritative statements like commands that don't have truth value. For example, if a policeman tells you, “Pull over now” that's an authoritative imperative and you'd better pull over. But it's not true or false. An imperative like an interrogative (a question) isn't truth-apt – it isn't true or false but it is authoritative or non-authoritative. And so these mytho-historical narratives in Genesis 1-11 can be and are authoritative for Israel and the church even if they are not literally true in every respect.

KEVIN HARRIS: A quick example, and he quotes this as well, and I would wonder how he himself would interpret the serpent, for example.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: We just don't know the full nature of that serpent. We know some characteristics. We know what it's trying to portray. But we don't think it was a boa constrictor in a tree with vocal cords.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I wonder what James thinks. This is a great example of a fantastic element, as I call them, in the narrative. That's a technical term as I use it. To be fantastic is to be an element which, if interpreted literalistically, would be palpably false. As you say, it's inept to say, “Was it a python or was it a garter snake? Was it a boa constrictor or a water moccasin?” That is just inept. The Pentateuchal author knew that snakes don't talk and that this wasn't a snake like you might find in your garden. This is a mythical image, probably a symbol of evil, that is used in the narrative to convey an important theological truth. But we don't need to take this in a literalistic way.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap up, the conclusion seems to be this. James thinks – let me just quote him,

Now, I’m not a prophet or the son of a prophet (though I do work for a non-profit organization…), but I’d like to make a prediction: Those who sow to this misguided genre analysis will reap the consequences. Such a view isn’t a slippery slope; it’s is [sic] a slip and slide! It gives the interpreter no boundaries for handling these key chapters of Scripture.

That seems to be kind of the bottom line here.

DR. CRAIG: It does, and that's demonstrably false as I've already explained. These criteria for discerning myth would eliminate as myth the whole of the New Testament and virtually all of the Old Testament. James is simply wrong when he says that these could be applied to any sort of religious literature. I would firmly resist this claim that it leaves you with no boundaries. On the contrary, it will enable you to say that much of the Bible is not mythical. In fact that's exactly what C. S. Lewis said of the Gospels. I remember Lewis, in response to Rudolf Bultmann’s claim that the Gospels were myth, said, “I have been studying myths and legend and folklore all my life. I know what this kind of literature looks like. And when I read the Gospels, these are not myths.” As a student of folklore, Lewis understood clearly the boundaries of myth and correctly discerned that the Gospels are not myths. History has borne him out. Today the subtle consensus of New Testament scholars is that the literary genre that the Gospels most closely resemble is ancient biography like the Lives of famous Greeks and Romans which have a definite historical interest. So I think James is wrong that this is a slip and slide. And here's my hope – that this book will be a tremendous profit to the church. I have already heard from people saying that this treatment helps them to trust the reliability of the Bible more by understanding this literature correctly rather than thinking that we're committed to things like a six-day creation, magical fruit, talking snakes, the Tower of Babel being the origin of all languages, and so forth. So this has actually been a real help to thinking Christians. Mike and Debbie Licona are good friends of ours, and Mike has done work on the Gospel narratives and the inconsistencies and contradictions that they present. What Mike has tried to show is that when you compare these to ancient biographies they employ literary devices that are quite common in ancient biographies and so shouldn't be thought of as contradictions or inconsistencies. Debbie made a very interesting remark that I think is pertinent to my work on the historical Adam. She says for people who are aware of these inconsistencies and have struggled with them, Mike's work is of tremendous benefit. But for naive Christians who are unaware of these problems and have never encountered them, Mike's work actually arouses doubts in their mind because it makes them confront these for the first time. And I suspect that could be the case here with this work on the historical Adam. For scientifically-informed Christians who have struggled with the idea of how there could be a universal human progenitor so recently in the past along with all the rest of these narratives will be greatly helped by this, but the naive literalistic Christian is probably going to be very upset by this book.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I’m sure that you join me in thanking James Rochford for his interaction with you. He ends the article by saying that he is looking forward to your systematic philosophical theology that you are writing.

DR. CRAIG: Good! Thank you, James.^[3]