Babylon and the Bible

Written by Jim Fletcher Saturday, 19 September 2009 17:54

Every so often, I like to write about two guys no one has heard about. Long-dead Bible scholars tend to get that kind of reception. After all, they aren’t as interesting as dead, weird pop stars.

Or are they?

Princeton’s Robert Dick Wilson was an academic in the last century, but a lion when it came to defending the Bible. He died in 1930, but his insights into the attacks on the Bible are highly relevant for us today. In fact, he would have embraced the recently published Already Gone, by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. The book tells us in startling detail just how tenuous is the Church’s hold on our youth today. Simply put, they are leaving in droves, because the Bible is not being taught.

A contemporary of Wilson’s was Friedrich Delitzsch, a German scholar who did not share the same world view as his colleague across the pond.

In the spring of 1902, Delitzsch delivered a speech in Berlin. “Babylon and the Bible” was heard by no less than the Kaiser himself. In it, Delitzsch contended that the Bible had in fact been influenced by Babylonian myth. In other words, the ancient Sumerians had not in fact been part of the people groups that arose after Babel — as the Bible itself clearly indicates — but rather they were the first great human civilizations that were the endpoint of human evolution from hominids to homo sapiens.

This contast in world views could not be more stark.

For thousands of years, people read the Bible and understood that it is a straightforward account of earth history.

In the past 300 years, though, that view has been challenged and enhanced dramatically by Darwinian philosophy. Darwin probably knew it would happen, but he would still have been astonished by subsequent philosophers, who took his theory about biology and applied it to every other sphere of life.

We even have, we are told, a host of religions that have evolved from the dim mists of the past, concluding with, among others, Christianity and Judaism.

After all, the scholars contend, the Hebrew writers were simply setting down myths that had evolved as man’s religious consciousness had evolved.

How do they know this, by the way?

Here’s an interesting secret: they don’t.

It is their bias against the Bible as the Word of God that drives these theories.

One has only to read, say, the doorstop-sized The [aptly named] Interpreter’s Bible, first published in the 1920s (updated 30 years later) and realize that mainline scholars weren’t believers at all. They were infected with the idea that Scripture is in reality a cheap, serialized version of Sumerian myth.

This changes everything, if true.

No longer is God the all-sovereign Being who controls history. No longer does Israel’s modern rebirth have any significance. No longer can we believe in a specially created world; it evolved.

(And if you wonder what this has to do with today, read The New Living Translation, or many of the other modern versions of the Bible, while also considering the weird theology of Emergents like Brian McLaren.)

Wikepedia has an interesting description of The Interpreter’s Bible:

The Interpreter's Bible series is a Biblical criticism series published by United Methodist Publishing (Abingdon/Cokesbury) beginning in the 1950s. Each volume covers one or more books of the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Apocrypha. The volumes contain in-depth introductions and commentaries, complemented by original translations, with full critical notes that include alternate readings and alternative translations. Synopses of informed discussion of the historical origins and the manuscripts' traditions are also provided. These volumes are not designed for the casual Bible reader, but for the "educated layman" who is already prepared with a general understanding of and interest in higher criticism, or for members of the clergy who are already familiar with basic Biblical criticism.

There are several key phrases here, including “full critical notes.” These “alternative translations” really mean that the commentaries are simply a mishmash of dreamy, weird, stream-of-consciousness ramblings from these ultra-liberal scholars. I’m serious. Just crack one open sometime when you have a spare 10 or 1,000 minutes.

The scholars meander down a multitude of paths, drawing in Tennyson, recent history (such as the First World War), and humanistic philosophy. Among other things.

The commentaries are a dizzying blend of musings about a whole host of things that have nothing do with anything. They also include a rich (as in comical) stew of interpreting just what ancient Hebrew writers and participants in historical events (think Joshua and Caleb) were actually thinking. Of course, the upshot is that the scholars are sure they know that the writers/participants were thinking something entirely different from what they clearly wrote about.

This is the most pathetic and pure form of hubris I’ve ever seen.

For instance, in the account of the spies entering Canaan…the scholars are sure that the spies didn’t see actual giants, but that’s only what they thought they saw.

If this was a stand-up routine, you’d lose your breath.

These are otherwise smart people who are so steeped in liberal criticism of the Bible that they make it say exactly the opposite of what it says. They do this because they hate supernaturalism, predictive prophecy, and the doctrine of creationism. They hate it because the world hates it and therefore those doctrines must be primitive recordings from primitive, evolving people. In other words, not true.

My point in all this is that this teaching has infected our entire culture and that is why young people are leaving the Church by the millions. The exodus will continue.

Wilson knew all this and anticipated it. He knew what liberal scholarship was going to do. In September of 1902, he gave his own devastating critique of Delitzch’s bizarre biblical theories. Wilson also wrote extensively about the Old Testament, for years, and you can access much of his material online. If you can lay your hands on a copy of his A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, do so. He presents bullet-proof evidence that the Bible is exactly what it claims to be.

These two long-dead scholars are highly relevant for us today, because their world views are highly relevant. Either the Bible is God’s literal Word to us, His instruction for life, or it is not.

It’s that simple.

And that critical.

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Originally published in One News Now, Prophecy Matters. August 13, 2009