In the last issue of TSR, we discussed the myth about astronomical proof of Joshua's long day that biblicists still recycle from time to time even though it has been repeatedly discredited and even rejected by scientifically informed inerrantists. As the mailbag column in this issue shows, these articles created a lot of interest in the subject, an interest that is no doubt partly due to the attention that this myth has received on the internet, where naive biblicists continue to cite it as proof of biblical inerrancy. I mentioned in my article that I recalled encountering this myth for the first time when as a Bible college student in the 50s, I dutifully read Harry Rimmer's Harmony of Science and Scripture. Rimmer was a Baptist preacher whose stock in trade was defending the Bible with appeals to pseudoscience. He was sort of the Josh McDowell of that time, and no serious ministerial student was without at least some of Rimmer's books in his personal library.
Over the years, I lost Rimmer's Harmony of Science and Scripture, but Don Robertson, a subscriber from South Carolina, saw my reference to it and sent me some photocopied pages from the chapter that presented the version of this urban myth that was circulating in the 50s. Now that we have seen the latest "NASA" version of the myth, looking at the version that Rimmer told in his book (copyrighted in 1936) should help even staunch biblicists see the unreliability of the kind of information that their "apologists" use to defend the Bible. The quotation is a bit long, but I'm going to publish it uncut so that no one can accuse me of misrepresenting Rimmer.
The final testimony of science is that such a day [Joshua's long day] left its record for all time. As long as time shall be, the record of this long day must remain. The fact is attested by eminent men of science, two of whom I quote here.
Sir Edwin Ball, the great British astronomer, found that twenty-four hours had been lost out of solar time. Where did that go, what was the cause of this strange lapse, and how did it happen? The answer may be expected in vain from sources of human wisdom and learning!
There is a place, however, where the answer is found. And this place is attested by a scientist of standing. There is a book by Prof. C. A. Totten of Yale, written in 1890, which establishes the case beyond the shadow of a doubt. The condensed account of his book, briefly summarized, is as follows:
Professor Totten wrote of a fellow-professor, an accomplished astronomer, who made the strange discovery that the earth was twenty-four hours out of schedule! That is to say, there had been twenty-four hours lost out of time. In discussing this point with his fellow-professors, Professor Totten challenged this man to investigate the question of the inspiration of the Bible. He said, "You do not believe the Bible to be the Word of God, and I do. Now here is a fine opportunity to prove whether or not the Bible is inspired. You begin to read at the very beginning and read as far as need be, and see if the Bible can account for your missing time."
The astronomer accepted the challenge and began to read. Some time later, when the two men chanced to meet on the campus, Professor Totten asked his friend if he had proved the question to his satisfaction. His colleague replied, "I believe I have definitely proved that the Bible is not the Word of God. In the tenth chapter of Joshua, I found the missing twenty-four hours accounted for. Then I went back and checked up on my figures, and found that at the time of Joshua there were only twenty-three hours and twenty minutes lost. If the Bible made a mistake of forty minutes, it is not the Word of God!"
Professor Totten said, "You are right, in part at least. But does the Bible say that a whole day was lost at the time of Joshua?" So they looked and saw that the text said, "about the space of a whole day."
The word "about" changed the whole situation, and the astronomer took up his reading again. He read on until he came to the thirty-eighth chapter of the prophet Isaiah. In this chapter, Isaiah has left us the thrilling story of the king, Hezekiah, who was sick unto death. In response to his prayer, God promised to add fifteen more years to his life. To confirm the truth of His promise, God offered a sign. He said, "Go out in the court and look at the sundial of Ahaz. I will make the shadow on the sundial back up ten degrees!" Isaiah recounts that the king looked, and while he looked, the shadow turned backward ten degrees, by which ten degrees it had already gone down! This settles the case, for ten degrees on the sundial is forty minutes on the face of the clock! So the accuracy of the Book was established to the satisfaction of this exacting critic.
When the astronomer found his day of missing time thus accounted for, he laid down the Book and worshipped its Writer, saying, "Lord, I believe!" (Harmony of Science and Scripture, Books, Inc., 1960, pp. 236-238).
I naively lapped up such stuff as this in my Bible college days. I'm embarrassed to admit it, because Rimmer's story almost reeks with the smell of phoniness. In his rebuttal of the NASA version of this myth, Charles Brennecke explained why finding a "missing day" in the time of Joshua would not be possible, but the scientifically impossible claims in the story are not the only reasons to doubt it. Professor Totten, the source of Rimmer's version of the myth, apparently didn't bother to give the name of his "fellow-professor," who was identified only as an "accomplished astronomer," so there was no way that Rimmer's readers could have checked the accuracy of Totten's claim that a professor's quest to find a missing day in time had converted him from skeptic to believer. I'm always suspicious of tales about unnamed skeptics who are instantly converted without even taking the time to evaluate whatever it was that presumably impressed them so profoundly. I would say that Totten's "fellow-professor" could not have been much of an "accomplished astronomer"--and certainly not an accomplished skeptic--if immediately after reading the tale about Hezekiah's sundial, he laid the Bible down and said, "Lord, I believe!" This sounds too much like those apologetic yarns about the atheistic professor who was silenced in his tracks by a simplistic question that any informed skeptic could easily answer, but pulpit audiences eat up this kind of stuff. That's why preachers use it.
Furthermore, Rimmer, like his present-day counterparts, didn't even try to explain how the "professor" knew that exactly 23 hours and 20 minutes were missing in the time of Joshua. He simply said that the professor "checked up on [his] figures" and made this determination. Exactly what calculations did the professor make, and what "figures" did he check? How was he even able to make any calculations at all without knowing the exact orbital positions of the earth and moon before and after the alleged long day? It's incredible that biblicists would continue to circulate this yarn without even investigating to see if existing scientific information can even establish its truth.
In many respects, however, the versions of this tale are alike. Rimmer tried to give his account respectability by attributing the quest for a missing day in time to a professor at Yale and a "fellow-professor" who was an "accomplished astronomer." Harold Hill adapted his account to the space program and made NASA scientists the counterparts of the professor at Yale and his friend, the "accomplished astronomer," but in both accounts, "scientists," who would presumably be trustworthy people qualified to know, had discovered a missing day in time and then found the explanation for it in the Bible. The end result in the minds of gullible inerrantists would be that science has confirmed the truth of the biblical account of Joshua's long day. Never mind that the information in either version of the story was insufficient to establish the truth of a myth that presumably proves the biblical myth. What biblical inerrantists are going to know enough about science to see holes in the story? Those who do know enough about science to see flaws in it (like the staff members of Apologetics Press, Inc., mentioned in my earlier article on the subject) reject the myth and advise others not to use it as an apologetic argument, but that Christians who have no background in science would be so quick to believe such a tale as this should not be surprising. After all, their whole religious lives have been based on a believe-anything approach to the Bible.
Everette Hatcher, whose defense of the book of Daniel will continue in the next issue, apparently recognizes the phoniness of at least some of the information that Christian apologists use to defend biblical inerrancy, because he has sent to me an article from Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith that debunks another "scientific" proof that Rimmer used in Harmony of Science and Scripture. Rimmer claimed that the story of an English sailor, who was swallowed by a "whale shark" and then recovered alive forty-eight hours later, proves that the story of Jonah is scientifically possible. The article that Hatcher sent to me ("A Whale of a Tale: Fundamentalist Fish Stories," December 4, 1991, pp. 224-237) was written by Dr. Edward B. Davis, a professor of science and history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. It relates the author's detailed research into Rimmer's fish story, a tedious effort that took Davis into the archives of various libraries and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic over a period of several months before leading him to the conclusion that the story was a legend that never happened. The article is fascinating reading that I highly recommend, because it shows not only how legends begin and grow but how that they can even become full blown within the lifetimes of the principal parties in them. This latter point is important, because a popular argument that Christian apologists use in defense of the resurrection of Jesus is that a minimum of four generations is necessary for a legend to develop, because if it begins earlier than this, people who lived at the time of the event or person being legendized would be able to nip the story in the bud by testifying that they were alive at the time and place and knew nothing about the events and people in the legend. According to the argument, the same would be true of the second- and third-generation descendants of people who had lived at the time. They could kill the legend by testifying that their parents and grandparents living at the time had never mentioned any events or persons involved in it. This is a commonly heard apologetic argument, but Davis's research into Rimmer's fish story shows that it is without basis, because legends can and do develop over much shorter periods of time than four generations and sometimes even within the very lifetimes of the principal parties in the legends. In this country, we have only to consider the legends that developed around such frontier heroes and outlaws as Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, etc. to know that legends can develop much sooner than four generations. I could cite other examples of rapidly emerging legends, but at this point I am not as interested in debunking the fundamentalist argument about legends as in showing how that a particular legend about a man and a whale began and was used in a pseudoscientific attempt to vindicate the Bible.
Davis became interested in Rimmer's modern Jonah when he inherited books from a relative of his wife and found inside one of them a copy of a sermon that Harry Rimmer had preached on "Jonah and the Whale." Between the book pages, there were also sermons on "Noah's Ark and the Deluge" and "Modern Science and the Long Day of Joshua," all of which Rimmer had later included in Harmony of Science and the Scripture. Attached to Rimmer's sermon on Jonah was a tract about Jonah by an unknown Fred T. Fuge and also an article from The Moody Bible Institute Monthly (September 1930), which had been written by Professor Albertus Pieters of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, to explore the possibility of a man's being able to survive for three days in the stomach of a whale. Pieters' article cited some sources that I will refer to later, but first I will present the version of the modern-day Jonah as Davis found it in Rimmer's sermon folded between the pages of the book he had inherited.
In the Literary Digest we noticed an account of an English sailor who was swallowed by a gigantic Rhinodon [i. e., a whale shark] in the English Channel. Briefly, the account stated that in the attempt to harpoon one of these monstrous sharks this sailor fell overboard, and before he could be picked up again, the shark, feeding, turned and engulfed him. His horrified friends made so much outcry that they frightened the fish, and it sounded and disappeared.
The entire trawler fleet put out to hunt the fish down, and forty-eight hours after the incident occurred the fish was sighted and slain with a one-pound deck-gun. The winches on the trawlers were too light to haul up the body of the mighty denizen of the deep, so they towed the carcass to the shore and opened it, to give the body of their friend Christian burial. But when the shark was opened, they were amazed to find the man unconscious but alive! He was rushed to the hospital, where he was found to be suffering from shock alone, and a few hours later was discharged as being physically fit. The account concluded by saying that the man was on exhibit in a London Museum at a shilling admittance fee; being advertised as "The Jonah of the Twentieth Century."
We corresponded with our representatives in London, and shortly afterward received corroboration of this incident, and last year had the privilege of meeting this man in person. His physical appearance was odd, in that his entire body was devoid of hair, and odd patches of a yellowish-brown color covered his entire skin (Davis, pp. 229-230).
Davis noted that Rimmer's account was characteristically lacking in details that would enable readers to verify the account. He didn't give the name of the sailor even though he claimed that he had later met him in person. He said only that the sailor "was on exhibit in a London Museum at a shilling admittance fee," but he didn't give the name of the museum. He didn't give the name of the town along the English Channel where the incident happened and the sailor was later retrieved alive from the whale shark's stomach. These are all strange omissions in a story that the writer obviously intended as scientific verification of the biblical story of Jonah.
Rimmer did say that he had read the story in the Literary Digest, but he didn't give the date of publication. Davis explained that the Literary Digest was a "popular magazine from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that was rather like a cross between Reader's Digest and Newsweek" (p. 230). Davis told how that he was able to find every issue of Literary Digest from 1916 through 1927, with the exception of "a few issues just before 1920," and look through each one for the article that Rimmer had alluded to in his sermon. He was unable to find "anything even remotely like the story Rimmer printed" (p. 230). Davis noted that in Harmony of Science and Scripture, which was published after the sermon, Rimmer's version of the modern-Jonah story was identical to the one he had told in his sermon except that he omitted the reference to Literary Digest and said only that he had read the story in "a magazine devoted to current affairs" (p. 230). Davis speculated that Rimmer had originally encountered a version of the story that claimed the Literary Digest as its source, and had accepted it without verification. When he perhaps learned later that no such story had ever appeared in Literary Digest, he changed the source reference in Harmony of Science and Scripture to a vague, imprecise "magazine devoted to current affairs." The end result was that the version in Harmony contained no specific information at all that readers could have used to verify Rimmer's claim.
Rimmer's imprecision did not deter Davis's determination to verify the story. Fuge's tract, which Davis had found folded in the book with Rimmer's sermon, told a similar story that the author attributed to a book written by a missionary to Iceland named Arthur Cook. (Davis later found this book and learned that the author's name was really Gook, not Cook.) This version of the story contained some specific details. The sailor's name was James Bartley, and he was allegedly a crew member of a whaling ship named Star of the East. The incident had happened not in the English Channel, but off the coast of the Falkland Islands (in the Southern Atlantic). The "fish" was not a "whale shark" but an actual whale, which, after being harpooned, had sounded, resurfaced, thrashing in a fit of agony, and capsized one of the boats. Before the crew of the other boat could pick up the men, one had drowned, and another named James Bartley could not be found. The whale was towed to the ship, where the crew worked the rest of the day and part of the night to butcher and process it. Work resumed the next day, and when the crew had stripped away all the fat and flesh, the stomach was hoisted onto the ship, where Bartley was found unconscious but still alive inside it. As in Rimmer's version of the story, Bartley survived the horrifying incident.
Armed now with at least a few specific details, Davis set out to check the story for accuracy. He surmised that if an incident like this had happened, it would probably have been picked up and published by the New York Times. Neither Rimmer nor Fuge had given a date for the alleged incident, but fortunately the article by Pieters (cited above) had given February 1891 as the date for a similar event alleged in it. Davis checked the Times Index for that year, found a lot of references to whales, but nothing about an incident like the one claimed by Rimmer, Fuge, and Pieters. He continued checking through the index for the next year and the next and the next, until in the volume for 1896, he found the entry: "Whale; man swallowed by...." On the microfilm for that year, he found the story, which was almost identical to the version he had read in Fuge's tract but with an additional note that "The Mercury of South Yarmouth, England, October 1891" was the source of the information. In going through the other issues of the Times on the same microfilm roll, Davis found more entries that referred to the Bartley story. A Harlem preacher, for example, had claimed that he had verified the existence of a ship named The Star of the East, which was a barque of 734 tons that had been "built in Glasgow, based in London, and commanded by a Captain J. B. Killam" (p. 226).
At this point, Davis had begun to feel that this story was perhaps true, but he wasn't quite ready to declare it a proven fact. Shortly afterwards, when he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to do research on another project in the library of the Royal Society in London, he saw it as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. In addition to doing his research project for NSF, he would also try to verify the information he had so far uncovered on the James Bartley incident.
Few can read this article and lay it aside without feeling a profound admiration for Dr. Davis's tenacious commitment to thorough research. Not many would have the time, patience, or means to put into research the effort that Davis expended in his search to find if the Bartley story was true. In England, he encountered all sorts of problems in his quest to verify the information he had found about Bartley in the United States. These problems are too numerous to summarize here (Davis's article was 14 pages long), so I will mention only the major ones. At the British Library, he found copies of two sources of the Bartley story that Pieters had mentioned in his article, and discovered in one of them a version of the story that claimed that Bartley had been treated at a London hospital for injury to his skin. Knowing now when the incident had allegedly occurred, Davis checked the *British Medical Journal* for 1891-1895, but found no references at all to anyone who had ever been treated for the skin problems that Bartley supposedly had suffered after his ordeal with the whale. Davis even checked into the possibility of searching through hospital records for 1891 but inquiries about the feasibility of trying this convinced him that it would be an impossible task even if records from that time could be found.
He then turned to checking the claim of the New York Times that the Bartley story had first been reported in an October 1891 issue of the South Yarmouth Mercury, but his research in this direction found that no such newspaper had ever existed and that there wasn't even a place called South Yarmouth listed on any maps of England. He did, however, find that there was a Great Yarmouth on the seacoast a hundred miles north of London and that it even had a local newspaper called the Yarmouth Mercury, which had been in print since 1890.
The specifics of Davis's research, some aspects of which I am even omitting, are too tediously detailed to include here, but through correspondence he eventually managed to find a library in Norwich County with microfilms of the Yarmouth paper and a librarian who was willing to look for the whale story. When nothing was heard from the library after a few weeks, he called to inquire about the status of the research and was told that just the day before the story had been found in the June 1891 issue of the Yarmouth Independent. The Yarmouth Independent? This was not the Yarmouth Mercury that had been mentioned in his source article, so he asked for confirmation of the name and date and was assured that both were right. The librarian, however, informed him that the story was different from the one he had written about, because this was just a story about a whale that had been killed off the coast of a nearby town named Gorleston, but there was no man inside it! "We've never heard such a story as this," the librarian informed him.
Determined to follow every possible lead to the end, Davis made a three-hour train trip to Great Yarmouth the next day to go through the library archives himself. The story he found was about a 30-foot rorqual whale that had run into a pier at the town of Gorleston "just south of Great Yarmouth." Several boats then pursued the whale, and after attempts to harpoon it had failed, the men ran it aground and killed it. The whale was then hung up by its tail on the shore and kept on exhibit for two days, where it was seen by an estimated crowd of over 2000. It was later dissected, and a taxidermist was hired to stuff the skin, which was then put on exhibit in the London Westminster Aquarium.
Davis's first reaction was that this could not have been the whale he was searching for, but subsequent research made him suspect that it was. For one thing, he continued his search in the archives of the Great Yarmouth library and found that two months after the story about the Gorleston whale was published another story ran about a man who was swallowed by a whale and later found alive, and the story was similar to the version that was in Fuge's tract, which had been attached to Rimmer's sermon. The publication of two whale stories in the same paper within the space of only two months was a coincidence that Davis wanted to pursue, so plodding on in his research, he uncovered still other versions of the story that had been published in the 1890s. One of them had even appeared in a French journal whose editor (Henri de Parville) was a respected science journalist. In his article, Parville had said that after having confronted this "entirely modern example," he had ended up "believing, this evening, between ten and eleven o'clock, that Jonah really did come out of the whale alive" (Davis, p. 231). Besides Parville's article, Davis had found a copy of the book written by Arthur Gook, the Icelandic missionary, whom Fuge had quoted in his tract. Upon learning that Gook had even published an Icelandic version of the book, Davis searched until he found a copy of it, at which time he learned that the version of the Bartley story was different in it. For one thing, this version gave the date of the incident as August 25, 1891, whereas Gook had cited February 1891 as the date in his English version.
So many different whale-swallows-man tales all published in the same decade was a perplexing situation that Davis wanted to find an explanation for. Besides the many variations in the various accounts, Davis was disturbed by an obvious absence of any indications that real scientific research had gone into verification of the story before any of the accounts had been published. In reference to two French accounts of the story that Davis had found, he said, "(I)t isn't the least bit clear from anything I have found that either one made what could be described as a careful investigation of the incident. I will state this more strongly: no one, repeat, no one, has given the story the kind of careful investigation it warrants if it is to be used as evidence for the reliability of scripture. Yet this is precisely what everyone citing the story assumes--that its authenticity has been established beyond a reasonable doubt, at least by de Parville if not also by others" (Davis p. 231).
The variations in the story and the obvious absence of serious scientific investigation before publishing the accounts were just two problems that bothered Davis. His research had uncovered other anomalies that led him to conclude that the Bartley story was actually a legend that, oddly enough, had its roots in the Gorleston whale, which had had no man in its stomach. Davis's research had discovered that there had been three vessels named Star of the East in the 1890s, but since two of them were actually boats of less than 20 tons, Davis concluded that the 734-ton Star of the East had to be the ship in the Bartley story, but it was a cargo ship and not a whaler. Furthermore, Davis learned that even though Bartley had allegedly been swallowed by the whale in 1891 near the Falkland islands, whaling in this area had not even begun until 1909, almost two decades after the contradictory dates cited in the different versions. Davis found sailing schedules for the 734-ton vessel and learned that it had sailed from New York for Wellington, New Zealand, on June 25, 1890, under the command of Captain J. B. Killam, whom the New York Times article had reported was the ship's captain. The date of its arrival in New Zealand could not be found, but the schedules reported that it left in early November for a return voyage to New York and had arrived there on April 17, 1891, a date that should have put it in the proximity of the Falkland Islands in February. ^However,^ Davis had also obtained a copy of the "crew agreement" (contract) that had listed "every member of the crew (including a few who signed on in Wellington and deserted just six days later in Lyttleton), and there is no James Bartley on the list, nor anyone of similar name, either for the entire voyage or any part of it" (Davis, p. 233).
Davis even learned that some apparent attempts were made to debunk this story at the very time that it was developing into a legend. L. C. Allen's commentary on Jonah had cited a correspondence between E. Konig (the author of an article on Jonah in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible) and a reader named Williams, which was published in 1906 and 1907 in The Expository Times. Williams had requested Konig's opinion of the Bartley story, and in his reply Konig had said that he would be interested in knowing "if the source and the certainty of the above narrative could be established" (Davis p. 232). In his reply, Williams included transcriptions of a letter from Mrs. John Killam, the wife of the captain of Star of the East. In it, she said, "(T)here is not one word of truth in the whale story. I was with my husband all the years he was in the Star of the East. There was never a man lost overboard while my husband was in her. The sailor has told a great sea yarn" (Davis, p. 232).
The sailor had told a great sea yarn! This was an indication that Mrs. Killam was convinced that someone had made up a tale that had never happened and had tried to put it into the setting of the ship that her husband had commanded, probably as a ploy to give the story credibility. This was what Davis suspected too. He put together facts that he had uncovered in his research: (1) Harry Rimmer claimed in both his sermon and Harmony of Science and Scripture that he had actually met this sailor, who was on exhibit in a London museum. (2) The earliest version of the Bartley tale that he had found was published in the Yarmouth newspaper only two months after the story of the Gorleston whale had been published in the same paper. (3) The Gorleston whale was stuffed and put on display in a London museum. (4) Tales of a man who had survived having been swallowed by a whale began to appear on both sides of the Atlantic. (5) A man, so some versions of the story claimed, was on exhibit in a London museum claiming that he had once been swallowed by a whale.
So was the Gorleston whale the source of this tale after all even though no man had been found alive in this whale? Davis concluded that this was the probable explanation of a story that had circulated around the world with no real scientific investigation having been made to confirm it. Davis wondered if there had been a person, possibly even named James Bartley, who suffered from a skin condition, and upon hearing about and maybe even seeing the Gorleston whale, he thought that this was an opportunity to share the spotlight and maybe even capitalize on his skin problem by putting himself on exhibit in circus side shows as a man who had survived being swallowed by a whale. To make his story credible, in case anyone bothered to investigate, he had put it into the setting of a real ship that actually had been in the South Atlantic in 1891. Within two months, the story had been picked up by a newspaper that had already shown an interest in whales, and from there it made its way around the world and was made famous by such writers as Rimmer, Gook, Fuge, and Pieters. Even though Mrs. Killam had tried to debunk the story, her denial didn't receive the notoriety that the story, and so it grew into a full-blown legend. After all, a denial that the sensational happened is never as appealing to human interest as the fantastic is, especially to Christians wanting to prove that the Bible is "God's word."
This, of course, is only a hypothesis that Davis formulated as
a plausible explanation for the contradictory and sometimes
contrary-to-fact data that he had uncovered during his research. The
legend may not have begun this way, but however it started, the
evidence indicates that there is no historical basis for it. Davis's
research is valuable not just because it established the probable truth
about this modern-Jonah story but because it also showed that legends
can indeed begin and grow quickly, even within the lifetimes of the
parties and events that are legendized. In this case, the legend of
James Bartley had even fooled a respected scientific journalist like
Henri de Parville. When we see such as this happening in modern times,
we have to wonder just how many myths and legends found their way into
the Jesus story that became the foundation of Christianity. To think
that such could not have happened in a time of ancient superstition is
incredibly naive when we know that legends can and do develop in modern
times.
