With this issue of TSR, we welcome Michael Bradford into the ranks of those who have tried to defend biblical inerrancy in this publication. In addition to his article above, he has also submitted one on the issue of the sons of God and the daughters of men, which will probably be published in the next issue of TSR. I am happy to welcome him, but I was disappointed to see that he has nothing to offer but more of the same apologetic arguments that have been repeatedly discredited in past issues. As long as biblical inerrantists continue to recycle these "arguments," I will gladly publish them so that Christian subscribers can see that defenders of their holy book have nothing substantial to offer as proof that it was divinely inspired.
Like inerrantists before him, Mr. Bradford has attempted to explain away the biblical anachronisms that I had identified by simply offering how-it-could-have- been scenarios that would put these anachronisms into their proper time slots, so before I address any of his specific "solutions," I will first show that this popular apologetic method he is using is logically flawed. Inerrantists argue that when a discrepancy is claimed in the Bible, the problem will be automatically solved if they can just show how the passage could be interpreted to remove the discrepancy, but this is a fallacious argument. If a discrepancy is claimed in a written document, there are two possibilities: (1) It is a real discrepancy. (2) It is only an apparent discrepancy that can be explained. In order to remove a claim of discrepancy, then, the inerrantist must show an absolutely undeniable solution to the problem and not just a "possible" solution, for if the biblicist shows only a possible solution, he has done no more than show a possible solution. Positing only a "possible" explanation, then, will always leave open the other possibility, which is that a real discrepancy does exist in the text. Since inerrantists almost always assert with bold certitude that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant "word of God," they owe us more evidence than just mere possibilities, because it's possible that the Bible is every bit as errant as we have claimed in this publication. Indeed, given the human tendency to err, I think I could say that it is very probable that the Bible is errant, far more probable than the possibility that it is inerrant. Mere possibilities, then, are inadequate to explain claims of discrepancy that are based on plain language in a biblical text. An apologist who seeks to resolve such a discrepancy by arbitrarily declaring that the writer could have meant such and so hasn't gone nearly far enough. He must show that the writer unequivocally did mean such and so. Otherwise, the possibility of a discrepancy in the Bible remains unresolved.
Many TSR subscribers also subscribe to my "errancy list" on the internet, so they know that I have often pointed out on this site that there is no such thing as an unanswerable biblical discrepancy, because no matter how obvious the discrepancy may be, there will always be an inerrantist somewhere who will step forward to propose a how-it-could-have-been scenario to "explain" the discrepancy. A serious problem with this method of "apologetics" is that if it is in any way a sound method of resolving textual discrepancies, believers in any other holy book (the Book of Mormon, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad-gita, the Avesta, etc.) must be accorded the right to apply the same critical method to their sacred writings to "prove" that they are also inerrant. Otherwise, biblicists who insist that this method can be applied only to the Bible will be committing a logical fallacy known as special pleading.
I have often challenged biblical inerrantists to cite what they consider to be an undeniable example of discrepancy in some nonbiblical book so that I can use their same apologetic methods to show that it really isn't a discrepancy. For some reason, inerrantists have evaded this challenge like the plague, and I am sure I know why. They know that if they accept the challenge, I will be able to show that the very apologetic methods they use to defend the Bible can "disprove" any claim of errancy in other documents. Thus, biblical inerrantists expect us to believe that a line of reasoning that would prove all written documents to be inerrant is a sound way to show that the Bible contains no errors. The obvious fact that discrepancies in writing can exist shows that this popular method of biblical apologetics is logically flawed.
The kings of Israel: Mr. Bradford's application of the how-it-could-have-been method of apologetics has apparently proven to his satisfaction that no anachronism exists in the reference to the "kings of Israel" in Genesis 36:31-43, because "Moses," knowing that other countries had kings, could have guessed that there would one day be kings in the nation of Israel. The weakness of this "explanation" can be seen when the text in Genesis 36 is compared to passages where "Moses" referred to kings of Israel with clearly predictive intentions. In at least two other places, the book of Deuteronomy said that the Israelites would one day decide to have kings just like all the nations around them (17:14-17; 28:36-38), but in both places, the language was clearly prophetic, and through the usage of the future tense, the writer made clear that he knew that kings in Israel hadn't yet existed but would someday. As Stephen Van Eck pointed out in his article, pages 2-3 in this issue, the language in Genesis 36:31ff is entirely different. It was not predictive but was stated in the past tense, obviously written from the perspective of someone who knew that kings had reigned over Israel: "And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.
Compare this to the clearly predictive references that "Moses" made to Israelite kings: "When you come to the land which Yahweh your God is giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, `I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me,' you may indeed set over you a king whom Yahweh your God will choose" (Dt. 17:14). This is a statement written by someone who realized that he needed to present it from the perspective of someone who knew nothing about Israelite kings at the time but knew by inspiration that someday there would be such kings. The writer of Genesis 36:31ff carelessly forgot that he was supposed to be someone who had lived before the era of Israelite kings, and so he slipped up and wrote the passage from the perspective of one who knew that such kings had existed. This, as Van Eck pointed out, is just one of many reasons to believe that the Pentateuch was written long after the time of Moses.
The best that Mr. Bradford has done is present a possible but unlikely scenario to explain the anachronism in Genesis 36:31, but not having established that his explanation is a fact and not just a possibility, he has failed to resolve the problem, because the possibility still remains that this is indeed an anachronism. A failure to establish his could-have-been scenario, then, is a failure to prove that Genesis 36:31ff is an inerrant text.
In addition to the problem of the Israelite kings, Stephen Van Eck presented several other reasons why the authorship of the Pentateuch must be dated long after the time of Moses. When Mr. Bradford's "possible" explanation of an apparent anachronism in Genesis 36:31 is evaluated in terms of all of the problems that Van Eck identified, Bradford's "possible" solution becomes unlikely indeed, so this brings us to the matter of Kirk Mitchell's article (p. 7, this issue) that applied probability factors to the biblical inerrancy claim. Even if we should grant that Mr. Bradford's explanation of this anachronism is anywhere close to being 99% certain as the reason why a book, which was presumably written centuries before Israel even became a nation, referred to the kings who had reigned (past tense) over Israel, Mitchell's article still shows how improbable it is that the Bible is inerrant. Anachronisms are just the tip of the iceberg in the matter of biblical inerrancy, because there are compelling reasons to suspect that biblical writers also made mistakes in science, history, geography, chronology, prophecy, and other areas. Mitchell used 1,000 as an estimate of the number of possible discrepancies in the Bible, but this number is surely conservative. The index in Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties has over 2,000 entries in its index of scriptures that were referred to in discussing "explanations" of biblical discrepancies. John Haley's Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible has over 2,500. Many possible discrepancies, however, weren't even mentioned in either one of these apologetic books, so it is reasonable to consider Mitchell's estimate of 1,000 discrepancies to be on the low side.
Mitchell also applied a factor of 99% certainty to all of the how-it-could-have-been scenarios that biblicists use to "explain" biblical discrepancies, but a degree of certainty this high for all alleged discrepancies is generous indeed. I won't go into specific examples, but I have heard "explanations" of biblical discrepancies to which I wouldn't even assign a probability of one percent, so if the number of possible discrepancies is increased and the probability of correctness in the explanations is lowered to a more reasonable percentage, the likelihood that the Bible is an inerrant book becomes slim indeed. This also is a factor that Mr. Bradford has working against his faulty apologetic method.
Priests before Aaron and his sons? Bradford has applied the same how-it-could-have-been reasoning to "explain" why there was no anachronism in Yahweh's warning in Exodus 19:21-24 that the priests would be killed if they touched Mount Sinai while Yahweh and Moses were powwowing on the summit, a warning that was given nine chapters before Aaron and his sons were appointed the first priests of Israel. This is no problem, Bradford thinks, because Genesis 14:18 referred to Melchizedek, the king of Salem, whom Abraham met returning from his slaughter of the kings who had taken his nephew Lot captive, so if there were priests in other tribes and nations, Bradford speculated, maybe the Hebrews also had priests who were never mentioned in the Bible.
I find serious problems in this "resolution" of the anachronism. First, this Melchizedek, who was presented in the Bible as a mysterious figure "without father and mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life" (Heb. 7:1-3), was the king of Salem, thought to be Jerusalem, which didn't even become an Israelite city until David captured it from the Jebusites (2 Sam. 6:1-15) in the 8th year of his reign, which would have been about a thousand years after Abraham and 400 years after the time of Moses. Hence, Bradford is arguing that because a non-Hebraic people had a vaguely described priest over 400 years before Aaron and his sons were appointed priests, then it *could have been* that the Hebrews had had priests while they were slaves in Egypt who were just never mentioned in the Bible. That's thin evidence indeed.
In addition to this problem, I have to wonder why Yahweh selected only Aaron and his sons to be the priests of Israel while they were trekking through the Sinai wilderness if he already had priests who had been serving his "chosen ones" in Egypt. After all, didn't experience count for anything? If Yahweh already had priests, then why didn't he stick with them and appoint those who were already familiar with the duties of priests to continue in this service or at least include them in the new priesthood. After all, the Israelite population in the wilderness was about 2.5 to 3 million, if we are to consider the census figures in the book of Numbers to be inerrant, and Aaron and his sons were only five. Right away, Yahweh reduced this number by two when he consumed two of Aaron's sons for using "strange fire" in their censors (Lev. 10:1-5), so this left only three priests to attend to the spiritual needs of 3 million people. I realize that Yahweh's ways are higher than our ways, but it does seem a bit confusing why Yahweh would have skimped so in appointing priests when there was a corps of former priests from which he could have drawn emergency recruits. I'm sure there must be some how-it-could-have-been explanation for this.
In the matter of the priests whom Yahweh seemed to have anachronistically referred to, Bradford can't argue that these "possible priests" were just men who had presumed on their own to become priests without authority from Yahweh, because the very passage that issued the warning that the priests were to stay away from the mountain during Yahweh's confab with Moses referred to them as "the priests... who come near to Yahweh" (Ex. 19:22). This was the same terminology used later (Ex. 28:43; 30:20; 40:32) in reference to the priestly duties of Aaron and his sons, so obviously the language of this passage, which I still believe to be an anachronistic reference, was intended to convey that these "priests" were serving in some official capacity in which they were to "come near to Yahweh," so this expression conveys that these were men who had been sanctioned by Yahweh to serve as his priests. If Yahweh had had such priests as this at the time, why were they not mentioned before this, and why, as I have already asked, did Yahweh suddenly disenfranchise them and appoint an entirely inexperienced line of priests? These are questions that Mr. Bradford needs to give reasonably satisfactory answers to in order to make his explanation of the anachronism credible.
The Greek (Septuagint) translation of the book of Daniel: Switching from anachronisms to other issues being debated in TSR, Mr. Bradford has jumped into the dispute over the authorship of the book of Daniel by citing a source that claims this book was translated into Greek prior to 270 B. C., so since 270 B. C. obviously preceded 164 B. C., the approximate date that many scholars assign to the authorship of Daniel, Bradford said that "the claim that the book of Daniel was written in the 2nd or 1st century B. C. would be clearly erroneous."
Mr. Bradford is right, of course, because a book could not have been translated into another language before it was even written in the original language, but I was glad to see that he acknowledged that he had not yet checked for accuracy the source he cited. I'm going to give him now what I hope will be a valuable lesson in trusting biblical fundamentalist sources. The truth or falsity of a claim is always independent of its sources, but if Mr. Bradford ever takes the time to check the claims made by biblical fundamentalists, he will find that distortion, misrepresentation, and outright fabrications are rather commonplace. Chuck Missler is a biblical fundamentalist whose writings would generally make the works of Josh McDowell look downright scholarly. His purpose is to sell to his readers the notion that the Bible is the inspired word of God, so relying on the information in his articles to be trustworthy would be somewhat like trusting the National Enquirer to give reliable evidence that alien beings are visiting our planet.
It would be inappropriate of me to make a statement like this about Missler without supporting it with concrete proof that his claims about the Bible should be viewed with suspicion until they are verified. Mr. Bradford referred to a web page article in which Missler had said that the "Hebrew canon" had been translated into Greek "prior to 270 B. C." I checked the article and found that he did say this, but, as I will show, his claim is a distortion of what his own quoted source said about the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Old Testament. I urge Mr. Bradford to research this subject more in depth. If he will do this, he will find that there is a scholarly consensus that translation of the Septuagint only began in the 3rd century B. C. but was not completed until much later, in the 2nd or 1st century B. C. The first part of the Old Testament to be translated was the Torah or Pentateuch, and other books were translated later. The whole process took over two centuries.
This is, in fact, exactly what Missler's source clearly states. Look back to the final paragraph of Bradford's article, and you will see that Encyclopedia Brittanica,*volume 10, p. 642, was the source that Missler referred to. I have taken the time to find this edition of the encyclopedia, and this is what it said:
Septuagint, abbreviated LXX, the earliest extant Greek translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, presumably made for the use of the Jewish community in Egypt when Greek was the lingua franca throughout the region. Analysis of the language has establish that the Torah or Pentateuch (the first five books) was translated near the middle of the 3rd century BC and that the rest of the Old Testament was translated in the 2nd century BC (emphasis added).
This is the very first paragraph in the entry about the Septuagint. The article later relates that the translation process began at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had reigned from 285-246 B. C., but it does not say the work was finished during his reign. The statement in the first paragraph, however, is so clear that I can only believe that Missler intentionally misled his readers.
I have a copy of the Septuagint with Brenton's English translation in the margin, and the introduction to this edition states the same opinion as noted in the source that Missler misrepresented: the first books translated in the Septuagint were the Pentateuch, and scholars know only that the work had commenced by the year 285 B. C. (p. i). Eerdmans Bible Dictionary says that "in the first half of the third century B. C. the Pentateuch was translated into Greek, with translation of the remaining portions completed during the next two centuries" (1987, p. 154, emphasis added).
This is what Encyclopedia Americana said about the dating of the Septuagint:
The version was made in Alexandria, beginning in the reign of Ptolemy II, for the use of the large numbers of Alexandrian Jews who were no longer familiar with Hebrew. The first portion to be translated was the Pentateuch; the Prophets followed, and eventually the Writings, that is, the Wisdom literature and the other books of the Old Testament. The latest parts were most likely translated in the 1st century B. C. (Vol. 24, 1998, p. 566, emphasis added).
Obviously, then, Missler has distorted a scholarly reference to leave the impression that it supports a fundamentalist view of the Bible. Scholarship, however, does not support Missler's claim that the book of Daniel was translated into Greek as early as 285 B. C.
Why do fundamentalists distort information as Missler has done
in this case? I think Mr. Bradford's acceptance of Missler's distortion
explains why so many biblicists twist information to give the
appearance that it supports their view of the Bible. They are
reasonably sure that their audience will not bother to check their
claims for accuracy. In other words, they do it because they know that
they can get away with it. A few may check them, but they don't care
what these may think about their misrepresentation. They are interested
in those they can win to their side by distorting information. The
lesson in all this for those who are interested in truth is simple:
beware of biblical fundamentalists quoting sources. Their sources may
not really say what the fundamentalists are claiming.
