DO WE BELIEVE THE BIBLE TEACHES TRUE HISTORY, ALL THE WAY BACK TO GENESIS 1?

THE TOPIC IS THE BIBLE’S HISTORICAL ACCURACY: WHETHER ITS OLDEST STORIES ARE TRUE HISTORY.

“History would be a wonderful thing, if only it were true”
(Leo Tolstoy).

Why We Need to Reboot the Bible

When it comes to the question of origins, Christians believe that we have the inside track in this quest. And we do. We know a great deal about the past. The Christian faith is drawn from the renowned actions of the Bible’s heroes and saints, our Lord Jesus chief among them. Unfortunately, we have been fooled into believing a great deal of hogwash about earlier times, what many label antiquity but which we may also properly designate as “primeval.”

We might say that having the inside lane hasn’t kept us from selecting the wrong road. That’s why we need to exit the current highway we traverse and head in a new direction. What we believe about ancient history needs to be recast. And this begins with a reboot of how we understand our Bible. We must reconsider our framework for the Bible’s primeval account. Primeval means, “relating to the earliest ages… of the world or human history.” (Merriam-Webster) It is this very early history this book hopes to set aright and reinvigorate our worldview. The first step in our quest: To discover how the Bible was tarnished 1,900 years ago. Once we do this, we will understand why a reboot or “reset,” using computer terms, is mandatory.

Over the past 200 years or so, secularism has championed positivistic explanations for sacred texts. Today, many well-known best-selling authors offer examples from a very different place. It seems spacemen were our forebears. All human achievements are explained by unseen extraterrestrials behind the scenes. However, whether from a perspective of naturalism that denies supernatural agents, to a fantastical point of view that considers every wonder in our past proving visits from ancient aliens, we need to call “balderdash” on both.

We need to push back on unjustified conclusions drawn from empirical data gathered from what archeologists dig up. And we need to distance ourselves from unscientific biases that make us look foolish. At the same time, we need to colorize a black and white past. Therefore, we must address ancient biblical history, with our touchstone the birth of Abraham. And then, we will work our way all the way back to Creation – and maybe – beyond.

History is undertaught in both religious and secular schools. And for any reader familiar with my work, that reader knows most of what all of us have been taught is not only inaccurate, it was written intentionally wrong. That is, our instruction fed us false lines, fake stories, and clouded our minds with pabulum. Since supposedly no child could be left behind, with too few exceptions, all children missed the bus. Our kids are incredibly unaware of what happened in days gone by. I know this in part because I teach college students – lots of them. Their energy is contagious. And while children are our future, too few kids know much about our past.

So, while they are smart about many things, they know very little about anything happening before the Kardashians and Kanye. For the most part, our public education system has failed us. It has undoubtedly failed them. This declining education system in America combines with the “Mockingbird Media” established by the CIA in the 1960s, to promote politically correct propaganda to the public.

However, so-called “Fake news” is not new. We have lived with it for half a century. In stealth, it grows more menacing, falsely shaping the public’s perception of reality, essentially brainwashing “we the people” into what the Shadow Government wants us to believe. Tragically, what it communicates only faintly resembles the truth about the past, and even less, what’s really happening in the world today.

When it comes to what we were taught about the Bible, because of which source text we rely upon and how it was tampered with long ago, in many of its passages, our Bible fails to say what it initially did. This is not to claim that God inspired error in the biblical text. Instead, it expresses that He entrusted His Holy Word to the hands of humanity. More than once, as it regards Protestants and their Bibles, those hands faltered. God’s truth was tainted. Part 1 of my book, Rebooting the Bible, demonstrates when and how this mistreatment transpired as well as to how the record can be set right, in recovering the original meaning of the Old Testament and its timeline. Part 2 of Rebooting the Bible will dig into the primeval history, the days before Abraham, and show how the Bible and Archeology can be synchronized. Additionally, this author hopes to establish a pathway for others to explore alternate primeval history, that we might discover together what may have happened in those ancient days that accepted history ignores.

The Errors in Our Ways

To clarify before I lose many of my readers: I believe in the infallible Word of God and inerrancy of its autographs. But what happened to the Bible two millennia ago, is the greatest untold story of religious history. It remains a monumental deception. And almost no one, even well-studied Jews and Christians, know about these failures nor the duplicity of numerous founding leaders. In the pages that follow, this author aims to shine a light on these covert operations undertaken in bad faith; for these actions have done us much harm.

The falsehood about which I write was baked into the biblical text Protestants used over the centuries, but mainly since the sixteenth century. It matters because it weakens our faith and makes evangelizing unbelievers more difficult. This is especially so regarding our Jewish friends. And there are many implications due to our neglect to learn the truth.

To enumerate the errors in our ways: We are guilty of…

Supporting inaccurate translations of the biblical text in no small number. In particular, many messianic passages in the Masoretic (Hebrew) text are not what the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to write;
Ignoring the findings of Archeology like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ugaritic Texts – giving them too little place to inform our beliefs about and understanding of the Bible;
Nurturing an anti-intellectual bias that implicates good science and justifies poor biblical exegesis. We label knowledge dangerous and blind faith virtuous;
Professing a super-spiritual persona built upon the false premise that we only need one book – the Bible – to be the sole guide for living in this world. Evangelicals might not burn books today, but far too many pay them no mind. Nationally, we are a population practicing illiteracy. In our Evangelical churches, we lack interest in history, science, and politics. Instead, we focus on “feel-good” messages and avoid challenges to our protected view of the world. We Evangelicals, especially in America, began following Baal some time ago.
Ascribing near-canonical status to apocryphal and pseudepigrapha works outside the biblical canon – which while helpful, in some cases, may be blatantly wrong.

Because we Protestants believe the Bible is the Word of God, we have never heard how the Old Testament was altered to undermine its the messianic prophecies and salvation by grace. Likewise, its chronology was changed because it testified to the early Church that Jesus was the Christ. Because of these premeditated modifications to the authentic Word of God, our understanding of the past – from the Creation to the conquest of Canaan – has been severely impaired. This needs to be corrected.

That’s why my book, Rebooting the Bible was written. It’s time to set the record straight – to get us all on the same page. It’s essential we commit ourselves to revisit our beliefs about the Bible. Although it will be unpopular and uncomfortable, we must inspect what we hold sacred, to consider that what we thought was free from taint isn’t.

Where Scholars Fear to Tread

To reconsider the times long since passed, we need to go back in time. How far? All the way back to Genesis, chapter one. That far back. And here’s how I organized the quest.

Part 1 I’ve explained above. Part 2 will focus on the events in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. We will touch on what happened at the beginning of the Bible’s story (recall Genesis means beginnings) and consider whether this planet started spinning less than 10,000 years ago. We investigate whether the Bible supplies an accurate chronology. However, we will only glance at the debate over The Young Earth vs. The Gap Theory – for although significant, Rebooting the Bible doesn’t seek to prove either to be solely correct. My focus will be on what comes about after Genesis 1, conventionally seen as a 4,000-year period from Adam to Christ. The “corrected chronology” this study presents is neutral on which theory is most likely true, although it admittedly supplies a shot in the arm to the view the world is less than 10,000 years old.[1]

We recall that Noah built a giant ark (300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high) through which he and his family weathered the world’s worst perfect storm. But, since the global

population outside the ark (both human and animal, birds included) was reset to zero, does it mean that we should call Noah our ancestor? Yes, it certainly does.

Consequently, after the Flood, Noah and his kids restarted humanity. That part of the story remains especially crucial because most Christians still don’t know why God went to the extreme to destroy all land-life on the earth. The background to “why the Flood” is unlike anything we can imagine except in our worst nightmare. It involves chimeras and giants, angels corrupting the human genome, and demons appearing for the first time – and from that point forward – sanctioned to harass and deceive humanity. This is a challenging subject, to say the least. Happily, we can count on some sophisticated help from a scholar or two that will ease us over the speed bump we might label, “The Incredible Hybrid Humans, the Nephilim.”

After Noah’s Ark was grounded, we recall that the father of humanity, Noah, grows a vineyard, and drinks too much wine. His son Ham takes advantage of the situation (one of the more controversial episodes of the Bible’s flood account), and as a result, Noah curses Ham’s son (and his grandson) Canaan, commencing a fraternal conflict enduring through the ages. But what was the sin of Ham? It will surprise you. But the critical point up for discussion has more to do with the replenishment of the world, instead of what Ham did to his parents.

Then we will take up the man, the myth, the legend we call Nimrod. Yes, he was a real, live historical figure. And we can spot him amid the annals of the past as constructed by secular Archeology from Iraq, however treacherous such activity might be today. Was Nimrod the first “transhuman?” What difference does it make if he was? We will examine whether Nimrod was in fact, the rabble-rouser that led to the Tower of Babel incident. We will consider whether he was only an archetype of the evil one to come or will one day reappear during the end times as the embodiment of Antichrist. Like H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu who slumbered (suspended in the blackened depths of the darkest ocean), we will ask whether Nimrod lurks in the bottomless pit, described in Revelation 9 until his moment arrives to haunt humanity one final time.

Then we will set the table, the so-called “table of nations” that is, from Genesis, chapter 10. Through its contents, we will take a look-see to where everyone went after God enforced His mandate to humanity to multiply and replenish the earth.[2] You see, it looks as if the LORD had to force the issue by confusing the languages of humankind so we would quarrel, get in big dustups, then split them up – literally – scattering to-and-fro over God’s green, and recently very well-watered earth.

Meanwhile, almost 800 years later, back in Sumer near Uruk (Spoiler alert: Fans of the Book of Jasher won’t like the biblical chronology offered here), God places his historic call to Abraham in the famous city Ur of the Chaldees, presumably occupied by the infamous Chaldeans. But when exactly did Abraham live? Was he a contemporary of Nimrod as the Book of Jasher supposes? When did he first visit Egypt? When did his son Jacob (Israel) migrate the clan to the land of the Pharaohs? How many were in that clan? How long did the Israelites remain there? How many years were the Hebrews enslaved to the Egyptians? You may think you know the answers, but I can promise that only a few readers actually do.

That will bring us to the Exodus and the incident following: The conquest of Canaan. This period is most important because once the timing has been rightly established, for the first time the biblical testimony aligns with Mesopotamian and Egyptian Archeology. As it stands right now, by believing in the “conventional chronology” as set forth by the King James Bible, we cannot reconcile secular Archeology with the Bible. Yet, with a corrected chronology based upon the original biblical record (which Rebooting the Bible demonstrates by referencing the Septuagint), the two can be synchronized. Consequently, if we really care about our witness to the world and our ability to convince others that the Bible provides an accurate and reliable historical account, we must no longer hold to a false history protected by a fundamentalist tradition while conflicting with science and an authentic scriptural record.

In an article later this week, this piece will continue to describe the matter of the historicity of the Old Testament. This article is from the Introduction to Rebooting the Bible. The book is available at Amazon in both Kindle and printed format. 450 pages. Published, 2019.

Notes

^[1] For the record, I currently believe the so-called Gap Theory is the correct way to interpret the ages before Adam and Eve. But that position is not essential to the revised chronology presented in these pages.

^[2] It seems humans were clannish and didn’t want to disperse, thinking they had a better chance to make a name for themselves if they hung out together.