Chateau Lloyd

I've been going through one of my dated history books, and one passage in particular struck me as emblematic of everything that is wrong with religious (and therefore Bible) scholars.

The book is titled The Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, edited by Arthur Cotterell.  It consists of a selection of essays by various experts on Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, etc.  At first I just hopped through it here and there, but now I'm reading it sequentially, but with no great urgency.  It's a back-up time-killer that informs and amuses.

In the article on Babylonia, A.K. Grayson writes: 

One of the interesting types of historiographical works was that of prophecy.  This was a literary text which described past events in prophetic terms as though the author had predicted these before they happened.  Having thereby established his credibility, he proceeded to make real prophecies which had a variety of forms according to the particular purpose he wished to achieve.  The Babylonian prophecy was a forerunner of apocalyptic literature, a genre to which the Book of Revelations belongs.

I think this is pretty much the perfect distillation of what most religious scholars still think today, and this is particularly true of the secular Bible scholars.  They love to dissect, analyze, and conjecture about how the various pieces came together and the one thing they all seem to agree on is that none of it can possibly be divinely inspired. 

All recorded prophesy was patched together after the fact to give religious leaders legitimacy by which they could control the masses.  An alternative view is that ancient people were simply stupid compared to modern man, and since they had no idea of science, attributed everything to invisible spirits. 

This view inevitably leads to scientism, which is the cruelest faith of them all. 

Put simply, the evidentiary standard they want to see is all but impossible to achieve.  Most writings of the ancient world are difficult to date, and books in particular have had to be copied and re-copied in order for their texts to survive to our age.  This opens up myriad possibilities for editorial changes - something not lost on scholars.

Their gold standard of evidence would be a positively dated writing that can be clearly placed before a given event.  By its very nature, that's an almost impossible standard to meet because prophesy is often extremely close to a specific event.  The warnings typically come when the gods are just about done with the offending nation/city/people and the lightning bolts are practically already on the way.

How would one track that?  In a newspaper?  Magazine story?  Ancient wire report?

In fact, even modern works would likely fail this test.  Consider Winston Churchill's history of World War II.  The first book of the first volume of The Second World War, The Gathering Storm, painstakingly documents Churchill's attempt to stop German rearmament and subsequent aggression.

The thing is, it was published after the fact.  Let us say that centuries from now, our only record of British politics from that era is Churchill's mammoth work.  Using Grayson's logic, Churchill's claims would have to be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

Whenever one considers an ancient text, the first thing one has to consider is why it even survived.  This is especially true in fragile media like books and scrolls.  Someone had to think what was in there was very important and therefore reliable.  Yes, there were official versions of history and that complicates things, but the default assumption has to be that whatever we have is true, not the other way around.

You see, most predictions aren't carved in stone, particularly if they were made only a few months or weeks (or even days) in advance.

However, once they are proven true, suddenly its the talk of the town.  For example, it is now well known that James Woods observed the 9/11 hijackers on a training flight, noticed their strange behavior and reported it to the FBI (who of course did nothing).

How much media play did his observation get?  Lots, but it came only after the attacks had been carried out.

It is not a stretch to imagine future accounts of what Woods saw would survive but the FBI's corroborating reports would not. 

The same is true in ancient times.  Some nobody on a corner says "Doom is upon us!" and everyone ignores them.  If nothing happens, nothing will be written.

But if something does happen, it will be a major event and recorded.  Even if the earliest records date from decades after the original event, there is still a link through living memory to what happened. 

In fact, it is typical for historical accounts to be written not immediately after the fact, but at least a generation later.  This is because there is no point in writing about something everyone still alive clearly remembers.  It is only when that generation begins to fade and a new one rises to maturity that there is a necessity to write things down.

This is why many of the accounts of the American Civil War only emerged decades after the conflict. 

One will also find examples of how subsequent events will change how previous ones are interpreted.  Thus histories of the First World War written before 1939 will have a very different sensibility than those written after 1945 even though the passage of years was relatively short.

I would therefore say that Grayson has it exactly backwards - the only reason someone would write down a new prophesy was that the old one was correct.