The ancient Greek myth regarding Philemon and Baucis tells
the story of an impoverished couple visited by Zeus and Hermes in the guise of
men. The gods had already traveled through the area and had received no
hospitality. The poorest and most destitute household, that of Philemon and
Baucis welcomed the gods and were even willing to slaughter their precious
goose in order to put on a proper spread.
As a result of this act, Zeus in his wrath and fury decides
to destroy the surrounding community with fire (or flood) from the heavens.
Philemon and Baucis are rewarded with their cottage being made into a temple
and they in turn are made priest-guardians of the shrine.
There are obvious parallels between this story and that of
Lot, the angels and the destruction of Sodom. Indeed this is exactly the kind
of story that liberal scholars and higher critics pick up on and point to the
lack of uniqueness within the Old Testament and indeed the tendency of Old
Testament to borrow from and appropriate the stories of surrounding cultures
and their mythologies.
But amazingly in the 20th century, Evangelicals
have also embraced this kind of thinking and in the 21st century,
such postulations are becoming quite popular in 'conservative' academia. In an
age in which Evangelicals have embraced the canons of higher textual criticism,
such form and thematic criticism is also becoming normative. The only way
Evangelical academics save the text from a complete humanising process is to
argue that such appropriations were divinely guided. God supernaturally guided
the Israelite scribes (such as Ezra and later figures) to appropriate and claim
these stories.
Somehow this approach attempts to retain academic
respectability by embracing mainstream-secular paradigms and narratives
regarding the text and its development but attempts to overlay the result with
a degree of supernaturalism, though one apparently less outlandish then to
actually suggest that:
A. The events described in Genesis were historical and thus actually
happened and,
B. They were recorded in early antiquity and the textual
account was preserved. And,
C. The recording and preservation were supernatural in
nature, a case of special revelation and Providential preservation.
The older and more faithful approach to Scripture posited
that the pagan accounts were thefts and counterfeits of the Biblical account or
represented occasions of primeval memory, stories that had survived out of the
deep past but were in fact appropriated by the writers and shapers of other
religions. The infidel will at this point say that's what the Biblical writers
did too. And apparently many professing Christian scholars have embraced the
same argument giving preference to the pagan origin and leaving it to the Bible
to play the 'appropriation' game, rather than the other way around.
But of course we who put our faith and trust in Christ and in
the Divine revelatory nature of the Holy Writings believe otherwise and our
beliefs regarding the veracity and revelatory nature of Old Covenant Scripture
are confirmed and ratified by the words of Christ and the apostles. There is
the issue of why we believe the Bible but then there is also the issue of how
the Bible was composed. They are separate issues but not unrelated as some
would have it.
The events surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah take place before
2000BC. Many Evangelical scholars have played the 'late date' game of the academics
and have pushed the life of Abraham and Moses centuries ahead in an attempt to
harmonise with mainstream paradigms. However in contrast to the 'scholarship' the
earlier dates work even better with the historical and archaeological record
and actually harmonise more readily with what the text reveals.
The Greek myths seemed to arise in written form during the
Greek Dark Ages which run parallel to the Biblical time period of the Divided
Kingdom and yet many were not recorded (in their various forms) until much
later. By any sober account, the Hebrew story is at least 1000 years older than
its appearance among the Greeks and in terms of its recording, the Old
Testament narrative regarding Sodom and Gomorrah was written at least 600-700 years prior to the
Greek Dark Ages when it is believed Homer wrote. Ovid (the common source of the
Baucis and Philemon tale) of course wrote in the first century AD, but the
story (even among the Greeks) is obviously much older. For that matter I'm
inclined to push Greek authorship far into the past, much older than what is
posited by the scholars, and yet it still does not mean that it antedates
Biblical accounts or that Biblical writers appropriated ancient Greek tales or
that of the Canaanites or any other people.
A Christian metanarrative should not focus on attempts to
smooth out differences with the secular academy, rather we should use these
seeming parallels in other religions to point the universality of the human
race, the fact that such commonalities point to a common primeval origin which
if anything gives veracity to the Genesis narrative and in facts harmonises nicely
with the Flood-Babel narrative.
This is certainly what older generations of Christians
understood and such arguments are common in the writings of the Early Church
Fathers. In fact in some cases I would argue the apologists venture too far in
an attempt to both defend the Scriptures and in other cases lay claim to a
Hebraic-Divine origin of certain aspects and tendencies within Hellenistic
thought. They wanted everything to point back to the Old Testament and in my
opinion get a little carried away, at times to the point of being harmful and
actually undermining some of the authority of the Old Testament by giving too
much credence to philosophically based epistemology.
Additionally, it needs to be stated that the arguments being
made here do not rely on Ussher's chronology. A well meant attempt to be sure
but the chronology is flawed, overly compressed and should not be taken as
authoritative. The Biblical record allows for a much earlier date than 4004BC
for Creation. Regardless, adding a few, dozen or even a score of thousand years
to the record in no way gives any ground to the Big Bang theorists or the
scholars.
Finally, the obvious needs to be stated. The issue in Genesis
with regard to Sodom was not poor hospitality rather it was a perverted sense
of hospitality being laid on in a rather oppressive manner. The Sodomites
wanted to show their type of hospitality. They would not leave the guests alone
out of perverse desire. These modern attempts to cast the story in terms of
hospitality or rape, or the reaction of Lot, ignore the plain message within
the text... the men of the cities were wicked and guilty of grievous sin. While
the incorporation of New Testament interpretation violates the canons of
criticism, canons which Evangelical scholars seem quick to embrace, the truth
is that as Christians we cannot, we dare
not read the Old Testament apart from the apostolic commentary. And it is
there that the sins of Sodom are further elaborated upon. And once again, they
have nothing to do with hospitality or even rape. Their sins are decried as
ungodly, unlawful, filthy, an abomination, deserving of vengeance and against
nature (contra naturam). They sought
strange flesh... the mixing of the human and angelic in union being an
additional abomination. This point is made explicitly by both Peter and Jude
and tied to the earlier events that took place in Genesis 6, another chapter
that many conservatives are quick to explain away out of embarrassment.
Ironically it is mainstream scholarship that is more likely
to embrace the Genesis 6 narrative as 'it's all myth' to them anyway, but they
will readily concede that's what the text is teaching and it's more or less what
everyone in Church History believed up until the time of the Reformation and
the rise of critical scholarship.
There was of course a bit more to the Sodom story. We can
explore the origins of their sin in passages such as Romans 1 and Ezekiel 16.
The abomination does not stand alone but rather is rooted in deeper ethical-epistemological
problems, points which some conservative commentators and theologians have
chosen to ignore or downplay.
To argue the story was appropriated is to deny the Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch. We will grant there are different ways to
understand Mosaic authorship and there are a few questions that must be
addressed in order to make the argument. That said, once Mosaic authorship is
denied, the principle of appropriation is embraced and inspiration is placed
within in a redactive framework, the authority of the Old Testament is all but destroyed.
The Evangelical proponents of this model don't think so and yet if Old
Testament works are reckoned as pseudepigrapha (canonical or not), they become
little more than lies agreed upon and
are something far less than authoritative divine revelation. While this fits
the paradigms of the scholars and keeps Evangelicals respectable, it flies in
the face of New Testament teaching regarding both the Old Testament and the
related concepts of Scripture, Canon, Prophecy and Inspiration.
Do we believe or don't we? We can try and defend the Bible on
the world's terms or we can proclaim the revelation of God, assert the Bible's
claims vis-à-vis the historical, textual and archaeological record...where
despite all the claims to the contrary it stands in strong stead... and yet
also acknowledge that at the end of the day the embrace of the Scripture as the Scripture... the Holy Writings, is
an act of faith and thus a gift of God.