TRUTH PIRATES

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

            Welcome back. Let's talk about truth.

            Justin Martyr wrote that truth belongs to us, the Christians. He was not making the same kind of claim about truth that fundamentalists stake out when they quote John 14:6--as if it were some kind of proof that only Christianity is true. Here is the verse below:

            “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the father but by me.”

            Some use this verse as proof that Christian truth is the only truth.  Truth is too big a ship to be equated with one of its planks.  Making our truth THE TRUTH transforms us, the Christians into pirates. We seek to board and commandeer the entire vessel of truth. Casualties be damned to the deep!

           Justin Martyr was not making such a bold claim. I have heard John 14:6 given as an example of , “God said it!  That settles it!”

            We can do better than that.

            Technically, there’s an irony in believing that John 14:6 is true just because Jesus said it. A majority of academic scholars believe Jesus never said those words nor anything else attributed to him in the Gospel of John. But that is another post for another day.

            Justin Martyr meant that there is no truth that can contradict Christian truth. If a new discovery is made, and Christian truth has been contradicted, then we must not look at truth as the error; rather, we must consider the Christian truth that it contradicts.

            For example, it was hard for Christians to accept the discovery that the earth moved when the Bible clearly says in many places that it does not. Google “earth does not move in the Bible” and a lot of verses will come up. You should notice a similarity of expression among many of them.

“Yahweh set the earth on its foundations. It can never be moved.”  Psalm 104:5.

 “The world is established. It cannot be moved.”  Psalm 93:1

“Indeed, the world is established. It shall not be moved.”  Psalm 96:10

“The world is firmly established. It cannot be moved.”  1 Chronicles 16:30

            The similarity suggests that a fixed earth was conventional wisdom that no one questioned in ancient times.

            Consider also the story of the sun and moon stopping in the sky in Joshua 10: 12  so the Israelites might have more time to defeat the Amorites in battle means one of four things:

1.       The earth is not moving and the sun and moon are, but Yahweh halted them.

2.      The earth is moving, but Yahweh halted its rotation so that the sun and moon appeared to halt.

3.      The earth is moving, but Yahweh made a halting sun and moon appear to everyone in a vision.

4.      The story is a legend intended to preach Yahweh as the primary cause of everything that saves Yahweh’s people.

I vote the latter. In any case, the possibility of a literal interpretation is dubious.

            To those who raise the objection that Biblical writers were being poetic every time they wrote the earth is fixed, my answer is, “I agree.” 

            Indeed, just about everything the Bible says about anything is poetry. However, poets write about the cosmology they know. Ancient people believed the earth was flat and immovable. How could they think otherwise?  To me it appears the earth is fixed and unmoving every day.

            But what if we read the following poem in the Bible? 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and
diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

            We might be amazed to find those words among "The earth is established in its foundation.  It cannot be moved."  

           We might question its authenticity. We might give the passage a technical name, call it an interpolation, and then wonder when and why someone would insert such a passage of untimely truth within a context of ancient wisdom.

          Ponder that. Next time, I will write more about truth and how it belongs to us, the Christians.

            Blessings…