Time Travel and the Bible

The people who wrote the New Testament (NT) were not, in their day, like those of us living today. They lived and wrote in the latter half of the first-century CE, many centuries before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century CE. The Enlightenment was an intellectual awakening in Europe and America that witnessed the birth of the critical method, the rejection of the hegemony of Christian belief, and the rise of reliance on human reason.

Hence, first-century people generally, by definition, were prescientific in their approach to the world. What things people generally today commonly assume about the world, would have seemed strange to them. For example, occasionally in the pages of the NT, the authors write as if they conceived the earth being flat, not globular, in shape. Hence, most people, who likely shared this view, upon hearing Rev 1:7 being read aloud (most people could not read), might not be surprised by John’s description of the imminent return of Jesus to the earth in judgment:

Look, he is coming with the clouds; every eye shall see him, even those who pierced him. (Rev 1:7; see also Rev 2:1, 20:8; Matt 4:8)

In the twenty-first century, however, the words, “every eye shall see him,” jump off the page for the careful reader. How can it be that from a globular surface every eye will see anything hovering over a point on its surface? And “even those who pierced him” suggests the event would occur in the lifetime of the writer, but it has been over 2000 years now and “those who pierced him” have long since died. Even the later author of Second Peter (3:3-11) recognized the problem and found a way to mitigate the immediacy of the return.

They knew nothing of unseen microorganisms, like germs that can cause disease. The world only became aware of germs that cause sickness in 1860 through the work of Louis Pasteur.¹ They also did not understand that such physical ailments as muteness and deafness (Mark 9:37-43), blindness Matt 12:22-24), epilepsy (Matt 17:14-21), leprosy (Mark 1:40-45), and mental illnesses (Mark 5:1-17) are biologically induced. They, on the other hand, believed them to be caused by demons or evil spirits. They thought such difficulties required the services of a faith healer or thaumaturge to exorcise the spirit forces that caused such abnormalities, rather than treatment by a physician. Medicine was not very advanced in those days. Some health issues, people imagined, could even be cured by a kind of religious magic.

And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them. (Acts 19:11-12 RSV)

            Of course, the spirit of science was alive before and during the first century, but it was not the view of the general population and is not represented among the thoughts of NT writers, much less those of the Old Testament. For example, Aristotle (4^th century BCE) knew that the earth was spherical because in an eclipse, the earth’s shadow on the surface of the moon was always circular. Some years later, Eratosthenes (3^rd century BCE) is credited with proving that the earth was spherical in shape.²

            Readers of the NT must remember that they are traveling back in time some two thousand years when they delve into its pages. There were bright spots, sure enough, but in general, the world was as dark as it was in the Dark Ages.³ What little scientific progress there was did not benefit the welfare of the general population of the world. Hence, do not read the NT as if it provides an accurate description of the nature of the world and how to get along in it. When reading the NT in the 21^st century, one must exercise a willing suspension of disbelief and aim not to inculcate its views on how the world works. To do so, would be to risk losing the world in which you now live with its scientific achievements and medical advances.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur

²Eric M. Rogers, “The Triumph of a Theory,” pp. 111-116 in Louise B. Young, ed., Exploring the Universe (2^nd edition; Oxford: Oxford university, 1971). And Aristotle, “The Shape of Heaven and Earth (4^th Century B.C.),” Young, Exploring the Universe, 116-121. Carl Sagen, Cosmos (New York: Wings Books, 1980), 12-16.

³The Dark Ages consist of the centuries (ca. 500-1500) following the fall of the Roman Empire.

⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

Down the Rabbit Hole

In 1865 Lewis Carroll wrote a novel about a seven-year old English girl named Alice who, bored with a book her sister was reading, chased a large white rabbit with pink eyes down a rabbit hole “into a subterranean fantasy world populated by peculiar anthropomorphic creatures. It is considered one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre.”¹ The literary nonsense genre “is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning.”² It strikes me that the definition of literary nonsense literature in many ways is an apt description of the biblical world when compared to the world in the 21st century. Nonsense literature “has a kind of internal lunatic logic of its own, and often comprises enigmatic variations on the absurd.”³ The absurd in contemporary literature and literary criticism is a term reflecting “[e]xtreme forms of illogic, inconsistency, and nightmarish fantasy.”⁴

The Earth and the cosmos, as we currently learn about them in public schools and the universities of Western culture, are quite different from the worlds reflected in nonsense literature. The world today operates on the basis of the observations and principles of modern science. This includes the physiological and psychological make up of human beings, and the animal and plant kingdoms, which evolve on the basis of natural selection.

Reading the Bible, entering its world, is much like going down Alice’s rabbit hole. One finds in its pages a world that operates with a logic all its own yet illogically from the perspective of modern science. In the Bible one finds talking snakes (Gen 3:1-13) and donkeys (Num 22:5); that the laws of physics can be suspended so that the earth can be paused in its journey around the sun (Josh 10:6-14); that a Judean Holy man can feed 5000 people from five loaves of bread and two fish (Mark 6:32-44); that the dead can walk after an earthquake opens their graves (Matt 27:52-54); that magic cloth has the “magical” capability to heal disease (Acts 19:11-12); that ax-heads can float (2 Kgs 6:1-7); and that the bones of a dead holy man, like a talisman, possess the power to raise the dead (2 Kgs 13:20-21).⁵ The “logic” that enables these fantasies to work is the presence in the universe of invisible spirit forces.

The biblical world is the scene of a great cosmic struggle between the invisible forces of Good and Evil (Eph 6:10-12). Demonic forces cause sickness (Luke 11:14), insanity (Mark 5:1-20), epilepsy (Matt 17:14-21), paralysis and other diseases (Matt 4:24). They can demonize the human body (Matt 12:43-45) and cause deafness and muteness (Mark 9:25). On the other hand, there are emissaries (Matt 25:41) of an invisible power stronger than the demons but this power sometimes helps (Acts 12:11) or sometimes harms (Acts 12:23) people.⁶

Many continue to view the cosmos from this religious and superstitious perspective. Nevertheless, in the modern Western world, the strength of the biblical worldview has been rendered ineffective because of the advances of modern medicine. In the ancient world what was attributed to unseen invisible forces has been successfully explained by science as due to natural causes. For example, organisms (germs and viruses), unseen by the naked eye but visible under magnification, cause disease; evil spirits do not. Medical practitioners have virtually replaced the religious shaman as the first to consult in the case of illness. The physician’s advice and treatment, rather than prayer or exorcism, is now sought first to combat what in the ancient past were understood to be disease-causing spirits.

The texts that comprise the Bible are flawed by their antiquity and hence the collection is only marginally reliable as a basis for contemporary life. Those anti-intellectual institutions that continue to measure the world and human life by the Bible’s flawed views will only succeed in marginalizing themselves further from the mainstream in the 21st century. Figuring out what century one lives in is a primary responsibility of living in the present.

Here is the main point of this mini-essay: The Bible does not depict a world that actually was but rather a world as it was perceived to be.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland.

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_nonsense.

³J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (revised by C.E. Preston; 4th ed.; London: Basil Blackwell, 1999), 551.

⁴C. H. Holman and W. Harmon, A Handbook to Literature (6th ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1992), 2.

⁵Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 1-12.

⁶Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 20-22.