In one way yes. I have alrady stated elsewhere, Genesis 3 was transmitted orally, minimally from Sarug to Abraham (or young Abram, since this was before God changed his name), maximally all the way from Adam to Moses.
Here is the final comment on Genesis 3 by Haydock:
Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.
As I use the chronology of the Roman martyrology reading, there would be more years and more minimally overlapping generations, but this is an option. For my own part, I think it could have been written down as early as by Abraham, since he had the opportunity to store written material in his Beduin tribe and this opportunity was never broken after his time.
So, Genesis 2:6 to Genesis 11 were first transmitted orally, Genesis 12 to fifty were written down soon after the facts. This holds whether Genesis 3 was orally redacted by Adam, and transmitted like the Iliad from Homer to the time of Peisistratus, or whether Adam wrote, or even Abel wrote, since a lost book of probably cumulative chronicles is "the book of Yasher" or "of the Just" and Abel is called the just, and Sarug read it, but couldn't show it to young Abram, and therefore transmitted it orally to him. This is a contrast between the two.
Another type of contrast is often made. Here is a screenshot from quora:
Normally, I would have joined the fray and commented there, and shared the debate on Assorted Retorts, much as I did with most of:
Factuality of the Bible: answering Earnest Farr · Guestpost · answering Dick Harfield · Answer on Acts (to Dick Harfield)
But Dick Harfield found my non-compliance with his academia worship too much for him to argue with, and blocked me from commenting, and as you can see from the screenshot, I am still disabled from adding comments.
So much so, not only I can't add a comment directly under Dick Harfield's words, but also not under Peter Biro's.
So, this is another contrast between Peter Biro's view of Genesis 1 to 11, and his view of Genesis 12 to 50. The first is, on his view, non-historical, does not compute, is not strictly historical. The latter is.
If Genesis 1 to 11 is dismissed on the grounds that:
- the world is supposedly much older than 7222 years (by AD 2023),
- life diversity and humanity came around by evolutive processes,
- language diversity came around only by processes of natural language change and no initial split into many required or possible ...
... then there will follow severe problems with the rest.
- with millions of years (and the time for evolution), there is no chance that carbon 14 levels were so low by Genesis 14 that a real 1935 BC is carbon dated as 3500 BC
- but without them, you need separate creations of life forms (not on individual present species level, but say families or subfamilies like hedgehogs)
- without them you very definitely need Adam created separately
- without them, you need a global flood to account for fossils
- without them and with a global flood, you need a speeding up of the language split in post-Flood humanity.
So, without YEC for Genesis 1 to 11, neither any historicity for Genesis 14. This gets very much worse, if you push Abraham's birth to a 2015 BC within an Old Earth, rather than a Young Earth scheme, and consequently carbon dates being not just relatively but also close to absolutely correct, you will search for Abraham in carbon dated 1900's - 2000's BC - and not find him. You will search for the Exodus in carbon dated 1460 BC, if you follow that chronology, and have problems to match it up with Egyptian chronology, which for this period is New Kingdom and better documented than previous times. Though, in fairness, a certain video I saw involved a good argument that not even in New Kingdom would an Exodus have been recorded and preserved in the material we find, since the material we find are nearly exclusively funerary monuments, offered to the gods for the wellbeing of a pharao in the hereafter, and as such would have omitted all reference to calamities for ritual reasons.
So, no, the contrast breaks down.
That's for Peter Biro, who would deserve a long answer. Dick Harfield deserves a shorter one, so here is one more.
If Genesis isn't scientifically accurate but claims to be, then this helps explain why it is not historically accurate either.
No, it doesn't. Being scientifically literate is not a prerequisite for recording history. We do not dismiss Egyptian historic records out of hand, just because they involve references to gods that Dick Harfield and I agree don't exist. If a text says "... and the other gods fought with the Egyptian army and it was victorious" I will take the gods fighting with the army as an interpretation made in the light of their world view, and I will take the victorious Egyptian army as historical. In some cases historically faked. Someone pointed out that a series of victories against the Hittites, plotted on the map, reads like a retreat rather than as an advance, but that is as it may - it was meant to be read as (lying) statements about historic fact, not to be reas as fiction for entertainment.
... Genesis is simply a compilation of folk lore, legends and ancient myths. It is not a record of events or real persons.
Dick Harfield has consistently in the past failed to argue why "folk lore, legends and ancient myths" would not be "a record of events or real persons" - I'd disagree on it even about Pagan myth, as stated here:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Matt Dillahunty Spoke of a Problem in Evangelical Usage of Terms
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2023/02/matt-dillahunty-spoke-of-problem-in.html
Dick Harfield won't have this answer directly communicated from me, since I can't comment under his answers, but I will try to reach Peter Biro.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Cyril of Alexandria
9.II.2023
PS, if you want to visit the question on quora: What if Genesis isn't scientifically accurate? where I have already answered some other guys, which is shared on Assorted Retorts./HGL
