Six Days
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More than 40% of the American population, if opinion polls are to be believed, think that the world is less than 10,000 years old. And that's a shocking figure. It shows deep, profound...

That's the world's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, on a CNN special back in 2012. It's a somewhat typical example of atheism's derision when it comes to the book of Genesis. It also represents the tension many Christians feel when it comes to the early chapters of the Bible, where miracles on a grand scale abound.

The earth formed out of nothing at God's command. The universe ushered into existence in six days. And the world swamped by a divinely appointed flood.

Atheists and many others laugh at the literal reading of these passages, and their response can lead many believers to feel publicly shamed, and many thoughtful doubters to feel that the Bible might be a fairy tale after all. Others take a more front-footed approach, suggesting that it's science that needs to take the step back. Here's Ken Ham, the author and founder of Answers in Genesis.

Here's the interesting thing. The word day is used 2301 times in the singular or plural in the Old Testament. But in Genesis 1, that's where we don't know what it means. How come we know what it means everywhere else it's used, but we don't know what it means in Genesis 1? Why are they not going to believe it? Because you know what? If you believe in six literal days...

Then you add up the dates in the Bible, it's a young earth, and you're going to be called anti-science, anti-academic. You're going to be mocked at and scoffed at and ridiculed because the world is so adamant you've got to believe in millions of years.

Last season, we brought you John Lennox talking about the compatibility of faith and the scientific mind. Ard Louis, professor of physics at Oxford University, talked about the evidence for a rational universe. But we kind of sidestepped one obvious debate. Creation versus evolution. Six days versus 13.8 billion years. Young earthers versus ancient universes.

It's a pretty hot argument in the minds of some believers and some non-believers alike. Sometimes both sides think there's only one way to take Genesis, and that's at face value. I'm not so sure. I actually think that this debate has the potential to obscure the real purpose of the Bible and even of these controversial passages. I sometimes get criticized for this perspective.

Google John Dixon and Genesis or something like that, and you'll find some pretty spicy love mail directed at me. It is sometimes suggested that if you leave the door open to any form of evolution or old age universe, you're just giving in to secular intellectualism. But then some of my atheist friends respond that if you do believe in a God who brought the universe into existence at all, you're checking your brain at the door.

It's hard to win friends on this one, but I think today's episode plots a path that might not please everyone, but it certainly leaves the biblical story of creation looking more insightful than many of us on both sides think. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by my favorite publisher, Zondervan, and its brand new book, How to Follow Jesus, by Craig Springer. Every week, we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

So I want to focus on these questions as they apply to the biblical creation story of Genesis 1 and 2. To listen to some people, the reason the Lord provided that story to us is so that we'd have something to argue about.

And of course, we all snicker and rightly so. But it is true that that is how people behave and we're going to try to do better. Meet Professor C. John Collins, or Jack Collins, as he's better known. He's the professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. That's the famous institution of the public intellectual now past, Francis Schaeffer.

Jack holds degrees from MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD from the University of Liverpool in the UK. He specializes in Hebrew grammar and was the Old Testament chairman for the English Standard Version of the Bible. He's authored a stack of stuff, including some books on reading ancient texts like the Book of Genesis. So I was leading Bible studies on the MIT campus and

and I realized I knew very little about the Bible actually. And so I wanted to study it further. So that was my initial motivation for seminary. It was just getting more Bible, more theology. And so I started studying those things and basically got hooked. My intention was simply to get a simple degree

and then go back and finish a PhD in engineering. And that was what I intended to do, but I got hooked and had very positive feedback from the elders in my church who thought I should finish a seminary degree and even go on for doctoral work, which I did. And my doctoral work was in linguistics and Semitic linguistics.

So he's a nerd with a side order of nerd. MIT mathematician who studies ancient linguistics. What's not to like? Jack's academic curiosity was piqued when he began to apply literary and linguistic theories to the first 11 chapters of Genesis. That's where all that stuff is about creation, Adam and Eve, the flood and all that.

Well, my general approach owes most of its impetus to something from C.S. Lewis. His opening sentence in his lectures on Paradise Lost, that to criticize or evaluate any work of art from a corkscrew to a cathedral, you need to know what it is, what it was meant to do, and how it was meant to be used.

And so just asking those kinds of questions and then teasing out what those questions would look like from a more rigorous standpoint, that's been my approach and it's developed over the years.

and came, I think, to its fullest fruition a few years ago with the publication of my book, Reading Genesis Well. Reading Genesis Well is the book Jack recently published. Its subtitle says it all, Navigating History, Poetry, Science and Truth in Genesis 1-11. We'll throw a link in the show notes for you. It's interesting, you mentioned C.S. Lewis, and I think some people who have some vague knowledge of Lewis...

We'll be thinking, oh, Lewis the apologist, but that's not what you mean. You mean Lewis the literary scholar who was and is still highly regarded, especially for these particular lectures and essays that you refer to. Can you say just something briefly about Lewis the literary scholar?

Sure. And the way to start is to insist to most people what they don't know, namely that the man had a day job. He was a scholar of literature. He also was for a time a scholar in philosophy, but left that behind and also was well grounded in the classics, Greek and Roman classics. And he was a professor of the history of literature, ancient and medieval literature, really not modern literature.

And so here's a person who had experience with reading ancient texts, foreign texts, with sympathy and trying to get an idea of what it's like actually to read an ancient author on his own terms. Lewis was particularly interested in medieval myths and the Norse myths and all those sorts of things. But you have specialized knowledge of the ancient myths of...

in the ancient Near East. Can you tell us something about those origins myths in other cultures? Right. Well, the origins myths, first of all, they all serve a purpose. So, for example, in Mesopotamia,

There are a set of myths that have a story about the origin of the world and the reason that the gods made the world and made humankind and so forth. Why there was a great flood and so forth. What happens after the great flood. And the function of those myths, well, one of the functions of those myths is to establish a status quo. You have a very stratified society in ancient Mesopotamia.

And one of the functions of those myths was to keep it that way. So that, for example, humankind were made so that the gods didn't have to do the work that humans do. So that you have the senior gods and then the junior gods and the junior gods were doing all the work and they get tired of it because it's hot in the Middle East. You know, all of our military people who've been to Iraq can tell you how hot it is. And so they went on strike.

And so all the gods agreed that they would make humankind to do the work like digging the irrigation channels and tending the crops and so forth. And what that does then is it gives you an idea of a hierarchy in a social system. And the vast majority of people in Mesopotamia were at the bottom level of that hierarchy, just doing this kind of ordinary labor.

and they're enabled by the recitation of those myths to see their place in the world as doing this and that those who are higher up have their role and all the way up to the gods and so you don't rebel against that structure or else you're rebelling against the gods and it's and that would go very poorly for you. So those kinds of myths are there to serve that kind of purpose. The story in Genesis is

is aiming, as it were, to tell a lot of similar events, but to tell those things in the right way.

to tell them in a way that reflects God's own purposes for human beings and also God's interest actually in dignifying human beings. Rather than making human beings the slaves of the deities, human beings are dignified with the image of God. And rather than endorsing a stratified society, all human beings are accountable to the same kinds of standards. - So you're not saying Genesis is derivative and therefore relegated.

You're saying it's conscious of the kind of the mood of these other myths and is in a way polemical? Okay, I got a bit carried away in that question. I blame Jack though. I'm just asking if he's saying Genesis simply borrowed from other literature.

Or is Genesis borrowing in order to debunk the alternatives? Back to Jack. Yeah, so there's different definitions of the word polemical. And so I would certainly say that what's in Genesis is in opposition to those other stories or a clearly drawn alternative to those other stories. And so it seems likely that the story in Genesis reflects knowledge of those other stories.

to say its derivative is to go way beyond anything that we're entitled to say. But it also misunderstands the way in which Genesis relates to those stories. Again, C.S. Lewis pointed out that stories are not like mice, you know, reproducing their species. They go, even if they're retold, they go through human beings and they reflect different sets of values.

And so the way in which the Genesis story is told reflects a different set of values from those that are in Mesopotamia. And so those differences become very important.

Referring to Genesis 1-11 as a story and comparing it with ancient Mesopotamian myths has got Jack into trouble with some folks. Some Christians listening right now may be feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps sceptics are feeling a bit incredulous. So is Genesis literal fact or made-up fiction?

I'd ask us all to hang in there and follow Professor Collins' logic a bit further. It's just possible that the descriptions literal and made up need to be finessed a little. Bear with us. Jack gets a bit technical, but it's worth it.

And so a literalistic reading, you know, doesn't allow for imaginative elements and figurative descriptions and so forth. And I think that there are those who consider that to be the only really honest reading. And part of what I've wanted to show in my work is that that's not actual, that's not documented, justifiable human behavior. People who are literalistic in everything are actually difficult to get along with.

And literal, that word is too ambiguous. Literal should mean simply cooperation with the author. And so I think part of cooperation with the author is to recognize that there is an historical impulse, but the author has lots of liberty as to how he narrates his events, what level of detail he expects you to take him literally on and so on and so forth.

So, for example, how widely spread does the flood need to have been? There are those who would say that it needs to have been worldwide in order to be historically true. And I don't think that's the case. I think that there are manifest examples of hyperbole in the Bible. And hyperbole is not the same as not telling the truth. If I tell my children that I have thousands of papers to mark,

They recognize that as hyperbole and they don't think that I've told them an untruth. And so hyperbole is one of those things that's available as legitimate storytelling in the Bible. It's interesting though that some feel really uncomfortable about this.

You know, God would never use these literary techniques like hyperbole and so on, or even poetry. Obviously, you've come to a very different conclusion. People do add these qualifiers. If they say it's poetry, they'll add the qualifier only poetry or merely poetry. And I think they're really misunderstanding how communication works.

Poetry does not mean that it isn't about something. Poetry can be about something, but it expects you to use your analytical capabilities in a different way, say, than a prose narrative would. And that's so not neither of them is better or worse than the other. They just serve different purposes.

So just to clarify, a literal reading is accepting the basic meaning of Genesis within its cultural context as intended by the author. But a literalistic reading is one that settles on the surface meaning of the words without reference to the author's purpose or the time in which it was written. We often add the suffix "-istic to words to indicate an intensification of meaning. For example, we say something is simple...

And then we say something might be simplistic. Something like that is meant by the difference between literal and literalistic.

And Jack believes that a literalistic reading of Genesis 1-11 doesn't allow room for what linguists find in the text. First of all, the work of the six days is... The six days are described in a very highly patterned way. Each day begins with, and God said, and he expresses a wish, and then it ends with a refrain, and there was evening and there was morning, first, second, third, down to the sixth day. And then you have...

a very broad stroke description of things. There is nothing that's described there that gets its ordinary name from the Hebrew. So rather than the sun and the moon, you have the great light and the lesser light.

You have the different kinds of animals, but you don't have anything more specific. You don't have a mention of sparrows or ravens or cows or goats or whatever. You just have beasts of the field and creeping things and so on. And so you have this very broad stroke description. It's very evocative, like a painting,

that uses very broad strokes and you just have to step back a ways before you can get the full image. And if you get up too close, you're asking the wrong things of the painter, just like you're asking the wrong things of Genesis. - So six days? - Sure. - Why don't you accept the plain reading? - Right. Well, and that becomes a question of what constitutes a plain reading.

And I would argue that the plain reading is that these are six workdays of God and that how they relate to human workdays is by analogy. The whole purpose of Genesis 1 in the creation story is to set a pattern for the ideal human community. The ideal human community is a place in which the image of God or the imitation of God is something that's actually going to be realized.

So that's the ideal, the creation pattern that is then distorted because of the disobedience of Genesis chapter 3. So a part of the ideal human community is the imitation of God in the life of Israel as they work for six days and they have a Sabbath. And so they work for six days and their work is like God's work.

But it's like God's work, but it's not identical to God's work. I mean, an Israelite would surely love to be able to say to the ground, go ahead and sprout. But instead, he's got to be out there with his hoe and his animal and so forth. And he's got to do a lot of hard work in the sun. But his work is then dignified by recognizing that even in Israel, as he's going about his six days of work and having his seventh day as a Sabbath, he's imitating a divine pattern.

And that's the function of Genesis 1 then is to dignify the people of Israel by giving them this whole outlook on life, this whole image of what the ideal life could look like of imitating God. Couldn't this just be your acquiescing

to the troubling conclusions of science. You're a guy of science and went to MIT and all that. And so all you're doing now is post hoc rationalization. Right. Well, there are people who say that. And I suppose they...

They, I guess I would say they're pretending to greater insight into my personal psychology than I actually, than I have myself. So from my own point of view, it is certainly true that the sciences do provoke us to look at the text again, just like they provoke us to look at the text again. If we thought that the Bible teaches that the sun physically rises, we look at the text and realize, nah, that wasn't really what it was about.

So that sort of thing of going back to the text and reevaluating, it can never be a bad thing. And as a matter of fact, there are plenty of antecedents. For example, one of the things that I notice is that in the seventh day, there is no refrain, evening and morning, the seventh day. And that that suggests that the divine Sabbath is something that continues forever. Well, it turns out that there was a Jewish author in the second century BC who was already saying that.

Jack's referring to the Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, who believed that Greek philosophy owes a lot to and can be enhanced by an understanding of the Jewish scriptures, including Genesis. He talked about the ongoing seventh day of creation.

And then that seems to underlie several passages in the New Testament where it's assumed that the divine Sabbath is still going on. So Jesus is working on the Sabbath, just like his father is working on his Sabbath in John chapter five.

And then Augustine as well, there's no refrain because the Lord has sanctified it to an everlasting continuance. So you already have one of the days that is an analogy to human experience, the Sabbath. And so then that provokes the question of going back to the other six days. And is there a necessity for them to be regular days like we're used to?

A really well-kept secret in the modern world is that quite a number of ancient Jewish and Christian intellectuals didn't read Genesis 1 literalistically. Many did, of course, but some of the most famous didn't. The greatest Jewish intellectual of the first century read Genesis 1 as a metaphor. Philo of Alexandria said the six days of Genesis 1 weren't a temporal marker but a symbol of order in the universe.

The number six, he said, is, quote, equal to the product of its factors, one times two times three, and made up of the sum of the factors, one plus two plus three. So it's the perfect symbol of rational productivity, he said.

He was followed in this by some Christian thinkers like Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century and after him, Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century. Probably the most influential Christian of the entire ancient period was Augustine in the 5th century. He reckoned God created all matter instantly in

in an unknown past. That's the meaning of Genesis 1.1, he said, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The days that follow in Genesis 1, he said, were successive eons.

epochs, centuries or millennia in which God fashioned the matter of heaven and earth into the various forms we see today. And then there's Moses Maimonides. You may never have heard of this guy, but he's the most famous, revered Jewish rabbi of the Middle Ages, long before the scientific challenge about creation. Maimonides wrote, The subject of creation is very important, but our ability to understand these concepts is very limited. There

Therefore, God described these profound concepts, which by his divine wisdom found necessary to communicate to us, using allegories, metaphors, and imagery. Something as profound as the first principles of the universe, he's saying, deserves to be communicated through metaphor and imagery.

This way of reading the Bible isn't just a retreat from the troubling discoveries of modern science. These were ways of reading the text suggested by the text itself, long before the rise of modern science. Genesis has a literary and theological intention more than a scientific one. That's what many ancients believed. Not all of them, by any means, but a number of them.

They say that it's not a scientific document. Eusebius is very clear about that. Aristobulus is aware of the danger of literalism when you talk about God's eyes and hands and so forth. And so they, and they also are aware that Genesis is written not for the scholars, but for a peasant audience. And so that, that side of things is very helpful and guides us in what we, what we would be

best do with Genesis in our own setting. Is it the case, I think I read this in your book, that Augustine in fact thought God made everything instantly and that the six days are there for some other purpose? Yes, that's correct. So he thought the six days were a literary invention to serve the purpose of setting the pattern for human life.

And actually the most thoughtful ancient, old author anyway, I don't know, you wouldn't really call John Colette an ancient author. He's a predecessor of the Reformation. So he's Augustinian in his thoughts about that, but he has the longest and most extensive and actually the most nuanced thought on that. And it's similar. He's talking about the days are a...

He would use a word like invention, but he doesn't mean by that fictionalizing, but it serves the purpose then of providing a pattern for the human workweek.

And so a lot of his interpretation of Genesis is driven by that understanding. Now, it's important to note that Jack isn't saying the Genesis account is not true, even at the factual level. It could be 100% factually accurate on his view. Jack is just saying that conveying how the creation was created is not the purpose of the passage. So whether or not it's strictly historical doesn't affect the writer's intention.

Take the parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus in Luke 10. Jesus doesn't say it's a parable, nor does Luke. Jesus just begins with the words, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers.

Suppose that some clear historical evidence were discovered that around AD 29 a certain fellow from Samaria was indeed travelling along the Jerusalem-Jericho road and came upon a Jewish man stripped of his clothes and half beaten to death. Imagine the evidence reported that the Samaritan promptly tended to his wounds and paid two denarii for his care at a nearby guest house.

Would this chance discovery, perhaps in some passing report by Josephus or Philo, have any bearing on the actual point being made by Jesus in his parable of the Good Samaritan? The answer is no.

It would certainly be a happy coincidence if one of Jesus' teaching illustrations turned out also to be a true story, but it wouldn't alter the fact that it's a parable, a well-known literary device in Jewish teaching, and was never intended to be heard as a historical narrative. Parables are narrative constructs with a moral or spiritual message. Whether or not they correspond to actual events in time is of no consequence.

But if Jack is intent on reading the Genesis account literally, not literalistically, what does that mean for biblical figures like Adam and Eve? That's where we go after the break.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

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Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

So let's get really controversial because we haven't already. Adam and Eve, how does that square with science? I mean, geneticists say, and you concede as much in your book, that there was a much larger population. Right, right. And so in terms of the standard genetic theory, and you always have to put it that way because things can change. That's the beauty of the sciences is they get revised.

So according to what's now current and standard, species don't evolve simply as a new member of a species all of a sudden appears. There's a very gradual evolution and it's a population that evolves. And so you have to talk about the breeding population of ancestral humans and so on.

And according to the best estimates, that breeding population would be in the thousands. Now, some have said there's ways in which you could bring it down

say, to the hundreds or even a little bit smaller, but you're not going to get anywhere near two based on the current understanding. So we have a straight contradiction between what Genesis says and science. We have a potential contradiction. And so that's where clarifying what Genesis says and what the sciences are saying, what we have to clarify is whether they're actually talking about the same thing and therefore contradicting.

So, and there are a number of ways in which one can manage that. A fairly straightforward way would be to say, well, I'm not really sure of the resolution, but I'm confident

I'm confident of certain things, namely that humans were made good. Humans have unique capacities that go beyond a purely natural development from anything in any other animal. And also humans are fallen and that's an unnatural condition. So there's no need for anybody ever to be uncertain about that. And that's what the fall story is there for.

We would like also to believe that we all come from a common source so that all the different kinds of humans, the different races and so forth, come from a common source. So we really are a human family. And there's no reason to doubt that either. So then the question becomes, does the biblical account require just two? I think I would incline in that direction or at least would prefer to find a way to make that work out.

but there are others who have said, well, you can still have a population with Adam and Eve as real people who are the king and the queen of this initial population. Derek Kidner has a really good commentary on Genesis. It's an old one now from the middle 1960s.

And after Cain has killed Abel, he is banished from the presence of the Lord. And he's afraid that anybody who finds him will kill him in vengeance for his having killed his brother. And so the Lord puts a mark on him. And so the question becomes, why would Cain be afraid of anybody if Abel

if he and Abel were the, besides Adam and Eve, were the only humans. And so Kidner is trying to answer that kind of question and imagines, well, possibly you had a larger population with Adam and Eve as the first maid. And it's, you know, that's a little bit far from the simplicity of the biblical text. I think that's fair to say. Others have suggested, people that I know and respect highly have suggested that

Actually, if you go back far enough, so you're talking about 500,000 years ago, you could actually have a just two as the ancestors of the entirety of what we think of as the line of human beings, the line of human descent. So you could actually get just two if you're willing to go back far enough. And so what you're doing is you're recognizing that there are possibilities. You can't say with any one of them, okay, I've nailed it.

but you still have possibilities and so you don't have to feel uncomfortable with the basic affirmations of the Adam and Eve story, that there's a real historical fall, a real historical creation of human beings, and then therefore the genuine Christian hope of the undoing of the fall and also the purification and perfection of human beings into what they were originally created to achieve. I confess to a certain sympathy for Jack's approach to Genesis.

Genesis is a hot-button issue for many, especially in the United States. But it shouldn't be about taking sides. It should be about trying to make sense of a sophisticated ancient text far removed from the uniquely modern concerns about the mechanics of the universe. I'm trying to ask sort of the critical questions. So what's legitimately required by the sciences? What's legitimately required by the Bible? And where are the places where they can clash, where they actually clash?

I recognize that what I get from the Bible is a reading of the Bible. Now, I think my reading of the Bible is justifiable and, you know, I've tried to apply a level of rigor. So I don't think that every reading is equally valid with every other reading. I think my reading is better than some others. But you have to argue for it. Well, the sciences are the same way. They're a reading of the evidence. There's no such thing as a scientific fact.

There are well-established theories. There are well-established discussions in the sciences and so forth. And so just trying to recognize the way both of these disciplines work has become important to me. Press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. One, five, ten Bibles just sold. And by the end of this five minutes, 285 Bibles will have sold. By the end of the day, 82,000.

Part of the reason for the Bible's phenomenal success is that it tackles the fundamentals of life from the first page. The order and goodness of the universe, the singularity of God, the value of human beings and so on. But it often presents these profound insights in literary devices designed to evoke our spirits rather than in a textbook style to feed the intellect.

It has the prosaic intellectual stuff as well, just read Paul's letter to the Romans and you'll see what I mean, but it also speaks to our emotions and imagination. I know we often think of ancient people as pedestrian and dumb, but the fact is the Bible generally, and Jesus in particular, regularly employed sophisticated literary and rhetorical devices.

Obviously, Jesus used parables a lot. About a quarter of his recorded teachings are in the form of parable. That says something. He uses metaphor. For example, he speaks of hell, God's final judgment against injustice, as outer darkness one minute and as unquenchable fire the next. These are obviously images. You can't have dark and fire in the same place.

Jesus uses classic Jewish hyperbole when he said, for example, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away." Everyone in his audience knew he wasn't advocating literally cutting off body parts. They understood the rhetorical pattern.

There's rhyme and irony together in his saying to the religious fundamentalists of his day. You blind guides, you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. In the original language that he spoke, Aramaic, he actually says you strain out a kalma and swallow a gamla. It's a rhyming joke.

One of the more famous sayings is, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." There was no little door in Jerusalem called "eye of the needle." This is just a memorable aphorism in the form of rhetorical juxtaposition.

We could open this up to other literary and rhetorical devices throughout the Bible. We're used to this with our own writings. I mean, you take a newspaper and we all know how to adjust our approach to reading, say, the editorial versus opinion versus letters, news, cartoons, TV guide and so on. Well, ancient cultures had their own literary styles and they all knew how to read them.

There's plenty of straightforward historical prose in the Bible, the books of Kings, the Gospels, the book of Acts and so on. But there's also parables, as I've just said, poetry, where rhyme, rhythm and imagery are used to convey deep truths. There's a thing called prophetic lament, where tyrants are lampooned, not because the tyrants themselves would ever hear the criticisms, but to comfort those oppressed by them.

Then there's apocalyptic, where colours, beasts and numbers carry coded meanings that everyone understood. There's proverbial wisdom, where pithy generalisations convey truths of a universal practical kind rather than an absolute theoretical kind. Then there are literary devices within genres. For example, there's acrostic. So every stanza of Psalm 119 begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet and everyone spotted it.

There's gematria. This is where numbers are used as code for key words that have the same numerical value. There's inclusio, which is where the first line of a passage or a book corresponds to the last line of a passage or a book to create a frame for interpreting the whole thing. There's chiasmus, which is often called polystrophic.

where the first line of a passage corresponds to the last line of the passage. Second line corresponds to the second last line until there's a central line that doesn't have a counterpart and it reveals the point of the passage. I'm sure I'm boring you. In some ways, I want to. What I'm saying is these are literary styles ancients knew all about. And the fact that we miss them today is a judgment on us, not a judgment on them.

God isn't just a historian or textbook writer. He's also a poet, a singer, an artist, a literati. This is why some of the literary greats like J.R.R. Tolkien stood in awe of the narrative majesty of the Bible and tried to echo it in his Lord of the Rings epics.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson, sometimes described as the greatest living novelist, regards the story of Genesis 1-3 as the foundation of the West's infinitely high view of humanity.

Others disagree, of course. I was once on ABC's Q&A TV show. They put me up against atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss. He pilloried the Bible, especially Genesis. He even said that teaching Genesis 1 to children was a form of child abuse. It was a tense moment. I tried to point out that there are grown-up ways to read Genesis, ways that are attuned to ancient literary conventions, but he wouldn't have a bar of it.

He dismissed it all as hocus pocus, designed to avoid the obvious: that Genesis is the outmoded speculation of Stone Age goat herders. It's a very sad but very common perspective. People pick up these simplistic generalisations about the alleged stupidity of Bible writers,

And when they're introduced to a more informed, sophisticated way of reading the text, they usually dismiss it as smoke and mirrors designed to avoid their very clever criticism. But often, they're just projecting their lack of knowledge about the Bible onto the Bible. They don't happen to know anything remarkable about the Bible, so there mustn't be anything remarkable in the Bible to know.

It's like the kid in English class who's introduced to Shakespeare for the first time. He puts up his hand and declares, Miss, Shakespeare's stupid. That was me once, with Shakespeare and the Bible. But the grown-up me is embarrassed, as I should be. Jesus was a grown-up preacher for grown-ups. The Bible is a grown-up book for grown-ups. You can press play now. We're in America, and...

the debate amongst young Earth creationists and everyone else who has a view on Genesis is pretty hot here. It's not so hot where I come from, but it is hot enough. We have some very famous young Earth creationists. You do. How do you sort of personally navigate that? I guess I want to ask you psychologically, how do you navigate the criticism that I know you receive? Yeah.

But then socially, how do you navigate the relationships? Well, I think it's important to affirm that people who disagree with me on these issues are nevertheless firmly in agreement with me on the Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the importance of faith in Christ, you know, the things that matter the most.

And it's possible to care about another human being in terms of his or her actual human life, his or her moral development and so forth. And so I actually have a relationship with somebody in church who's a very ardent young earth creationist. And various things have happened that have put us into conflict.

rather than argument, into contact with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, death in the family and so forth, or an injury or something like that, and the ability to show kindness and so forth. And so making the human connection is, I think, the most important thing. To be able to ask, okay, so this issue of disagreement, is it going to be the defining thing about the relationship between me and you?

Well, if you wish it to be, then I guess it will be. And I might decide that I have better things to do. But if you will allow the possibility of human contact, then that's where I prefer to go. And then the discussion can be carried on between human beings who will interact with one another.

In addition to C.S. Lewis, I'm also quite fond of the Pooh stories, and St. Eeyore describes a conversation as first one and then the other, and a genuine exchange of thought.

And that's what I'm after in whether I'm talking to somebody who's on an atheistic perspective or even a theistic perspective, but quasi-atheistic or a young earth creationist perspective. I'm looking for a genuine exchange of thought, and I'll see if that's possible. Professor C. John Collins, Jack.

Sounds a bit like the great 5th century intellectual Saint Augustine. He observed the arguments over Genesis, even way back then, and offered this lovely insight about how to find peace amidst contentious issues. It's a good place to end. Let's not be so dogmatic about all this, that we defy the principle of love.

Whatever Moses meant in these books, he meant it to be ordered by the two precepts of love, love for God and love for neighbour. It is foolish, rashly to affirm that Moses intended only one of these interpretations, and then with destructive contention to violate love itself, on behalf of which Moses had said all the things we are endeavouring to explain.

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Next episode, we meet a woman at the forefront of commending Christianity in public, Amy or Yui. I call it Amy's greatest hits. I can't wait to share her insights. See you. Music

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