Today's entry comes not straight from the pages of the Bible but rather from a personal life lesson that occurred while studying variations of the Hebrew Bible this morning. One of the requirements for 700-level Old Testament courses at Asbury is in-depth text criticism. Essentially what this means is that students must interact with different versions of Ancient Hebrew manuscripts, some of which are mere fragments of passages, and make a substantial case for reconstructing the "original" Hebrew text.
If we, as Christians, believe that the Bible "as originally given" is the inspired word of God, figuring out what that original word is and constantly reworking hypotheses to accomodate new archaeological findings of even-older manuscripts is an important step in helping others understand the Message of the Bible. While the current versions based primarily on copies by Jewish scholars dating from around 600 CE are fairly reliable, they are not carbon copy replicas of the "original text."
This isn't a task for everyone. Undergraduate students can often get by without even taking any courses in Hebrew, and graduate students who are training for pastoral ministry rather than for a career in the Academy can often excel in their profession by simply taking elementary language courses. But there are some who God has called to aid or train the pastors and teachers by doing this type of original research, and according to Scripture, those who he has called he will equip.
I say all this to lay out a parallel that I found striking as I was practicing my own text criticism this morning. I--a novice at best--was busy making a substantial case for a variation of a word in Genesis 4 this morning, having spent several hours studying this particular word, the variations, and different ways other ancient texts have translated it. In the middle of my study I received an email about a fossil that was found near the Panama Canal that suggested there may have been a camal-like creature with a crocodile-like snout and teeth. As evidence they showed a picture of a jawbone fragment that was slightly larger than the length of the scientist's hand.
Instantly my mind switched gears from what I was doing and immediately reverted back to my early childhood anti-science education. I sarcastically and rhetorically asked myself, "How could anybody trust that information? No one can reconstruct an extinct species from a single fossil fragment!" I had read a single sentence along the lines of, "A new study suggests camels with long, crocodile-like snouts once lived near what is now the Panama Canal," looked at the photo, and had dismissed the entire study as invalid based on simple prejudice--and given the nature of my current assignment, a rather hypocritical prejudice at that.
While I realise there are significant differences between the science/art of textual criticism and the science/art of reconstructing extinct species, what struck me as hypocritical was that my upbringing had led me to be prejudiced against reconstructing based on fragments because I assumed the falsehood that "the fragment is all there is" was true. Now, I know nothing about this study other than what I mentioned, and the source of the email was a particularly unreliable source known for intentionally making extreme hyperboles for the purpose of making people laugh. In this particular case, my conclusion could have been based on the incredulity of the source, but it wasn't. It was instantly based on the subject matter.
As my personal studies are revealing, the fragment is not all there is. One does not simply find a bone (or a word) and assume it belongs to something completely different. There are rules that scientists (or scholars) must follow before making public speculations regarding the nature of a bone (or a word). I'm not a paleontologist--I'm simply a novice paleographer--so I don't know all of the rules, but I trust that some people do, and I trust that those who are qualified to teach the teachers follow those rules, and perhaps even rewrite them as necessary.
The moral of the story: don't be so quick to judge a study solely based on the subject matter. When it comes down to it, very few of us are experts in the fields we most often like to discredit. And when it comes down to it, we can either trust those who God has called and equipped in their fields, or we can trust that our own lack of calling and equipping is better than God's discernment. I guess it goes back to Genesis 1 vs Genesis 3.
Never simply disbelieve because you don't feel like putting forth the effort to understand.
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