Were the author’s of Genesis inspired by other myths? Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett tackle this question in light of Humani Generis.
Transcript:
Cy: M. Duff Beer asks if we interpret Genesis as describing God’s creation of man through evolution and the Flood as describing a population bottleneck thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before Genesis was recorded. Is it possible that the author incorporated contemporary myths into the writing of Genesis? There are Mesopotamian flood myths that predate the writing of Genesis by at least 100 years, likely inspired by the flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. If God revealed to me the knowledge of a battle between good and evil, I might visualize it as an Avengers-style fight or a Lord of the Rings-style battle. Because of my contemporary culture, would it be acceptable to think the writer of Genesis did the same thing, using a popular myth that already existed when Genesis was being recorded to convey why God destroyed the wicked and created the covenant, even if the means God used were different in prehistory?
Jimmy: Okay, so I wanna make sure we’re clear on what Duff Beer is proposing here. He’s assuming that we are interpreting Genesis as describing a population bottleneck that occurred thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before Genesis. And what he’s asking is if that’s what Genesis is talking about. Could the author of Genesis have described that population bottleneck? A population bottleneck is when a large part of a population dies off. So it’s like all the genetic material that survives has to go through this smaller number of people, which is why it’s called a bottleneck.
But he’s asking, could an earlier population bottleneck have been described in terms of stories that were told in Mesopotamia that were likely based on the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, which is a well-known phenomenon that happens over there?
Well, personally, I don’t think that Genesis should be interpreted in terms of a population bottleneck that occurred hundreds of thousands of years earlier. I don’t think that there is any plausible mechanism for the societies to have transmitted information about such a population bottleneck up to the time Genesis was written, about 1000 BC. I think whatever Genesis is describing, it’s much more recent than that.
But we can go with Duff Beer’s framing of the issue. So if Genesis is describing a much earlier population bottleneck, could the author of Genesis have taken more recent events or stories and used them to depict that population bottleneck the same way that he says he might envision a fight between good and evil as something you’d see in the Avengers or a Lord of the Rings movie?
Well, we actually have a discussion of the extent to which Genesis might incorporate prior popular stories. This comes from Pope Pius XII’s encyclical *Humanae Generis*, which was released in 1950, 75 years ago. And things have shifted some since *Humanae Generis* was released 75 years ago. But the same fundamental principles are going to apply.
So if you look in sections 38 and 39 of *Humanae Generis*, Pope Pius XII says this. He says the first 11 chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking, not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which, however, must be further studied and determined by exegetes, which is what’s been happening in the last 75 years.
The same chapters, in simple and metaphorical language, adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narration, and this may be conceded, Pius XII says so. He’s conceded they may have. The author of Genesis may have taken material from popular narrations.
It must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents. Therefore, whatever of the popular narrations had been inserted into the sacred Scriptures must in no way be considered on par with the my other such things, which are more the product of an extravagant imagination than of that striving for the truth and simplicity which in the sacred books also of the Old Testament is so apparent that our ancient sacred writers must be admitted to be clearly superior to the ancient profane writers.
So he’s saying that the author of Genesis, especially in the first 11 chapters, may have taken stuff from popular narrations. He doesn’t call them myths, as that would have a pejorative connotation that he wants to avoid. But there were narrations, or stories, as I called them, about great floods. In the Mesopotamian context, there’s the equivalent of Noah, who was a guy named Utnapishtim. And so there were stories about Utnapishtim and how he survived the great flood.
In Greek stories, there was Deucalion, who was the survivor of the great flood. And what Pope Pius XII is saying is that the author of Genesis may have used earlier narrations like those coming from Babylonia, but in the process of incorporating them into sacred Scripture, he was protected by divine inspiration.
So I would say that the answer to Duff Beer’s question is, yes, these texts could have been influenced by earlier stories about a great flood and how people survived it, the same way that he’s proposing that you might have an earlier population bottleneck that then gets depicted in terms of more recent stories.
So I would say the basic answer to his question is, yes, it could have happened this way. But personally, I don’t think Genesis is talking about something that happened hundreds of thousands of years earlier. But if you do, you do you.
Cy: Good advice for Duff Beer. M. Duff Beer, thank you very much for the question. Lots more questions to come. We’ve got… Well, the Internet, because it’s made by people, has endless questions. And so we will get to more of those questions with Jimmy Akin right after this on *CATHOLIC ANSWERS LIVE*.