Genesis by Carl Sagan

Genesis by Carl Sagan?

… Every Sunday for most of one school year Ellie went to a regular discussion group in a nearby church. It was one of the respectable Protestant denominations, untainted by disorderly evangelism. There were a few high school students, a number of adults, mainly middle-aged women, and the instructor, the minister’s wife.

Ellie had never seriously read the Bible before and had been inclined to accept her father’s perhaps ungenerous judgment that it was “half barbarian history, half fairy tales”. So over the weekend preceding her first class, she read through what seemed to be the important parts of the Old Testament, trying to keep an open mind.

She at once recognized that there were two different and mutually contradictory stories of Creation in the first two chapters of Genesis.

For instance, Ellie did not see how there could be light and days before the Sun was made, and had trouble figuring out exactly who it was that Cain had married.

«I wonder, if Jesus spoke today, would he say: “I bring not peace but the sword” or “I bring not peace, but a machine-gun?” (quotations from M. Jorgensen) Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, of the betrothal od Dinah, of Jacob and Esau, she found herself amazed. She understood that cowardice might occur in the real world – that sons might deceive and defraud an aged father, that a man might give craven consent to the seduction of his wife by a King, or even encourage a rape of his daughters. Du in this holy book there was not a word of protest against such outrages. Instead, it seemed, the crimes were approved, even praised.

When class began, she was eager for a discussion of theses vexing inconsistencies, for an unburdening illumination of God’s Purpose, or at least for an explanation of why these crimes were not condemned by the author or Author. But in this she was to be disappointed. The minister’s wife blandly temporized. Somehow these stories never surfaced in subsequent discussion. When Ellie inquired how it was possible for the maidservants of the daughter of Pharaoh to tell just by looking that the baby in the bulrushes was Hebrew, the teacher blushed deeply and asked Ellie not to raise unseemly questions. (The answer dawned on Ellie at that moment).

When they came to the New Testament, Ellie’s agitation increased. Matthew and Luke traced the ancestral line of Jesus back to King David. But for Matthew there were twenty-eight generations between David and Jesus; for Luke forty-three. There were almost no names common to the two lists. How could both Matthew and Luke be the Word of God?

The contradictory genealogies seemed to Ellie a transparent attempt to fit the Isaianic prophecy after the event – cooking the data, it was called in chemistry lab. She was deeply moved by the Sermon on the Mount, deeply disappointed by the admonition to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s, and reduced to shouts and tears after the instructor twice sidestepped her questions on the meaning of “I bring not peace but the sword”.

She told her despairing mother that she had done her best, but wild horses wouldn’t drag her to another Bible class.