The biblical scholar Peter Enns is Satan…
…or at least like Satan, according to Answers in Genesis. Why? Because he attempts to read the Bible in its historical context, is honest enough to admit there are troubling passages in the Bible, and humble enough to wrestle with the biblical text understand it better. And, of course, he doesn’t read Genesis 1-11 as modern scientific history.
Why is reading the Bible in its historical context important? Because if you don’t, you can read back into the Bible any modern notion or event you want to see. My friend Ian Panth wrote a short piece on his blog where he argues that using the hermeneutic of the likes of Dispensationalists (i.e. think of the Left Behind series) and Ken Ham, you can read back into the Bible anything. He then goes about showing how you can even argue that there are aliens in the Bible. Ridiculous? Of course. Are there aliens in the Bible? Of course not. What’s the difference between arguing aliens are in the Bible, the coming of Nicolae Carpathia, or Genesis 1-11 talks about genetics? None. All three notions are guilty of ignoring historical context and reading modern fancies back into the Bible.
If that is going to be the way we read the Bible, let’s just say that when Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan!” to Peter, he wasn’t talking to Simon Peter the fisherman; he was really talking to Peter Enns 2,000 years in the future over how he was not submitting to the authority of the Bible. Does that make sense? If not, then why would it make sense for God to talk “modern science” to an ancient people?
But let’s get back to seeing what else Mrs. Mitchell can fire at Peter Enns.
Mitchell Puts Enns Back on the Firing Line
After calling Enns Satan, Mitchell then likens him to the Pharisees that Jesus accused of “replacing God’s truth with man’s fallible notions.” Well, not surprisingly, she gets a few things wrong. What Jesus was angry with the Pharisees is that they had “made a hedge” around the Torah, and then proceeded to call anyone, even their fellow Jews, “sinners” if they didn’t abide by the “oral tradition” that the Pharisees had developed in order to, as they thought, protect and defend the Torah. They weren’t “replacing” the Torah; they were adding extra things in order to protect and defend the Torah.
For example, the Torah said, “Keep the Sabbath holy, and rest on it; don’t do any work.” Well, that was just a bit too vague for the Pharisees. So, they developed extra rules (i.e. oral tradition) that said things like, “Picking grain on the Sabbath constitutes ‘work;’ healing the lame is considered ‘work;’ you can only take so many steps on the Sabbath—any more than what we determine is considered ‘work.’” None of their oral tradition was actually in the Torah, mind you. God had not really said any of it. But in their zeal to “defend” the Torah, they had come up with even more commandments to follow. Consequently, unlike Mitchell claims, they were not attempting to replace Torah commandments with their own—they actually thought their oral tradition was defending the Torah. That is what Jesus was condemning the Pharisees of.
Ironically that is the very thing Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis does—this is the heart of their “ministry”! In their attempt to “defend” the Bible, particularly Genesis 1-11, they have come up with their own pharisaic “oral tradition,” and proceed to condemn any and everyone who does not agree with it. Remember when the Pharisees accused Jesus of hanging out with “sinners”? Those “sinners” in the Pharisees’ eyes were fellow Jews who didn’t follow their “oral tradition”—that’s why the Pharisees called them “sinners.” In a similar fashion, what does Ken Ham call Christians who don’t believe the universe is 6,000 years old? Well, he doesn’t call them “sinners,” but he does call them “compromised Christians” who are undermining the Bible’s authority. Pretty similar, don’t you think?
Enns, on the other hand, is simply wrestling with what the Bible actually says, and is taking the historical and literary contexts seriously. He’s wrong on some points, correct on others—but he’s putting his thoughts out there so that people will read the Bible themselves, wrestle with what it means, and then engage in dialogue with other Christians so that the Holy Spirit could get to work, guiding us in all truth. That scares Answers in Genesis—they just want you to obey and submit to the Bible, which is really their own particular “oral tradition” of young earth creationism.
So Enns is Satan, and Enns is a Pharisee. That’s not all—Mitchell also accuses Enns of saying that all the reported historical events in the Bible are “biased stories that should be taken with a huge grain of salt.” She accuses Enns of saying the biblical writers were not “recording anything they ever witnessed themselves and suggests they merely recorded—and embellished at their own discretion—traditional tales and did so long after the actual events occurred.”
Now, I have to think that Mitchell is not purposely trying to misrepresent what Enns is saying—I think she honestly believes that’s what he is doing. The problem is that she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. Enns is making a fundamental point that every biblical scholar knows. The books of the Bible, be it Genesis, Exodus, Judges, I Kings, Matthew, Mark or Luke, were all written for a specific purpose, namely to convince people that YHWH is the true God, and that Jesus is truly the Messiah and God’s Son. That is what he was saying.
Yet Mitchell takes this to mean Enns is saying “The stories in the Bible are just biased!” Well, in a sense, of course they are biased! Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John weren’t trying to write an objective, unbiased account of the history of Jesus—they were convinced he was God’s Son, the long-promised Messiah, and they wrote their Gospels in order to convince their readers of that.
Furthermore, it is common knowledge that most of the historical books in the Old Testament were put in their final form probably during the Babylonian Exile. I think that the first five books of the Old Testaments certainly have roots that go all the way back to Moses, but I also acknowledge that they had undergone editing and revision during the exile. There are comments within the Torah itself that prove this. This is not some scandalous attack on God’s Word—it is understanding what God’s Word is. Yet Mitchell (and presumably Ham) cannot see this.
The Gospels…
Concerning the Gospels themselves, Mitchell claims that Enns says the Gospels contradict each other. Well, he doesn’t say that. What he does is point out that in addition to conveying the historical events of Jesus’ life and ministry, the Gospels are also literary works, and that the authors creatively fashioned their accounts as they saw fit. In other words, they had inspired, creative, literary license in the way they portrayed Jesus.
Now what is astounding about Mitchell’s accusation that Enns was saying the Gospels contradicted each other, is that she then turned around and essentially said the very thing that Enns was arguing! She says, “what we read in the Gospel accounts are the true accounts of many words and works of Jesus Christ from four different perspectives.” And then, in yet another astounding example of turning around and saying the same thing, Mitchell states, “But Enns sees all sorts of supposed contradictions between the Gospels, writing, ‘Just read the Gospels. They clearly give us very different portraits of Jesus’ instead of ‘one, clean, accurate version of the story.’”
I’m sorry, but all I can say is, WHAT? She is literally accusing of Enns of saying there are contradictions in the Bible, then stating herself that the Gospel are accounts from “four different perspectives,” then she criticizes Enns for saying the Gospels are “different portraits” of Jesus! I feel like Mugato from the movie Zoolander: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” Seriously, what can you say to that?
Mitchell also takes issue with Enns’ acknowledgement of yet another thing that every biblical scholar knows: Matthew and Luke copied significant portions of their Gospel accounts from Mark, and then elaborated, edited, and used a bit of creative license in their accounts. This is known as the “Synoptic problem”—of course it’s not really a problem; it is just an acknowledgment of something that is quite obvious. But Mitchell views such an acknowledgment the obvious with suspicion. She puts it this way:
“Indeed, it has become popular to assume that any place in the four Gospels in which the same words appear is evidence that the writers merely copied one another or a common source and that they should therefore be disregarded.”
Two things need to be said. First, they did copy each other—it is one of the most obvious things in the Gospels. Second, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, has ever suggested that the portions in the Gospels that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark should be disregarded. Yet Mitchell accuses Enns of saying this! I’m sorry, there’s no getting around it. That is a complete lie, put out there in an attempt to slander a biblical scholar who doesn’t hold to a young earth creationist view, pure and simple.
But wait a second! Believe it or not, immediately after the above statement, Mitchell turns around and says the very thing that Enns was saying:
“…gospel accounts provided from different perspectives should be expected to contain some parts in virtually verbatim agreement and other parts in which one writer focuses on certain details that another excludes.”
That’s basically what Enns was saying! The only difference is that he’s saying the changes that Matthew and Luke made were for literary reasons that helped shaped the overall themes and portrait of Jesus in their respective Gospels. It is simply mind-boggling to me how anyone who reads Mrs. Mitchell’s analysis wouldn’t be able to see such muddled, contradictory statements.
Tomorrow, we’ll see how Mitchell takes issue with Enns’ take on yet a few other things.
