This article deals with modern scientific concepts found in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic texts written in the intertestamental period (i.e., between the Old and the New Testament writings) from around 300 BCE to around 500 CE (Barnstone, p. xx) but not found in the canonical (official) books of the Bible. My contention is: if the Bible is truly ‘God-driven’ or ‘God-inspired,’ these modern scientific concepts should also be found in Holy Scriptures. It begs the question, therefore: is the Bible truly God’s revelation, or man’s semi-blind search? Following are some examples.
Note: It goes without saying that we must not expect these ancient texts to be crystal clear using modern scientific terms, and some might be somewhat cryptic. For example, they are not going to use a term like ‘electromagnetic radiation’ because it didn’t even exist at the time of their writing: they will use a word like ‘light,’ which is a form of electromagnetic radiation, instead. Refer to my article entitled ‘Science in the Bible’ to see what to expect.
(1) Creation from Nothingness
The (first-century-CE) ‘Second Book of Enoch’ has, “First, I [God] created things from nonexistence into existence, and from invisible into visible. … I created everything from the highest to the lowest.” (Barnstone, p. 4)
Most Christians don’t realize that this is not what the Bible says in the book of Genesis: it says primordial waters existed as raw material; we read, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2, KJV, emphasis mine) This was prior to God’s creation of the earth and the universe: even before God created the first thing, light: “God said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3, KJV). The first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, KJV), is only a preamble or title to Genesis chapter 1.
Creation from nothingness was out-of-the-box thinking for the author of Genesis and his contemporaries. Confirming this, in her book, ‘A History of God’ (p. 7), religious affairs author and commentator, Karen Armstrong, states, “In Babylonian myth—as later in the Bible—there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world. Before either the gods or human beings existed, this sacred raw material had existed from all eternity. When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have been similar to the wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men.”
(2) Creation of Space
Not only matter, but apparently also space was created by God according to the Gnostics. The (second-century-CE) ‘Gospel of Truth’ has, “Each space which, on its part, is in the Father comes from the existent one, who, on his part, has established it from the inexistent.” (Barnstone, p. 293)
(3) Expanding Space
The (fourth-century-CE) ‘Haggadah’ (i.e., Jewish legend) has, “The heavens and the earth stretched themselves out in length and breadth as though they aspired to infinitude, and it required the word of God to call a halt to their encroachments.” (Barnstone, p. 18)
This sound like the expansion of space in our universe (discovered in 1929)—but excluding nearby galaxies.
In the Bible, we only find the concept of the ‘firmament’ being ‘beaten-out’ like a metallic canopy: the ‘stretching-out’ is in area not in volume (See Job 26:7, 37:18; Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 42:22, 44:24, 45:12, 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15; Psalms 104:2; Zechariah 12:1).
(4) Big Bang Theory
Introducing (second-century-CE) Basilides’s Gnostic system, Barnstone writes, “The Basilides system as given by Hippolytus begins with a cosmogony where there is nothing, neither spirit nor matter. But there is a nonexistent God who ‘wished’ … to make a universe. This was the first universe. But a second universe came about because the nonexistent universe contained a seed out of which our universe came.” (p. 627) Hippolytus, who was a second/third century Bishop of Rome, the first antipope, and Christian martyr, writes, “The seed of the universe had everything within it, just as the grain of a mustard seed, collecting everything in the smallest space, contains it all together.” (Barnstone, p. 630)
This sounds like our universe originating from a ‘singularity’ as proposed by the ‘big bang theory.’ However, in the interest of fairness, I fail to see how an inexistent God could possibly wish anything.
(5) Software
A software program is practically ‘an inexistent universe’: every kind of seed is programmed to produce a particular organism; but its program is intangible—one might even say ‘inexistent.’
(6) Light’s Timelessness
The (second-century-CE) ‘Secret Book of John,’ also known as the ‘Apocryphon of John,’ has, “It is the immeasurable Light, the holy and pure purity, the indescribable, perfect and imperishable. … Time does not belong to it. … Time is not allotted to it.” (Barnstone, pp. 53-54, emphasis mine)
This agrees with Einstein’s ‘Relativity Theory’: no time elapses over anything travelling at light’s speed.
(7) Light’s Duality
Again, in the ‘Secret Book of John,’ its author wonders: “Behold, a child appeared to me; but I saw the form of an old man in whom was light. When I looked upon him I did not comprehend this wonder. If it is a unity with many forms because of the light? Then its forms appear. If it is a unity, how would it have [these] aspects?” (Barnstone, p. 53)
This sounds like the duality of light in ‘Quantum Mechanics’: that light behaves both as a wave and as a particle (i.e., a photon).
(8) Blood Flow
In the ‘Damascus Document,’ written early in the first century BCE by the Qumran sect and discovered among the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ in 1947, we read about blood flow through veins and arteries: “the artery is full of blood,” it says. The authors-editors comment on this paragraph, “It displays a rudimentary knowledge of the circulation of the blood through arteries, a phenomenon not fully described until the seventeenth century by William Harvey.” (Wise, p. 64)
Conclusion
These ancient texts give us a glimpse of the tortuous path taken creating ‘Holy Scriptures.’ Some of the steps we’ve taken were good, others not. We would have regarded the above Gnostic concepts ‘revelations’ from God in the field of science had they been present. It makes one wonder, therefore, what criteria were used by Christianity (and God) in selecting the Bible’s canonical books.
Aptly, Barnstone comments, “In the second century [CE], Valentinus, a major Gnostic thinker, sought election as Pope of Rome. Surely the fixation of the New Testament in Carthage in 397 [CE] would have been drastically different had Valentinus succeeded; and what would have been the views of that former Gnostic, Saint Augustine, whose words so affected the conciliar decisions at Carthage? … As [essayist] Jorge Luis Borges notes in his essay on the Gnostics, ‘Had Alexandria triumphed rather than Rome, these esoteric writings would today seem perfectly ordinary.’” (pp. xviii, xxv)
References
Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1994. (ISBN: 9780345384560)
Barnstone, Willis, Ed. The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha, Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, and Dead Sea Scrolls, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. (ISBN: 9780060815981)
The Holy Bible: King James Version. Oxford, UK, 1769. (KJV)
Wise, Michael, Michael Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, Eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. (ISBN: 9780060766627)
Author’s Books
For those readers who might be interested in buying any of my books, following are the publisher’s (iUniverse’s) links. If you find the hard copies expensive, the soft copies are only US$3.99 each. Should you decide to buy any of my books, kindly also remember to leave a review after reading it (2 or 3 sentences would do).
(1) Is God a Reality?—A Scientific Investigation: https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/740913-Is-God-a-Reality.
(2) Is the Bible Infallible?—A Rational, Scientific, and Historical Evaluation: https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/792987-is-the-bible-infallible, and
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