Genesis 1-11

Is Genesis a historical account? Does the answer have to be "yes" for it to be biblical truth?

My roommate made the point a few weeks back that based on the narrative nature and ambiguities with scientific study, he thought Genesis 1-11 (basically everything before Abram) was fictional. It has all sorts of weird stuff: God calling Himself "us" on a regular basis, the Tower of Babel, the Flood -- all these things that present a lot of challenges to the way we think of God today, if we really sit down and think about it. So Peter argues that Genesis 1-11, based on modern scientific evidence and differences in writing style, is narrative, rather than historical.

That's not as iconoclastic as it seems at first -- in the same way, I think Job in many respects is likely a fable, rather than a historical occurrence. We take stories from the Bible all the time that do genuinely reflect God's character and nature, like Jesus's parables. They're not any less true for us because they didn't happen in real life.

But what implications does that have for the Fall? It would mean that humanity didn't inherit sin from Adam's poor life decision, but it's just generally a sin nature that we have. Which is fine on a day-t0-day basis, but what do we make of scriptures like Romans 5, which talks in great significance of the transgression of Adam and the big hairy start of sin?

A possible counterargument might be the strong suggestion that there were other people created outside of Adam's lineage. I think most people think that Adam and Eve didn't just pump out two boys, one of whom murdering the other, as the basis for starting mankind. Something doesn't really add up there. So what about the other people that God probably created outside of Adam? They probably have a sin nature too that they didn't inherit from Adam. Maybe Adam was only symbolic of the entrance of sin into the world, and if that's the case, it's okay that he could be fictional.

I run into more relevant problems in the gospels. In the beginning of Matthew, the book traces the lineage of Jesus from Abraham, which is fine. In Luke 3, the lineage goes all the way back to Adam. The Jews of this period validated their writing and corroborated the veracity of their main characters by including detailed accounts of lineage, as if to say, look, this person is legit, and here are the connections you should be making to realize that I'm telling you a historical truth. So could that historical authenticity end once we pass Abram and start getting into those mythical crazies like Methuselah? I have some familiarity with the diligence and attention to detail that the Jewish culture puts on scriptural preservation -- I have a really hard time believing that they would chronicle a partially fictional lineage.

One of the wild cards is, how much of the first five books did Moses get from God on Mt. Sinai? Did God give him that ancient history, or was some of it preserved by the Hebrew people? Did God tell him to write about his own death? I don't know a lot about how the Torah was put together, whether in one solid revelation from God, or piecewise, but that would certainly affect whether Jewish scholars were passing on history that man preserved or that God gave them. If God gave Moses the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah, then who am I to question their truth? Am I confident in the Scripture and its real, honest-to-God truth, outside of what did or didn't happen historically? Yes. So in a sense, my question about historical happenings doesn't really matter. I mean, I don't really follow Hugh Ross's creation science anyway, so it's not like I'm running into a huge wall reconciling the age of the earth with my faith. I'm not the sort of person who gets hung up on the challenges presented by dinosaur bones and dark energy and their reconciliation with the Bible. Just doesn't interest me that much.

It'd still be nice to know.
I feel that way about a lot of things.