This essay is a faith-booster. It is intended to show you just how silly and desperate certain critics of the Bible can get.

This essay, for me, is a walk down memory lane. It is a profile of the first anti-Biblical book I rebutted as a Christian, some 20 years ago. You might say it was the second book that set my course. (The first, obviously, being the Scriptures themselves!)

Finally, this essay is a commentary on how ignorance has overwhelmed our society. Despite what you will read here, despite the fact that this is a book so incredibly off-the-wall that not even C. Dennis McKinsey would be fooled by it, it is a book that at least one person I know of takes as authoritative, and that many more certainly think of as food for thought. How diseased indeed has the life of the intellect become!

The book is Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (Citadel Press, 1975), and it is partly standard "pagan theft" thesis, partly New Age claptrap, partly conspiracy theory. It is filled with incomprehensible diagrams, polemic, and word games; it is a regular feature in catalogs sent to me (as a librarian) by Barnes and Noble, suggesting that it still sells well. The author is styled "Lloyd M. Graham", and we aren't told a thing about him; there is no bibliography to speak of, and little offered in the way of proof for what is asserted throughout. I won't need to say a lot about this one to convince you that it's no threat. It's obvious that this book belongs in the trash heap, to anyone with common sense. Problem is, there are a lot of folks who seem to be lacking that these days! (To this day, no one knows who Graham is, but his writing style and his ideas sound suspiciously like Alvin Boyd Kuhn.)

Graham, whoever he is, is a mean and arrogant one. He has to be: He starts his book with an outrageous thesis which would make even the worst of my ideological enemies laugh, namely, that all planets were once suns, and that our sun will someday burn out and become a planet...and that the Bible is just a collection of allegorical retellings of this thesis. Adam, Noah, the paschal lamb, Pharaoh-Necho, Jonah's gourd, Elisha's bald head, Jesus' tomb, Abraham's father Terah...all of these are actually symbolic of the Earth. (The latter is "proven" by noting that "Terah" sounds like the Latin terra, which means "earth".) The burning bush in Exodus is "the earth in its postsolar convulsions" [174] The priestly garments of the Levites have a hidden sexual symbolism. Tarshish (1 Kings 10:22) is really Tartarus, "the underworld of matter." [227] The virgin Mary is symbolically equivalent to Jonah's whale. [298] All of this Ancient Wisdom, we are told, has been edited out of the Bible by "power-seeking priests" [6] who couldn't bear the truth. Now aren't you glad Mr. Graham freed up your mind like that? (We're also told that the earth is older than the sun, and that the moon once had life...yes, all of this is found in the "Ancient Wisdom". Don't bother checking your local library for these facts.)

Now check out some of these word games. The older KJV versions of Genesis 3:1 read:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.

Of this, Graham says [61]"...is not the word for this subtle?" The old English spelling here affords him this explanation:

Subtil is from the Latin subtilus -- sub, beneath, and tela, web; and from tela we get texo, to weave, and textile, fabric. This is the real meaning of Satan's 'subtil' nature. In Evolution he refines the coarse, material earth and weaves it into etheric, astral and mental matter...

The Hebrew of Genesis 3:1, of course, refutes this quite handily (the word is 'aruwm -- cunning (usually in a bad sense):--crafty, prudent, subtil.), but we see what we have here: A mind not unlike the sorts that seek to prove British-Israelism; we are not far from Farrakhan's mathematics of the Washington Monument. (Not that Graham cares: In a later explanation of similar nature, he states that his explanation is true "regardless of etymology". [190] Good thing we have the "Ancient Wisdom" around to remind us not to consult dictionaries.) All of this sort of thing is supplemented by ideas that not even the most skeptical Biblical scholar would take seriously: Dating the Gospels at 170-185 AD; the Essenes are the same as the Christians (Why does this always seem to be part of the mix?); Jesus never existed as a person (Arthur Drews cited as chief authority on this!); and why not, Graves' 16 Crucified Saviors. It's a wild world out there in Grahamland.

How can Graham keep up this silliness? Mostly, by assuming a tone throughout his book to the effect of, "If you were as smart as I am, you'd know all of this already, you idiot." The current state of affairs, according to Graham, is entirely the fault of a conspiratorial cover-up by the priestly power structure, aided and abetted today by the legions of "Christendumb". Shape up out there, brethren.

Why does material like this, like Barbara Thiering's, like Robert Eisenmann's, like much of what I have addressed from Dan Barker, C. Dennis McKinsey, and so on, continue to persist? Who do people read and believe such nonsense or give any part of it credence? That's the spiritual lesson for today: Anyone who believes that the mind and reason cannot be corrupted by sin is fooling themselves. In the past decades since I first tore Lloyd M. Graham to ribbons, I have found this sort of thing repeated time and time again; current targets like Michael Martin are just the same thing in more sophisticated guise. We can blame our current state of education for some of this malfeasance (After all, how can you not blame a system that turns out college graduates that can't make change without electronic help from a cash register?), but the problem is too pervasive for the background cause to be simple ignorance. Such a state of affairs is perpetuated only when people want to remain ignorant, and that comes of a weakness of will, not of a weakness of the intellect.

And that's the sermon for this quarter. See you next time.