Myth of the Modern Man

As many people come to the Bible, they bring with them a peculiar bias. It's one they probably don't even realize they have. Nevertheless, it's the starting point for a train of thought that casts doubt on the accuracy of Scripture and can lead one far from the path of God. I call it the Myth of the Modern Man.

It goes like this: Our modern society has mastered electricity, the combustible engine, canned foods, computer technology, the Internet, satellite television and many other advanced technologies. We've figured out human psychology to the extent that we've got it all documented in the DSM. We've mapped the human genome and can trace our DNA ancestry back hundreds of thousands of years. We no longer hunt and gather, engage in bartering or fight each other with pointy sticks (most of us, anyway). We are so much more advanced technologically and sociologically than other previous peoples that it follows that we must be vastly smarter than they were, too.

From this foundation proceeds the idea that the Bible just can't be right. After all, people back then thought that the gods controlled the weather and demons caused epilepsy. Since we who are vastly superior intellectually know those things can't be true, we have no reason to trust them to have gotten anything else right, either. Everyone knows that people don't get swallowed up by a fish and then vomited out three days later. There might have been a king named David, but most of what is written about him is legend, you see. Jesus may have been a nice guy, but he didn't really rise from the dead--these things just don't happen! Even though we are removed from the events of the Bible by many thousands of years more than the original authors, we second-guess them from our Modern throne and say, "But of course it didn't really happen like that."

A cursory examination of architectural and artistic history sheds light on the Myth of the Modern Man, however. The great pyramids, for example, are very large and intricate structures that are extremely precise in their layout. They still rank among the wonders of the world. They were made by humans long ago without the aide of computers, machines or even metal tools. Try making a pyramid using only your brain and a stone hammer--not so easy, is it? Much the same can be said for Stonehenge and many of the buildings erected by early peoples of the Americas. Machu Picchu's architects created an intricate system to provide the location with water from a nearby spring, and they devised an underground drainage system to prevent the torrential rains from washing the whole place off the mountaintop--a system which has been working quite well for the last 600 years. Artistically speaking, I will never forget an example I saw at a museum in Kansas City a few years ago. Archaeologists had found a piece of jade which had been fashioned into a 6" cube and had a 1" hole drilled through its center. Jade is a material that is harder than diamonds, yet someone thousands of years ago was able to drill a hole through six inches of the stuff (for merely aesthetic reasons, nonetheless!). To this day, no one knows how the feat was accomplished.

The examples go on and on, but the point is clear: Earlier peoples were just as smart and ingenuous as we are. They mastered the materials of their day (stone, iron, etc) and created wonderful and lasting works without the aid of our modern contrivances. They created such fundamental things as writing and philosophy, which are the building blocks of our own society. Their only tools were whatever they could find around them and their wits, and they used them skillfully. These were smart people. And if they were able to do all of this, does it not follow that they could perceive events just as well as we? And is not the corollary also true that they could sniff out a fishy story just as well as we?

And yet, unlike us, the early biblical writers did believe the stories they heard and documented. The stories made sense to them; something about them rang true. Maybe they even had a grandfather who told them what it was like to serve King David. Maybe they were well aware of a type of aquatic animal that could swallow a man whole. Maybe they knew some of the 500 people who saw the resurrected Christ with their own eyes. Maybe things did happen differently and for different reasons in another time and another place.

So the next time you are tempted to read the Bible and ask, "Did it really happen like that?" think about living without the benefits of modern technology. How long would you last? How observant would you have to be to completely sustain yourself and your family using only what you could hunt, trade or grow from the land? How long would you last in such an environment if you believed everything anybody told you? The answers to these questions might persuade you that those folks might have indeed known and recorded what really happened.