Do Flood Stories Around the World Prove Oral Transmission Inaccurate?

Great Bishop of Geneva!: Does the Bible Say How Many Books It Has? · somewhere else: Not Hallucinations - Argument II · Creation vs. Evolution Do Flood Stories Around the World Prove Oral Transmission Inaccurate?

Lita Cosner made the point in an erroneous paper republished today on the collective blog of CMI:

Why did God give us a book?
by Lita Sanders, This article is from
Creation 37(4):16–17, October 2015
https://creation.com/why-book

Let's deal with this point before we go to the wider context:

God is associated more with the spoken word in Scripture than with the written word. So why inspire written documents? One very good reason is that written documents are less susceptible to ‘mutation’ over time.

Studies show that oral tradition, especially in societies with low literacy, is actually quite accurate, but as we can see with the Flood stories around the world, history passed down strictly orally has a tendency to change much faster than written documents.

The argument presupposes that Flood stories for instance of Norse Myth or of Mesopotamia started out as texts basically identic to the text of Genesis 6 to 9 and what we have is due to gradual mistakes in the transmission of one text. I disagree. The discrepancies are due to deliberate change.

For Norse Myth, I believe the source was a man known posthumously as Odin, falsely deified. I tentatively identify him with the Talmudic Yeshu, not the parts relating to Yeshu's execution, that would be blasphemous spoof on Our Lord, but the part when there is a disciple of Joshua ben Pekharia who is reprimanded by his master for being lustful (a characteristic the Norse myths certainly attribute to Odin, in a much less impressive way than Greeks attribute to Zeus) and who leaves him, who learns magic in Egypt, who founds an idolatrous sect (Judaism is here confusing the real idolatrous sect Odin founded among Swedes or more probably SWabians with Catholic Christianity, which is not idolatrous). When Odin's son Baldr had been killed in a battle, as we know from Saxo, he started an Osiris like worship of his son, and when he came to Uppsala - this may be legendary relocation for a locality within the then country of the Swabians - he starts out to make the former king there hallucinate*, and then goes on to initiate him into the secrets of "the true account" - that being Odin's own hotchpotch of Judaism, Khemetism or Egyptian Paganism, Zuism-Caldanism or Mesopotamian Paganism** and his own selectiveness.

The salient feature of the Norse Flood myth is, 1) only giants are killed in the Flood, 2) and men are created only after it. This is because the Flood is the blood of Ymir, father of the giants, and after it, the three brothers who killed him use his carcass to create the world. Well, ou world created from the carcass of a monster, that's Enuma Elish all over.***

Here, Odin can have chosen this approach to state the gods who made the flood happen are friendly to men, they only killed giants. That giants were killed in the Flood is true. Odin would have known that from Genesis 6. Do we have any evidence that Odin knew the Hebrew Bible? Yes, his Havamal, which we have in Old Norse, but which he would have given in Proto-Norse, a different language, if at all, is pretty close to Qohelet. And Jackson Crawford or a friend of his actually reconstructed stanzas from Havamal into the language form they would have had in Proto-Norse, and it is still metric - which is an argument for the poem having been around since Odin's days.

So, Odin has a clear theological agenda (of deception) in the changes given to the Flood story. So had the Babylonians. In the Hebrew story, one and the same God is concerned with both punishing men for misdeeds done to each other and saving a small family that was both innocent of misdeeds and clean from overly paranoia of getting exposed to them - perhaps because they were in a remote location, safe in the wilderness, while building the Ark° - by contrast, the flood waters and the salvation of one man with his household come from different gods in the Mesopotamian story. Enlil, god of justice and order is annoyed by men being many and loud, he gets a headache and decides the Flood in a tantrum. Enki, formerly shaper of man, and a trickster, his brother, decides, behind his back, to save Utnapishtim. That false theology is the main point of the Babylonian discrepancy from the Hebrew story. A subsidiary point is, Mesopotamians lived in a mostly inland culture and the description of the Ark became hard°° to comprehend, it was deliberately exchanged for an erroneous description of a coracle, but one of giant proportions. Odin who accessed both the Hebrew and the Babylonian descriptions refrained from describing the vessel on which Bergelmer (a giant) saved himself and his wife.

Hence, no, the various Flood stories do not prove that oral transmission, within one and the same culture and intended fidelity to original authors, would tend to change the text.

A change in theology or wider culture would provoke deliberate fiddling with the text, but oral transmission as such would not radically change it. Why is this relevant?

Lita Cosner is stating God gave us only a book and not an infallible oral tradition. This is a deliberate distancing from the Catholic view of how God reveals Himself to us, by Scripture and Tradition, preserved and faithfully exposed by the Magisterium. So, here is what she has to say on that:

But out of all the media through which God might have given us His revelation, why did He choose a written medium? Why didn’t He inspire an oral tradition that was passed down from generation to generation? Or some sort of visual medium other than text?

In fact, God gave us both. God spoke to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, to His disciples (12, 72, 500) during the forty days of the Easter Season before the Pentecost Novena, and to His disciples (12, 72, crowds) during the 3 and a half years of His public ministry. And also to St. Paul, by revelations. He did not intend for this teaching to be lost.

And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you for ever. ... But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you. (John 14:16 and 26)

And the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And seeing him they adored: but some doubted. And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Matthew 28:16 to 20)

Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle. (2 Thessalonians 2:14)

No indication anywhere that the oral tradition should cease. As to the visual medium, the Cross and the Shroud and Sudarium and the Holy Grave and the textile relics of Our Lady (She left veil and belt behind them) and the relics of apostles ...

So that even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs and aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the wicked spirits went out of them. (Acts of Apostles 19:12)

... and so much veneration for their bodies, that the Jews intended to deprive the Christians of the relics°°° of St. Polycarp under the pretext of saving them from worshipping that body instead of Jesus.

So, oral tradition, visual non-written medium, collection of books - in fact, God gave us all three of them. Not just one.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Satruday of Easter Octave
15.IV.2023

Footnotes:

* Every hallucination that either Saxo or Snorri attribute to Odin's "magic arts" is compatible with what a hypnotist can produce - not in the light hypnosis I sometimes use to compensate sleep loss, but in states "deeper down" on the Aron scale.
** I have written a series of comparisons showing how Norse Myth owes more to recorded Ancient Near East mythologies, than to any supposed and only reconstructed Indo-European mythologic influence.
*** Sumerian continued to be used into the 1st C BC and Akkadian into the 1st C AD, as learned languages. Eastern Turkish Edessa (aka Urfa, which some, me included, identify as Ur Kasdim) would in those days have been a centre of Babylonian pagan learning, and has been a centre of Esotericism since the official religion of the region became Christian or later other Monotheistic.
° 2 Peter 2:5 calls Noe a "preacher of righteousness" or "of justice" - which means he exposed his own person, when so preaching. He can still have had his family in a safe place.
°° I would say, the Bible also gives one example of substituting comprehensible words for such that would not be comprehensible - a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven (Genesis 11:4) can be understood by an ancient but not primevally post-Flood culture as what we would call a skyscraper, I think the immediate post-Flood culture was trying a hand at rocketry - the difference is, the words as I quoted them would be a very accurate description of a three step rocket. God's words in verse 6 of the chapter contain no "unless" or "lest" and promise success for the project - sth finally given when Apollo V took off at Cape Canaveral.
°°° Relics refers both to bodily remains and to textiles having touched the saint or God Himself, when it comes to the Shroud, Sudarium and Cross.