Quotes from Justin Martyr in "Apologia"

Justin Martyr believed that the Old Testament figure of Yahweh was the Son:

"Apology" Chapter 63:

"No one knoweth the Father, but the Son; nor the Son but the Father, and those to whom the Son will reveal Him."(7) The Jews, accordingly, being throughout of opinion that it was the Father of the universe who spake to Moses, though He who spake to him was indeed the Son of God, who is called both Angel and Apostle, are justly charged, both by the Spirit of prophecy and by Christ Himself, with knowing neither the Father nor the Son. For they who affirm that the Son is the Father, are proved neither to have become acquainted with the Father, nor to know that the Father of the universe has a Son; who also, being the first-begotten Word of God, is even God. And of old He appeared in the shape of fire and in the likeness of an angel to Moses and to the other prophets; but now in the times of your reign,(8) having, as we before said, become Man by a virgin, according to the counsel of the Father, for the salvation of those who believe on Him, He endured both to be set at nought and to suffer, that by dying and rising again He might conquer death. And that which was said out of the bush to Moses, "I am that I am, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and the God of your fathers,"(9) this signified that they, even though dead, are let in existence, and are men belonging to Christ Himself. 

That Christ was the first born of God, as the Word. And this word "Logos" means rationality or reasoning principle, and thus he equates reasonable men as godly men of faith and unreasonable ones as wicked...

Chapter 46

But lest some should, without reason, and for the perversion of what we teach, maintain that we say that Christ was born one hundred and fifty years ago under Cyrenius, and subsequently, in the time of Pontius Pilate, taught what we say He taught; and should cry out against us as though all men who were born before Him were irresponsible—let us anticipate and solve the difficulty. We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably(5) are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably. But who, through the power of the Word, according to the will of God the Father and Lord of all, He was born of a virgin as a man, and was named Jesus, and was crucified, and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, an intelligent man will be able to comprehend from what has been already so largely said. 

Christ is the Word and First-begotten

Chapter 23

that we claim to be acknowledged, not because we say the same things as these writers said, but because we say true things: and (secondly) that Jesus Christ is the only proper Son who has been begotten by God, being His Word and first-begotten, and power; and, becoming man according to His will, He taught us these things for the conversion and restoration of the human race: 

The whole work is here.

Is Two-Population Model more Christ-centered than Traditional Teaching on Adam?

An excerpt from a post I made on "Peaceful Science".

I very much enjoyed the office hours with Lutheran guests (and regulars) at Peaceful Science. If you have not read it, it is worth checking out for the distinctive 1 (and I think proper) way they have of looking at creation and the tension between tradition and exploring new ideas. The have a tradition of “Sola Scriptura” like Luther himself, but at the same time they have doctrine on some things which means that they don’t go only from the scriptures, but the scriptures through a lens of their own tradition. On matters such as this I think it creates a natural tension, which they are more comfortable with than some denominations. In looking at creation for example, they start with the Resurrection and look back to see what that says about Creation rather than starting with Creation. The beginning point is always Christ. And properly done He’s the ending point as well. 

Unfortunately the dialog ended just as they were beginning to explore the viability of the two-population model. That is, the idea that the biblical role of Adam is not to be the sole genetic progenitor of humanity, but rather to be the progenitor of the line of Messiah who would redeem humanity. There were other humans present outside the garden of Eden. 

It is my contention that this view of Adam is far more scriptural and Christ-centered than the traditional view. IOW, it should be a better fit for Lutherans than the traditional view. Romans 5:14 says of Adam that he is a “figure of Him who was to come”. That is, Christ. That’s his scriptural role. And of course Christ is portrayed in scripture as a brother to those of us who are believers, not a father. See Hebrews 2:11, 2:17, Romans 8:29. 1st Cor. 15 says that Adam was the first man, in the way that Christ was the last man! 

I could go on, but I’d like to start a conversation, not a monologue. The two-population model is more Christ-centered than the traditional view because it is a better fit at making Adam a figure of Christ than the traditional view. That this view of the text was not publicly supported in ancient Judaism is not surprising. Pandora’s family wouldn’t want to go around hollering that they were the clan that opened the box either. Best to pass over that part, especially given the history of persecution they endured. 

That it is hinted at but not discussed in the epistles is not so much cause for concern as one might think either because the epistles tell us that they didn’t tell us everything. Consider the last half of Hebrews Chapter Five and the first few verses of chapter six. 

1Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith in God, 2instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrectionof the dead, and eternal judgment. 3And this we will do, if God permits.… 

It was clear there was more the writer wanted them to know but they were hung up on the “milk of the word”. He had a lot to say (5:11) about the mysterious OT figure Melchizedek which he didn’t get around to saying. And if you go down that list in chapter six, that milk is pretty much all the Lutherans are talking about now. The other evangelical denominations don’t even talk about that! When is the last time there was “a lot to say” about Melchizedek from your pulpit? 

So let’s talk about the two-population model, any of them not just the one I am advocating, but Genealogical Adam or whatever else is out there.. Not just because it best matches what nature is saying to us about humanity, but because it is more Christ-centered than the version of events which the Christian church inherited from Judaism.

Science and Perceiving God

That "science" doesn't see God isn't an argument. It's a rhetorical trick. Under methodological naturalism science can't see God even if God were standing right in front of it. Science is a procedure which is conducted to detect for laws only. It is incapable of detecting any lawgiver.

An analogy would be lawyers trained to go about the legal libraries looking in various texts with a mission of determining what the laws were. If they were constrained to that process, then by that process they could never detect the human beings- the legislators - who drafted the bills which became those laws. Even if the legislators wandered the halls of the libraries crying out "it was me, I drafted such and such a law" the process of looking at the text for what is written there could not detect them. If the lawyers doing the searching desired to be obstinate and deny the existence of the legislators, they could semi-honestly report back that their search of the laws gave them no indication that any legislators existed.

To see the lawgiver one must take off the "hat" of methodological naturalism and look at things as a human, not very narrowly as a "scientist". If it weren't for sin in our hearts this would be easy to do. This is because the order, diversity, interconnectedness and beauty of nature cries out "there is a Creator God" as mentioned in Romans chapter one. But the respectability of science and what it has done for mankind has allowed some hearts to use this as a shield to prevent them from perceiving that which they ought to see, not as scientists but as men. They can deny the Lawgiver exists because they have found, in their search for the laws, only laws and no Lawgiver. That they could not expect to find a  Lawgiver in a search only for laws is conveniently set aside for the temporary comfort that escape from accountability brings. The pity is that lasting comfort for escape from accountability is only available through that same Lawgiver in the mercy and atonement accessed via faith in Christ.

My book on Early Genesis

Early Manuscripts of Jude Support the Christ-centered Model on Theophanies.

Some of you may know that the Christ-Centered model has the Son taking the form of a Man in Heaven from the beginning, and that all of those anthropogenic appearances of Yahweh in the Old Testament were Him, not God hopping in and out of human form. The Two Powers theology of the ancient Hebrews supports this view. Now it turns out, there is support for it in Jude as well. Verse five reads...

5 Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord[c]at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe.

If you will click on that tiny "c" after the word "Lord" in the verse above it will take you to this footnote. It says that many early manuscripts say "Jesus" here. In other words, Jude identifies Yahweh who led Israel out of Egypt as our Lord Jesus Christ. This fits what is said in the book. When the people of Israel looked at God, the pre-incarnate form of Christ was who they were supposed to see.


For more details, please watch this video on theophanies below or get the book..

Two Powers Theology a Stunning Confirmation of the Christ-Centered Model

What is two powers theology? A professor of Hebrew described it for me this way: A significant minority Jewish position pre-70 AD saw two YHWHs in the Hebrew Bible (one visible, one invisible). The visible YHWH shows up in many ways, particularly as the Angel of YHWH (also, the Word, the Presence, and others). Simply put, this is Jewish binitarianism, providing the theological backdrop to Trinitarianism. This is why it was declared heresy by the Jews after the rise of Christianity. So it’s both grounded in the OT text (wthin human authorial intent) and receives progressive revelation in the NT.

Here is a link to a long Michael Heiser video on the Hebrew "Two Powers" theology. It gives the scriptural support for the position described above. He also gives a brief written introduction to the idea when writing about a book called "The Two Powers of Heaven". Part of what he says is this...

For the orthodox Israelite, Yahweh was both sovereign and vice regent—occupying both “slots” as it were at the head of the divine council. The binitarian portrayal of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible was motivated by this belief. The ancient Israelite knew two Yahwehs—one invisible, a spirit, the other visible, often in human form. The two Yahwehs at times appear together in the text, at times being distinguished, at other times not.

 Early Judaism understood this portrayal and its rationale. There was no sense of a violation of monotheism since either figure was indeed Yahweh. There was no second distinct god running the affairs of the cosmos.

 Dr. Heiser and I don't see everything alike. He sees the "Divine Council" everywhere in the Old Testament scriptures, and I see Christ everywhere in the Old Testament scriptures. I do think there is such a council, but the text is really pointing to Christ. The incarnation is not God's back-up plan that He had to resort to once things failed to go as He anticipated. It was His plan. From the beginning. The human-like form of God in the Old Testament was the Son all along.

I did not know about Two Powers theology in history when I wrote Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology. But its a stunning confirmation of everything I wrote about the Theophanies, some of which is in this video....

Get the Book

A Dialog With Scott on the Clarity of God's Call to Repentence

it's a peculiar God who would expect any human being who wants to truly understand his divine word and instructions to become literate in ancient Hebrew in order to do so. If one thinks God was the ultimate author of this story that is.

It's perfectly consistent with a God who makes the plan of salvation both simple and centered on faith. That is, what you know about who He is gives you confidence that there is a solution for the things that are a mystery to you. And I don't see the God of scripture making His truths easy to understand because they are for those who love the truth enough to seek it out even when its hard. I think its a misconception to think He wants to make it so easy to find that some person who has little to no interest in it can't help but see it.

A "simple" plan of salvation? What's simple about this:- Have a plan of ultimate salvation that is of utmost importance to every human being who will ever live, whom you love and cherish more deeply than they can ever know.- Say nothing to humanity about it for the first two hundred thousand years humans walk the Earth, as they struggle in ignorance and misery.- Eventually reveal that plan in bits and pieces not to, say, the Chinese, who are the most populous and most literate at the time, but to an isolated desert tribe. Don't even consider revealing it to everyone at once.- Know that human beings speak many languages, but reveal the plan only in one or two of them, languages that you know will not be read or spoken by most of the human beings who will later be born.- Leave the plan not on indestructible material, but on fragile parchments destined to decay or be destroyed. In some cases, such as the vital life story of your own incarnation and ultimate act of redemption on Earth, don't bother writing it down. Let it be passed by word of mouth for several decades first.- Over the next several thousand years, watch as humans argue, fight, and slaughter each other over the details and meaning of the plan, as they distort, misinterpret, exploit, miscopy, and mistranslate it. Do nothing while this happens.- When someone from a rural village in Africa dies and stands before your throne in judgement, having spent much of their life simply walking for hours daily to get clean water, tell them that your desires were clear and perhaps they should have taken some time out to go learn to read ancient Hebrew so they would have known what you wanted of them. Deny them admittance into Heaven.

What utter nonsense. There are already plenty of ways in which faith in God is already said to be a challenge, like succumbing to temptation, dealing with adversity, or being distracted by wealth, and those at least have some halfway sensible arguments behind them (some, not all). But to say that God intentionally expects everyone to learn to read Hebrew just to understand what he has to say to us in the first place is the height of absurdity. No cosmic being of such bumbling incompetence and stupidity, or perverse maliciousness, exists. And on the slight chance that one does, it is by this utter failure of communication undeserving of worship.
 

What is simple about it is that God saves those who trust Him over their own righteousness regardless of whether they have access to any of that other information. Abraham didn't have most of that stuff on your list, yet he "believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness." Nothing has changed since the Garden of Eden. It has always been about whether we would trust God or decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. That's the real message of the Book.

Putting aside for the moment your total inability to actually know any of that, let's work with that idea. So we don't actually need any of the Bible at all, since even people who have been unable to read it will still be judged fairly. That's good to know, but it raises some additional puzzles. Why would God bother with inspiring the writing (and assembly, and editing) of divine commands, plans, and other revelations that we now know are not only incompetently executed (for the purpose of clear communication to all of humanity) but also unnecessary? Whence comes "The Great Commission," the imperative in Acts and other New Testament books to go unto the world and proclaim the Gospel? It's obviously a pointless exercise as far as actual salvation goes, since you tell us that having understood the Bible correctly in its original languages isn't required. I guess it must just be a general information campaign then? But the issue of incompetent communication still sticks to that. Even if spreading the Word is just about giving people useful but optional background information, that information is STILL misunderstood, mistranslated, miscopied, exploited, fought over, and treated by many AS IF people really do need it for salvation. And God doesn't consider this a misunderstanding worth clearing up, it seems.

But as I mentioned at the start of this comment, you have no means of knowing such things about God anyhow. It's a fabricated backpedal in the face of obvious evidence against the God you believe in, to try and wave this evidence away and claim the point doesn't matter in the first place. Were there actually an omnipotent God with an intent to communicate anything at all to all of humanity, it would do so in ways that were unambiguous, universally received, and unaffected by the passage of time or the failings of its recipients. Having Jesus make himself literate and writing down a single unalterable, imperishable, and indisputable account of his own life as it happened would be the barest minimum we should expect from this effort. We have nothing close to this. Such a being doesn't exist.

Since God doesn't conduct His affairs the way to your approval He must not exist? That's your argument? It's awful. It would be one thing if God said in scripture "I am going to make all of this plain so that anyone can see it even without trying". But He says the exact opposite. He speaks in parables just so they wouldn't get it unless they really sought it out. The true measure is not to compare what happened in human history to the way YOU think God ought to behave, but rather if how He says in His word that He operates is consistent with what we see. But to do that you would have to consult scripture, not your own gut. For this one though, I'll do it for you.. Ephesians 3:4-9 and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, 1 Corinthians 2:7 Verse Concepts but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; Colossians 1:25-27 that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Ephesians 1:9-10 He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him Colossians 2:2 Verse Concepts that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, Revelation 10:7 Verse Concepts but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, then the mystery of God is finished, as He preached to His servants the prophets. Mark 4:11 Verse Concepts And He was saying to them, "To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables, Proverbs 25:2 It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.  The conclusion is that most truth is not easy to find. It is meant, not even for the wise, but for those who love it.

Since God doesn't conduct His affairs the way to your approval He must not exist?Where did I say anything about my approval? I'm talking about what's likely, given what you and other believers claim about God. I'm told:- God is omnipotent, which includes intelligence and competence in carrying out asserted goals or plans- God loves all human beings- God is eternal- God consciously desires to communicate certain plans, commands, choices, and other information to ALL human beings, not just for casual interest but because we need to know it From those claims we should expect that communication to be carried out in a way that is clear, unambiguous, universally received and understood by all human beings (past, present, and future), and unalterable or distortable by the passage of time, by human error, or by purposeful human effort. This is basic logic about clearly understandable claims and evidence, just like if someone claimed there was a shooting in a certain place then the police would expect to find bullets, empty shells, or similar evidence that is expected at such scenes. If they don't find it, the occurrence of a shooting becomes less likely. Likewise, the lack of unambiguous, clear, and universal communication from God makes one or more of those claimed traits far less likely, which is to say a being with all those traits likely doesn't exist.

Those claims I just listed are virtually universally held among Christians, so you can't just pretend nobody's ever made them while you're pasting your convenient list of verses which contradict them. If God is ENTIRELY mysterious, as you're trying to imply as a way of dodging what I've pointed out previously, then you'll have to square that somehow with the very non-mysterious claims about God I just cited. The fact of the matter here is that like many Christians before you, you're pulling the "God is mysterious" card only when you're backed into a corner and don't want to give up any of the core non-mysterious claims about God you want to hold on to. God is loving...except when he appears to do non-loving things, which is just a "mysterious" kind of love we don't understand. God wants to communicate to us and have a relationship with us...except when he has a mysterious reason for remaining silent. God is creative, inventive, and intelligent...except when he has mysterious reasons for appearing to be an incompetent, inattentive bumbler. God hates evil...except that he lets it slide all the time, for mysterious reasons. Sorry, it doesn't wash. How handy to have a reusable "get out of jail free" card for God labeled "mystery", except that you believers are the only ones who swallow such obvious "just because" reasoning. A being which has a whole set of very specific, understandable, predictable, and well-defined traits and yet also doesn't behave according to them, for reasons no one can enumerate or give evidence for, is a bizarre being indeed. That bizarreness, by definition, makes his existence even less likely. 

God consciously desires to communicate certain plans, commands, choices, and other information to ALL human beings, not just for casual interest but because we need to know it

Key word, certain plans. Salvation through faith has been around for a long time. Longer than the crucifixion, which was a clear and purposeful and universally understandable message that 1) our sins are serious, more serious than we can atone for in our own strength, and 2) He loves us enough that He will live the life of faith and obedience that we could not while taking in Himself the penalty due us. And only by this accounting can God be both infinitely just and infinitely merciful. So I don't say "God is entirely mysterious". You said I claimed that, but its not what I said. There are things we know about Him. But at the same time, His ways are beyond our ways. In particular those who don't want to know Him do not get shown what those who do want to know him get shown. If you gave your intimate life details to every girl who passed by what would your sweetheart think? What would the girls think? Some truths are reserved for those who treasure them. Salvation is simple. It's not easy because it forces us to be honest with ourselves that He is holy and we are not, but its simple. But we will never know Him fully this side of the vail. And that's OK. He's God after all, are we supposed to completely understand His ways without mystery before we trust Him? Surely nothing has changed since the garden. We are willing to trade paradise for the ability to judge for ourselves what is good and what is evil.

First, I accept your correction on saying God is entirely mysterious. I shouldn't have summarized your comments that way. What I probably should have said is that you're taking aspects of God's nature (as claimed by Christians) that are almost universally given very clear and non-mysterious descriptors, but then adding extra unspecified and unsupported mystery to them when our experience of the world contradicts them. "God has a message of redemption for all people." There's nothing mysterious about that, or about God's omnipotence, which should carry with it the capability to actually get that message out to ALL people in an effective way. Pausing there for a moment, if God also has truly mysterious plans that have nothing to do with that, like mysterious plans for black holes, or a different redemption plan for a species on another planet, I could make no logical objection to that other than to say you have no way of knowing even that fact. But those aren't the plans we're concerned with here.

When we face the fact that God is obviously not, and has not been, communicating that message of redemption effectively to all people (by what an omnipotent being should be able to do), the conclusion is not that God also has a mysterious reason for neglecting to communicate effectively, but that he either doesn't actually have that desire, or isn't capable of carrying it out, or both. The only way for us to hang on to those two non-mysterious claims about him is if you were to produce actual evidence or proof of whatever mysterious quirk prevents God from living up to those descriptions. 

All I'm doing here is what we all do with people around us all the time: watch their behavior and from that build up a sense of what they are really like, from repeated experience. If you have a co-worker who hardly ever talks to anyone and rebuffs attempts at friendship, you're not going to mentally label them as "really outgoing, but with a mysterious reason for not talking to anyone"; you're just going to label them as anti-social. Now if someone reveals to you that for the last three months that normally outgoing person has been going through a divorce and has been given a high-pressure project by the boss, well there's the reason and you might then accept the claim of them being really outgoing, under normal circumstances. But you have to prove that the mysterious reason is actually there. Until you do, you have to expect people to push back on you when you call something a duck that never looks like a duck, swims like a duck, or quacks like a duck.

Someone accepts correction on a You Tube discussion thread? I am glad I was sitting down when I read that! Thank you for the teachable attitude. It is the only way any of us can get better, but most won't accept the cost getting better if it involves admitting they were wrong in the first place. If they did, we'd have a lot more Christians, and the ones we had would be better Christians. Now you write God is obviously not, and has not been, communicating that message of redemption effectively to all people (by what an omnipotent being should be able to do), the conclusion is not that God also has a mysterious reason for neglecting to communicate effectively, but that he either doesn't actually have that desire, or isn't capable of carrying it out, or both. Well its been the largest religion in the world for the last 1,000 years so its not like He's Thor or whoever ran things in Zoroastrianism. But I think your complaint is that ALL people are not getting the message, but only a relative few compared to the total number of people, and that this indicates that God is either not that caring or not that powerful. I believe your conclusion leaves out possibilities, and not just possibilities but those which comport with just the scenario that the Holy Writ describes. One is your assumption that God wants to communicate effectively His message of salvation to every human being. The scripture only teaches that He "desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." But there is a difference between being all powerful and using that power to over-ride the free will of all humans. IE- He gives up what He desires out of respect for the choices of the people who have no love for the truth and thus would not want to spend an eternity in His presence, for His Word is Truth. He desires them to be saved, and permits them to be saved, but that is not the same thing as compelling them to be saved. And the evidence from scripture is that He knows who many if not all of these people are. They are not interested in truth but if the evidence was too "in their face" maybe they would be compelled by the evidence to accept His goodness even if they hated to admit it. And so when speaking to such people He deliberately obscures the message lest people who hated truth had it shoved into their faces anyway. See Matthew 13:12-15 for a perfect example. Another good one is the parable of Lazarus and the Rich man near the end of Luke chapter 16. The rich man in hell is making the same argument you are. That his brothers would turn around and love the truth if only the message were presented clearer and more starkly. Father Abraham denies this, saying if they would not listen to the prophets they would not listen even if someone rose from the dead. This is a pretty consistent trait even back in the OT. In fact the Matthew passage is quoting from the OT. I think the classic example is Pharaoh. At the first miracles, he hardened his heart. But God kept the miracles coming to the point where he couldn't resist the truth of God anymore even if he tried with all his might. But he wasn't a man who loved the truth, he was just being forced to see it in a way that he lacked the will to resist in his own strength. So subsequently scripture records that God hardened Pharaoh's heart! God was like "I am going to show how powerful I am through your refusal to heed me, but that's going to give you something that you don't really want- seeing my greatness. So I am going to use my power to PREVENT you from seeing it even though in yourself you would have been compelled to." So though I think your reasoning would stand if your premises were correct, the premises you are reasoning from don't fit those that are laid out in scripture. Your conclusions are not invalid to some conceptions of God, but they don't apply to the God of the Bible. There are some people He knows are no good before they are even born, and whatever His desires for them, they are going to go a different way. So it is written "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated." So God is as effective as He wants to be in communicating His message. And billions of humans have gotten the message with far less opportunity to do so than you or I and its not over yet. Sometimes He sent His prophets to pester people with the truth about themselves that they hated to hear, and they mostly killed and persecuted them. So most of the time, His SOP, is that He does not do that. If we sincerely want to know Him He will move heaven and earth to introduce Himself, But that does not mean that He is in the habit of wasting energy proving Himself before a heart which has no real desire for Him to be real. He is not the beggar here, we are. Those who recognize that, He makes into kings.  Now I could say a lot, and do say a lot in my book, about what Yahweh went through in His dealings with man. He was hurt deeply by the attitude of people when He only meant to do them good. It's in the pages of the book for all who care to see it. So there is some of what you write about in there.

Homo Sapiens Idaltu Gets Kicked Out of the Family

I visited a "Skeleton Museum" recently. It was a large and well-displayed collection of all sorts of bones. Among them were models of the skulls of Cro-Magnons and other hominids. Now you may or may not know that I take a narrower view of what is "human" than those who want to lump all kinds of different species under the "human" label. To me "human" = "Homo Sapiens."  For example, I think the Jebel Irhoud finds from 300,000 years ago are not those of humans, but rather examples of the mysterious Denisovans or what later become Denisovans. Never mind for now the reasons why I believe that, but because I do I thought until my museum trip that the oldest "human" fossils were Omo I and Herto where "Homo Sapiens Idaltu" was recovered. Basically the way Idaltu is named means it is considered a sub-species of our own. And it's dated to 160,000 years ago.

Omo I is said to be the older of the two, if correctly dated, and it was not in this collection, but the Idaltu skull was there, right next to a couple of Cro-Magnon examples, Neanderthal examples, an Erectus and even a sample of Homo floresiensis, the "Hobbit".

Until I walked into this museum, I agreed with the judgement that Homo Sapiens Idaltu was a member of our species, albiet a robust one with hefty brow ridges. It really is surprising how your perception can change between looking at pictures of a skull verses having a three dimensional model in front of you. After getting a close look at those samples side by side, I no longer believe that. Basically the back half of the skull has the globular shape of a modern human and as a result of this the dome of the skull is slightly higher than that of a Neanderthal, even one from over 100,000 years later. The mid-face does not protrude.Those are the parts that look human. The front of the skull however, is very primitive with brow ridges if anything more prominent than Neanderthals. There is a "bone line" from the outside corner of the brow ridge along the skull at an even lower angle than those neanderthal skulls and nothing like the Cro-Magnon skulls. The skull dwarfed those of modern humans in both overall size and robustness.

On the other hand, the Homo floresiensis skull looked a lot like what I would suppose a juvenile Idaltu would look like. That is, reduce the brow ridges and make it smaller and more "child-like" and it would look most similar to the "hobbit" skull. Now you may remember that there was a big dust-up when the "Hobbit" skulls were first discovered because of the claim that they were the skulls of diseased humans, and not that of another species. Over time it was realized that even though the skull had some Sapiens-like features, overall it was too different throughout the whole skeleton to be considered one of us. The hobbit skulls are not over 50K years old and probably much more recent than that. To me they look like a version of Idaltu which suffered from island dwarfism. They too are globular in the back but more primitive in the front of the skull. They too have a fairly small face which does not push forward as much as many hominids but unlike Idaltu, florensis has strong cheek bones.

:LATER EDIT- A recent find fits with Herto/Idultu even better, and that is Homo Longi from China 146,000 years ago. Except for a larger nasal passage- it lived in colder weather - there are a lot of similarities. Could they be regional variations of the same species?

I think what we are finding is that there are many composite hominids. That is they may well have some features consistent with modern humans but lack others. The modern looking feature will vary from find to find. These composites are not the same thing as true transnationals. An El Camino is not "transitional" between a station wagon and a pick-up truck. Its a composite which fully shares features of both, not a vehicle which is halfway between the two in all its features. In the same way a Monkey may have a less-projecting mid-face than a Chimp, but that doesn't mean its closer to us than a chimp. An orangutan may have a higher and less-sloping fore head than a chimp, but that doesn't mean its closer to us than a chimp. The same thing should be considered when we evaluate hominids and their "place in the family".

I am not sure what to make of all of this, but I would like a good look at a model of Omo I. So far I am inclined to say that the so-called Homo-Sapiens Idaltu is not really in the family.

The Case that Neanderthals were not Human- Genetics

Neanderthals were not like us. Though there is a lot of pressure to expand the definition of "human" as much as possible, the evidence suggests that no other hominid was like our species. If being "human" means being like us, then only Homo Sapiens are human. There are several categories of evidence for this, but I'd like to focus on the very strong genetic evidence which points to this conclusion after just one point from morphology.

Of course humans have been changing somewhat for a while. Our modern globular brain shape did not even work its way into our phenotype until after 36,000 years ago, a date which some would say was near or after the date Neanderthals went extinct. I am not even convinced that the physical brain is what truly makes us human. But to the extent that it is brain shape may be even more important than brain size. Hominid brain size did not change much in almost half a million years while what humanity has accomplished from the time modern brain shape occurred to the present is orders of magnitude greater than those of other hominid groups given that same amount of time with a similar brain capacity.

Scientists tell us that all living Eurasians have an average of 1.5% of their genes from Neanderthals due to admixture events which occurred approximately 55,000 years ago. My own genome confirmed that this is the percentage in me. There is a caveat to this which I would like to address in a bit, but let's go with that number for now. The discovery of a 40,000 year old Romanian male [with somewhat more recent Neanderthal introgression seems to represent a genetic dead end who left no living descendants (else we'd find people with longer such gene segments than we do).

Indeed a comprehensive study showed that the lack of Neanderthal mtDNA (inherited from mothers) in modern Europeans despite thousands of years of the two living side by side indicated possible sterility problems between human males and neanderthal females and that the _maximum_ possible number of such hybridization events over 12,000 years was 120.

Other studies indicate fertility issues going the other way. The human Y-chromosome is lacking in the "Neanderthal" genes present in the rest of the genome. The researchers concluded [that modern human females and neanderthal males were not fully compatible The most parsimonious explanation was that such unions could not produced fertile male offspring.

Put the two studies together and the lack of Neanderthal genes in both mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA is consistent with the idea that the only pairing that really "worked" was a male neanderthal mating with a human female and then only for producing female offspring.

I put the word "worked" in quotes because there is other evidence to show that it did not work well. This study concludes "Much of this Neanderthal DNA appears to be deleterious in humans, and natural selection is acting to remove it." The paper suggests that this was a consequence of their smaller group size- allowing more deleterious mutations to stay in the genome rather than a fundamental weakness in genes making the species jump. It bases this conclusion solely on their finding that these mutations were only weakly deleterious. That does not add up to me because the other studies showed that plenty of other mutations seemed to be strongly deleterious and thus are no longer around to be counted!

But even if the researchers got that right, it is still a consequence of humans having a sense of connectedness and sociability in a way that other hominids may have lacked. This helped us live in larger groups which helped keep weakly deleterious genes from fixing. What we know is that while these genes "worked" in producing fertile offspring in some cases, much of the load was at least mildly deleterious.

Now I say that the genes are being weeded out slowly over time, but it now appears that some of those genes which the OOA humans got from (presumably) Neanderthals was actually the ancestral condition of the gene in both species which had been lost in modern humans. IOW, the Neanderthals did not give them neanderthal genes, some of the 1.5% is simply the genes our species once had in common with them but lost being returned to us through these events. Either that or they were ours all along and returned to us through an earlier hybridization event. So even a large proportion of the "Neanderthal" genes we wind up keeping may not really have been exclusively "theirs" anyway. Thus whatever the true figure of percentage of neanderthal genome possessed by the average Eurasian, it is liable to be lower than the oft-cited 1.5%

So the scope of all the evidence indicates that successful human-neanderthal hybridization was a limited event which ended before humans obtained their present brain shape and the explosion of human culture around 36,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.  IOW even if what we call humans 55,000 years ago had instances where the barriers to fertility were overcome and fertile offspring were the result there is no reason to think that living humans and neanderthals, if they could be brought back, could do so. The fact that the researches in the study I cited earlier said that they could not detect any evidence of such interbreeding in living Europeans from the time humans and neanderthals lived side by side in Europe for thousands of years shows that there was no repeat of what probably happened in the mid-east 55K ago.

If any group can think outside the box, even our own boxes, its this one. Something changed in humanity in the Upper Paleolithic, and that even changed the way they interacted with other hominids. Lions and tigers have about the same fertility issues that the research indicates that archaic homo Sapiens and h. Neanderthal had, and we all know they are not the same species.

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Did Neanderthals Really Paint Cave Walls In Spain 66,000 Years Ago?

For some reason a lot of people are intent on "humanizing" Neanderthals and other hominid species. Since there is disagreement about what it means to be human, there is plenty of room to argue about it. But while what we define as "human" may be a matter of opinion, the things used to support our choice should be a matter of facts. I don't see that happening here.

One manifestation of this was the declaration that Neanderthals were responsible for "cave art" in Spain around 66,000 years ago. This headline blared "Neanderthal Artwork Confirmed." The Washington Post was more cautious, saying they may have been the artists.

The main reason to assume that Neanderthals were the artists is that uranium-thorium dating of calcite deposits on top of the lines of the red earth material they used for "paint" dated the finds in three caves to a time when it is thought Neanderthals were the only hominids around- 66,000 years ago in the case of the oldest date. Our species was not thought to have made it to Spain until 45,000 years ago. That date counts on the idea that the calcite deposit legitimately grew after the "paint" was applied instead of just an artifact of the "paint" having less ability to adhere to the surface of a crystal compared to limestone cave walls.

The other thing is, no remains of either us or them have been found at the sites in question. Scientists think that modern humans did not come along until later, but how many times have we heard recently that humans were in one place or another earlier than what was previously thought? And since Spain is practically connected to North Africa its not like a human presence there would have to start from the Mid-east or Eastern Europe as it appears happened with the wave of human occupation which "stuck".

 But that is speculation. Let me get to the evidence. The most elaborate "painting" they found was a box within a box like so...

Now it turns out that there are 32 symbols that true modern humans used in cave art for at least 30,000 years. This indicates that these where not random drawings but each symbol communicated something across many generations of time over a vast geographic area.

Now I want you to compare the picture above, which contains what they claim is something painted by Neanderthals in a cave in Spain some 60-odd thousand years ago to the examples of "Spanish Tectiforms" in this link.  which was undoubtedly painted by our species in a cave in Spain ...

It sure looks like the earlier cave art is an formative example of one of the 32 symbols known as a "Spanish Tectiform". So are they suggesting that Neanderthals in Spain made cave art 66,000 years ago that looked just like one of the 32 enduring cave art symbols that modern humans used later from the moment of their arrival? This even though no Neanderthals anywhere else made anything close to it in the following 25,000 years of their existence?

As if that wasn't enough in itself to make one question if the earlier art was made by a separate species, there is the issue of the negative hand prints. We have never seen a Neanderthal hand in the flesh, but if you go by the size of the last little bit of bone on the end of their fingers, they must have had hugely thick fingertips compared to humans. Perhaps double the thickness.

But the hand prints found look like they are within the range of normal human proportions.

Look here and in particular the upper left one here to see what I mean.

I think there is a story here, but its not that Neanderthals made cave art. It is that some group of humans, H. Sapiens, occupied Spain long before we thought that they had. (UPDATE: If that is even so, Reasons.org has an article up casting doubt on the dating processes by which it was determined that the art was really 64,000 years old).

Also: The genetic case that Neanderthals were not like us.