How Do You Tell A Polemic From An Original Exposing Corrupted Accounts?

It would be very difficult. In addition to the normal tendency of things to get garbled over time, some people who repeat the tale may want to shoehorn some of their own agenda into it. Maybe they want to make one of their ancestors interact with the characters to enhance their prestige for example.

Was the creation account in Genesis chapter one a "polemic" against Egyptian or Ancient Near Eastern cosmology? Or was it an original version that was later corrupted or merged with other ideas in neighboring cultures? Many scholars believe the former. Of course, you can point to elements of early Genesis that "correct the record" of things in these other accounts. But is that really because Genesis was written to correct the record, or is it because it was the correct record?

The answer won't be found by examining differences in the text so much as determining which came first. What you conclude about the differences in the text will depend on your assumptions about which came first. If you think the ANE texts came first, then you will assume Genesis is a response to them. If you assume the accounts Moses used to compile early Genesis came first, the logical conclusion is that it wasn't a polemic, but the correct original record. It does set the record straight, but not because it was written to do that, but because its the original.

Right now, most scholars assume the other ANE creation accounts came first because creation accounts have been found with some similar elements before the life of Moses would have occurred, around 1400 BC. But this reasoning presumes that Moses wasn't working from older original documents. In other words, the family history of his people was in Mesopotamia, and they had their own version of these same things. The "Tablet Theory" has been dismissed, but I think that's wrong. A modified version of the theory addresses the legitimate concerns of the critics, and so far as I know has never been evaluated.

The use of "toledoth" ("these are the generations of") phrases throughout the part of early Genesis that was set in Mesopotamia (and the first generation born in what is now Israel) indicates that whatever early Genesis is, the writers intended it to be viewed as a series of ancient accounts strung together. Aren't the scholars always urging us to view the text through the lens of those who lived when it was written? Well, early Genesis was written as a series of ancient accounts that were edited together into a single great story which unfolded over time.

If I write an anthology of ancient Greek stories it would be wrong to say that accounts from the last days of Rome were older than the accounts in my book just because my book was compiled long after Rome. The book may not be as old as Rome, but the stories in them are older. This I think is the relationship between Genesis, the accounts used to compile Genesis, and the ANE texts which came in between.

I am going to make the argument that the ANE accounts are garbled versions of the creation account, and following accounts, from early Genesis. In some ways, those in Mesopotamia were more derived than those from elsewhere because they were more politicized. The government-controlled priestly class kept writing the king's ancestors or the gods from some city they were trying to assimilate into the story.

To do this, it is needful to understand how the Christ-centered model views the "days" of Genesis chapter one. We must know what is being garbled to see if what they are saying sounds like a confusion of the original. My contention is that both the Jews and most of Christianity today (the eastern Orthodox excepted) has it garbled too. So, though it is far beyond my meager powers of explanation, I give you the one-paragraph version of the days of Genesis one.

The days in Genesis chapter one have nothing to do with solar days, at least until day six. In the Genesis Creation account, the "light" which is what "day" is (verse 5) is the Logos of God entering creation. Which is another way of saying God entering creation, for the Logos is the second person of God. Each time God speaks, that is, God's Word enter's creation, it produces light, and that is the morning which signifies a new day. The evenings have nothing to do with the day, they are just the condition which precedes it- separation from the illumination of His word produces increasing darkness over time. When God speaks, the Logos enters some aspect of creation. He brings order, fruitfulness and illumination each time. The seventh time the Logos entered His creation was of course the Advent, as described in chapter one of the Gospel of John.

Now let's look at the Egyptian Ogdoad, a set of eight primordial deities- four male-female pairs. They had somewhat different roles in each of the main Egyptian religious centers who had their own complimentary takes on their creation accounts. A recurring concept is that the Ogdoad proceed from a more distant Supreme God to order some aspect of creation. This sounds a lot like the Christ-centered take on the creation account in Genesis. It has the second Person of the Godhead enter creation six times. It ends in Him being made Male and Female in the timeless heavenly realm which is Christ and the Church. The Egyptian creation accounts have the same general theme, they just don't get that it is one Person of God entering creation six times, not a new deity being manifested for each function.

The Egyptian myths are more focused on the steps from the first two or three days of the account in Genesis, and indeed it is unclear what exact function each of the pairs in the Ogdoad have. The first pair seems to stand for sky and water. Another for darkness and a cessation of work. Although the Egyptian stories overall have a lot of detail, details about the work of the Ogdoad are varying and mysterious.

The Jews actually went farther than the text to contrast that there is only one God who created everything. The New Testament clarifies what the Old Testament really teaches- that God exists in three persons, and that all that has been made was made by the second person. In other words, it goes back a half-step in the direction of the Ogdoad. And it fits in perfectly with the Old Testament text, when seen through the lens of Christ. See also "Two Powers Theology" to understand that this was always a minority voice in Judaism. Something written as a polemic should not be able to do that. It should be written as a stark contrast, with no wiggle room. After all that's the point of a polemic. But if the Egyptian stuff was a garbled version of the original creation account, then it makes sense.

But here is the real kicker: A Mayan Creation Myth from the Popol Vuh sounds a lot more like Genesis chapter one than any of the Egyptian or ANE versions! You could use the exact same reasoning they use to claim Genesis is a polemic against ANE or Egyptian Mythology to say that Genesis chapter one was written as a polemic against the Mayan Creation Myth! Or you could argue that the Mayan myth was a polemic against the Egyptian ones. No one would do that, because it would be ridiculous given the separation of those cultures. But this should open reasonable eyes to see that proximity alone should not lead you to jump to conclusions which otherwise look groundless when proximity is absent.

Here is a short video on the Mayan Creation myth, or you can skip below while I give a list view of the parallels.

The account says that at the start there was no light, no sound, no motion, no land. Just water. Obviously it doesn't point to Creation of everything from nothing (or the unseen) as Genesis does, but that is a hard concept for ancient folks to get. The initial conditions they describe sound a lot like those described in Genesis 1:1-2.

Then it describes six "deities" in the waters who help "Heart of Sky" shape the cosmos. This reminds me of the six creation "days" which according to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis, are not light from the sun at all, but rather the Word of God entering creation when God speaks. The light is the "day" and He is the Light. They have six deities while Genesis has God the Logos entering creation six times. Other versions have two deities, one in the sky and one over the seas (Plumed Serpent and Hurricane) together shape the world.

The Maya speak of plants being made before the sun, just like Genesis says the sun wasn't "appointed" or "set in position" until after plants are made. In the Maya account animals are also made but the story says they could not worship. So the deities formed humans from mud, but they couldn't worship either, so were destroyed in a flood! Do you see how the same elements are getting scrambled? They then say another attempt was made with humans derived from wood, but they too could not worship and had to be destroyed, except for those who became monkeys. This leads me to a rabbit trail, the idea of "Others" from the past who were near-human but still not like us. Both science and many ancient traditions tell us that such beings existed.

Finally the gods make a human out of Maize (corn) and get it right. This has shades of Adam, the man made to "tend the garden and to keep it". The idea of man coming along and doing things right is connected to agriculture and thus civilization. Shades of man inside and outside of the garden? Near-humans? Something else?

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It is unlikely that the Mayans had contact with ANE cultures and got this story from them, and as I say, their version sounds even more like early Genesis than those of the ANE cultures. I conclude that the creation account in Genesis chapter one is very old. The story may be older than Adam (who isn't the father of all of humanity in the Christ-centered model, but rather formed to be the father of the line of Messiah). The evidence that Genesis was a "polemic" against the other ANE creation myths only fits if you begin with that assumption in the first place. Circular reasoning in an echo chamber is no way to find truth!

PS- I do to my hat to RC Kunst who goaded me into finally putting this in writing.

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Some Kura-Araxas Basin Evidence of 6K Flood Event

I am still collecting evidence as I find it, so this piece is going to be more scattered and less conclusive than most of them. I hope by getting this circulated more evidence, for or against, will come my way so that I can reach a firmer conclusion.

I was reading this paper about fluvial deposits of the Algeti River in Georgia. I suspect ground zero for the flood of Noah (a local flood with global consequences) was the Araxas basin, or even around what is now Lake Urmia. It has been difficult for me to find good information about the depositional history of the Araxas basin, but the Algeti is a tributary of the Kura River Basin, with which the Araxes joins before they empty into the Caspian Sea.

My thesis is that it was a highland flood, with Mesopotamia receiving a glancing blow around 4,000-4,500 B.C. because they were "downstream". Lake Urmia offers the tantalizing hint that all of its layers for the Holocene, 4.5 meters worth, are missing as if they have been eroded away somehow. Lake Van is on the opposite side of a mountain range, but even the Wiki article on it notes that it had a "sudden rise" of three-hundred meters about 6,500 years ago (~4,500 B.C.). These dates fit well within the error bars of the timeline I lay out in my book.

I am collecting all the data I can and this paper has a couple of interesting figures from the periphery of my area of interest. To me, they point to a very large single flood event around 6K ago. At some points of measurement, the deposits from the 6K event were later eroded away (like Lake Urmia?) but where they remain they point to a sizable event. See below...

Click on image for larger view. The 6K event is the only one not given a range of time, and is the most dominant at many points, not just at this location.

Click on image for larger view. The 6K at point b) event looks under-sold to me. Where did the unmatched-in-size layer of gravel come from which was not present in a)?  Figure d) is the only one that looks close in size in terms of deposition of both gravel and sediment, but the two layers of gravel suggest to me that more than one aggradation event occurred during this time frame. IOW, the 6K event at b) was one huge event which dumped lots of gravel followed by sediment at once. No other event came close in effect but the 3.2K to 3.4K period (d)) that was closest was not a single event, but two very prominent floods on top of each other.

To see the post discussing the highland flood model from the book, see here. If you discount a local highland flood because you think the text describes a situation where they had an unobstructed view of the horizon for miles, watch this.

Hardly conclusive proof, but interesting that whenever I get data around 6K at what I believe was the target area, or even the edge of it, it sticks out in a way that would support the hypothesis.

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Was Lamarck Right? Squid Edit Their RNA Outside Nucleus

Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first to outline a coherent theory of evolution, though not the one accepted today. He didn't know about genes. He thought there was some material force in the universe, like electromagnetism, which drove life to increasing complexity. He called this a "complexifying force". But his second major thesis is the one he was most known for: that animals can prompt biological changes in themselves by the use or disuse of a function. There was, he proposed. an additional "adaptive force." In his mind this change would then be hereditary.

Well, it turns out squid edit their own RNA. Their DNA can say one thing, but the messenger RNA can be altered, outside the cell nucleus, to make different proteins. I don't think there is any evidence such changes would be heritable, but it does speak to Lamarck's second thesis within the life of an animal.

What it also does, is make biological evolution to any great extent even more unlikely. Very much like the fly study on epigenetic changes I recently wrote about, this represents another way an organism can adapt to its environment without passing down heritable changes to its offspring. In other words, squid can adapt within a range without having to genetically evolve. It in fact relieves the pressure to genetically evolve. If a particular protein is needed, it can be edited into existence without changing the DNA.

Are the edited proteins "intelligently designed". Well, a squid is not much for intelligence. I think it would be better to think of the squid as an end-user of its own RNA editing software, which would seem intelligently designed.

So in spite of my provocative headline, it still seems Lamarck was more wrong that right. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of his "complexifying force" operating on the earth today. Creationists and some Theistic Evolutionists would say that such a "force" operated in the past, but it wasn't a material or natural force. Rather it was the hand of God aiding the earth and seas as they obeyed His command to "bring forth living creatures". His "adaptive force" has been mostly rejected by science once we learned about heritable DNA, but maybe it needs another look. He may have been right about the ability of an organism to self-edit, but wrong about the heritability of those edits.

These two studies together, along with a lot of other evidence, point to the idea that types of organisms have a certain range of built in adaptability, much of which is not in the long run heritable and does not require any changes in DNA. So for example a squid with a genetic mutation to produce a new protein would have no evolutionary advantage over a squid who can edit that protein into existence anyway if it is needed. The mutation may even be a disadvantage because it is unclear if the mutated DNA can be edited back to produce the original protein. How is macro-evolution, rather than just variation around a mean, supposed to occur if vast swaths of adaptability are not even inheritable, but rather environmental responses?

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 Note: the book is mostly about the miraculous presence of repeated references to Christ and His work in early Genesis rather than the "creation-evolution wars", which it mostly soars above.

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New Evidence About the Moon Makes More Creationist Sense

I found a new study of the moon fascinating. Here is a report on the study. When the Apollo mission brought back moon rocks in the 1970s, we measured them and found that their chemical composition was of the same stuff as rocks on earth. This led to scientists rushing to embrace some sort of giant impact theory to explain the existence of the moon. That is, they proposed that early in Earth's history a Mars-sized object (Theia) struck earth, melting the upper layers and sending some of the "splash" of molten rock into orbit, which coalesced into the moon.

That never caused too much trouble for an Old Earth Creationist (OEC) view of things. Most OEC (such as Reasons to Believe) think that the "heavens and the earth", including the moon, were created in verse one, but were not made, appointed to their roles and set in position (stable orbit) or visible from the surface, until the fourth "day" of Genesis chapter one. Still, I was always a bit uncomfortable with the idea that the moon was carved out of the earth and was almost "birthed" by it from a giant impact. That is the kind of thing you would think that the text would at least allude to.

It was also hard to reconcile with the text saying that the early surface of earth was covered with water, a statement which science has confirmed. Even if the underlying crust was molten due to increased internal heat, a blast like that should have vaporized oceans. Shouldn't the text of early Genesis at least hint at such an event when describing these things?

Add to it the fact that our moon is very unusual among planets. It is much closer in size to its host planet than any other moon. It stabilizes earth's orbit and produced regular and substantial tides. Perhaps it does things for us that are necessary to sustain advanced life.

Well, the study I mentioned changes the picture considerably. It turns out only the outer layer of the moon has a chemical composition like earth- indicating it came from the same place. The inner part of the moon has a different composition, indicating a different origin. The article of course stuck to the party line about the "giant impact theory" being the cause. But the fact that the moon is really composed of an earth-like "crust" over a mantle and core of a different sort of world raises other possibilities.

What if there never was a giant impact of "Theia" and earth? What if instead there was a period of intense asteroid bombardment of early earth and the larger strikes each blasted a much smaller amount of fragments into earth orbit? Perhaps early earth had a bit of a "ring" of debris. Then Theia came along and was "made" into the moon by scooping up these fragments and adding them to its mass in a series of smaller but still potent impacts. If Theia had started in a somewhat different orbit from earth that would have changed as the debris moving in earth orbit transferred its momentum to the growing moon. So this "no giant impact" hypothesis explains the same facts, including less water on the moon than expected, and fits better with the text of Genesis chapter one.

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Was Eve mtDNA H2a1?

I don't know, but I have found a paper  (see also) (UPDATE and also this and this) that I mean to dive into at some point. If it checks out, then one aspect of the Christ-centered model for early Genesis had what they call in the science business "predictive power". That is, you hypothesize that some pattern or thing might exist if your idea is correct and then what you predicted is found in the field.

Because Genesis chapter six speaks of the "Daughters of ha-Adam" being found suitable as wives by the "Sons of God" I have been looking for a certain pattern in Archaeology. I was looking for a female mtDNA type from Anatolia which was mixed with males in seminal farming and pastoral cultures. Basically I was looking for "the daughters of Adam" who were "suitable" for marriage to the chieftains of surrounding tribes for the knowledge they could bring to the table. A part of my thesis is that Adam received knowledge during his time in the garden, along with access to more domesticated versions of plants and animals. He had a role in "jump starting" a better way of life- just as Christ has done. He is like a figure of Christ in the material realm. Sure enough, this paper is reporting on just such an mtDNA group - H2a1. See also this one.

UPDATE NOTE: I say "Was Eve H2a1?" but it is also possible that she was a bearer of just H2a and the subtype H2a1 simply was that of her female descendants who were taken as wives by "the sons of God" and produced the "mighty men".

From my initial study of the paper, females from this line mixed with males from surrounding cultures which carried these advanced lifestyles all the way to the Atlantic. The paper also associates them with medical practices, as if they were an almost shamanistic class of female healers. I have been looking for evidence of "Strong Women" in the cultures which spread far and wide with the help of knowledge of advanced practices. Read the papers yourself and make your own decisions, but my first take is this fits the profile I described in my book.

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How Can Evolution Shape Genomes When Key Traits are not Inheritable, and Larger Questions

This article describes an amazing study done with fruit flies. It turns out that what could be a very important behavioral trait - whether when walking to a goal they travel directly there or meander - is not an inheritable trait. It is the result of non-inheritable "static" during development. 

Flies don't have much "personality" but to the extent they do, how they move toward a goal is a big part of it. Humans vary in traits like this too, and the implications of the study were that many aspects of personality were not heritable. In some traits we are often like our parents. The debate has always been how much was nature and how much was nurture? But isn't it also true that many times siblings have very different personalities?

I think the folks reporting on the study may go too far in applying it to humans when they say that important personality traits in humans may not be inherited. We are more complicated than fruit flies. But right now it sure seems like things which are potentially very important for survival and reproduction come from what look like to us random processes. 

How is evolution supposed to be the dominant factor in shaping genomes when non-heritable traits have such importance? Suppose a new allele in one of 20,000 genes was by some chance twice as good as any existing allele as far as helping a species survive in a given environment. That would be a vast improvement, improbable enough as it is. But it is also just one of 20,000 genes and so being twice as good in one part out of twenty-thousand in the genome wouldn't confer much of a survival advantage. Maybe some other gene has a mildly deleterious allele, cancelling out the advantage. Maybe the creature gets eaten by a hawk by bad luck and the advantage goes away. The math was always dubious unless the new advantage was incredibly large. So the idea that environmental pressures combined with chance mutation was hard to accept as the sole force which turned amoebas into men and explained all the diversity we see in earth's living things.

Now we learn that once creatures get advanced enough to have anything resembling "personality", that major aspects of their behavior are not inherited. It seems to me that in the more advanced animals, where behavior plays such a big role, that personality would be a huge factor deciding who survives and reproduces and who does not. If its not heritable, evolution can't work the way its advocates have said that it does.

Look, I have written a book about Early Genesis. It is not even an "anti-evolution" book. Nor is it a "pro-evolution" book. It is a book about how even Genesis points to the work and person of Christ. Obviously, this could not be so absent a miracle. But we have a miracle. And this miracle in the text, so clear once you do the work to see it, deserves a lot more consideration than the creation-evolution debate whose noise is drowning out so much else.

The argument over the extent to which nature alone is responsible for life's diversity is very divisive. There is an extremist Theistic position which says that all species were specially created by God. There is an extremist Naturalistic position which says that nature alone is fully responsible and no help from outside nature is needed. I think most Christians have come around somewhat to the middle, but naturalists and some Christians have maintained an implacable resistance to even considering the idea that nature must have had help. And indeed this is what Genesis one describes with respect to living creatures- God commanded the waters and the seas to bring them forth but then the text subsequently says that He had to make them somehow. The text describes God helping nature fulfill His command for it, just as He helps us fulfill His commands to us - something which we cannot do in our own strength.

We can meet in the middle, and not out of unprincipled compromise but out of respect for the evidence as much as each other. But we don't even have to wait for that to pursue the higher questions of whether the text is indeed Divinely inspired or simply the natural work of men wholly within nature itself. I have come to see that if we answer this question correctly then our other disputes will fade into insignificance. If we continue to put the creation-evolution question first then we will never come to terms on either question.

I maintain that the way the text of early Genesis resolves so beautifully (with scripture, nature and history) when viewed through the lens of Christ makes a compelling case for all but the most unreasonable and unwilling minds that Divine Inspiration is the most rational explanation for the results. 

Unfortunately we all tend to over-estimate our own objectivity. Most of us believe we are rational, but scripture teaches that we are all bound by sin, and sin is anything but rational. So I would say the proper order of approach to know truth about scripture is to first accept the truth about who we are (necessary for changing for the better), and then consider the truth about what the text really says (Christ says it is about Him in John 5:46 et al), and only lastly what that means about the natural world.

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Why the "Christ-Centered Model" for Genesis is Indeed More "Christ-Centered" Than YEC

Does calling the view of early Genesis described in my book "the Christ-Centered-Model" irritate people? Yes. And I can understand why. Christians are not immune to the trends of radical egalitarianism and relativity which swept over the culture in recent decades. There is a strong tendency for people to say "Well, the view of my faction about early Genesis is just as Christ-centered as what you are saying." There is an emotional desire to believe on some level that all viewpoints are equally "good" while also believing that their particular view is superior. Again, this is an emotional condition, not a reasonable or logical way to view the matter.

There is of course, no intellectual reason why equivalency has to be true and a lot of reasons it could be false. Different views of early Genesis can vary in many respects, one of them being the degree to which they point to the person and work of Christ. Some views for example, arbitrarily deny the possibility that the text could have any meaning outside the cultural environment in which they believe it was written. That's extremely wrong, but that's for another article. My point is that these views would tend to be less Christ-centered. On the other end of the spectrum, the Eastern Orthodox view of the text bears some early similarities with the Christ-centered model- which makes sense because this isn't strictly "new revelation" but rather in large part a re-discovery of things which American Christianity has lost. 

So far as I can find no other view makes the first twelve chapters of early Genesis so much about the person and work of Christ as what I call "the Christ-centered model" does. After all, I didn't tag it with that name just to irritate people. It's the only honest thing which I can think to call it. I didn't even start off calling it that, it was only looking back that I saw what the common theme was. It is the same thing Christ Himself ascribed to it when He declared that Moses wrote about Him (John 5:46).

So what I'd like to do here is give some of the specific reasons that the Christ-centered model does indeed point more towards the work and person of Christ as compared to another specific and widespread model. In this case, Young Earth Creationism as supported by Ken Ham et al. I don't mean to prove that my differences with them on the points below are correct here. I just want to show that they do in fact point to the work and person of Christ better. The list is not all-inclusive.

1) "Day" in Genesis one is not about a twenty-four hour period of time on earth, but rather a result of the Word of God, the Logos, entering creation. When God speaks, His Word enters the cosmos. This produces light without any other action required on His part. And as verse five says, the light is the day. The night isn't a part of the day, just the condition which precedes it. So we can either make it about physical illumination on the planet for a fixed amount of time or we can make it about God's word entering His creation!

2) The "evenings" and the "mornings" are not about literal 24-hour days, but rather describe what happens when the light produced by God's Word brings form, life, and illumination to some aspect of creation- just as it does in our lives when we obey it.

3) In verse twenty-six of Chapter one when God says that He will make Man in His own image, His image is Christ. Christ is the image of God, and unless we are connected to Him we cannot be in His image, only His likeness. In verse twenty-seven it isn't the same thing being repeated thrice, but a list of three things God does to implement His plan in verse twenty-six. First He makes a template in heaven by fusing uncreated God with created man- Christ and the Church. On earth the echo of that, "created He him", is Adam. The male and female part is A) Christ and the Church in the eternal realm B) Men and women generally (male and female who are not said to be in His image to start) and C) Adam and Eve through whom God initiates His plan to turn men and women into Christ and the Church. Even if you don't quite get what I mean here, I hope you can grasp that it is a more Christ-centered view of the creation of man than a view which makes it about man alone.

4) The very fact that I am saying that Christ is the image of God and not something intrinsic to us is more Christ-centered. We have the capacity to bear the image of God when in right relationship to Him. We aren't innately in the image of God. Hitler and Jack the Ripper don't share the Image.

5) I say that Adam and Eve were not the sole genetic progenitor's of humanity but rather Adam's role is to be a figure of Christ. That is, he is a representative or stand-in for humanity and not the father of all of it, but rather was formed later to bring the line of Messiah. Adam is a better figure of Christ if He is formed by special means in an already-existing population to stand in for them with God rather than his role being "father of mankind". Christ is our brother, not our father. 

6) The seventh day, God's original sabbath rest, was not something that happened in the seventh 24-hour period of the universe. Rather it happened in heaven in the beginning, but the manifestation of that rest does not occur on earth until after the crucifixion. When Christ rested in the ground to redeem His creation, that was the rest of God that we can enter into. So these verses are really prophecy, and not just history. You can either make the first sabbath about a literal 24-hour day or you can make it about the Atonement. Clearly one view is more Christ-centered than the other.

7) The LORD God who walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden is Christ pre-incarnate. He didn't hop in and out of physical form throughout the OT. Rather He was embodied (though not in corruptible flesh) back in Gen. 1:27 and all the anthropomorphic forms of God, including the "Angel of the Lord" and Melchizedek, were Him. When Israel looked at God, He was who they saw. This view was shared by Justin Martyr and is an example of the knowledge of God that we have largely forgotten. 

8) The descendants of Adam as "the LORD's special people" in a world full of "others" fits better with the pattern we see of Israel in the OT and the Church in the NT.

9) In the flood account, "Yahweh" is the pre-incarnate Christ and "Elohim" is God the Father. This is not, as the critics claim, two accounts which have been merged but rather represents a stress-point between heaven and earth where the LORD has to destroy His people, mirroring the NT stress point where He has to be destroyed for them. Clearly an account which has a pre-incarnation Christ as a major figure and points to the Atonement is more Christ-centered than one which instead stresses the global nature of the flood and doesn't include any of that about Christ.

10) A local flood aimed at the descendants of Adam via Seth instead of all of mankind is better connected to baptism than a global flood which destroys all of mankind. Baptism isn't where the unbelieving world is wiped out, but where we submit to God's judgement so that what is unbelieving in us is wiped out.

GRAND FINALE: YEC take Gen. 3:20 as some kind of proof that Eve was the physical ancestor of all humans born. The Christ-centered model takes Genesis 3:20 as talking about The Seed discussed a few verses prior- IOW all who are IN CHRIST will be in the living. The LORD God shared with Adam and Eve His plan to redeem mankind and fix their mistake by being "born of a woman". It isn't about human origins, this verse is about Christ.

These are just some ones off the top of my head. There are lots more. Some of them would require a more intricate explanation to tie them in, but ten should be enough for the fair-minded person. The "Christ-Centered Model" laid out in the book below really is more Christ-centered than the YEC view of the text.

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