Jimmy Akin Makes a Blooper

Was Genesis inspired by Ancient Myths?
Catholic Answers Live Clips | 11 July 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpmIiMdpwz8

If a bottleneck happened in 100 000 BP, without an Ark, and if the hagiographer (at this point definitely identified as Moses) based things on earlier popular stories, but these inspired by more recent Mesopotamian floodings ...

That would mean a non-protection from error, because it would then be erroneous to state there was an Ark. It's flouting the most basic limitation Pope Pius XII put into §§ 38 and 39

As for Mesopotamian Flood stories being inspired by floodings of the Euphrates and Tigris ... Utnapishtim took off from Shuruppak, which is South East of Baghdad, so, downstream of Baghdad.

He landed on Mount Nisir or Mount Nimush in Kurdistant, on Pir Omar Gudrun aka Pira Magrun, near Sulaymaniyah. Now this city is upstreams from Baghdad, over 200 km in each direction.

May I ask you very gently if you have ever seen a flooding push a survivor 400 km upstream?

No, the story of Utnapishtim is NOT based on a flooding of Tigris and Euphrates. It's based on a memory of a world wide Flood. So, with equally obvious text reading, is the Genesis account. However, the Genesis Ark could actually survive the very long and non-abrupt waves of a Global Ocean, which the world would temporarily have been. The vessel in the Utnapishtim story couldn't. This makes more sense if the Genesis was the ungarbled, and the Utnapishtim story the garbled account of the same event, than if the Genesis story had been filtered through the Babylonian version.

Apart from the question of the Flood, there is so much "in the first 11 chapters" which has no direct counterpart in the standard versions of Babylonian myth or any other that I'm definitely aware of.

Adam and Eve. Cain and Abel and Seth. Tower of Babel.

Then again, the limit of "first 11 chapters" is not adequate if you want Old Earth Creationism and from some point on straight forward history after the "myths" ... Pius XII by "Quae autem ex popularibus narrationibus in Sacris Litteris recepta sunt" probably meant things much closer to Paul Revere or George Washington's cherry tree than to Uranus and Gaea. Indeed, that's basically the only way one can make sense of the following words in Humani Generis. But be that as it may, you cannot have chapter 12 (plus final verses of chapter 11) transition from "this is very shortened, telescoped into much smaller narrative time than the actual time" to "this is the same number of years in the narrative and the actual events" ...

Genesis 14 mentions a habitation of Asason Tamar. Now we know from II Chron. Asason Tamar is En Geddi. However the archaeology of En Geddi is totally void of habitation for carbon dated 2000 BC. The Chalcolithic habitation, identified with Amorrhites, and thus with the Genesis 14 event, ceases in carbon dated 3500 BC. Next human habitation is in the Iron Age, so definitely too late.

For me as a Young Earth Creationist, this is not a problem. I take the carbon date 3500 BC, identify it with Genesis 14, based on Abraham being c. 80 and born in 2015 BC, I identify it more specifically with 1935 BC. This means, I'll have to say the atmosphere in 1935 BC had not reached higher on the rise from less than 2 pmC at the Flood than to sth like 82.763 pmC (the value on my latest table). However, if you are Old Earth, you will not agree that a carbon date of 39 000 BP = 2957 BC, and so you will also not agree that carbon dated 3500 BC was 1935 BC. You will not agree that the carbon 14 level was lower than 2 pmC or around 82.763 pmC at those two events that are 1022 years apart.

Therefore you cannot square the archaeology of En Geddi with full historicity of Genesis 14, which I can.

And given "the Genesis 14 war" is the immediate prequel to Melchisedec blessing Abraham, you'd have to abandon historicity for that one too. Now it's really starting to cut scars in pretty central Christian theology, isn't it? Unless, of course, you accept Young Earth Creationism as the clue. Aka City of God being right about the patriarchs. Those of Genesis 5 and 11.