by William Trollinger

Giotto di Bodone’s “The Kiss of Judas”. Public Domain.

At the height of the pandemic, Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis (AiG) instructed Christians to ignore the medical experts and evolutionist academics (some of whom teach at supposedly Christian colleges!) who were recommending that people get COVID vaccines, given that this is “a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” 

Now Purdom has turned her attention to making the fundamentalist case that there are no contradictions in the Bible, her example being the death of Judas. The ever-attentive Paul Braterman looks at Purdom’s argument in a recent blog post at Primate’s Progress:  

Biblical exegesis; how did Judas die? Answers in Genesis has the answer.

Matthew 27:5 And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.

But Acts 1:18 Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.

How can these both be true?

No problem, says Answers in Genesis. Since the Bible contains nothing inaccurate, both of these must be the case, and therefore they must represent two perspectives on the same event. But bear in mind that the bowels are held firmly in place by the abdominal muscles and skin. So what must have happened is this; first of all he went and hanged himself, but after a while the rope snapped, flesh goes off quickly in the hot Mediterranean sun, and his rotten corpse exploded.

That’s exactly what they say. I am not making any of this up.

So what’s my point? My point is that the Answers in Genesis style of literalism is absurd, offensive, and in its own way deeply irreverent.

Absurd, offensive, irreverent. Yes. Ludicrous. Yes. 

And yet it turns out that, as is the case for all those who hold to a strict inerrantist view of the Bible, Purdom and her AiG compatriots are also, to understate the case, extraordinarily selective when it comes to their biblical literalism. 

Let’s take the example of geocentrism. As Susan Trollinger and I discuss in Righting America at the Creation Museum, “one could easily assume,” from the multiplicity of biblical texts to this effect, that AiG would “proclaim and defend the idea that the sun revolves around a stationary Earth.” See, for example, Joshua 10:12-13:

On the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD; and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in mid-heaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.

Seems pretty clear that the biblical author is describing a geocentric universe! 

The folks at AiG, however, beg to differ. They reject such a reading as “hyper-literal” (as opposed, I suppose, to what Purdom does with the death of Judas). 

But they have a problem. As Susan Harding makes clear in her wonderful study, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, in fundamentalism the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that “I am more literal than thou.” Enter the late Gerardus Bouw, who – as director of the Association for Biblical Astronomy – went after the AiG young Earth creationists with great enthusiasm:

So, if Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is a clear statement that God created, then Ecclesiastes 1:5, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose,” is just as clear a statement of geocentricity. And with that, we come to the real issue: Is the Scripture to be the final authority on all matters which it touches . . . The issue is final authority, is it to be the words of God, or the words of men.

So the folks at AiG are absurd, offensive, irreverent, AND quite inconsistent in their biblical literalism. 

But in their defense, there are and can be no consistent biblical literalists. Read this verse literally, do not read that verse literally. No matter how often inerrantists argue for a plain, common sense reading of the text, interpretation is always required – and for these Protestant fundamentalists, there is no interpretive magisterium.

So it goes with biblical inerrancy.