Pseudo-History and Genesis 1-11

There are professing Christians who claim to believe the Bible, then try to find ways to get out of believing the first eleven chapters of Genesis are written as history. When they claim that it is something else such as allegory or pseudo-history, they are rejecting and undermining the authority of Scripture.

Pseudo-history is something written as history but is actually fictitious. Some people may say that the Bible contains stories intended to teach us something. So what? We can do that with many books, so the Bible is not so special in that view.

Bible and note-taking, Unsplash / Fa Barboza

There are those who relegate Genesis 1-11 to story or allegory status, but they have some problems. First, why aren't the later chapters of Genesis also pseudo-history? Further, these blackguards are calling Jesus, Paul, Peter, and others liars because they refer to Genesis as real history and authoritative. By the way, drop Exodus 31:17 and Exodus 20:11 on them — those verses will show the true colors of these pseudo-believers.

Is Genesis 1–11 history, pseudo-history, poetry, allegory or parable? By ‘pseudo-history’, I mean something which was written to look like history, but was not genuine history. Before the rise of uniformitarianism and the theory of evolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the vast majority of Christians, including all the Reformers, regarded Genesis 1–11 as straightforward history. But since then, many Bible-believing Christians have tried, in one way or another, to reconcile these chapters with evolutionary, long-age beliefs. Some, such as the ‘gap’ theorists and ‘day-age’ theorists, have tried (unsuccessfully) to preserve the historicity of the Bible while allowing for a pre-history of millions of years. But others, such as the ‘literary framework’ theorists, have abandoned any such attempt and regard these chapters as figurative or symbolic.

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