Knowledge (in the Biblical Sense)

In researching my talk on The Bible as Science Fiction, I've been looking into Genesis in more detail than I have for quite a while. I'm intrigued by how readily it seems to lend itself to Gnostic interpretation... which is presumably how Christian Gnosticism managed to survive for a millennium or so, before being finally snuffed out in the Albigensian Crusades.

Personally, although I'm interested in Gnosticism as a concept, I'm also very fond of the material world, so have no desire to explain it away as a prison for the soul created by a vengeful and flawed God. Still, I can't help feeling that some of the people who contributed to Genesis may have felt otherwise. Consider...

Genesis contains two separate and mildly incompatible Creation narratives, firstly from I.1 to II.3 and then from II.4 to II.25. These narratives use different names for God -- the plural "Eloi" ["God" in the KJB] and the singular YHWH ["Lord"] respectively. YHWH, who makes Adam and Eve (the Eloi just make a generalised humanity), later becomes the vengeful God of Israel, who's fond of ordering the occasional genocide and striking people down for disobeying Him.

The creations of the Eloi include "every thing that creepeth upon the earth" [I.25], whereas YHWH just creates mammals and birds [II.19]. When a creature comes to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey YHWH's injunction not to eat of the fruit of the tree, the creature is a snake -- "more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (emphasis mine). The apparent implication being that YHWH didn't create the Serpent...

YHWH's injunction to Adam and Eve not to eat the tree is ostensibly ordained because "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" [II.17] -- which sounds less like a threat than a statement of cause and effect. The Serpent, on the other hand, points out that "Ye shall not surely die" [III.4], and it's quite right -- they don't. God was, apparently, lying to them.

What YHWH says in III.22 seems to confirm the Serpent's story that he forbade A&E the fruit because knowing good and evil would make them like Gods -- like Him, in fact. After this, it's only their mortality that seems to keep them separate from Him.

(It was a popular idea -- see Paradise Lost, for example -- that Death entered the world as a result of the Fall, but it clearly doesn't. The other tree in Eden would confer eternal life, which is what YHWH doesn't want. This makes it pretty clear that Adam and Eve weren't created immortal.)

All of which makes the Gnostic schema -- where a tyrannical God creates an already-fallen world order which the servants of a higher Godhead must work to redeem -- fit strangely well with the myth. (Not being a biblical literalist, of course, I'm not obliged to worry about all this... and don't you worry either, I won't be talking about any of this at Greenbelt. My talks are unorthodox, but not that unorthodox.)

Complementarily, I've also recently read Revelation all the way through for the first time in years. I know it's a cliché to say so, but I'm truly impressed by how utterly barking it is. (I'm also impressed by the early exhortations to the seven churches, where the angel conveniently tells John to tell them to stop doing the things which he, John, happens not to like them doing.)

The imagery is stream-of-consciousness gibberish (although if you listen to some commentators it's also carefully-coded symbolism disguising a satirical attack on the Roman Empire, which is why on the surface it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever). I find myself put irresistibly in mind of an Eddie Izzard routine:

"...Then I saw a man riding on a lizard, and he had five horns and a big sword coming out of his mouth, and his wife had nine heads and was juggling sausages. Then a beast arose from the ocean, like unto an ox or a wallaby or possibly a bat, and it had the head of a penguin and was made out of soup. And the man and the soup-beast fought, and as they fought it rained for ninety years, and lo! it rained jam..."

Er... so, did Mr Izzard ever actually do a routine like this, or did I make it up?