It Isn't About Believe What You Want, Except When It Is

(With apologies to Dave Barry, who had nothing to do with this and would like that on the record.)

Today I spent three hours on Facebook with a gentleman in Australia, who was obviously tired, learning that Moses did not write Genesis. Levi did. I know this because he told me so in a Creationism group, and he had a theory, and I had a keyboard, and that is how most of history's great friendships begin.

The theory, as best I can reconstruct it, goes like this. Levi wrote Genesis. Levi also wrote Joseph and Asenath, a book about Joseph's wife, around 1550 BC. Moses wrote a book called Jubilees at Mount Sinai in 1406 BC. And Ezra the scribe wrote 2 Esdras in the 500s BC. I am not making this up. I am merely reporting it, which in the Facebook era is considered a form of making things up, and we will get to who actually was.

Now, a normal person would say, "Isn't Genesis the first book of the Torah, and doesn't the Torah belong to Moses?" A normal person would be missing the point, which is that normal people do not read footnotes. I read footnotes. I read all 122 of them in a journal article about a papyrus from a cave, which is a sentence I never expected to write and now cannot take back.

Let us take the claims one at a time, the way you take a cactus.

Joseph and Asenath. This book was written in Greek, in the style of the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was begun in the third century BC. A book written in 1550 BC in the style of a translation that would not exist for more than a thousand years is either the greatest time-travel story ever told or it is not from 1550 BC. Scholars date it somewhere between the first century BC and the second century AD, and the earliest date anyone proposes is the middle of the second century BC. My friend pointed out, correctly, that the oldest manuscript is not the same thing as the date of writing. True! Nobody dates it by the manuscript. They date it by the Greek. The Greek does not care how you feel about it.

Jubilees. This one is fun, because it was offered as proof and turned out to be a witness for the other side. Jubilees was written around 164 to 100 BC. It leans on an older book, a later book quotes it, and the oldest copy from the Dead Sea caves is from about 125 to 100 BC. It also retells Genesis, which means Genesis had to be sitting on the shelf when the author sat down. And in Jubilees 2, when the angel tells someone to write down the creation account, the someone is Moses. Not Levi. Offering Jubilees as proof that Levi wrote Genesis is like proving your cousin owns the house by showing me the deed with my name on it.

2 Esdras. This is the one with the giant eagle. The eagle has three heads, and the eagle is Rome, and the three heads are the Flavian emperors, which puts the book around AD 100. Ezra the scribe, meanwhile, had arrived in Jerusalem about five and a half centuries earlier. That is a long lead time for a book report.

Levi himself. The strongest thing in the pile is that Levi really does show up as a teacher of letters. In the Testament of Levi he tells his sons to teach their children to read, and to read the law of God continually. I said so, in public, because it is true. But teaching letters is not writing Genesis, in the same way that a fourth-grade teacher does not write the dictionary. And when we were told that Levi passed Enoch's books down to his sons, I pointed out that this makes Enoch the author and Levi the guy holding the coat.

Somewhere in all this, the gentleman admitted that his AI had invented a verse. It was, he said, the first time it had done that. I want to be clear that his honesty about this was excellent, and more than most of us manage when our Fantasy Football predictions fall apart. But it is the thing worth taking home. An AI will cheerfully quote a Bible verse that does not exist, in a confident tone, with a verse number attached. This site has free tools for exactly that, including the Hallucination Guard, whose entire job is to tell the AI that making things up is not a personality. A good prompt cuts down the fabrication. It does not replace opening the book.

Then he asked what Moses wrote about Christ in Genesis. Fair question, and one search answers it. The seed of the woman who bruises the serpent's head, Genesis 3:15. The blessing of all the nations through Abraham's offspring, Genesis 22:18, which Paul says is Christ in Galatians 3:16. The scepter that stays with Judah until Shiloh comes, Genesis 49:10. In Luke 24:27, Jesus starts with Moses and the Prophets and explains what they say about Him, and in John 5:46 He says plainly that Moses wrote of Him. That one is not about footnotes. That one is the whole thing.

He signed off with "Believe whatever you want." I have thought about that sentence more than I have thought about most of my own opinions.

Here is the thing about "believe what you want." When the question is who wrote Genesis, it is not an argument. It is a white flag with good manners. Dates come from the Greek, from who quotes whom, from what a book knows and what it does not. They do not come from the mood of the person holding the theory. On that question, believing what you want is not freedom. It is a very comfortable chair.

Except when it is.

There is a place where "believe what you want" is exactly right, and it is the place most of us never visit: holding our theories with open hands. I hold that Moses wrote the Torah, because the text and Jesus both point there. I also hold it as a man who has been wrong before and expects to be again, and who would very much like to find out sooner rather than later. Open hands, an open mind, and the honest admission that the theory is not the point.

Eternal life, Jesus says in John 17:3, is knowing the Father and the Son. It is not holding the correct position on who wrote what. The first beatitude, Matthew 5:3, is poverty of spirit, which is a fancy way of saying we show up with empty pockets. A man can be right about Levi and Moses and still miss the One both of them were writing toward. A man can be wrong about both and know Him. I would rather be the second man than the first, though I am working hard at being neither wrong nor smug.

To my friend in the thread: you made my day. The laugh reaction, the replies, the whole three-hour parade of it. I disagree with you about Genesis and I like you anyway. The door is open, and the footnotes are on me.