Introduction
Part One: Biblical Authority
Part Two: Authority from Tradition – the Jewish Sages and the Early Church Fathers
Part Three: The Weight of Traditional Views
Part Four: Man’s Fallible Opinions
Part Five: Clues in the Text
Part Six: More Clues in the Text
Part Seven: What are the Days of Genesis?
Part Eight: Misconceptions of Paradise
Part Nine: Life and Death in the Pre-Fall Animal World, I
Part Ten: Life and Death in the Pre-Fall Animal World, II
Part Eleven: The Other Realm and the Other Fall
Part Twelve: Tracing the Advent of Man, I
Part Thirteen: Tracing the Advent of Man, II
Part Fourteen: Tracing the Advent of Man, III
Part Fifteen: Tracing the Advent of Man, IV
An argument that often crops up in the creation controversy is that Jesus himself affirmed a young earth. This claim is based on a confrontation Jesus had with the Pharisees, as recorded in Matthew 19:3-5 and Mark 10:2-8, where they questioned him concerning divorce.
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” – Matthew 19:3-5
Some Pharisees came up to Jesus, testing Him, and began to question Him whether it was lawful for a man to divorce a wife. And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two but one flesh. – Mark 10:2-8
Commenting on this incident, young-earth teacher Henry Morris argues that old-earth claims contradict Jesus:
The Lord Jesus, on the other hand (who was there, having Himself created all things—note John 1:1-3), taught that men and women were made essentially at the same time as the cosmos itself, when He said that, “from the beginning God…made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). “The beginning” obviously was a reference to Genesis 1:1 and Christ was specifically citing Genesis 1:26.[1]
Morris says here that male and female were made “essentially at the same time as the cosmos itself.” Why the qualification? Because he knows that Jesus’ statement cannot be taken in a rigidly literal fashion. Humans were not made at the very beginning of creation but rather at the end of the process. In fact, they were the very last thing God is said to have made. For this reason, Morris writes of the “beginning of creation” in the sense of the general time period during which everything got started. In this sense, the whole creation week is “the beginning,” and while not technically accurate, Morris is comfortable with this idea because he views the days of creation as six literal calendar days. In that scheme, given that so little time passed from the creation of the cosmos to the creation of man, man might as well be said to have existed “from the beginning.” This is basically a matter of ‘close enough is good enough.’
On the other hand, Morris would undoubtedly find it absurd to argue the same way from an old-earth position, given that, according to this framework, humanity did not come along until billions of years after the cosmos began. In that sense, man does not appear on the scene anywhere near the absolute beginning. But if, in the eyes of God, the entire creation period comprises “the beginning,” then it really does not matter how long the days of creation actually were, as the creation was not finished until man came on the scene. Only then did God look upon all that he had made and pronounce it “very good.” Only then was the work complete and he chose to “rest.”
Thus, even from an old-earth perspective, it is true to say that man has existed “from the beginning.” It may seem rather counter-intuitive at first to think of “the beginning” in a sense of billions of years, but we must also bear in mind that there is an eternity of endless ages yet to come. Eventually, no longer how long “the beginning” took, that timeframe will come to seem insignificant. Given that he exists outside of cosmic time, God himself likely sees it this way already.
Moreover, in the Hebrew language, the famous opening phrase of Genesis, “in the beginning” (bereshit), is also the name of the book itself.[2] Thus, the entire book is literally called “In the beginning,” even though it chronicles events that occurred long after creation, such as the life of Abraham. For this reason, when a Hebrew (or Aramaic) speaker of Jesus’ time named the book of Genesis, they were literally calling it “In the Beginning.”
Bearing this mind, if we go back to the account of Jesus and the Pharisees in Matthew 19 and Mark 10, we find that the word translated “from” in the phrase “from the beginning” is the Greek preposition apo, which usually appears as “from” or “of” in the New Testament but can also be legitimately translated as “in.”[3] Thus, “from the beginning” could be alternatively translated as “in the beginning.” Given that he likely spoke Hebrew or Aramaic among his own people, it may be that Jesus was simply naming the book of Genesis here. A paraphrase of his remark to the Pharisees might read as follows: “Do you not remember reading that he who created them in Genesis made them male and female?”
At this point, I direct the reader’s careful attention to the differences between Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts of this incident. There is general agreement among scholars and theologians that the Gospel of Matthew was written primarily to Jews. In fact, there was a tradition among the early church fathers that it was originally circulated in Hebrew and Aramaic rather than Greek, and the Jewish flavor of the gospel is apparent in a number of ways, including in this passage. Note how Matthew records Jesus as saying to the Pharisees, “Have you not read?” Read what? The book of Genesis, of course, which he then proceeds to quote. In doing this, Jesus was asking the Pharisees a rhetorical question. He knew very well that they had read Genesis; he was simply referring them back to it because the answer to their question should have been obvious in light of the account of man’s creation.
The Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, is thought to have been written for a gentile audience, and thus reads a bit differently. For one thing, Mark does not include the statement, “Have you not read?” in his version of this story, likely because most of his gentile readers had probably not read Moses and were not familiar with Genesis. So, where Matthew says, “He who created them from the beginning,” Mark says, “From the beginning of creation, God made them.”
If Mark recorded the incident in such a way as to communicate what Jesus was saying for the benefit of a gentile audience who had not read the Torah, he might have been partially paraphrasing Jesus here rather than trying to quote him verbatim. Rather than saying, “Have you not read that he who created them in Genesis made them male and female?” he says instead: “From the beginning of creation God made them male and female.” This is the same information expressed more generally with respect to the target audience. The truth content is still the same, however.
[1] Henry Morris, “Did Jesus Teach Recent Creation?” Institute for Creation Research. June 01, 2005.
https://www.icr.org/article/did-jesus-teach-recent-creation
[2] Ancient books were often named for the first words they contained. For instance, the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, begins with those words, which translate to “When on High…”
[3] For instance, see Romans 11:25, where Paul says that “blindness in part has happened to Israel.”
Thank you for the series.
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