This is the last of three articles gathering up the questions that came to my page over a few busy days. The first dealt with manuscripts, the second with eyewitnesses and Greek. Two objections remain. One is historical: “Books were removed from the Bible.” The other is an entire worldview in a sentence: “There is no God; we evolved from fish.” I will take them in order and keep the citations where you can check them.
Nothing Was Removed, Because Nothing Was Received
Start with 1 Enoch, the book most often named. It was never cut out of the Bible, for the simple reason that it was never in. Josephus attests a closed Jewish canon of twenty-two books, with nothing added since the prophetic period (Against Apion 1.38-42). The earliest Christian canon list, from Melito of Sardis and preserved in Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 4.26.13-14), does not include it. Neither does the Muratorian Fragment, from about AD 170, nor the Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius in AD 367. The Aramaic fragments found at Qumran (4Q201 through 4Q212) confirm that the work is ancient. They say nothing about whether it was ever received as Scripture, and it was not.
What about Jude, who cites 1 Enoch 1:9? Quotation is not canonization. Paul quotes Aratus in Acts 17:28 and Epimenides in Titus 1:12, and no one imagines he was conferring inspiration on Greek poetry.
The Gospel of Mary
The Gospel of Mary survives in a single fragmentary Coptic codex of the fifth century (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, missing ten of its nineteen pages) and two third-century Greek scraps (P. Rylands 463 and P. Oxyrhynchus 3525). No specialist dates its composition earlier than the middle of the second century. A document written a hundred years after the events, and never present in any canon, cannot have been removed from one.
The Marriage Claim
The idea that Jesus was married has no ancient attestation of any kind, in any tradition, hostile or friendly. The passages usually cited from the Gospel of Philip (Nag Hammadi Codex II,3) turn on the Coptic loanword koinōnos, which carries the general sense of associate or partner, in a manuscript damaged at the critical point, in a third-century Gnostic text. The papyrus fragment promoted in 2012 as evidence was shown to be a modern forgery; the Harvard Theological Review devoted its April 2014 issue to the testing, and later investigative work traced the object to a contemporary fabricator. The claim’s real origin is documented and recent: Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1982, popularized by a novel in 2003.
Against it stands a passage people rarely notice. In 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul defends the right to marry by pointing to the married apostles and to the Lord’s brothers. A marriage of Jesus would have been the decisive precedent in exactly that argument, and Paul does not use it. The silence is loud.
Lilith
Lilith appears once in Scripture, at Isaiah 34:14, where the Hebrew lilit names a creature in an oracle of desert judgment; the Authorized Version renders it “screech owl.” The story attaching her to Adam appears only in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval composition of the eighth to tenth century AD that scholars widely read as satire. The earlier Talmudic references (Eruvin 100b, Niddah 24b) are demonological and make no connection to Adam. We can watch the legend accrete across the centuries. Genesis, meanwhile, states the opposite of subservience at the very outset: “male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27), both bearing the divine image.
“We Evolved From Fish”
The second objection is not a historical claim but a complete account of reality, so I will answer it with three problems, in ascending order of difficulty.
The Problem of the Thinker
If our cognitive faculties are the product of selection for reproductive fitness alone, then the reliability of those faculties for abstract truth is not established by the process that produced them. Every conclusion they reach inherits that uncertainty, including the conclusion that there is no God. Darwin felt this himself. In his letter to William Graham of 3 July 1881 he described the “horrid doubt” whether the convictions of a mind developed this way are worth anything at all.
The Problem of the Information
The distance between a fish and a man is not measured in tissue. It is measured in functional genetic information: specified sequences that fold into functional proteins and regulate development. In cryptography and information theory the operational question is simple to state. Can an undirected stochastic process generate functionally specified sequence? Random substitution is noise, and noise degrades a signal unless an error-correction and selection mechanism is already in place, a mechanism that itself presupposes functional machinery. The explanation requires the very thing it is supposed to explain.
The Problem of the Rocks
Darwin named the absence of innumerable transitional forms as the gravest objection to his theory (Origin, chapter 9 in the first edition) and staked its resolution on future collection. The Cambrian record, at Chengjiang and the Burgess Shale, documents the abrupt appearance of most animal body plans within a geologically narrow interval, placed near 538 million years on the conventional scale. Abrupt appearance of distinct kinds is not Darwin’s pattern. It is the pattern Genesis describes: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life” (Genesis 1:20).
A Universe Tuned to a Knife Edge
Set biology aside entirely and the problem for atheism remains. The vacuum energy density we observe differs from the quantum field theoretic prediction by roughly 120 orders of magnitude. Vary the strong nuclear coupling by a few percent and stable carbon or hydrogen disappears. I spent years thinking about key spaces, so let me put it in those terms: a key space of that size, with a single functional value, is not a candidate for random selection.
So the inventory is complete. Nothing was removed from the Bible. The Gospel of Mary, the marriage legend, and Lilith are each a case of material arriving long after the fact and being mistaken for something hidden. And the fish story, examined at the level of the thinker, the information, and the rocks, asks for more faith than the Genesis account it was meant to replace. I say that as someone who spent twelve years trying to make the other case work. Bring the next question. I will answer it the same way, with the data on the table.
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