Ancient People Were Not Stupid

Blog-out. That's what I'll call my lapse in blogging motivation. Today I found, however, something worth mentioning.

Ancient people were not stupid. Lewis opines on this idea in one of his essays in God in the Dock (I don't feel like looking it up). Modern thinkers scoff at the notion of the Virgin Birth, because they imagine first century neanderthals as simply too naive to realize how the fertilization process works. This is hogwash. Men and women have plainly understood how babies are made for millennia. They knew that it required intercourse. That is why Joseph sought to quietly send Mary away -- he assumed that she had been naughty, or raped, or something. He was reluctant to accept the miraculous account, until the Lord spoke to him.

The same can be said of other reinterpretations of biblical miracles. A Sunday school teacher once told his young students that the Red Sea was easily crossed because of a strong wind and only a few inches of water. A boy remarked, "That's an even bigger miracle!" "Why?" replied his teacher. "Because Pharaoh's entire army was drowned in a puddle!"

So here's the latest installment of "Man's Neurotic Obsession with Explaining Everything in Scientific Terms." An oceanographer at Florida State U. has proposed that Jesus was able to "walk on water" because of ice formation in the Sea of Galilee. This theory makes one crucial assumption: the disciples were stupid. Somehow Jesus fooled them, and Peter must have been in on it, too. Jesus obviously resorted to chicanery in order to cement his position as the greatest ethical teacher in human history. And those naive disciples! They must've been dummer than a bag of hammers. They obviously didn't understand that this was clearly impossible.

Give me a break.