Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

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Difflugia
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Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

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Post by Difflugia »

In another thread, otseng mentioned an apologetic argument that I haven't heard often, but that I find novel. The idea is that certain Chinese characters contain meanings that refer to a knowledge of Genesis, but originating before any possible Chinese contact with Jewish or Christian people. It's apparently an old one, being attributed to seventeenth-century missionaries by Herbert Giles in 1902.

The book that otseng mentioned is The Discovery of Genesis by C. H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson. It's not available as an ebook, though a bootleg scan isn't hard to find.

Another book cowritten by Ethel Nelson about the same topic is Genesis and the Mystery Confucius Couldn't Solve. It's also not available as an ebook, but archive.org has a scan that can be checked out and read.

There are also two articles from the old Answers in Genesis publication, Creation ex nihilo Technical Journal, placed online by Creation Ministries International, the "other half" of an acrimonious split between the US and Australian halves of Answers in Genesis. Each link is to the table of contents for the issue. Scroll down until you find the article and click on the PDF icon to the right: So, the question for debate:

Does the ancient Chinese language contain references to events portrayed in Genesis?

To be honest, I'm not sure how much discussion this will generate, but I thought others might at least find the argument fascinating.
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Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

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Post by TRANSPONDER »

p.s :D I think I got my head around it. It a mental pretzel, but I think it goes like this:

The atheists said 'The Chinese know of no global flood' (The same for the Egyptians around 3,000BC which I gather is the supposed date of the Flood). In Both case, the Genesis -literalists tries to ferret out anything that looked like a validation of the Flood or could be fiddled to look like it. In both cases they related to flooding of rivers The Nile and the Yang-tze, I believe. In neither case were the a global flood. It could be argued that a severe flood only caused local flooding in Egypt and China but it wasn't total. That's the Biblical flood out the window right there.

Some apologists have tried to argue for a local Flood (q.v the Black Sea flood) which is what the Bible tells us. But even if that's true, that completely bins the point of the story - what God wanted the Flood for. It's the old story of - in trying to wangle the Bible into real events, the apologist deflates the Divine intention of the events.

So this is where I said I couldn't get my head around it. If they were going to come up with stories that didn't actually support the Biblical flood (just riverine flooding) and they were going to pretend that they did, why not just invent stories that claimed records of a global Flood in China and Egypt, if they trusted that the doubters wouldn't check? I think they can't just make up a fake tale. They have to have Something to work with, even if if they are lying about it in the end. It's not a Total lie and I guess that allows them to deceive themselves that it just needed 'interpretation', where a flat -out fabricated story wouldn't.

I may be wrong, but that's the only explanation up with which I can come ;) .

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Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

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Post by 1213 »

TRANSPONDER wrote: Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:56 pm ...The idea was of course to try to make old Chinese records validate Genesis -literalist belief. It was an old (Bible skeptic) argument that Chinese knew of no global flood. The believers tried to wangle a counter to that with a 'Flood' story which was about Chinese official controlling the flooding of a river...
Hmmm... by what the Wikipedia says, Chinese seem to have had many flood myths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Mythology_of_China

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Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

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Post by TRANSPONDER »

I can already see one implication of a flooding river, because otherwise how could the water be diverted into the sea? If you want to propose a Chinese myth that has a global flood, we could look at it together. I can only say that I ave only seen the one about the official who successfully dealt with the flooding of a river presented as support for the Genesis flood and not the ones about 'repopulating the world' as relating to the Noachian Flood even by Creationists, but I'm willing to be corrected.

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Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #14

Post by TRANSPONDER »

Just looking at the one about the goddess Niuwa "Earth did not hold up [Heaven] all the way around [its circumference]. Fires blazed out of control and could not be extinguished; water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferocious animals ate blameless people; predatory birds snatched the elderly and the weak. Thereupon, Nüwa smelted together five-colored stones in order to patch up the azure sky, ..."

It appears that floods (which did not recede) were just local, not total. Fires sprang up which would require something to burn, though it could be argued that it happened before the flooding. But birds snatching people implies that people were still walking around to be snatched.

It takes a bit of quotemining to make that one (for example) to support Genesis.

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