THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE
We now reach the second stage in our examination, which is the claim that no religion known to man can be truly said to be original. All religions, the Christian religion included, are adaptations or variants of older religions. Religions are not revealed: they are evolved.
If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion which fulfils those conditions.
According to Bible chronology, Adam was created some six thousand years ago. Science teaches that man existed during the glacial epoch, which was at least fifty thousand years before the Christian era.
Here I recommend the study of Laing's Human Origins, Parson's Our Sun God, Sayce's Ancient Empires of the East, and Frazer's Golden Bough.
In his visitation charge at Blackburn, in July, 1889, the Bishop of Manchester spoke as follows:
Now, if these dates are accepted, to what age of the world shall
we assign that Accadian civilisation and literature which so long
preceded Sargo I. and the statutes of Sirgullah? I can best
answer you in the words of the great Assyriologist, F. Hommel:
"If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern
Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C.
in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture
adopted by them—a culture, moreover, which appears to have
sprouted like a cutting from Shumir, then the latter must be far,
far older still, and have existed in its completed form in the
fifth thousand B.C., an age to which I unhesitatingly ascribe the
South Babylonian incantations."... Who does not see that such
facts as these compel us to remodel our whole idea of the past?
A culture which was complete one thousand years before Adam must have needed many thousands of years to develop. It would be a modest guess that Accadian culture implied a growth of at least ten thousand years.
Of course, it may be said that the above biblical error is only an error of time, and has no bearing on the alleged evolution of the Bible. Well, an error of a million, or of ten thousand, years is a serious thing in a divine revelation; but, as we shall see, it has a bearing on evolution. Because it appears that in that ancient Accadian civilisation lie the seeds of many Bible laws and legends.
Here I quote from Our Sun God, by Mr. J. D. Parsons: