What’s more, Jesus is clearly a “first century, second temple Jewish rabbi,” Huff added. “We’re not seeing a multilingual, cosmopolitan, ecumenist guru.”
Several claims Huff and Knowles discussed related to the idea that Christianity copied other sources. One of those claims says that the Genesis creation account copied the Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian creation story, word for word. Huff responded to this idea, noting that a “subtle but important difference” between the two accounts is that Genesis offers a “creation story” while the Enūma Eliš describes the “Babylonian origin story.”
Other key differences are that ancient near eastern (ANE) cultures believed that “matter and the created order was more or less eternal,” said Huff. The Enūma Eliš assumes a polytheistic view of the world and describes the world and human beings emerging from slain gods. In contrast, Genesis describes a God who is monotheistic, who is outside of time and space, and who created everything.
While there are some broad correlations between the two texts—for example the idea of bringing order out of chaos—Huff sees no “causative link” or evidence of “literary borrowing.”
“The content is very, very different,” he said.
Knowles wanted to know why people think the texts are related if the reality is they are so different, and he suggested the reason might be ignorance. Huff agreed it could be ignorance, as well as cherry-picking and “wanting to downplay what Genesis actually is and its implications for the rest of the story.”
“If you find enough of these parallels,” said Huff, “you can draw conclusions, but that’s not honest with what’s going on.”
Later in the conversation, Knowles brought up the belief that Christianity is a copy of pagan religions or fertility cults, and Huff again mentioned the problems with seeing correlation as causation. “In order to establish that, you really need to show once again causation, right, not just correlation,” he said. “We can find correlative patterns all over the place.”
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For example, someone could point out the facts that Huff and Knowles were both wearing clothes, sitting at computers, speaking into microphones, and drinking out of tumblers and use those facts to argue that Huff must be the Protestant version of Knowles.
“That’s not a coherent argument,” said Huff.
