Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Stonehenge, Yucca Mountain, and the Bible

Stonehenge, Yucca Mountain, and the Bible

Last updated on: January 5, 2016 at 11:43 am by Fred Clark

Stonehenge, Yucca Mountain, and the Bible 2016-01-05T11:43:50-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Philip Jenkins offers a weird, wonderful, wandering rumination on historical memory and “The Ghosts of Stonehenge.”

We’ve learned a lot in recent years about the history of this ancient monument in southern England and Jenkins reviews some of the new theories about its origins:

There was apparently a gap of some centuries between the time when the stones were quarried, around 3,400 BC, and when they reached Wiltshire to form the basis of historic Stonehenge, around 2,900 BC. The archaeologists involved offer an explanation for this, namely that the stones originally stood as a stone circle in West Wales, in Pembrokeshire. They were then moved as a unit to southern England, possibly because they were of such unusual sanctity. Alternatively, perhaps a tribe of people moved and migrated, and they decided to bring their sacred remains with them. Or else, Tribe A defeated and conquered Tribe B, and annexed their sacred site as a war trophy.

From there, Jenkins takes a fascinating turn to “one of the most wholly bogus and discredited literary sources of the Middle Ages, the History of the Kings of Britain (c.1150) by Geoffrey of Monmouth.” Jenkins wants to be very, very clear that Geoffrey was an utterly unreliable peddler of invented stories. Even Geoffrey’s contemporaries, Jenkins stresses, “recognized he was making most of it up.”

And yet, Geoffrey’s fantastical “history” of Stonehenge (which involves Merlin and Irish giants, among other things) also includes these two elements: That the stones were originally quarried far to the west, and that they were first part of an earlier monument that was transported to the present location. And those two elements, long thought to have been fanciful, are now thought to be roughly accurate.

Here’s Jenkins:

Never, please, ever accuse me of giving credence to Geoffrey of Monmouth on anything. The whole story might be a lucky guess by a great story-teller and historical novelist, which is what he was. … Also, Geoffrey is wrong on so much.

But the idea of that relocation, that second hand quality, does take me aback. Is it possible that local folklore in early medieval times remembered a story that was then reported by some writer, which Geoffrey is transmitting?

… It is tempting, but the timescale is daunting. We are after all talking about a move around 3,000 BC.

And thus we arrive at the very intriguing question he’s exploring here: How long can history and memory be preserved without any written record? And, even if we stipulate that some vestigial memory might linger after many centuries, is there any way to separate those legitimate memories and histories from all that has accumulated around them?

It’s a tantalizing problem. We want to know more than we do — maybe more than we can — about the ancient past, but the record of it just isn’t there. What we have, instead, are ciphers and puzzles, like Stonehenge itself. Here is a tangible message from the world of 5,000 years ago, but we have few clues as to how to understand it.

For his part, Jenkins is doubtful that older traditions and memories can long survive without a written account:

I am very skeptical when ancient or medieval authors claim to pass on older traditions, because they so clearly demonstrate how rapidly accurate information fades away. In eighth century England, the author who wrote the poem The Ruin describes the country’s ruined Roman cities in such a way that shows he has not a clue about their actual operation or function. That is over a gap of just four hundred years – and yes, these cities are likewise attributed to “giants of old.” The Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan several centuries previously describes the destruction of the city of Ai, a name that means simply “heap of ruins.” That was, likely, all the memory that had survived of the site and its fate, and a story was invented accordingly. Claims that accurate tradition can survive more than a century or two without written continuity need to be examined very carefully.

And yet, he says, he still wants to cling to some “ghosts” and to some “illusions about oral tradition extending across several millennia.”

I don’t think that’s entirely impossible, or wholly illusory. Clearly, some kinds of oral traditions did, in fact, survive for millennia — trades and crafts, agriculture, fishing, winemaking, masonry, etc. Those skills were remembered and retained out of necessity. But for less practical arts and lore — who built that temple? why is that mountain sacred? how did our people come to live here? — Jenkins is, alas, probably right to be very skeptical that any meaningful truth might have been preserved for very long.

This recalls the intriguing problem addressed by the Human Interference Task Force and its ongoing efforts to figure out some kind of warning sign for our nuclear waste that might endure for 10,000 years and still communicate its message millennia from now when we and our language and symbols are all long gone.

Whatever warning sign we might imagine, we can also imagine it being misinterpreted or misunderstood by whatever future visitors might stumble across our waste sites thousands of years from now. Slate’s design blog had a good summary of this dilemma a few years ago:

Ruling out language and symbols, the panelists thought about using some visual storytelling. A landscape artist and architect named Mike Brill envisioned huge needles jutting up from the ground — a “landscape of thorns” — to make people scared of being in this dangerous place. But there’s no way of knowing that this ominous landscape wouldn’t become an attraction in itself and actually invite people to explore it.

Even if this landscape of thorns still somehow signified “keep out: danger,” the visitors of 10,000 years from now might take that as an indication that it guarded some treasure, rather than still-deadly toxic waste. Or, like the archaeologists now studying Stonehenge, they might be drawn to the site to study it so as to try to learn more about us, the mysterious people of 10,000 years ago.

But there’s a more immediately relevant point in Jenkins’ ramble, too. He hints at it there in his reference to the biblical story of Ai — a story, he notes, that seems to have been “invented accordingly” to account for a heap of ruins.

That story was written down some 2,400 years ago, more or less. So already, with that written story, we’re dealing with a text written by people who lived in an almost incomprehensibly different world from our own. But that text purports to tell a much older story still, one that took place hundreds of years earlier and one that claims to have endured through all those centuries without any formal record or written account. As Jenkins says of Stonehenge, “the timescale is daunting.” For the Book of Joshua no less than for that ancient monument, “Claims that accurate tradition can survive more than a century or two without written continuity need to be examined very carefully.”

Jenkins is writing on Patheos’ evangelical channel, so he’s tip-toeing a bit here. But he’s not suggesting anything that would seem strange to any biblical scholar — not even to most evangelical biblical scholars. The “histories” of the Hebrew scriptures were written centuries after the events they describe, and, generally speaking, we regard the historical reliability of many of them as somewhere around that of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

We do not have any tangible history of the city of Ai, and the story we have in Joshua shouldn’t be thought of as giving us such a history. But what we do have is that story. That story was written down and preserved as a story, eventually entering the canon of the Hebrew scriptures and, much later, of the Christian Bible. Is that story “history”? No, but that story is scripture. It should be read as what it is and not as what it’s not. It’s always a good idea to read things that way.

Previous Post

January 5, 2016

Outside there's a boxcar waiting

Next Post

January 6, 2016 Epiphany: Jesus wept

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What Persian king helped rebuild the Temple by searching royal records?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Artaxerxes Xerxes Darius Cyrus