Chris Heard: Religion professor complains when a Christian documentary maker distorts his interview
A couple of years ago, I welcomed a camera crew into my office for some interviews about Old Testament stories. The crew went away and I never heard from them again, until I e-mailed the production company last week to find out what ever became of the footage. A representative of that company promptly e-mailed me back and kindly sent out a screener of the DVD that is scheduled to release in October.
I am not happy with the end result.
When I agreed to do the interview, I did not know that the thankfully direct-to-video program would feature “re-enactments” of biblical scenes (and horrible re-enactments at that; only Moses has a proper beard). I did not know that the film would use completely irrelevant footage to distract viewers during longish voiceovers by host Roger Moore (yes, that Roger Moore). And I certainly did not realize that the production would end up trying to promote views that I do not personally endorse. I did suppose that a diversity of opinions might be represented, and represented as such. Silly me.
Here are some of my specific complaints about the program. Yes, I know that you haven’t seen it yet. My hope is that maybe you won’t. But perhaps if I embarrass myself pre-emptively by means of this post, at least my learned colleagues will cut me some slack. Also, as far as I know, I’m not bound by any non-disclosure agreement, so please consider this an “advance review” of the film.
Adam, Eve, and Eden. The first eight minutes or so of the program offer up young-earth creationism, with a heaping helping of commentary from folk associated with the Institute for Creation Research. Longtime readers of Higgaion know that I have no sympathy whatsoever with young-earth creationism (I’d sympathize with a young-earth creationist who got bit by a pit bull or something, but you know what I mean); I consider it exegetically irresponsible and it is (regardless of my consideration one way or the other) not scientific in the least. The producers conveniently left out the parts of my interview where I expressed the view that the biblical Adam and Eve are “everyman” and “everywoman” and that the impossible geography of Eden is a clue to readers not to try to interpret Genesis 2–3 literally. Instead, the film gives air time to ICR folk who completely misuse the real scientific concept of a Y-chromosome most recent common ancestor (Y-mcra) and a mitochondrial DNA most recent common ancestor (mt-mcra), sometimes called “Y-chromosome Adam” and “mtDNA Eve”; the talking heads try to conflate Y-mcra and mt-mcra with a literal Adam and Eve from Genesis 2–3, even though Y-mcra and mt-mcra, according to current evidence, lived almost 90,000 years apart from one another. (To my better-informed friends: yes, I know that this brief explanation is awfully simplistic.) A caption in the film claims that “Using geographical clues given in Genesis, scholars almost all agree that the Garden of Eden is in Iraq.” Wrong. There are some biblical scholars who want to locate the original location of Eden in what is now Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; of course, none of these scholars would say that the Garden is (now) anywhere to be found. And most biblical scholars are not even interested in the question. If you take the geographical description in Genesis 2 as your clue, you will be hopelessly frustrated, for the clues simply don’t work. No such place exists. If you are willing to stretch some of the geographical references in Genesis 2, and allow certain place names to mean things in Genesis 2 that they don’t mean anywhere else in the Bible, you can assign a geographical context to Eden, not in southeastern Mesopotamia but in the mountains of Asia Minor. I’m pretty sure I talked about this with the interviewers. If I did, they didn’t use any of that material. It wouldn’t fit the agenda....