Biblical authority

In the seventeenth century, fossils and similar geological phenomena were being used to demonstrate the veracity of the Genesis account of the Flood. In an age of science fiction Ezekiel’s vision of a chariot of “wheels within wheels” seems more relevant if what he saw was a spaceship from another planet; and an age of drug cults and popular occultism feels attracted by the notion that Jesus and his disciples were devotees of the agaric mushroom, or that Moses produced such miracles as bringing water out of a rock through his training in Egyptian magic, which would naturally have included dowsing. I am not dismissing such explanations: one should doubtless keep an open mind about them, though an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake. What I am saying is that all explanations are an *ersatz* form of evidence, and evidence implies a criterion of truth external to the Bible which the Bible itself does not recognize.

Thus someone recently asked me, after seeing a television program about the discovery of a large boat-shaped structure on Mount Ararat with animal cages in it, if I did not think that this alleged discovery “sounded the death knell of liberal theology.” The first thing that occurred to me was that the Bible itself could not care less whether anyone ever finds an ark on Mount Ararat or not: such “proofs” belong to a mentality quite different from any that could conceivably have produced the Book of Genesis. Similarly, if a historical record of Jesus’ trial before Pilate were to turn up that corresponded in any detail to the Gospel account, many people would hail that as a definitive vindication of the truth of the Gospel story, without noticing that they had shifted their criterion of truth from the Gospel to something else.

- Northrup Frye
The Great Code (pp. 44-45)