It has been said that legends, not myths, have come from true stories. Many of these legends seem to come from the Bible, although most unbelievers would say it is the other way around.
The character of Eve in the Christian bible was heavily influenced by the myth of Pandora as well as Plato’s philosophy. (source)
This is always the thought of the unbeliever. They think that secular records were the inspiration for the biblical writers even though that cannot possibly be true. There is no record of Moses coming in contact with anyone from the Greek region or that he had even heard the story.
This contrary claim just comes from the minds of those who seek to make the Bible a human book. They cannot produce one shred of evidence their claim is true, just like the biblical scholars who claim much of the OT was taken from Babylonian myths and written in the 5th to 7th centuries BC.
If you read the story of Pandora, it is remarkable how similar they are. However, similarity does not prove the Bible was copied from a secular source. Since Moses wrote somewhere around the 14th to 12th centuries BC a good 500 to 700 years before Hesiod wrote Pandora’s Box it is most likely that Hesiod copied from the Bible.
Not to speak for him or to read his mind but it is possible that Hesiod wanted to write a story that resonated with his target audience, people who did not like the words of the OT. Or Hesiod heard the story of the Fall of Man and decided to write his own version.
Whatever the reason, it is clear that evil is using this situation to deceive humans and turn them away from Jesus. The viewpoint of the Bible from the secular point of view has not changed.
They continue to promote myths about the biblical record and make unsubstantiated claims against it even though those claims have been refuted masterfully for hundreds of years. Those alternative ideas come from their personal interpretation of the Bible and its content:
The two creation accounts in Genesis, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3, are generally understood as distinct from each other, written by different authors in different contexts. In the first creation narrative God creates a male and female at the same time, which has been interpreted to imply the egalitarian creation of man and woman. The second creation account states that God created Eve from Adam because he was lonely. (source)
That quote contains many fallacies about the Bible. There was only 1 creation account in Genesis chapter one and the record found in Genesis chapter two is just providing more details. Also, there are not two different authors who wrote Genesis 1 & 2.
Different details are not evidence for different writers. Then, the third misleading information is found in this line- ‘which has been interpreted to imply the egalitarian creation of man and woman.’ This is just not true. It just says that God created both male and female and anything else is being read into those words
26 Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and [aj]let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1)
There is nothing in that passage or subsequent verses that supports the egalitarian ideology. Other people keep making the same mistake. They keep allowing their personal views to influence what the Bible says:
In recent decades, scholars such as Phyllis Trible have sought to re-interpret the second account from a feminist perspective, (source)
They do this despite Peter’s warning that scripture is not of personal interpretation. Of course, people will ‘re-interpret’ what scripture means. They do this because they do not like the truth or what someone else has said scriptures mean.
Given the importance of this story in the Christian tradition, one would assume that it held an equal place of influence in ancient Judaism. But it did not. Eve is not mentioned again in the Hebrew Bible after Genesis 4, and it was only in the late Second Temple Period, from approximately 200 BCE onward, that Adam and Eve appear prominently in Jewish literature. (Ibid)
Eve does not have to be mentioned more times after Genesis 4 for the story to be important, true, or influential. Why should God have to keep repeating the event when once is enough? If you do not learn the lesson the first time, it is doubtful you will learn the lesson after repeated tellings of the story.
Several early Church Fathers grounded their doctrines in Hellenistic philosophical concepts. Above all, they borrowed from Platonism, and many prominent Christian scholars altered Plato’s ideas to fit Christian theology. (Ibid)
When people say this, they normally do not have a foundation to base those types of accusations. Which Church fathers? Plus, the so-called church fathers were not infallible, were not writing scripture and their work is to be treated like anyone’s work that contains biblical content.
Plato’s theory of the forms underpins a surprising amount of Christian thought on the nature of the mortal world, and it could plausibly be argued that Plato’s works (most notably the Symposium, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Phaedrus) had as much influence on the ideologies of the Church Fathers as the Hebrew Bible. One could easily discuss how much of the Christian worldview has unknowingly stemmed from Plato, and not grow short of topics to investigate. (Ibid)
If this is true, then it would mean that false teaching entered the church and would need to be removed. But we do not agree with that author’s claims. Most likely, she misunderstood what the Church Fathers were writing about and leapt to his own conclusions.
With regards to Eve, Plato is significant in two ways. Christian intellectuals took some of Plato’s prominent theories and applied them to Genesis in order to construct two interconnected doctrines: original sin and the fall of man. The Christian reading of Genesis, and indeed the entire Christian worldview, is based upon these ideas. (Ibid)
This is not true either as it assumes something not in evidence. Plato is not that credible of an author to turn to especially when he is credited with promoting the false tale of Atlantis. The author’s work we have been quoting is filled with baseless and unverifiable claims.
She does not provide one shred of evidence to prove her words are true. It is just another article in along line of articles meant to distort the truth and confuse Christians.
Why was Eve alone seen as guilty, and not Adam? This is a question that often puzzles biblical historians. In the early allusions to Genesis in Jewish literature, including the few references to Adam and Eve in the epistles of Paul in the New Testament, if anyone was responsible for leaving the Garden of Eden, it was Adam. Gradually, however, Eve came to take the blame; she led Adam astray and so the blame was not truly his. (Ibid)
That author continues to show that she does not know anything about the Bible or what she is talking about. Eve is not getting all the blame here as Paul wrote:
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned— (Romans 5:12)
Eve does get her share of the blame because that is what truly happened:
14 And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman was [i]deceived and [j]became a wrongdoer. (1 Tim. 2 & Genesis 3)
Pandora’s Box is based on Genesis 3, not the other way around. Unbelievers will always try to discredit the Bible as they continue to distort and misrepresent the facts and history. We have said this many times, if God had copied from unbelievers, then he would not be God and he would not be above all other gods.
He would be a weak spirit who could not think for himself or record history correctly. This reminds us of what one archaeologist or scholar once said- ‘if the OT is not historical then Israel becomes the first nation incapable of writing its own history’.
If God cannot write original material, what does that say about God? A question you can answer for yourselves. One point would be that God is not who he says he is. That would be devastating to Christians everywhere.
But since God is who he says he is, then it is a fact that Hesiod copied from the Bible. Unbelievers love to twist history to fit what they want it to be instead of accepting it as it was. Believing what God wrote is a part of faith and that pleases God.
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