DELUSIONAL FABLES

Ben Carson provides a rich lode of evidence that he is wholly immersed in the delusional fables of the False Prophet. How many Seventh-day Adventists is he carrying with him into ultimate oblivion? (Rev. 19:20.) In 2 Tim. 4:3-4 the Apostle Paul predicted:

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they draw to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Among cross referenced texts are the following:

Isaiah 30:10 (RSV)

Who say to the seers, “See not”; and to the prophets, “Prophesy not to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions.

2 Thessalonians 2:11

For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie

Both of these texts are particularly applicable to these times when the light of true prophecy has
gone out in the Christian world, and illusory predictions are substituted. It is of extreme significance that Paul's prediction is specifically linked to the papacy (which has corrupted and neutralized the Bible prophecies by its invention of Preterism, Futurism, and Higher Criticism.)

It transpires that Ben Carson has not plucked his "belief" that the pyramids of Egypt were built by Joseph as granaries out of thin air. The problem is that his sources (though not identified by him) are all fables tracing all the way back to the early Christian era. These fables have been embraced in the Evangelical world, and Carson is one of them! Note that these are the people who were duped into taking over the Republican party and opening the door to domination of party and nation by the Church of Rome - forming the Image to the Beast. (Note that use of the following articles does not constitute endorsement of any hint of doubt about the historical record of the Bible):-

The Long, Strange History of the Pyramids as the Granaries of Joseph

The most concerning part of this anti-science debacle is Carson’s assertion that claims about ancient history are merely “personal beliefs” that should not be evaluated against facts. When asked directly if he was specifically claiming that the pyramids were literally built under the direction of Joseph and were used to store grain, Carson replied, “It’s a plausible belief […] because I believe in the Bible.” But facts aren’t “beliefs,” and it’s disturbing that Carson feels that he can use “belief” as a magic wand to avoid having to support his feelings with facts. . .

But the second part of his defense was also upsetting because he cast his “belief” as existing in opposition to “secular progressives,” as though Christians would uniformly accept a crackpot version of ancient history—or the Bible.

The fact of the matter is that the claim doesn’t appear in the Bible at all. The story of Joseph and Pharaoh is told in Genesis 41, where Joseph tells Pharaoh that a prophetic dream foretells seven years of famine. In Genesis 41:48, we read that Joseph collected grain in each Egyptian city as insurance against the famine, and in Genesis 41:56 we read that this grain was kept in storehouses. If we read this literally, it would seem that there was a storehouse in each city, so even if you believe literally in Genesis, these storehouses cannot be the pyramids.

That did not stop people from speculating about them, however. Here is where things start to get complicated. According to some sources, the monk Rufinus reported in the second of two books he added to his translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History that pyramids were shown as Joseph’s granaries in his day, c. 410 CE, but this passage doesn’t appear in modern editions, for reasons unknown to me. (The closest source I can find is a sixteenth century hagiography.) In St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, there is a series of murals made in 1204 that depict scenes from Genesis. Because many of these match closely to images in the illustrated Cotton Genesis, a copy of the Book of Genesis made in the fifth century CE, it’s assumed that the remaining murals reflect pages missing from the incomplete Cotton Genesis. One of these shows Joseph’s granaries as the Pyramids of Egypt, with holes at their peaks for pouring in grain. If this assumption is correct, then the Cotton Genesis would be the oldest identification of the pyramids with the granaries of Joseph. . .

Julius Honorius, a Roman writer of Late Antiquity (c. 500 +/- 50 years), was apparently the first to describe the pyramids as Joseph’s granaries, in his Cosmographia, in which he says that the pyramids “are called the storehouses of Joseph,” but without elaboration. . .

I guess we’re experiencing another outbreak of medievalism, but we can take heart that if it is true tha[t] the story was inspired by Jews and early Christians trying to syncretize their faiths with the glory of grain-giving Serapis in the Roman era of Egypt, then there is some irony in the pagan origin of Carson’s Christian extremist beliefs.

Did Joseph Build the Great Pyramid at Gizeh?

Dr. Ben Carson has made lots of controversial headlines this week with his assertion, that turns out to be quite common in certain Adventist/Fundamentalist Christian circles, that the biblical Joseph in fact built the Great Pyramid of Cheops–the one that appears on the back of our U.S. dollar bill as the “Great Seal” of our nation.

Although this assertion comes as a shock to the press and is repudiated by all Egyptologists, it has some broader background that is worth exploring–see Ana Marie Cox’s very intelligent post in the Daily Beast here. I remember hearing this theory here and there in Christian evangelical circles growing up in the 1960s as a teenager. The assertion that Joseph was the engineering genius (with God’s help of course!) behind the mysterious construction of the oldest pyramids–and that they were used for grain storage, is still floating around after 50 years, see the purported evidence here. The late Dr. Herman Hoeh, self-educated “historian” and biblical scholar, wrote an article in the Plain Truth magazine in 1964 titled “Who Built the Great Pyramid?” that is available on-line here. He asserts that not only Joseph was involved, but the biblical figure of “Job” was in fact Cheops, the non-Egyptian king who ruled Egypt in the 18th century BCE. If you read through Dr. Hoeh’s article you can see how naive readers would be taken in by his presumed knowledge of history while all mainstream historians and archaeologists, lacking biblical faith, are thus deluded and can’t see the truth.

This is the “closed” scientific world that Dr. Carson and millions of fundamentalist Christians live in and within that bubble everything makes sense. . .

It is hoped that the "millions of fundamentalist Christians" do not include too many Seventh-day Adventists.