Chapter 1
The account of creation in Genesis, is it just an introduction to biblical scripture? What are its verses hiding? Myth, invention or scientific truth? This book attempts to address an issue about which both scientists and religious people feel uncomfortable.
Science flatly dismisses the story, first with a smirk and then with anger, and the Catholic Church has relegated it to a mere introduction to the Scriptures. "The tale of Creation is a religious text with religious teachings," they say. "There is no science in it", "we should not seek scientific explanations", of course.But...
I must admit that I have always been a harsh critic of the Genesis. I was always among those we tried to conceal a smile and changed the subject in order to avoid discussing it. Talking about Genesis and Creation in particular seemed unthinkable to me…, until a few months ago.
It is about a year since my youngest son asked me about God with great interest, more than he used to have.
At the time we chatted, I explained everything I could within my knowledge and we agreed to read the holy books of the major religions to expand concepts. So we began to read, first the Bible [1], as the main book of Catholicism-Judaism-Islam, to then continue with the Bhagavad Gita [2] of Hinduism-Buddhism [3].
When I read him the Bible, when we were moving forward with the book of Joseph, I had what we might call a revelation. I understood then the reason for the Bible, the reason for the creation of the Chosen People, the reason for the coming of the Messiah, The Creation, Eden, the policies of the Catholic Church, the momentous task of the Jewish people, polytheism, monotheism, and much more. This revelation caused me such a shock that I decided to write it down and I poured it in my book One God (Un Único Dios).
The explanation of the Creation story of Genesis was to be part of that book, but after analyzing it with my editor and literary adviser we decided it was better to leave it for a separate book as it warranted special treatment.
When I finished the book One God, in August 2011 - I returned to the account of creation in Genesis and devoted myself to solve it.
It was clear to me that the Genesis story was real; they were facts that could have happened but were somehow masked.
What was the key? What was the Rosetta stone that would allow me to interpret the narrative?
The key, I discovered, was that the story-the text- was a narrative of someone who was telling what he was seeing. That was the key -the board, so to speak- on which I had to assemble the pieces of this puzzle.
In the text of Creation there was an observer, a narrator. They were not just verses, no, it was clear that it was a narration: the narration of an observer.
By introducing this variable, the-narrator-observer, all made sense. From then on the rest was just a case of looking for the right questions: Was it a vision or a revelation? Or both? How long did the vision take? Who was he? Where did he live? What was his location?
The location, the location was crucial.
The observer and its location were the cornerstones for understanding the story of Creation.
This book describes the journey I had to make from the Bible to science in a permanent back and forth until I managed to unravel the mystery.
I encourage you to join me in my discovery.
Let´s have a cup of coffee, find a comfortable chair, and leave the preconceptions aside for a moment.
Let us open our minds and look at what mysteries have been hidden in the verses of Genesis for over three thousand years.
The version I have used for this comparison is The Jerusalem Bible.
The Jerusalem Bible (Bible de Jerusalem) is a version of the Bible published in installments between 1948 and 1953 that the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem published later as the result of the translation to French of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. It was later translated into other local languages, and to the Spanish language. The approach they took was to compare the translation with the original texts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.