At the time of writing this we are in the midst of the
COVID19 Coronavirus pandemic and in many countries, lockdown. In recent weeks there has been a certain
amount of excitement as people have noticed interesting things in old novels
and TV shows. Possibly the first to gain attention was the 1981 Dean Koonst novel
The Eyes of Darkness which features a biological weapon called Wuhan-400 named
after the city in China that was the apparent origin for COVID19. The 2011 film
Contagion features a pandemic from a disease that originates in a bat and is
spread by someone not washing their hands. The 2018 Korean TV series My Secret
Terrius has an episode that involves a genetically modified coronavirus. It is
not surprising that we notice coincidences. We look for patterns. It’s the way
we are. It is not surprising that we should see more excitement about these
patterns. The pandemic is seemingly the only thing on the news at the moment
and added to that the reach of social media and the extra time people have to
spend on it at the moment.
There are a number of theories going about regarding these accounts
such as:
The author knowingly or unknowingly had a psychic experience
and “saw” the future.
The author somehow got hold of secret information from some
conspiracy organisation and leaked it in their creative works.
The manuscript was written in/after the 2020’s and sent back
in a time machine.
These are some of the wilder theories put out there. The one
theory I have not heard though is the one that says:
You cannot really believe that this pandemic is happening
because it is obviously just a retelling of these older fictions!
Such an idea is ludicrous. Nobody would say that because a
novel spoke of a virus from Wuhan, there can never be a pandemic that
originates there. We acknowledge the coincidences. We realise that there are
many thrillers written about these sorts of themes. Some elements are therefore
more likely to appear than others. Unless you are writing a story about viruses
or microbes being our first encounter with extraterrestrial life, such as
Michael Crichton’s 1968 Novel The Andromeda Strain, you are likely to use
known diseases as a starting point. The more your novel is based out of fact,
the more likely it is to coincide with real events. There will be other points
that are more a case of pure chance.
If we look closely we also admit that we
are cherry picking the points that match and ignoring the ones that differ. We are also looking at them from the
viewpoint of the 2020 COVID outbreak. We
read the things we see now back into these accounts. In fact these fictional plagues
are very different from the current COVID19 virus and apart from the generic
similarities i.e. coronavirus is a respiratory disease and good hygiene
practice slows the spread, there is little similarity.
So what is this doing on a blog about answering objections?
Well one objection that gets raised against the gospel accounts is the
suggestion that it is just a rehash of older myths. That all the key elements
of the life of Jesus were previously told as the story of Osiris, Mithras,
Horus or some other ancient deity. But the same answers apply to this as apply
to the current COVID precedents. Some of the key similarities are actually retrofitted
to the “older” myths because people brought up with the gospel traditions are
interpreting ambiguous sources and reading things in that aren’t actually
there. An illustration to this is the Palace of Knossos in Crete. Arthur Evans
set about recreating the palace in the 1920’s. There seemed to have been a room
that contained a large chair. This was
therefore declared to be The Throne Room. Because it was The Throne Room a back
story was imagined about who sat on the throne and what they did. A set of
steps resemble a small amphitheatre so that therefore “must have been The
Theatre” and there must have been plays etc. etc. There is no archaeological reason to believe this was the
case, and more reasons to doubt it.
What the current COVID precursors reminds us though is that
even if elements of the story have been told in fiction before, it doesn’t mean
that they cannot feature in a later true story.
For an examination of the stories of Osiris, Mithras and Horusby J Warner Wallace click on the links.
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