Passages of Time
Charles J. Colton on the Gap Theory & Biblical Chronologies
When I was a student in my church’s youth group, we debated the “Gap Theory,” which posits that there is an unspecified span of time between the first two verses of the Bible. The venerable Scofield Reference Bible had left open the door to that possibility, which made our discussion of the subject acceptable. The adults in charge didn’t really like the theory, however, because of the way it gave ground to all those “atheistic evolutionists.”
The concern, it seemed, wasn’t really about propositional truth; it mostly was about proper associations. So we were made to understand that Genesis 1:1–2 said what it said, and that the earth was quite young,―if only to make us different.
I’ll bet that more than a few readers now have me pegged as a conflicted post-fundamentalist who clings to decidedly old, discredited solutions to questions about early Genesis that few are even debating today. But I am suggesting neither that there is a gap, nor that there isn’t one. We simply don’t know, and it’s okay to be agnostic over things about which Scripture is not clear. I have met folks for whom everything is perfectly clear, and uniformly found that they don’t seem to be nice people. They are not bad people,―just not nice people.
The Biblical Narrative Mode
From my own reading of the Scriptures I have found that, while the inspired Hebrew writers apparently bothered themselves with sequential accuracy, they did not concern themselves as much with spatial precision. They were not inaccurate; they simply did not trouble themselves to mark out the exact time between events. They were not unscientific, but prescientific, at least in this regard.
Unannounced “gaps” are common in the narrative literature of both the Old and New Testaments, and not just in the genealogies. Just as Hebrew poetry is quite unlike our own, so Hebrew narrative differs from ours. It is real history and all true, but not the kind of true history that we would write.
Of course, literary scholars are not unaware of this and other “tricks” of the writing trade. They would draw our attention to the fact that narratives may contain sizable gaps in time for any number of purposes, such as to allow rapid movement toward a climax or to connect related events that would otherwise be separated.
But a distinctive feature of the Hebrew Bible is the extent to which this is true. This observation leads Shimon Bar-Efrat (Narrative Art in the Bible) to write about the prevalence within the Hebrew Scriptures of “empty spaces of time” and about the “highly selective nature of biblical narrative.”
Sequence over Spacing
This penchant for temporal thrift shows up in the New Testament as well. In three places where John, a Galilean Jew, uses the phrase “after these things” (meta tauta) in his Gospel to introduce what happens next, with unmistakable reference to those events of which he has just written (5:1, 6:1, 7:1), there is a considerable passage of time. Within those gaps, several other significant events occur, as attested by the Synoptic writers. Aware of this “problem,” the New International Version in two places has “some time later” and “some time after this,” but in neither case is any duration of time supported by the Greek. It was supplied for spatial clarification.
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