The Elusiveness of Knowledge–Part One
Does it make any sense that knowledge is so easily gained and lost and that not everyone comes to have the same knowledge at any given time—especially about the Bible? Why should it be this way? Why wouldn’t God make all knowledge, including what we find in the Bible, available at the same time to everyone in the world? Many people might suppose that in our modern world we possess a greater amount of knowledge than the generations that preceded us. Many in the developing nations would probably consider themselves to be more advanced as a society and better educated than their ancestors. But how many of us today could fill the shoes of the architects of the Great Wall of China, and design the famous castles and palaces of the world? How many of us personally could build a ship that could cross the Atlantic Ocean? And how many of us could steer a course across the oceans using the winds, and navigate across the vast deserts of Africa using the stars? We might believe that the methods and deeds of people who lived long ago were crude and archaic compared to how things are done today. However, most people would feel helpless if they were suddenly thrust into these situations. This causes us to think about how strange it is that an advancement into the Modern Age doesn’t necessarily mean an advancement in all knowledge for all people. When we think about it, the knowledge that each of us has is relative to our known world. Each of us may know a lot about some things, but very little about most things. Why should it be this way? Why wouldn’t God make all knowledge, including what we find in the Bible, available all at once for everyone? Knowledge seems to have an elusiveness about it. It rises to shine brightly from place to place, then it is gone as if it were never there. We can take an example from a man named Eratosthenes (c. 276-196) who was the librarian of Alexandria, Egypt. He was a man of some learning who set out to reform a map of the world. This was no small task because his first problem was to determine the size of the earth. Now, it had been observed in the city of Aswan, Egypt, that on the longest day of the year the sun was directly overhead. Observers noted that a well in the city could be seen all the way to the bottom because of the sunlight shining straight down. Eratosthenes knew that the city of Alexandria was about 500 miles away from Aswan. So, he took a sundial, which was only a stick mounted on an overturned bowl and measured the shadow cast by the stick in Alexandria. He saw that the shadow, on the longest day of the year, was one-fiftieth of the circle and computed that it represented about 500 miles. It was a simple matter after that to multiply 500 miles times 50 to arrive at the remarkably close number of 25,000 miles for the distance around the earth. It was a simple task that created a great advance in knowledge and people’s ability to describe the world. Then, some years later, another man named Posidonius (c. 135-50 BC), a respected traveler, recalculated the distance around the earth to be several thousand miles less than Eratosthenes’ calculation. This had a negative effect on those who navigated the seas, and for those who dared to brave a voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, now known as Jebel Sidi Moussa and the Rock of Gibraltar. Thus, by a simple calculation, one influential person had negated a great advancement in knowledge about the earth. Knowledge about the earth that would have affected the outcome of future knowledge in a positive way was in a sense “lost” to the world. In time, the library at Alexandria was eventually destroyed by successive invasions over several centuries. This renowned center for Greek learning, with its thousands of notable volumes, was gone. We can take another example of how elusive knowledge can be from the time of the Roman Empire. There is an old saying that “All roads lead to Rome.” These roads were built for the sake of military control and commerce as Rome became a center for trade and wealth in Western Europe. Knowledge of the world also traveled along these Roman roads, and some of these ancient roads still exist to this day. Now, the Romans first learned of an expensive fabric called silk during the first century BCE. But most people didn’t know exactly where it came from, and fewer still knew how it was made. Eventually, as people’s knowledge of the world expanded they learned that it came from Seres, a place somewhere in the Far East. Those who traveled the roads and waterways of commerce knew that silk could be bought in the area of the Ganges River. From there they learned that it came from a country in the north and to the east called the country of Thinae, sometimes called Sinae. This, of course, was the land of China. It was for a time a place of some mystery to the Romans, and also later for many Europeans. Then, as it was with Alexandria, so it was with Rome. It too fell apart at the center of an empire, and with it went a major center for commerce and knowledge about the world.However, these were not the only places in the world where knowledge expanded and increased. There were many other places over time, such as in Spain, in China, in Russia, in Iraq, in Turkey and in England. However, none of these were the first, nor were any of these the last. If we look back further in time, we see that the ancient Sumerians were developers of commerce and a people who valued knowledge. Here in the region of the ancient Fertile Crescent we find the