Around 1900 or so, two leading Catholic exegetes, Lagrange and Hummelauer, admitted that none of the countless interpretations of Genesis 1 that had been offered during the previous eighteen hundred years could carry conviction. The source of that debacle was concordism, or the belief that Genesis 1 was cosmogenesis in a scientific sense, however indirectly. This dispiriting state of affairs is re-examined in this book on a scale hitherto unparalleled. Rabbis, Church Fathers, Scholastics, Reformers and Counter-Reformers are passed in review. Scientists are taken to task for wading into exegetical waters. The author submits to unsparing criticism various 20th-century exegetical efforts, Catholic and Protestant, aimed at finding a clue to Genesis 1 by taking it for a legend. The concluding chapter also contains an interpretation of Genesis 1 which is literal without being literalist and eliminates thereby the specter of concordism.

    The Creator's Sabbath Rest deals briefly with the same argument and can be found here.

By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

ISBN 978-1-892548-00-9  •  x + 301 pages  •  softcover