From the Inbox: Did Noah's Flood Really Happen?

No, but that's actually pretty rad...

One of my favorite things about being a pastor is the random notes I get from people asking theology questions. Not infrequently, these turn into long conversations where I end up formulating a lot of ideas into something coherent (hopefully!).

I thought it would be fun to share these with my subscribers in a (very irregular) feature I’m calling “From the Inbox”.

A few days ago, I got into a conversation about the nature of the Bible, and before too long, the question of the historicity of Noah’s Flood came up.

The story can be found in Genesis 6-9 and you probably know at least the bones of the story: humanity has become so wicked God decides to flood the earth and start from scratch. There’s one guy worth saving - Noah, so God instructs him to build a boat and save two of each animal. Noah does so, the whole world floods and only Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives survive.

The questions I got were:

Did Noah's flood really happen? Is Noah an historical character or just some sort of myth?

The short answers are “No, not really. No, probably not. Yes, but that’s actually very cool.”

Now for the longer answers: