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Christianity and Genetic Engineering: A historical perspective

Modern light is shed upon a mystery from an ancient text...

"...and the sons of men in those days took from the cattle of the earth, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and taught the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord; and God saw the whole earth and it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth, all men and all animals..."

The Book of Jasher 4:18

The above passage is quite remarkable and amazing in many respects, given the period of time to which it refers (before the Flood of Noah's time) and the very antiquity of The Book of Jasher itself.

The Book of Jasher is one of some fourteen books which are mentioned and referred to in the text of the Bible, but which do not appear in the Bible itself. In the Bible reference is made to The Book of Jasher in two places:

Joshua 10:13

II Samuel 1:18

The text of The Book of Jasher concerns itself with the period of time from the Creation to shortly after the death of Joshua. Even though it is not canonical, it is undoubtedly a very ancient text. The translation from the ancient Hebrew text from which the above passage is quoted was done in 1840. For many, many thousands of years I am sure that what this passage described was considered to be too fantastic to be true, perhaps lending to a certain degree of incredulity to the entire work itself-after all, canonical scripture must speak true, consistently-but now, given recent developments and advances in biotechnology, it is certain that "...the mixture of animals of one species with the other..." is indeed possible!

Prior to the last few decades as far as men knew it was IMPOSSIBLE to cross one species of animal with another. Even natural crosses between closely related species like a horse and a donkey or a pigeon and a dove resulted in sterile, "mule" offspring.

For thousands of years men knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you penned a rooster up with a cow, no matter for how long, that you absolutely could not end up with a mixture of poultry/cattle as a result-but with the recent advent of genetic engineering this impossible thing is becoming possible as men use biotechnology in the laboratory to mix the DNA of species as differing as goats and spiders; jellyfish and rabbits; toads, silkworms and potatoes; humans and pigs; etc., etc. the list goes on appalling and seemingly endless as to what has ALREADY been done utilizing

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