Ark Fever

A century after the gold rush, a not unrelated compulsion is spreading. The stricken are willing to undergo amazing hardships in their quest. Their object? To recover the ark of Noah, thought to lodge on the remote mountains of Greater Ararat in eastern Turkey.

Even relatively sane and sedate professors have been bitten by this bug. On August 17, 1970, at 1:30 P.M. I attained the incredibly difficult 16,946-foot peak of Ararat while engaged in this search, and my eleven-year-old son came within 550 meters of the summit, thus becoming the youngest Westerner ever to reach that altitude on the mountain. We shall doubtless be at it again next month (ark-searching must go on in August, when the ice cap recedes to the maximum).

Why would anyone give up a glorious Alsatian summertime to alternately boil and freeze on a mountain so high that often one can take only ten or fifteen steps before sitting down to recover his breath in the rarefied atmosphere? The answer: because of the tremendous amount of solid evidence that on the mountain the Turks call Agri Dagh, the Mountain of Agony, a substantial vestige of the ark of Noah—if not the ark’s massive hull itself—remains to this very day, frozen in the glacial ice.

Here I do not refer primarily to the accounts of the ark’s survival set down in biblical and classical times. These accounts (from Josephus, the Greek church father Epiphanius, the Koran, Marco Polo, and other sources) and nineteenth-century discoveries of what were said to be ark relics can certainly whet the appetite; but a full-fledged case of ark fever, at least for a member of the hidebound academic community, requires a more substantial base in contemporary testimony. To mention even a major proportion of the recent evidence would be impossible here. But several impressive illustrations can be given.

First, the 1916 Russian expedition. In Delugé et Arche de Noé (second edition, 1953), Andre Parrot reported:

During the First World War, a Russian airman named W. Roskovitsky, flying over Mount Ararat, declared that he had observed on one of the slopes of the mountain the remains of an ancient vessel. The Czar at once organized an expedition, which, we are told, found the remains in question and brought back a description of them which was conclusive as regards their identification.

The source of Parrot’s reference was a 1949 issue of the Journal de Genève, but the same story appeared in several other publications. One of them was the Russian-language periodical Rosseya. The author of this account was a White Russian colonel, Alexander A. Koor. This distinguished officer, archaeologist, and philologue escaped from Russia after the Revolution and reached California by way of Manchuria. A year ago, I spent an afternoon with him and his daughter in their apartment in Menlo Park. I have no doubt of the colonel’s integrity and scholarly precision in conveying factual data. He in turn is fully confident of his sources, having known intimately the officers who gave him accounts of sighting the ark on Ararat.

In late summer of 1952, mining engineer George Jefferson Greene was reconnoitering for his company in a helicopter over Mount Ararat. He distinctly saw the prow of a ship in the ice. Circling within ninety feet of the object, Greene photographed it several times. On returning to the United States, he showed his excellent blown-up photographs to friends and acquaintances, who declare that the pictures unquestionably showed a vessel in the ice and were not retouched or faked.

In 1962, Greene was murdered in British Guiana, apparently for gold, and none of the possessions he brought with him were recovered. But the photographs—six of them—had existed, and some thirty people had seen them. Several of these persons have given sworn testimonies. Dr. Clifford L. Burdick, a geologist, obtained very specific description of the photographs from an oil man who had had contact with Greene in 1954 and who said that even “wooden side planking” could be identified on the photographed vessel. My personal conversations with Dr. Burdick have convinced me of his reliability and scientific acumen.

In August of 1952, the French amateur explorer Fernand Navarra made the first of his three explorations of Greater Ararat. He described that exploration in his book L’Expédition au Mont Ararat (1953). After attaining the summit of Ararat on August 14, 1952, Navarra and his companion began to search for traces of the ark. Here is his account of what they saw:

It was August seventeenth—we had reached an altitude of 13,800 feet and the enormous ice cap stretched before us.… We were surrounded by whiteness, stretching into the distance, yet beneath our eyes was this astonishing patch of blackness within the ice, its outlines sharply defined. Fascinated and intrigued, we began straightway to trace out its shape, mapping out its limits foot by foot: two progressively incurving lines were revealed, which were clearly defined for a distance of three hundred cubits, before meeting in the heart of the glacier. The shape was unmistakably that of a ship’s hull: on either side the edges of the patch curved like the gunwales of a great boat.…

Further confirmation could not be made, for the explorers had no radar equipment.

In July, 1955, Navarra was back on the mountain in company with his eleven-year old son Raphael. With great difficulty they made their way to the area where the father had seen the silhouette in 1952, and, on the suggestion of Raphael, Navarra dug down and found hand-tooled wood. Lacking the tools for extensive digging, he nevertheless cut off and brought back a piece one and a half meters long. He subjected the wood to analysis at the University of Bordeaux and at the Forestry Institute in Madrid, Spain. The Bordeaux report declared that the fossilized wood derived from “an epoch of great antiquity,” and the Madrid analysis estimated the age of the fragment at 5,000 years. (Radiocarbon examinations of the wood have not been useful, owing to contamination of the sample.)

In a second book, Navarra argued that, by process of elimination, the 5,000-year-old hand-tooled wood, at an elevation well above any structure known to have been erected on the mountain, is best accounted for as a portion of the ark.

In 1969. Navarra returned to Ararat with a SEARCH Foundation expedition and uncovered more wood. Recent problems with the SEARCH efforts—specifically the arrest of members of the group last summer in Turkey when they endeavored to climb Ararat’s north face without obtaining official approval—have reduced to nil the chances that this group will fulfill what Navarra calls his “greatest desire.” But an afternoon with him in Rouen confirmed for me the integrity and consistency of his dream. He gave me most valuable information: he drew a map of the location of his finds, with precise elevation figures!

“Well, what of it?” some readers may be thinking. “Even if the ark turned up, do you seriously expect it would convert men, or even change their view of the Bible?” Certainly the discovery of the ark could not be regarded as a final apologetic for the reliability of the Bible. Despite the remarkable and persistent confirmation of biblical history by archaeological finds of the last seventy-five years, one can always find some yet unsolved problem.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of a recovery of the ark. The most radical biblical criticism since the onset of modern rationalism in the eighteenth century has been directed against the Book of Genesis, and particularly against its allegedly mythical early chapters. Surely a precise confirmation of the historicity of the details of Genesis 6–8 would devalue such interpretations, if not discredit an approach to the biblical materials that seldom gives them even the benefit of doubt Aristotle demanded for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey!

The presence of flood accounts in the traditions of peoples throughout the globe and the place of Noahic events in the Hebrew, Muslim, and Christian religions would create almost universal interest in a major discovery relating to the deluge. The missionary value of the find would be staggering, if only on the level of providing a common ground for the general presentation of the biblical message.

Danielou (Sacramentum Futuri) has correctly observed that Noah’s ark functions as “the instrument of eschatological deliverance.” The stress on eschatology—the last things, the events of the end time—is the prime element in the New Testament treatment of the deluge. Two New Testament passages are determinative: Second Peter 2 and 3, and Matthew 24:37–39 (parallel with Luke 17:26, 27). In Peter, the assurance of Christ’s Second Coming is set over against the scoffing of unbelievers, and the destruction by water in Noah’s day is paralleled with the destruction by fire that will accompany the Lord’s final advent (3:5–7). In Matthew 24 and Luke 17, Noah is likewise mentioned in connection with the end time, the Second Coming of our Lord, and the final judgment. Declares Jesus: “As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” The context of both the Matthew and the Luke passages is especially concerned with the signs and conditions preceeding the Second Advent.

A prime mark of God’s dealings with men in Scripture is that he gives them—creatures of earth that they are—visible signs and evidences of his spiritual truth and power. Again and again in biblical history, miracles offer concrete proof of the true God and bring unbelievers and doubters to their senses. Similarly, the “sacramental” devices of the Bible, such as circumcision or the sea (cf. 1 Cor. 10:1–4) in the Old Testament and water, bread, and wine in the New, serve as earthly means of conveying spiritual benefit. This general approach is summed up by Jesus’ question to Nicodemus (John 3:12): “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?”

Will “earthly things” be provided as specific signs and warnings of the end of the age? Jesus’ answer is yes, for Matthew 24 and its parallels tell us of natural calamities, wars, and other happenings that will precede his return. Could an even more explicit sign be in preparation for a world that has largely forgotten the days of Noah and cares little for anything but “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage”? Might the God of all grace, who so often goes the second mile in offering his truth to the undeserving, not present one final confirmation of his Word to those who “hearing can still hear” before he rings down the curtain on human history?

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