Did Jesus say that Noah's Ark was real?

In 2007 I posted this to a forum: I am a new user and I don't know how long I'll stick around, but I'm hoping to find Christians who accept evolution and see how they reconcile their beliefs. I was raised Mormon, but no longer believe in the tenets. I am now slowly working my way towards mainstream Christianity.

Recently I was reading Matthew 24 and came across verses 37-39: "But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." These verses really struck a chord with me and I'm surprised I have never heard about this before. Can you explain to me how you reconcile your beliefs with what Jesus said? Did Noah's Ark really exist?

I liked these two responses. First:

"I sympathize with your position. I can only imagine how hard it is to give up the tenets with which you were raised and what internal and familial conflict that may be causing you. Yes, Jesus spoke of the Ark as a real event. He also referred to Adam and Eve as real people. There are a great many errors of every kind in both the New Testament and the Old Testament.

The 3 synoptic gospels of the NT were written at the earliest 30-40 years after the events described and the primary sources for the tales in the synoptic gospels are unstated, except for Luke's claim to have spoken to (unnamed) eyewitnesses. Unfortunately Luke's claim to be derived from eyewitnesses is dented by the inclusion of conversations at which Jesus and Satan where the only people present. Other sections of Luke's gospel tell of events that occurred 70 years earlier; what eyewitnesses did he talk to for those bits?

The claim in the gospels that there were a large number of eyewitnesses to events such as the resurrection in fact decreases the chance that the gospels contain broad truth was not a single one of these eyewitnesses a literate man? Why did no-one make sure that a contemporary record of the events was preserved? One single credible contemporary source would add greatly to the credibility of the extraordinary claims in the gospels. The absence of any written record till decades later has to be disturbing, to say the least.

So, over time I've come to accept the fundamentalist argument, "Either the entire Bible is true, or none of its extraordinary claims are true." In my honest opinion the correct conclusion to draw from the available evidence is obvious... If however you are convinced by the extraordinary claims made in parts of the Bible (the life of Jesus), while rejecting other claims made by the Bible (the genealogy back to Adam, and the story of the Flood), I don't see why you can't ascribe Jesus's error to any of many possible explanations:

1) Jesus was misunderstood.

2) Jesus never said words anything like that at all; they were added to the Gospel in error.

3) Jesus knew perfectly well that the Ark was a fable, but was talking in a way that his audience could understand.

4) Jesus was God in man; the "man" part of Jesus had the normal knowledge of a 1st Century Jew, and for example knew nothing of quantum theory or cosmology.

5) Whoever told the story to Matthew simply got it wrong, or added their own take on Jesus's words.

In a way the fundamentalists are right, the moment that you accept that any part of the Bible may be false you are opening a can of worms that it may not be possible for you to unravel. Who is to decide which bits are true and which bits are false? And why does God permit false sections in His purported Word? But plenty of Christians do claim to be comfortable with evolution. If they are rational how could they be other than comfortable with evolution, when the physical evidence confirming it (and an old earth) across numerous lines of scientific enquiry is so crushing? I remain modestly perplexed that they continue to be comfortable with Christianity, but there are plenty of good people here who take that line and they can speak for themselves."

Second:

"I'm Jewish and fairly religious, if rather heterodox. I consider the narrative of the Bible inspired, both by God and by actual events, but muddled through need to explain complex events to a Bronze Age people, as well as human alterations, both by error and intent.

Noah's story is one of the more difficult ones to fit into history. However, there is an oddity in human genetics: An apparent bottleneck about 70,000-75,000 years ago, when the human population was reduced to a few thousand people. About the same time there was a massive volcanic event, the Toba Eruption, "Possibly the largest explosive volcanic eruption within the last twenty-five million years," to quote the Wikipedia entry.

The Toba Catastrophe theory is that these two events were related. Given that the Mount Tambora Eruption of 1815 produced "The year without the summer" and the Toba eruption expelled something like 20-30 times more material into the atmosphere, the worldwide climatic effect was likely quite heavy. Toss in other related disasters that may well have happened, like a tsunami, and primitive humans that managed to live through that must have thought the world had all but come to an end.

So, is the story of Noah and similar world-wide stories the story of the Toba event, passed down through 70,000 years of oral retelling? There are lots of difficulties to making such an argument. To start with it's not even clear that Toba and the population bottleneck are related. Similarly timed bottlenecks in other species are scarce. Could an oral story be passed down through 70,000 years of the human species? I don't know.

But because of my religious beliefs, I tend to think that it is a strong possibility that that oral tradition got mixed into the Genesis story. If nothing else, the Noah story in Genesis is quite clearly two different accounts of the same event, braided together, which casts doubt on it being literally true."