07AR12-14

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Apologia Report 12:14

April 12, 2007

Subject: Challenging the liberal bullies of scholarship

In this issue:

ARCHAEOLOGY - testimony to the observation that liberals tend not to be students of conservative thought

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ARCHAEOLOGY...

Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) history contradicting the

magazine's current liberal editorial philosophy

BAR interview considering threat of scholarship to scholars' faith

includes significant remarks by Bart Ehrman

Earliest inscription ever found mentioning Jesus Christ also

suggests an understanding of His divinity

Edwin M. Yamauchi argues that whatever is good for Homer should also be good for the Bible

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ARCHAEOLOGY

"Let the Evidence Speak" by Bryant G. Wood -- testimony to the observation that liberals tend not to be students of conservative thought, and as a consequence, pay the price in the end. In this case, the liberals represent the academic majority in control of Biblical Archaeology Review. Wood is responding to an Op-Ed piece, "Question Authority," written by Michael Coogan in the May/Jun '06 (n.p.) version of this column ("Archaeological Views"). Wood accuses the magazine of promoting the opinion that "Biblical history prior to the monarchy is myth and fable."

He then points out that "the evidence, much of it documented in the pages of BAR, ... demonstrates that the notion that the Biblical narrative for the pre-monarchy period is unhistorical does not stand up to the scrutiny of impartial data. The hard evidence favors a model in which the Bible should be treated as a valid historical source for this time period."

The brief evidence that Wood presents is from "examples pertaining to Joshua and Judges, proceeding from the end of the period of the Judges backward in time." He should know; he has a Ph.D. in Syro-Palestinian archaeology from the University of Toronto. Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr '07, pp77-78.

It is no coincidence that one of the main features in the above- mentioned issue of BAR sports the title "Losing Faith: 2 Who Did and 2 Who Didn't" (pp50-57), which asks how scholarship affects scholars. BAR editor Hershel Shanks interviews Bart Ehrman, "a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS's [Biblical Archaeological Society's] most popular lecturers ... James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister [denomination not specifically identified]; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America's best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he's a non-believer."

Only some of the interesting and brief remarks of Ehrman, an opponent of the Bible known to most readers of Apologia Report, will be considered here. He explains: "What ended up making me lose my faith was kind of related to scholarship: When I was at Rutgers University, I taught a course on the problem of suffering in Biblical traditions, where I dealt with issues of theodicy.... Theodicy is the question of how God can be righteous, given the amount of suffering in the world. ... In teaching this course, the thing that struck me is just how different the answers [in the Bible] are. ... I decided that I couldn't believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things."

Shanks elicits a few other compelling remarks that may require more context to appreciate than we can provide here:

"SCHIFFMAN: Study is worship. So a person who claims not to be a believer may be doing worship in some form. ...

"EHRMAN: ... I would actually like to be a believer.

"DEVER: I would too. I wish it were true. I really do."

Also of note is the sidebar (p55) "How Religious Are America's Professors?" It summarizes "a survey to measure the political, social and religious attitudes of America's college and university professors" conducted by Neil Gross (assistant professor of sociology, Harvard University) and Solon Simmons (assistant professor in the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Gorge Mason University). Only the topic of religion is considered in the sidebar, which shows that 50-60 percent of professors in higher education believe in God (no definition indicated). This slips to 36.6 percent of professors in "the top 50 in the latest US. News and World Report ranking" of such schools. Conversely: "The study found that 23.4 percent of the professors surveyed classify themselves as agnostic or atheist.... 6.9 percent of all Americans and 11.2 percent of Americans with four or more years of college ... consider themselves agnostic or atheist."

"Inscribed: 'To God Jesus Christ'" by Vassilios Tzaferis -- yet another item in the same issue of BAR (pp38-49). In this case, we have a report on a dig in Megiddo, northern Israel, started in 1990 after excavation work for a prison addition uncovered "a Christian prayer hall that may be the earliest church discovered in the Holy Land. ...

"The most spectacular find in the excavation ... was a beautifully preserved mosaic floor that clearly indicates the function of the room." At its center were two fish, "a distinct Christian symbol for Christ."

Regarding Christian symbols, the sidebar on page 45, "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior," explains that "The first crosses used were Greek crosses with arms of equal length, which began to appear in the fifth century. The modern Roman cross, based on the [Greek] letter 'tau,' began to show up in Christian art in the seventh century. ...

"Long before the cross became the most prevalent symbol of Christianity, early worshipers used a fish. Evidence from written sources comes as early as Clement of Alexandria (150-211), who told the readers of his Paedagogus to have either a fish or a dove engraved on their seals. Visual presentations of fish as a Christian symbol appear in early burial chambers such as the catacombs of St. Callistus (founded in the middle of the second century)....

"There are many hypotheses about how the fish came to symbolize Jesus, but the most prevalent is that it symbolizes an acrostic [in Greek] for the phrase "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior...."

Back to the prayer hall. "[T]he Christians who worshiped in this prayer hall were Roman soldiers." Tzaferis adds that inscriptions in the mosaic floor indicate that "a table once existed in the center of the hall - paid for by a woman named Akeptous: 'The God-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.'" Note that "this is the earliest inscription [estimated at 231] ever found in Israel, and perhaps anywhere, that mentions Jesus Christ!" It appears lost on the author that perhaps just as momentous, are the implications supporting the commonly held, but lately challenged view, that early Christians typically understood Jesus to be divine.

One begins to entertain suspicions that BAR is merely out to fan the flames of controversy (and milk profits from increased circulation) by including, in the same issue as the foregoing, the feature: "Historic Homer: Did It Happen?" by Edwin M. Yamauchi, elder statesman of Christian archaeology (pp29-37, 74). Yamauchi begins by quoting an innocent statement by William Dever supporting the reliability of Homer's writings in the face of critics who consider them myths. "[A] long oral tradition, preserving many authentic details of earlier Greek history, persisted down until about the eighth century, at which time these traditions were finally reduced to writing." Yamauchi responds: "If the Hellenic world could have kept alive accurate historical details in an oral tradition lasting many centuries, couldn't the Biblical world have done so too?" (Dever is sympathetic to the former while hostile to the latter.)

The contents page of this issue summarizes Yamauchi's argument: "Skeptics often argue that the epics of Homer - the Iliad and the Odyssey - are nothing but fiction. But time and time again, archaeologists have come up with proof that much of it is based on fact. If Homer accurately preserved historic memory, couldn't the writers of the Bible have done so too?"

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