18AR23-40

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AR 23:40 - Evangelicals and Middle Eastern antiquities markets

In this issue:

BIBLICAL RELIABILITY - the debate between Daniel B. Wallace and Bart Ehrman spills onto the pages of National Geographic

Apologia Report 23:40 (1,406)

December 12, 2018

BIBLICAL RELIABILITY

"The Search for Sacred Texts" that's the cover story teaser for National Geographic's latest issue (December). Robert Draper’s feature article is titled "The Bible Hunters," and it takes readers "Inside the cloak-and-dagger search for sacred texts." The process occurs "In the shadowy world where religion meets archaeology, scientists, collectors, and schemers are racing to find the most precious relics."

Included are ancient scrolls "Dating as far back as the third century B.C. ... the oldest biblical texts ever found. ...

"Reverence for holy writ is integral to the faith of evangelical Christians, who have become a driving force behind the search for long-lost biblical texts in desert caves, remote monasteries, and Middle Eastern antiquities markets. Critics say that the evangelical appetite for artifacts is fueling demand for looted objects - a charge borne out to some degree by recent investigations and by reports from legitimate dealers.

"'Evangelicals have had a tremendous impact on the market,' says Jerusalem antiquities seller Lenny Wolfe. 'The price of anything connected to the lifetime of Christ goes way up.' ...

"Among those helping to underwrite [one] Qumran expedition is a foundation established by Mark Lanier, a well-heeled Houston lawyer and avid collector <biblical-literacy.org> of theological texts. Another archaeological dig ... at Tel Shimron in Israel, is being supported by the new Museum of the Bible <museumofthebible.org> in Washington, D.C. The museum's chairman, Steve Green, is president of the craft store giant Hobby Lobby and one of the biggest supporters of Christian causes in the United States. His enthusiasm for Bible hunting is unabashed. ...

"[A]s Green, a devout Southern Baptist, has come to learn firsthand, not everyone in the Bible-hunting business is a saint." This is explained later in the story: "He soon discovered the dark side of the antiquities trade, and paid three million dollars in a legal settlement for importing objects that experts said were likely looted from Iraq."

Much absorbing archaeological history is introduced in this lavishly illustrated narrative. Concluding one portion we read: "For cloak-and-dagger drama, the Dead Sea Scrolls trump all other biblical discoveries. ...

"Scholars were thrilled to learn that among [the scrolls] was a nearly complete copy of the Book of Isaiah from the Hebrew Bible. Its content was virtually identical to another copy of Isaiah dated almost a thousand years later. The Great Isaiah Scroll would become Exhibit A for scholars who defend the Bible against claims that its text was corrupted by scribes who, over centuries of copying by hand, introduced a multitude of mistakes and intentional changes." Draper picks up some related controversy later in the piece.

"In 2009 Steve Green began buying rare Bibles and artifacts at an unprecedented pace, eventually acquiring some 40,000 objects - one of the largest private collections of biblical material in the world. ...

"Because the authentic Dead Sea Scrolls are 'the most significant cultural treasure of a Jewish nature on Earth,' as [one] curator ... puts it, the sacred documents are preserved with exquisite care. Meanwhile multitudes of other biblical manuscripts are left to molder in academic storerooms or be consumed by fire, flood, insects, looters, or war in countries wracked by political upheaval. Conserving and documenting them before their secrets slip away forever is 'literally a race against time,' says Daniel B. Wallace, head of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts <csntm.org> in Plano, Texas.

"Wallace and other globe-trotting textual scholars - most notably the Benedictine monk Father Columba Stewart of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library <hmml.org> at Saint John's University in Minnesota - have logged tens of thousands of miles traveling the world on an urgent mission: to digitally document ancient biblical manuscripts in archives, monastic libraries, and other repositories and make them available to scholars everywhere via the internet. It's a daunting task. In the case of the New Testament, whose authors wrote in Greek, more than 5,500 Greek manuscripts and fragments have been found - more than any other ancient text. They total as many as 2.6 million pages, Wallace estimates, and like <www.bit.ly/2rxYI3r> the Oxyrhynchus papyri, most of them have yet to receive scholarly attention.

"'About 80 percent of already known manuscripts that would be of help for New Testament scholarship aren't published yet,' says Father Olivier-Thomas Venard of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française <ebaf.edu/en>, a Dominican research center in Jerusalem. ...

"A ... solution may soon be technologically feasible, predicts Wallace, who hopes to use optical character recognition (OCR) software to digitize every volume of the Greek New Testament. 'Right now it would take a scholar 400 years to read and collate all the known documents,' he says. 'With OCR, we think we can do the job in 10 years.' ...

"Why all the fuss about old Bibles and older scraps of Egyptian papyrus? For folks like Wallace, who teaches <www.bit.ly/2Prnlsb> at an evangelical seminary, and Green, who has invested much of the family fortune in a world-class museum dedicated to the Bible, it boils down to this: Is their faith based on fact or fiction? ...

"[H]ow good is that evidence? Assuming for the moment that the God of the Bible actually exists and that he somehow spoke to the authors of the ancient biblical documents - do we have now what they wrote then? After all, none of their original writings, what scholars call the autographs, have been found. Their words survive only because they were hand copied countless times until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. And even conservative scholars admit that no two copies are exactly alike.

"Few publishers would bet that such questions would produce a national best seller, but that's what happened in 2005 with the publication of the cleverly titled Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why [1]. The book's author, Bart Ehrman, argues <www.bit.ly/2G91u9H> that the 'facts' about Jesus set forth in modern Bibles are based on centuries of copies, all of which say different things, so we may not know what the original texts actually said.

"In person, the goateed evangelical turned atheist is even-tempered if subversively caustic. Over coffee near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he's a professor of religious studies, Ehrman recites a host of scriptural passages that he views with scholarly suspicion. ...

"Many of Ehrman's assertions are debatable (literally so: he and Wallace have squared off in three public debates), but some scholars agree that Christian scribes deliberately corrupted certain passages over time. The question is one of degree. ...

"[W]hile it's true that more than 5,500 Greek New Testament manuscripts have been found, close to 95 percent of those copies come from the ninth to the 16th centuries. Only about 125 date back to the second or third centuries, and none to the first.

"None of these figures rattle Ehrman's sparring partner Wallace, who considers Ehrman a friend and refers to him by his first name. ...

"Still, the lack of Christian writings from the first century would seem to be a point in Ehrman's column - a point Wallace is eager to eliminate. Too eager, perhaps." Here and in the impressive info-graphic, "Oldest Testaments," which accompanies this feature, readers can easily be misled regarding the complexities involved. National Geographic, Dec '12, pp40-75.

And while the digital presentation on the NG site <www.on.natgeo.com/2QkFA86> is impressive, the print version will likely be something you'll want to hang on to if you get the chance.

Visit <www.bit.ly/2rsqkXF> for more on biblical reliability (and challenges to Bart Ehrman) from back issues of Apologia Report.

For now, you can start with The Ehrman Project <www.ehrmanproject.com> and Wallace's 2010 co-authored work, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ [2].

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005, paperback, 256 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/aj5fn4>

2 - Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ, by Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace (Thomas Nelson, 2010, paperback, 248 pages) <www.amzn.to/2QQy0S2>

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