Hector Avalos: How Archaeology Killed Biblical History - Part 1 of 2

well dr. Hector Avalos is a professor of Religious Studies and the founder of the u.s. Latino Studies program at the at the Iowa State University he was also named the professor of the year in 1996 and a 2003 2004 master teacher he's a former child evangelist and maybe he can tell us a little bit about that he was born in Nogales Sonora Mexico he received his BA in anthropology at the University of Arizona in 1982 in a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School in 1985 and in 1991 he became the first Mexican American to earn a PhD in biblical studies at Harvard he's the author or editor of seven books and numerous articles he's known for his expertise in religion among us Latinos and in science and religion his book fighting words the origins of religious violence was featured on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation two years ago and is now required reading in some universities this year he published the end of biblical studies which is a critique of the field of biblical studies in universities as a religionist enterprise rather than a holy historical or literary academic project we have Steve said copies of that for sale on the side Hector lives with his wife Cynthia in Ames Iowa where he and this is his words where the joyful sound of wild life forms a welcome intrusion into the serenity of the woods that surround their home please give a warm Minnesota welcome to dr. Hector Avalos I must warn you that if there any Scandinavian Lutheran still with any belief left I might scare you because I was a Pentecostal preacher so it was hard for me to stay still in any one place you know but I call secretions kind of stroll around the stage so I'll try to control myself today but I do want to thank Auguste and the wonderful staff that put together these talks this is my second time up here I come up here usually in October which is my birthday month and and so maybe we'll make it a tradition up here but I want to talk to you today about how archaeology killed biblical history and what I'm going to tell you comes from a little bit of my experience which I'll relate to you briefly I was raised in a Pentecostal home born in Mexico migrated to the US where I would go on circuits preaching the Word of God and trying to convert atheist to Christianity and Catholics to Christianity because we didn't think you know Catholics were Christians but something happened along the way and I thought well I'm going to have to be a missionary and to be a missionary you need to be a biblical scholar you need to know the languages and you need to know how to verify sources for yourself because I started to see that what my minister would tell me was somehow how different than what scientists told me about life in the universe so in the end after a few years of studying the Bible and when people ask me how did you become an atheist I always tell them a Bible study made an atheist out of me and that's the truth by the end of my high school and the first year of my college experience I was an atheist and so now the funnel is what what am I going to do for for my profession you know I can either be a Maytag repairman or I can be a biblical scholar and now however I'm going to be a little scarred from the other end and so having been a fundamentalist anti-creationist I know how to defeat the arguments of the fundamentalist so I became a biblical scholar went to Harvard Divinity School where the joke is of course you have to be an atheist to get in but I successfully completed the masters and went on to the PhD and now I am a biblical scholar an openly atheist biblical scholar and what I have found is my profession most of my colleagues in my profession are not always telling their audiences what they would tell each other so let me tell you what scholars know modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the Bible is the product of cultures whose values and belief about the origin nature and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant even by most Christians and Jews themselves and this is what scholars tell each other this is a report from the American American Academy of religion it's the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world and this is a report they put out in 1975 in which they said indeed one of the enduring contributions of biblical studies in this century course that's a twentieth has been the discovery of the strangeness of the thought forms of biblical literature of the Western tradition to us they know that this this book is alien once you know what it really says and most people don't you will see how odd these beliefs that this book is spouses and what do I mean by Iran well I mean a biblical concept or practice that is no longer viewed as valuable applicable or ethical ethical is a key word let's take some of these examples disease today is not due to supernatural agents as it is in the Bible I go to the hospital I am NOT asked what demon I have I am asked what my symptoms are the killing of women and children was sometimes endorsed by these biblical authors we no longer think most of us at least think that's moral or ethical the sky is made out of metal in the Bible most people don't realize that in Genesis 1 the Hebrew word rakia I really refers to a metal solid object up in their sky so people are not even reading Genesis 1 quite well and you know we don't see a metal sky up there people don't know what the Bible really says and so they think it's still relevant women are generally inferior to men in the Bible well most of us would think no women are at least equals they can they can vote and do other things that's not the biblical view for the most part so a lot of specific concepts in the Bible that are but to be biblical are no longer held to be relevant even by Christians and Jews themselves now biblical scholars though want to still create the illusion of relevance well what purposes does that serve you say well they're self-employment for what if there's no Bible there is no biblical scholarship if there's no biblical scholarship there's no paycheck now I don't want to say that's why they do it but I'm saying that's certainly one of the functions of keeping biblical scholarship alive so how do they do this how do they convince you that an irrelevant book is really relevant well they have a variety of scholarly disciplines whose methods and conclusions are often philosophically flawed this includes translation of the Bible textual chrism trying to reconstruct the original text archaeology history and so forth then there is an infrastructure that supports this discipline that includes universities that includes a media publishing complex and of course churches so when I say it's not a theist saying the Bible is irrelevant it is Christian biblical scholars saying that I am not lying to you look look at John bright he is one of the most respected biblical scholars of the 20th century a Christian some would say someone of a conservative on the conservative side of critical scholarship and he's talking about Leviticus 25 which talks about all these arcane agriculture raishin he says this the regulations described therein are obviously little applicable to the modern situation and they are so in apical that a preacher might be pardoned if he told himself that passage there's no relevant message for his people whatever that's not an atheist saying that now this might qualify as an atheist but even so he tells us this can biblical scholars and this is Philip Davies of Sheffield University one of them he's one of the most prominent biblical scholars today ten difficult scholars persuade others that they conduct a legitimate academic discipline until they do can they convince anyone that they have something to offer to the intellectual life of modern world indeed I think many of us have to convince ourselves first and this is Michael Coogan a Catholic biblical scholar who talks about how it is that churches try to hide the bad parts of the Bible from their constituents conspicuously absent from the lectionary this is the lecture the readings that you do from week to week in a church are most or all of such books as Joshua with its violent extermination of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan at divine command or judges with its horrifying narratives of patriarchy and even sexual assault to say nothing of the Song of Solomon with its charged eroticism that's not an atheist saying that and then we have this proposal by Hardy and urban Morocco that deals with how do you deal with passages where it's severely anti-jewish where Jews are definitely seen as evil how do you deal with in in modern Bibles well they propose this the solution to erasing this hatred is for Bible societies and religious publishers to produce two editions of the Bible one for public or de publics similar to the contemporary English version which reduces significantly this anti Judea tential and the other addition for scholars taken from the Greek text the stakes are high people have been murdered because of these words you know what he's proposing here right or what right we'll give one to the basses they don't know what's in there and then we'll keep the one that we know what it really says for those of us that know Greek to ourselves that's how they're keeping it relevant why don't they just say let's get rid of this book if it's so if it's so murderous if it can result in such violence no no they don't want to do that sales of Bibles would go down you see unemployment checks would would cease well I promise to talk to you about how archaeology has been used to keep the Bible relevant archaeology of course is dedicated to reconstructing the past new material remains and actually that's what I was restrained in as an anthropologist and archaeologist in archaeology at least in the biblical archaeology sense began with the purpose of maintaining the relevance of the Bible by seeking to confirm its historical accuracy so once you said see now we have proven that the Bible is accurate over here you can then extrapolate it to now it's accurate about everything accurate about one thing it's a cure about everything and that would include the supernatural claims that include the ethical claims and so forth and so archaeology has been very important in keeping this text alive so let me contrast the situation in 1900 with what's going on today in 1900 most biblical scholars not all would tell you Genesis is historical and scientific for the most part it is there was an Abraham we can prove there was a Jacob in Egypt and so forth and the Exodus really happened we have a evidence for the Exodus we have evidence that David was king and Solomon had a kingdom and empire that stretched from Egypt to Iraq today and they would tell you all we have plenty of evidence for Jesus as a historical character that by and large we described 1900 and chief among these academic biblical scholars is William F Albright he's probably the most influential biblical archaeologist of the 20th century I hate to claim him for Iowa but he was not from Minnesota he was raised in Iowa and sometimes called a crypto fundamentalist because even though he had an academic position at Johns Hopkins for most of his life and he was skeptical of a lot of things in the Bible he still thought most things we could tell our historical but this is the situation in 2007 if you were to take a poll among biblical scholars in academia today they would tell you we don't regard Genesis as a scientific or historical text for the most part we don't think that Exodus is mostly historical there might be seeds of it but we don't think as related in the Bible it is there's no trace of David or Solomon from their time and there's no trace of Jesus after centuries of searching in his supposed lifetime and to illustrate this let's look at what Ronald Hegel of UC Berkeley said biblical archaeology doesn't really exist today at the way it once did it's gone milling gee dipper Dean of biblical archaeology says Americans IRA Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology are more of an disciplines and archaeologists like me who have spent a lifetime in the profession feel like the last members of an endangered species now even so Deaver who comes in for the greatest criticism in my chapter in archaeology in the Bible still wants to retain he still thinks there's still some things that are truly historical and so Deaver fights for what little is left but look how little less left even with him he said with most scholars I would exclude much of the Pentateuch specifically the books of Genesis Exodus Leviticus and numbers much of what is called the English Bible poetry wisdom and devotional literature must also be eliminated from historical consideration Ruth Esther job Daniel historical novella with contrived real-life settings the latter dating as late as the 2nd century BCE or what's left or what's left is really Samuel Kings judges that's where he thinks any history if there is such a thing is found well what happened between 1900 and 2007 well first you have the rise of science which helped explain that the world was not created in six days took billions of years and human beings were not created out of dirt you have the rise of university training biblical scholars so even some of the ones that did believe a lot of it started drifting away slowly and then new discoveries in the ancient Near East showed that well you we have the flood story already in Mesopotamia we have a creation story in Mesopotamia we have a lot of stuff that we thought only the Bible only revelation from God would have told you including some of the laws of Moses we already have them in Mesopotamia for so what are they real to them too or more likely the case did you know the biblical authors simply adopt and adapt them and let me look at some very specific examples of things that used to be thought as historical the traditional date of the Israelite carpet so right after Moses gets out of Egypt almost gets into the Promised Land that doesn't quite make it we have this exodus of one to two million people crossing the desert and now they're about to conquer Israel right around 1400 BC if you follow the traditional day well that's a heck of a lot of people coming into you know a very small area you know one to two million people and what happened to that notion well in 1887 we discovered this trove of correspondence between a king of Egypt name Akhenaten and Kings all over Israel and Syria and what's now Turkey and in Turkey what's now Iraq and in this correspondence between King Akhenaten and these other towns no mention of its Israel as an entity is they don't know what that is it's not there this is 1375 BCE there is no Kingdom of Israel in 1375 fact the earliest mention we have is in the Merneptah stele it some around 1210 BCE so right there it tells you whatever it is these 1.2 million people that establish this kingdom right around the time of Joshua no trace of it in this correspondent there should have been we have this claim in first Kings 421 that Solomon ruled over the all the kingdoms from the Euphrates which is in Iraq now to the land of the Philistines to the border of Egypt they bought tribute to him and served Solomon all the days of his life this is an enormous Empire in fact there was no Empire this large before around the 600's but here it is Solomon is dated around you know 1,000 or so 900 and we have no trace of that in any extra biblical literature now where Deaver who I said still wants to keep a little bit of history said oh I have an example where the bible does confirm or archeology does confirm a detail found in the Bible and it is here in 1st Kings 9 15 through 19 briefly it says and this is the account of forced labor labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the Lord in his own house and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer three towns in which he is said to have built something and these towns Hots are up there in the north Megiddo up here and then guys are down here and so according to the Bible he was a great builder so Deaver said I think I have found those gates that Solomon built he says here they are we have three very similar gates at Megiddo Hazor and Gezer they all have the six chambers and they all seem to be constructed very similarly well where else do we have three gates that might have been constructed so similarly well maybe there's a centralized planner and where do we find a centralized planner well first Kings 915 said Solomon built walls at these three places therefore these walls these gates are Solomonic see the Bible is historically accurate and he said so he says the parallels between the three Solomonic gate saluted to in first Kings nine and those brought to light by the excavations are so close that we must posit royal supervision in the construction of four to five provincial administrative centers in the 10th century 900s here is a rare dramatic instance of archaeology turning up actual structures mentioned specifically in the Bible and then he said that the same soundings also revealed another case mated residents and proved that beneath the misstated offset insist while I won't get you into the technicalities of onset in Scent walls lay the true wall correspond to the Solomonic gate so now he's used the word proof proved something that's very scientific and Baruch Halpern PennState sort of agreed with him what is more of the major palace of 10th century Megiddo matches the Bible's description of the Jerusalem palace in first King six to T and now we've learned and I'm going to show you how archaeologists often hyperbolized what is really very weak evidence let's start with a dating game how do we know that those gates were from the time of Solomon well we don't what you do is you say well those gates there's no biblical mentions of those towns therefore they must be from the time of salt it's a circular argument now if you find pottery associated with those gates then any other pottery you find anywhere else in Israel it's going to be Solomonic so it's a circular argument once you guessed it you assume that this is from Solomon's time anything else similar to that will be from Solomon's time by 1998 we see Deva retreat here he has a capture in which he says something like this these three gates are now ninth century BCE gates at Megiddo Hazor gazer our son-in-law quiché now they're no longer 10th century another 9th now what happened to this proof that they were from the 10th century Solomon's time and then in 2005 year II streets even further and somewhat contradictory thus I believe that while the Hazor and megiddo gates might turn out to be 9th century the gazar gate will likely remain well fixed in the 10th century now notice two of them he he concedes maybe ninth a guesser maybe you know he still wants to keep it you know why why cancer that's what he does he wants that to be a Solomonic a Solomonic City Oh what happened why did this sort of proof that he said was there to its demise well first of all new radiocarbon dates in the 1990s cast doubt on tenth century BCE dates yes not all have agreed that the radiocarbon dates are good some alleged contamination that kind of thing but there are enough grade to carbon dates now to say you know maybe not 10th century and then Norma Franklin of Tel Aviv University went and looked at those layers again that had been assigned to Solomon's time and she said no these layers have been misinterpreted completely and was that we thought were connected to the gates really are walls that belong to the next century and so the gates too should be dated to the next century and then we found Masons marks very precise marks very individual marks at a palace in Samaria another City just south of Megiddo and these Mason marks which come from a structure that everybody pretty much acknowledges ninth century are the same Mason marks that are found in the Megiddo structures assigned to solid so unless you have the same Mason's living for over a hundred years they cannot be from the time of Solomon and now Gabriel Barkai a major Israeli archaeologist said this detailed examination of the gates are wheels that they are not identical and that they are certainly not built according to a single blueprint design by a central authority does the schematic and Connally held view regarding the homogeneity of the gates at Hazor Megiddo and Gezer and their attribution to Solomon in accordance with biblical passage no longer holds true there goes the Solomonic gates and so now the revised chronology would be something like this this would be the layer assigned formally to Solomon's time now it's assigned to a halftime you know a have that evil king that only did bad things he became the greatest builder actually in Israel history or one of them so now everything has been dated or is beginning to be dated downward one century later but what that means is this we're left with no 10th century in the archaeological record and the 10th century is a time of David and Solomon and when you look in Jerusalem for where is David's Palace where is the where is this temple of solvent can't find it have not been able to find it oh yes some people think it sits under that you know mosque the golden dome in that area yeah but we where is it we can't find it now some would say well it doesn't mean we won't but what about the resettlement the rest of the settlement of this grandiose city that was supposed to be there can't find it well maybe it's eroded away well how come we find earlier stuff you know but no none from the 10th century why so indeed there are no proven remains from the 10th century in Jerusalem as of now no mention of David or Solomon in any non biblical record from their time you will find correspondence to Solomon from Solomon like we do for every other King why not yet an empire as big as the Assyrian Empire and we have plenty of people sending the Assyrian King stuff where they have to keep receipts and all kinds of things nothing like that for something nothing like that for David why is that well the king of the revisionist is Israel Finkelstein from Tel Aviv University and he's the one responsible for reading he's also of course the archenemy of beaver and of course now he says you can't use the Bible to confirm anything you can't you shouldn't be using it to look for archaeological evidence of anything it is an unreliable record from a later period meant to glorify an earlier pair it's kind of like King Arthur where you know you had these dormant conquerors coming into England then they created this King Arthur character to keep the Saxons kind of happy that they had a past so in this way that's how David and Solomon are look that down you know these figures created by a later period and Rhett rejected back because archaeologically we can't find them and let me tell you what's happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls of course one of the most monumental discoveries of all time and here is behind me there is K 4 K 4 is where the greatest number of scrolls were found hundreds and hundreds of books texts we never knew were there and when the Dead Sea Scrolls showed was that the Bible people were reading today it's not necessarily the Bible they weren't reading then whole portions have been taken out put in things don't say the same thing we have a book of jeremiah 1/8 shorter than what people are reading today we have a story of David and Goliath part of what you find in 1st Samuel 17 verses 12 to 31 gone not not there so that leaves Christians with a big problem well if there were many different texts of the Bible how come you chose this one as God's inspired Word you could have chosen a dozen others so it leaves them with a big theological problem that most Christians in church aren't told and that that's not the only problem now you have to deal with all the dozens of other books that people are currently holding as authoritative that are no longer in your Bible so what happened to Enoch for example in your Western files what happened to the gospel of the lauda cience the Epistle to the loud dissent which was in Bibles for like a thousand years gone and of course we come to the big J Jesus of course is the central character in the in the Christian Bible and the first major assault on the historicity of Jesus was by this German named Romar's who who was so scared he could even say it with his own name when he wrote so he wrote anonymously and in it he already gave us this wonderful theory that Jesus is mostly a myth about a failed revolutionary and since remoras in 1768 not one single shred of evidence has come back from Jesus's time yes you've probably heard the James ossuary this is supposed to be the earliest mention of Jesus in the archaeological record there's a box which stores bones and on it has an inscription it's hard to see here but it's right here and for those of you that read Aramaic I'm sure you understand what it says we're already it says James the son of Joseph brother of Jesus well believers certainly flocked to this as well here we have and final proof that Jesus there was a Jesus in the first century and so the Bible is now accurate and everything it says right well since then of course it's been declared at least part of the inscription to be a forgery by the Israel Antiquities Authority now even if it were not a forgery there were so many Joseph's and Jesus's actually Jesus was a very common name so it's like going to your local cemetery here in Minneapolis and finding someone that says this is Paul who is related to Peter and then you say oh see that's all and Peter up with you Testament say you got the two things if what's the statistical what is it aesthetical properly that you would have these two names that are linked in the Bible also appearing in a cemetery in miracles well maybe the body was moved to Minneapolis you could come up with all kinds of apologetic explanations right well so even if you did have that inscription it wouldn't really wouldn't tell you what you know the fact that Jesus existed doesn't mean he was the son of God or that he did any other miracles well that tells us nothing more than he was a human being this is the actual earliest hard evidence for the New Testament we have is this little fragment called P 52 and P 52 is over in Manchester England it's from the second century maybe I'll run 125 see if we can date it by the sheer paleography the shape of the letters has not been carbon tested and that's the earliest thing we have we don't have anything from Jesus this time around 30 we don't have anything like that and then the other Gospels on which people depend for the life of Jesus you know your Matthew and your Luke and your mark nothing nothing until the third century you don't have any actual manuscripts until the third and fourth centuries and then when people say well but we have these Roman Roman authors who did say there was such a person as Jesus well yes but you know what they don't tell you is that all of those manuscripts of those Roman authors are from the medieval period so here we have a Jesus collar a major one saying that he buries it in a footnote you have to wade through hundreds of pages to find that footnote and he says F with Josephus so with Tacitus our observations must be tempered by the fact that the earliest manuscript of the else come from the 11th century why don't you tell us that in the main text you could have saved yourself you know a thousand pages of drivel because nothing else would matter mean you don't know what they put in between the year one in the year 1100 a thousand you don't know what they took out or what they changed why are you using 11th century evidence for a first century person so this is the sad reality of Jesus studies there is a gap Jesus lived around 30 and the oldest manuscript we have is from 125 and it doesn't even mention Jesus by the way that little scrap I showed you doesn't even have the word Jesus in it now we can reasonably say it's there but the fact is we still don't have anything with Jesus in it you know from the news I feel like the 3rd century how do we know how do we know what they put in here what they took out we don't but scholars local scholars for the most trying to pretend that they do when they can what they can't and so now Deaver has come over even more to the dark side this is one of his latest exhalations and he says I wrote to frustrate biblical English minimalist those are the people that had believed there's only a minimal amount of history then I became one of them sort of you know if you can't beat them well join them right so these are my conclusions the Bible is not relevant to the modern world people live tens of thousands of years without the Bible you don't need it most Christians don't even read the Bible they don't even know what's in it scholars need to focus on moving people beyond the walk not trying to keep it alive and let me show you what I mean a 2005 Gallup poll fewer than half of Americans can name the first book of the Bible you get names like you know farewell to arms a 2006 University survey by Baylor said this 21.9% of mainline Protestants and 33% of Catholics never read scripture so really you see the Bible is not really relevant in actuality it's this myth that keeps it relevant this this idea that it should be relevant that keeps it relevant and of course for further reading if you want to really inform and how it is that scholars try to keep this alive in more detail of course I just need a shameless plug or the end of the vehicle settings and it will show you how major areas of biblical studies are still permeated by religionists ideologies which i think is really a sad case of how biblical scholars are more interested in preserving their own discipline than they are in informing the world about how irrelevant this book is so now I'm ready for any accusations my - for Asians expressions of goodwill that you have for me yes yes up here

Channel: Minnesota Atheists

Views: 186,828

Rating: 4.6194811 out of 5

Keywords: googlevideo

Id: BP5LdELd_0o

Length: 38min 22sec (2302 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2011