Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 09 July 2006

Archaeology: Biblical Ally Or Adversary?

Archaeology in Palestine show that the early history of the Jews was not what bible says it was. The archaeologists, historians and bible students who have found it impossible to say otherwise and stay honest are often called extremist names in one way or another by those who would rather accept lies than the truth to keep the bible falsely “true”. These latter deny the archaeology, and persist that the bible is infallible. To do so they have to disparage the critics, but this is the biggest lie of all. Bible defenders are the ones whose methods are shoddy and unscientific, and they fool only themselves and Christian sheep in manintaining their lies.

One such liar is Paul L Maier, writing an article called “Archaeology—Biblical Ally Or Adversary?” in the Christian Research Journal. Anyone who calls William Foxwell Albright an “archaeological great” betrays their affiliations. They cannot be scientific because science and Christianity are incompatible and these people prove it. Maier will simply not allow the bible to be denied. That is unscientific, but Christians necessarily believe the bible and so have to be unscientific.

Daniel Lazare wrote False Testament—Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History in the March 1, 2002, issue of Harper’s. No one in Palestine before the Persian period was monotheistic. Whatever the bible says, they were polytheists, and there is no way the archaeology can be read otherwise. What worries conservative US Christian pastors is that the findings might show to their hitherto uncritical sheep that they have been fooled for centuries, and what worries them more is that rabbis, even conservative ones, are ready to believe the truth that the Christian ministers refuse to. So Maier sets out to show them wrong, in other words he will stick to his belief despite the evidence.

Abraham

Maier is unable to counter any of the critics with anything definite. Abraham, he tells us, was an ancient name, Ur was an ancient city, various ancient people in the ancient near east were mentioned in Genesis, treaties made by rulers and the price of slaves all agree plausibly with the stories of Abraham in the bible. Indeed they do, but these stories were written 2500 years ago when it could hardly have been surprising that educated people knew these things and could write a plausible myth about a founding father.

“Why should they?” you might ask, and the answer is that people liked to have the idea that they had a founding father because it united them as a people. The US is the same. They have the story of the Pilgrim Fathers founding the new colony in America, but millions of other settlers followed them, and so they are hardly the real fathers of modern Americans. In ancient times such stories were necessary, and we have many such myths that we can tell. Abraham is just another one. All of the incidental facts Maier gives are just that—incidental facts, the sort of facts needed as the background to any period story, but in this case, the facts did not change greatly over centuries, life was so conservative and unprogressive. Laws and treaties, for example, were of forms that did not alter from the second to the first millennium. And Maier is quite unable to produce any fact that actually corroborates an actual Abraham. That is the point.

Many Abrahams might have travelled around the ancient near east even then as part of caravans, but no Abraham is known in history who matched the biblical story, and there is no evidence even of this story of Abraham until only a century or so before Jesus Christ. Moreover, some of the facts Maier offers us are false, so why does he persist in restating them unless he is determined to mislead. Ur of the Chaldees is supposed to have been Abraham’s home, but for it to have been specified as “of the Chaldees” shows it cannot have been. Abraham is supposed to have been emigrating near the beginning of the second century BC, but the appellation “of the Chaldees” was not used until the New Babylonian empire over a thousand years later. It shows when the myth was written, not when it was supposed to have happened.

Not only that but the Ur called “of the Chaldees” is not the home of Abraham anyway. It is Urfa, and that is the tradition of the Moslems. It would fit the ideas of biblicists much better than Ur of the Chaldees, but would be recognizing that the bible is in error, and that really will not do, especially when you are trying to prove the opposite. Maier adds to his speculation by saying the route was the only way to get from Mesopotamia to Palestine, as if that was some sort of test. It was the only way when the myth was written. Are the writers supposed to have thought otherwise? This sort of absurd generalising is not evidence. They were the conditions in the near east for many centuries, and they had to be satisfied by any credible story. Not that mythical stories have to be believable, after all, few of the stories of Moses and Jesus and Elisha and Elijah are believable but believers believe them!

Having told us that Abraham migrated from Mesopotamia to Palestine in a one off migration, which he plainly did in the bible story, he now switches to pretending Abraham was a nomad. Nomads lead unsettled lives moving around with their herds to find the best pasture for them by seasons. The movements of nomads are therefore broadly circular as they follow the seasons. Nomads do not want to settle down to a sedentary life. So, nomads have nothing at all to do with a man who upped and offed with his family in search of a promised land.

Yet again, Maier bullshits us with the facts of life of herders and their laws and social arrangements. It doubtless is all true, but has nothing to do with proving that some specific man moved at a certain time. It is all general stuff that proves nothing. It is plausible that a man moved from Ur to Palestine, but how does that prove that the founder of the Jews did? If it is true, it is better adapted to the period called by biblicists “the Return”. That is when a lot of people who became Jews travelled from Mesopotamia to Palestine, and it is much more likely that Abraham was an example of them, allegorized or mythicized, but no actual historical man. Again, this is a far better explanation of the Abraham story, but biblicists do not want something that is historically likely. They want to force the bible to be infallible.

Moses and the Exodus

Turning to the absence of evidence for the Exodus, Maier typically tries to use the Merneptah stele as evidence of it, even though the stele says the Israelites, which seem to be mentioned, if the hieroglyphs have been properly read, had been destroyed—“Israel, his seed is not”. He wants us to believe that because the Israelites were mentioned they must have had an Exodus. Quite absurd. The Israelites finished up in Israel however they got there, so how is the fact that at some point in history a king destroyed them proof that they had wandered there form Egypt?

He says that no monument to an Exodus could have been expected, and that is true enough, but Egypt did not only depend upon chiselling monuments. Monuments are meant to impress common people. The Egyptians were hyper-literate and wrote down everything that happened. They recorded the escape of two slaves on one papyrus. Ordinary people would not get to read official papyri. They were for officials, but, even so, there is no official record of all these slaves escaping—no record kept in an archive to remind later officials to remind a stronger Pharaoh to punish or recapture the runaways.

Maier’s proofs are simply excuses. Not merely excuses, lies! He makes up what he cannot establish. He claims he knows that Rameses II failed in the battle of Kadesh, and the Nubians knew of it. It suits his argument, but he has no such certain evidence. The Battle of Kadesh did not seem to alter anything in the arrangements between the two superpowers, It was probably a draw. Pharaoh ceased to press any ambitions he had in the direction of the Hittites, and they did the same vis-à-vis the Egyptians. There was a stand off and a long peace between the rivals. That is unlikely if one or the other had had a great victory.

Now, the fact that Moses is an Egyptian name becomes the new proof of the Exodus. Pathetic, isn’t it? It is not even necessarily true. Moses could be Mazda (pronounced “Mazas”), the name of the Persian god, but when the story of Moses was written by the Ptolemaic priests they sought to give the impression that Moses was an Egyptian. The final exhaled breath of Mazda was vocalized and Greeks wrote it down as an “s”, for the hissing sound. In that way they made it look like the Greek way of writing the endings of the names of Pharaohs like Rameses and Tutmoses. The Egyptian means “born of”, so that Tutmoses means “born of Thoth”. It proves that “Moses” is not Egyptian because to be called “Born of” is meaningless. Curiously the Persian god’s title was “Ahura”, a name remarkably reminiscent of Aaron, said in the bible to have been the brother of Moses! It looks like a deliberate mythification of the name of the Persian God, to bring him down to earth. Not only that, but “Dat Ahura Mazda”, the law of Ahura Mazda can easily be misheard as “Torah Mazda”, or abbreviated in speech to it. It is conjecture, but no more so than the ridiculous speculation that a man was called “Born of”… nothing!

Again we get more generalities put in evidence. The descriptions of Egyptian life are plausible for the time. Maybe they were, but they were plausible for a very long time in Egypt which was the most conservative of societies. The priests who wrote the myth of Moses in the third century could comfortably have written the tale realistically from the broad conditions of their own day, when there were, in fact, a large number of Jews in Egypt, especially Alexandria, making the myth believable. Maier adds in a footnote that a growing body of literature exists on the Hebrews in Egypt, Joseph and so on, as if it meant the details are emerging. The Israelites have still not been found anywhere in Egypt, so this literature is better described as biblicist and creationist fiction.

Now we get the wishful thinking. The evidence of the Exodus might yet turn up in the Sinai. Well, it might, but so far it has not, so, so far the evidence is negative. The point of evidence is to establsish something. Absence of evidence shows that there is no evidence for it, so why should it be believed? Christians, of course, believe in a superbeing called God for whom there is no evidence either, yet they are not deterred by the absence of it, and they parrot their mantra, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, something that they would rapidly reject if they started being convicted of rape, child abuse, murder or terrorism in the absence of evidence. They do not mind it for other people, as George Bush’s gulags prove, but not for themselves. Decisions should be based on evidence, not the absence of it, but the absence of it is evidence! In law and in science, it is evidence that nothing happened or existed. To argue that the evidence that nothing happened does not exclude that something did is special pleading. Evidence that something happened could turn up, but until it does, no one should believe it.

The Conquest

Now to the conquest, and we get the same tired citations of fellow biblicists in defence of the indefensible. Jericho has no signs of a destruction to match Joshua’s at the right time, as Kathleen Kenyon showed, but the biblicists keep trawling in the opinion of a man called Bryant G Wood, who makes his living by letting believers pay him to dig holes in Israel in the illusion they are finding the bible. “Guaranteed to find something”! In other words he is a biblicist fraud and opportunist who pretends to be an archeologist, and the biblicists love to cite him. His view are worthless unless you insist on believing the bible despite the evidence, in which case even Wood’s views are irrelevant to you.

The biblicists have an unfair advantage in the archaeology of the Exodus and the Conquest—they have two options, an early one and a later one, and so they can jump from one to the other according to how the argument is going. It suited them for a long time to opt for the late date of the conquest, around 1200 BC, but now that the evidence is mounting up to show that there is no sign of a conquest or even a change of population at the time, they are switching back to the older idea that the conquest was about 1400 BC. That is what Wood favours, and Maier describes him as “brilliant”. He is as brilliant as a “Toc H” lamp, as they say [†]The Toc H lamps were notoriously dim!.

United Monarchy

Maier again argues that no evidence is evidence when he comes to the United Monarchy ruled by kings David and Solomon. This was supposed to have been a golden age with David building an empire and Solomon spending the wealth of it. There is no evidence of any empire, any wealth, any suitable social structure, any David and any Solomon, including the famous temple! Maier says that the critics are depending “much too heavily on the argument from silence or absence”! You have to laugh! Maier even cites Daniel Lazare’s Harper’s article:

Yet not one goblet, not one brick, has ever been found to indicate that such a reign existed. If David and Solomon had been important regional power brokers, one might reasonably expect their names to crop up on monuments and in the diplomatic correspondence of the day. Yet once again the record is silent.

Daniel Lazare, False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History, Harper’s, March 2002, 45-46.

Now we get a wonderful example of biblicist special pleading. All traces of David and Solomon have disappeared because Jerusalem has been completely “destroyed and rebuilt some 15 to 20 times” in the meantime. Not only that but all the valuable goblets were used at Belshazzar’s feast. Yes! This is meant to be serious! This large number of destructions of Jerusalem is a lie, and what has it to do with the absence of remains. Another biblicist writes something that completely refutes this one. Ancient Near Eastern cities are easily recognizable because they have formed tells (from Assyrian, “tillu”, a ruin). Garry K Brantley, citing biblicist Joseph Free, explains how a tell forms:

The cross section of a tell resembles a layer cake, with each layer representing an occupational level. These mounds were not formed merely by the natural drifting of sands, or by the gradual accumulation of debris. Though these were factors, catastrophes such as war, fire, or earthquake destroyed a settlement. Then, new settlers leveled the ground, and rebuilt on the same site. The layer of debris from the previous city formed a stratum, which generally measured from about one to five feet thick (Free, 1969, pp. 6-7). This caused the ground level of the new settlement to be several feet higher than the previous one. Also, the cultural remnants of the older settlement lay underneath the new. Over the years, this process was repeated until several successive strata were formed, and the mound rose higher.

Dating in Archaeology: Challenges to Biblical Credibility

So here is the norm, but Jerusalem, by another of God’s perversities, is the opposite of the norm. Occupation in cities that exist for a long time cause a build up of residue, each new building being erected on the ruins of the old. Not in Jerusalem. Where we should have 15 to 20 layers, this biblical liar claims, we have none, or none going back to David’s time. It is plain and utter nonsense and the explanation of one biblicist, stating honestly what happens in ancient cities, contradicts the falsehoods of another trying his best to lie for God. Besides that, and even if the biblicist were right that, for some curious reason, all remains had gone from Jerusalem, the empire of David and Solomon was allegedly extensive, yet there is no sign of it anywhere that matches anything the bible describes. If David and Solomon are not purely mythical, as seems most likely, some archaeologists are ready to believe they were little more than bandits. Even this seems just a way of preserving them, even though it is not as the bible describes them.

Needless to say, we get the usual utterly uncritical appeal to a stone called the Tel Dan stele that biblicists always say is proof that David existed. Maier says it is inscribed “probably” by Hazael, king of Damascus, who bragged on it he had defeated “probably” Joram, a king of Israel, and “probably” Ahaziah, described as king of “the House of David”. It is “probably” pretty poor evidence of anything. If it is a mention of David, Maier admits it is “the first archaeological reference to David outside of the Old Testament”, but is it?

It is one of those discoveries that seem to be too good to be true, and that puts a doubt in the mind of the scientist when it brings rejoicing from the believer. The discovery was made, not in any strata, and not by the Avraham Biran, the archaeologist, but his attention was drawn to it, though he had not noticed it before. This was in 1993 when the fake factory of Oded Golan was churning out biblical frauds in Jerusalem and he was placing them anywhere he could. In short, it looks as if it might be a fake, and some good people think it is, though biblicists cannot wait to confirm these fakes, only later to find they were… fakes!

There are other good reasons for not thinking the stone refers to David, even if it is genuine, and these are discussed elsewhere on this site. Maier disparages this but he is the one who is dishonest. Biblicists are mainly professional Christians and want their flocks to believe, not to question. So, they teach them to believe anything that one of the professionals tells them. They are as bad as the medieval Catholic priesthood that Luther and Calvin protested against, but the flocks are too ignorant to realize it.

Later History

According to Israel Finkelstein, the architectural achievements ascribed to David and Solomon were those of king Ahab of Israel. He has discovered by practical archaeology that the nearest substantial ruins in time to the supposed time of David and Solomon correspond with the Israelite king Ahab (874-853 BC), son of Omri, who is hardly mentioned in the bible but is, from the archaeological and extra-biblical documentation, the founder of Israel. The Assyrians called Israel the House of Omri,showing that they regarded the country to have been founded by Omri, and not David.

Maier expresses mock wonder that the critics accept that the bible becomes historical at the reign of Hezekiah of Judah (714-686 BC). It really is pathetic. No critic of the bible ever said it was 100% fairy tale. Far from it. Most of them have been believers, like the biblicists, but with one big difference. They are not willing to believe that God wants them to lie for him. Quite the opposite. If lying is part of upholding Christianity, then it has been taken over by the Devil. The critics have used normal scientific and critical methods on the bible, confident that it would stand up to the examination, because they do not believe that God is Himself a liar.

The critical examination in many places failed. The bible did not stand up. In other places it did stand up. Hezekiah is one of the kings attested elsewhere in history. So, is God a liar for having mythical kings in the history of Judah and Israel? It is up to Christians to decide for themselves, but the obvious decision is that God does not lie, so, if the bible is to be held as inspired, then the beginning of it is meant to be allegorical. That is what many sensible believers have thought for a hundred years or more. Then it passes into real history. More critically, if Christians can be it, is to realize that the book is the work of different hands, as the Higher Critics have always said, and not all of them were honest. Agents of the Devil have altered God’s Word, and Christians have believed it for two or more millennia. That is the danger of gullibility.

Maier pretends that there is a large problem for the minimalists in explaining the switch from mythology to history, or, as he puts it, “how fact suddenly emerges out of supposed fantasy”. He knows it will impress his thoughtless audience. But the explanation is easy, if unacceptable to dolts like him. The bible was begun in the fifth century when the “Returners” came from Babylon, sent by the Persian shahs as colonists. They wrote the law, and they wrote the first editions of the history that backed up the law. This history was accurate in chronology, being based on Assyrian and Babylonian archives. Its content was deliberately bent to suit the lessons the Persians wanted taught. Later the Persians were defeated by Alexander’s Macedonians, and the Greek kings of Egypt added the beginning of the bible which has the bogus histories in it, up to and including Joshua, but excluding Deuteronomy which was the original law. What is the problem? Unquestioning faith is the problem!

Poor Techniques of the Critics

Maier then lists the methodological problems of the critics, but there is nothing substantial in them, and they simply amount to biblicist special pleading:

1. Use of the argument from silence—silence means something, especially when it is long and loud. The absence of any corroboration of a mass of supposed history from Omri backwards to Abraham is a deafening silence that cannot be ignored.
2. Over emphasis on archaeology—the biblicist is the one short on method. Scientific method requires testing. Archaeology is a valuable test which works elsewhere but not for “sacred” history. There is no reason why it should not, unless the sacred history is faked.
3. Archaeologists are not objective—a hoot this one! Bible bashers are the ones who are not objective and idiotic articles like Maier’s are obvious proof of it.
4. Archaeologists are subject to political pressure—This is nothing but a slur, and the use of such tactics shows just how far these pious liars will go.
5. Archaeologists are not agreed—except biblical ones! Archaeology is a science and evolves by discovery and hypothesis. Since the biblicists reject both in favour of uncritical belief in an old book, agreement can only be when everyone is forced to believe it. That is their aim.
6. Claiming the critics are right—The biblicists can certainly churn out guff like Maier’s, but science is not based on volume of opinion. It is based on quality. The debate is over between biblicists and their critics, and all that remains is biblicist wailing.
7. Archaeologists are one sided—but biblicists are not. It is that hoot again! Are these people really so dense, they cannot see that they are more one sided than their critics. Critics have come to a conclusion based on evidence. Biblicists simply believe. The evidence does not matter. They are only concerned that, without some, they might look like the idiots they are.
8. Opting for sensation—what could be more sensational in reality than a three mile deep world-wide flood, or a man returning to life after death, something that happened many times in the bible before Jesus did it, so in biblical terms it is commonplace. These people have lied for so long that people came to believe them. It can be nothing other than sensational that their lies are being exposed, at last.
9. Using results selectively—the same dishonest claim again that applies more to biblicists, who will not accept the counter evidence to their biblical fancies. Believers refuse to let the evidence speak for itself, and there is no purpose in presenting evidence irrelevant to testing the hypothesis. The piles of irrelevant garbage that Maier offers in evidence shows he either cannot comprehend this or does not want his readers to.

Maier takes now to lamenting that the bible is does not better document such as the kings of Egypt at the time of Moses, or the kings of early Mesopotamia, Assyria or Babylon when Abraham was prancing around. He cannot comprehend that the much later authors did not know them, or were not willing to say because they would do just what Maier will not consider—give the game away. He is even more confused that such facts are given later in the Old Testament, so he offers to God to swap Leviticus and Deuteronomy for more detail about the Hebrews in the Exodus and settlement years. He was challenging the minimalists to explain why such things happened in the bible, and the explanation has been given from the viewpoint of Persian authorship of the original bible. God is not needed in this explanation. What is the biblicist explanation of God’s ineptitude?

He seems to attempt an explanation in that these were early records and they are always poor. So much for the care of the holy ghost entreated to look after the sacred books. We can expect older material to be less detailed than newer material in the ordinary manner of things, but these are sacred books we are told, no less than God’s Word protected by the holy ghost, not just profane matter. The easy explanation of this is the same. There is no distinction between what human beings declare to be sacred and what is not. All of them get the same treatment by time. The advantage of the sacred is that there are more of them, so we find more of them in the ground. They show that the holy ghost is inept too.

More Proof of the Bible?

Maier now broadens out with his lying base, saying that the flood story is common to Mesopotamians and Greeks, as well as the Jews, presumably to prove it must have happened. Well, he really is assuming his audience are idiots, now. The biblical story is the same as the Mesopotamian one because that is where it came from, and the same is true of the Greeks.

He mentions the Code of Hammurabi, for what reason being anyone’s guess because it shows that the Jews were not original or peculiar in having a law. The laws of Hammurabi were dated about 1750 BC, long before Moses, even in the conservative estimates of his existence. Maier even goes so far as to cite a law in the bible that appeared earlier in the stele of Hammurabi. It seems to show that God revealed Himself to others in the ANE before the Jews, and so why shouldn’t He have revealed Himself to the Jews by means of the Persians?

20,000 cuneiform clay tablets found at Nuzi in Assyria dated to 1500 BC show that many of the sorts of social customs and laws of the bible were already in use in Assyria centuries before. Again, Maier seems to be disillusioning his flocks because it shows that the bible was no unique revelation. In fact, as mentioned above, the customs of these places did not change noticeably over millennia, so that something written about 500 BC would not have differed in most social matters from something written in 1500 BC. Certainly the scholar can discern differences, but biblicists are not interested in scholarship unless it upholds the bible. This scholarship does not, for the initial joy of believers in the interpretations of the tablets of Nuzi and Mari were overturned by more careful and objective scrutiny which has shown there are marked differences froim the bible, in many of which the bible is not superior.

Here come the Hittites again! Another old chesnut, explained elsewhere on this site is the Hittites. Ephron the Hittite sold Abraham a cave and Uriah the Hittite was cuckolded by David who then arranged his death in battle. Not exactly the sort of example you want to give your teenage children. But these Hittites were plainly Jews. They lived in the same land as the heroes Abraham and David. They are therefore not the Hittites found in Boghazkoy in Turkey, proving a preternatural antiquity or divine wisdom of the scriptures. The Hittite empire had fallen even by the time of David, and the type of Hittite described in Abraham’s story was anachronistic. He was from the later time when Hittite was the name of a type of Syrian.

Maier introduces again the Merneptah stele which tells of the destruction of the Israelites. Since this stele is dated about 1200 BC, it shows that Israelites were known to the Egyptians then. Maier does not go on to discuss the rest of the inscription that says they lived in the land of Hurri. Just where is that?

Getting more desperate, he descends to listing cities that actually existed and were mentioned in the bible. Remarkable. That must convert any doubter. What Maier does not say is that the excavations of these biblical sites do not confirm in any way the practices of the people as described in the bible. They were polytheistic not monotheistic, as their different types of shrines, temples, altars and sacred paraphernalia show.

Now he tries listing the enemies of Israel in the bible as being real people. He is desperately trying to refute a thesis that no one holds, even among biblical skeptics—that the Jewish scriptures are pure fantasy. He is arguing against nothing, but setting up straw men to knock over impresses the average redneck Christian. Looked at more carefully, however, the people mentioned are not what would be expected. The Hittites have already been mentioned. Biblical Hittites were not a major superpower ensconced on the Turkish plateau, but chums of the Jewish heroes, a situation that pertained late in the period. The Philistines entered the land in history about the same time as the Israelites were supposed to have done in the myth, but they entered as a completely foreign type of people, not Semites—possibly early Greeks. Yet, in the bible, they seemed Semitic all along, showing that they had assimilated, and the situation was a much later one in reality.

Maier lists the assumption of all biblicists that Shishak, in the bible the conqueror of Rehoboam, is the Sheshonq who tells of his conquests on the walls of the Temple of Amon at Thebes. The conquest described there does not match the bible’s description, putting the assumption in doubt. It might be so, but the biblicists are sure it is though it has never been proven. The consequence is that Egyptian, and therefore ANE, dating depends on the truth of the bible, because Shoshenq the Egyptian ruler is dated to match Rehoboam in the bible! We must hope it is so, because if it were not, the whole dating caboodle will have to be rethought. It is not promising that Solomon is entirely fictional, and Rehoboam is his son, also fictional, as the son of a fictional father should be.

The Moabite Stone is another exhibit meant to prove the bible, but regretably it does not. What it does show is that the Moabite attitude to their God was exactly the same as the attitude of the Jews was to theirs, and that was supposed to have been a special revelation.

Maier mentions the black obelisk of Shalmaneser III to prove that Jehu was a real king of Israel. Indeed it does, and shows that the authors of the Deuteronomic History had access to Assyrian records. Jehu is shown submitting to the Assyrian king in Moslem fashion, forehead touching the ground, not kneeling as Maier says, when he paid a large tribute to the Assyrian king. It is the only picture of a Hebrew king there is and illustrates the subordinate role of these kings and tiny countries.

Our lying guide to the scriptures tells us that the burial plaque of Uzziah was found saying “Here, the bones of Uzziah, King of Judah, were brought. Do not open”. Not only is it not contemporary with Uzziah, it is almost a millennium later, so it is a biblical fake, and is no confirmation of Uzziah. Maier fails to mention that.

Next he comes to Hezekiah’s Siloam tunnel inscription. No one denies that there was a king Hezekiah, or the tunnel. What is in doubt is the connexion between the two. Hezekiah is mentioned on Assyrian prisms which relate the tribute he paid to avoid Jerusalem going the way of Samaria. The bible says that a murderous angel killed the Assyrian army of 185,000 men, which seems a bit gratuitous as the army was ready to withdraw when the tribute payment had been agreed. The bible says, and Maier repeats, that Sennacherib returned to Nineveh where his own sons murdered him. It is true that a son murdered him, but it was twenty years after!

Cyrus the Persian undoubtedly existed, and, just as Maier says, the many cylinder seals he produced prove it, if nothing else did. What he does not say is that, in the Babylonian cylinder seals, Cyrus treats the Babylonians in the same way that he treated the Jews. He pandered to their God. In Babylon, it was Marduk that he took by the hand! It shows that the Persians had a clever policy towards captured people whose cooperation they required. Most Christians fail to recognize that the Jewish scriptures recognize Cyrus as the Jewish messiah. Did God have two messiahs, and if so, why are Christians not worshipping both? If God did not have two sons, why does the inerrant bible say that Cyrus was the Jewish messiah, 500 years before Jesus?

Maier ends up citing the finding of the ossuary of Caiaphas the High Priest in the gospel story of Jesus. Well, it is nice to have found the ossuary, but no one doubted that Caiaphas once lived. So it adds nothing to the argument. Curiously and even more remarkably, the ossuary of James the brother of the Lord was also found recently. It was hailed as a wonderful relic. Then it was found to have been a fake. So, Maier does not mention it. Nor does he mention the amazing stone inscription addressing repairs to Solomon’s temple, hailed as another wonderful confirmation of the bible until… Yep! It was a fake! And they effect dismay and astonishment that secularists question the authenticity of these forgeries. The truth is that everything has to be thoroughly tested, especially when it is meant to have divine connotations. It is all too easy to fool gullible people with fakes, and Christians are amazingly gullible still, just as they were when they kissed the foreskin of baby Jesus, faithfully kept by the Virgin Mary. The praying punters just will not learn. They always are gulled by fakes, and fakers like the biblicist author of this list of lies and half truths.

Concluding Remarks

In his last few words, Maier rightly says that secular historians of the ancient world often have a high opinion of the reliability of biblical sources. He says higher than some biblical scholars themselves, but that is biblicist hype, another thing they are fond of. What is puzzling is why secular historians do have this high regard for a tribe of people who are often, if not always, utterly mendacious. The reason is that Christians have been able to fool the general public, including secular scholars, into believing they have a high reputation for honesty, when the opposite is the case in all but a few. So, the biblical file is a closed one to secularists. They ought to take an interest and show to the world what fakers these professional Christian believers are. Their dishonesty is transparent once you are conscious of it.

The whole of Maier’s piece can “be written off as the meaningless chatter of some conservative curmudgeon”, as he puts it. He says it is, however, “the majority view in biblical scholarship today”. So, the majority view in biblical scholarship today can be written off as the meaningless chatter of some conservative curmudgeon. It is nice to see a self effacing biblicist, but that is not quite what he meant. He means that this majority of biblical scholars behave and think like him, Maier—they are all liars when it comes to proper assessment of scholarship. At the very least they are tendentious, and at the worst, they lie blatantly, believing, presumably, that God wants it thus.

We are expected to accept it as true. Can we expect men who hold tenure in major theological colleges and departments to be going around saying that the bible is all up the creek? Can we expect them to saw off the academic branch that supports them? Not only do they defend the bible to defend their own sinecures, they foul mouth genuine scholars for threatening to kill the golden goose. Such intemperate language, though, shows they have lost the argument. In times past they would have been piling up the faggots and heaping on the greenwood to keep the fire burning as slowly as possible. The sad thing is that with so many madmen about distorting truth and scholarship in the name of God, we might well be entering a new dark age. As we can see in the modern near east, the lights always go out when religions dominate.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History