|
|
|
APOLOGETICS |
|
Biblical
Archaeology - Silencing the Critics - Part 2
By Dr. John
Ankerberg, Dr. John Weldon |
|
The noted classical scholar Professor E. N. Blaiklock once wrote,
quite correctly, "Recent archaeology has destroyed much nonsense and
will destroy more. And I use the word nonsense deliberately, for
theories and speculations find currency in biblical scholarship that
would not be tolerated for a moment in any other branch of literary or
historical criticism."1
Geisler and Brooks remark, "As for the critical theories which were
spawned in the early 1800’s but still persist today, they are left
without substantiation. The great archaeologist William F. Albright
says, ‘All radical schools in New Testament criticism which have
existed in the past or which exist today are pre-archaeological, and
are therefore, since they were built in Der Luft [in the air], quite
antiquated today.’"2
Indeed, the biases of modern critical biblical scholarship seems
evident to everyone except those doing it. And those with biases to
uphold usually don’t want to be bothered with troubling little facts.
As Kitchen points out:
Nowhere else in the whole of Ancient Near Eastern history has the
literary, religious and historical development of a nation been
subjected to such drastic and wholesale reconstructions at such
variance with the existing documentary evidence. The fact that Old
Testament scholars are habituated to these widely known
reconstructions, even mentally conditioned by them, does not alter
the basic gravity of the situation which should not be taken for
granted.... [citing Bright] "The new evidence [i.e., objective Near
Eastern data], far from furnishing a corrective to inherited notions
of the religions of earliest Israel tends to be subsumed under the
familiar developmental pattern’.... And the same applies to other
aspects besides history...." 3
Thus, "Biblical studies have long been hindered by the persistence
of long-outdated philosophical and literary theories (especially of
nineteenth-century stamp), and by wholly inadequate use of first-hand
sources in appreciating the earlier periods of the Old Testament story
in particular."4
One predominant example is the documentary hypothesis or the "JEDP"
theory of the first five books of the Bible, which we will discuss in
a moment.
The irony, or perhaps hypocrisy, of liberal critical
scholarship at this point is illustrated in its two-minded approach to
biblical archaeology. On the one hand, any time archaeology
does not directly confirm something the Bible teaches, the tendency is
to allege an error in the text. Thus, "any element in the [biblical]
traditions which was not corroborated by archaeological evidence has
been considered suspect or anachronistic." 5
On the other hand, liberal critics frequently tend to avoid
the use of archaeology where it confirms the Bible:
One of the striking characteristics of the scholars who have
approached the Bible primarily through literary analysis [e.g., the
documentary hypothesis] is the non-use or at best the grudging use
they have made of archaeological evidence. 6
For example,
A few scholars who had accepted the views of higher criticism,
such as A. H. Sayce, revised their positions because of the impact
of the early archaeological discoveries, but most higher critics
chose not to make use of the new data." 7
To cite another example, archaeology has discredited the theories
of form criticism, which holds that the content of the gospels
was largely invented and only written down 100-150 years after the
apostles lived, in the second century a.d.8
It may surprise no one that form critics have ignored archaeology when
it discredits personal theories that they have held to for emotional
as well as academic reasons. But how scholarly are they being?
Scholars, presumably, are interested in the truth and will allow the
evidence to take them where it will. Yet when it comes to the Bible,
it seems there aren’t very many real scholars in modern academia.
An illustration involves the documentary hypothesis. This
theory rejects Mosaic authorship in the fifteenth century B.C., and
supposes a much later compilation by a variety of authors who wrote
documents termed "J," "E," "D," and "P." This material was later
shuffled and reassembled by editors to form the Pentateuch and,
allegedly, later writings of the Old Testament also. Yet "even the
most ardent advocate of the documentary theory must admit that we have
as yet no single scrap of external, objective material
(i.e., tangible) evidence for either the existence or the history of
‘J,’ ‘E,’ or any other alleged source-document." 9
For more than 100 years the Graf-Wellhausen or "documentary" theory
has been taught in most seminaries and universities as the "absolute
truth" concerning the literary evolution and development of the Old
Testament—and yet not a shred of evidence exists to support it!
Instead, this theory has been thoroughly disproven for decades, even
by non-evangelical scholarship, yet it continues to be taught as
truth. How’s that for illustrating the objectivity of those in the
scholarly community supporting this theory? Essentially, liberal
biblical scholars are promoting elaborately devised myths in order to
reject Mosaic authorship and the divine inspiration of the Old
Testament so that they can "uphold" their own personal views of the
Bible as a humanly devised document. What could be fairer?
The theories current in Old Testament studies, however
brilliantly conceived and elaborated, were mainly established in a
vacuum with little or no reference to the Ancient Near East and
initially too often in accordance with a priori philosophical
and literary principles. It is solely because the data from the
Ancient Near East coincide so much better with the existing
observable structure of Old Testament history, literature and
religion than with the theoretical reconstructions, that we are
compelled—as happens in Ancient Oriental studies—to question or even
to abandon such theories regardless of their popularity. Facts not
votes determine the truth.10
As Dr. Kitchen infers, the documentary hypothesis, since it is
disproved, should be abandoned, but perhaps one should not hold one’s
breath. Anyone who reads even a relatively brief survey of the
evidence against the documentary hypothesis, as that given by the
noted biblical and linguistic scholar, Gleason L. Archer in his A
Survey of Old Testament Introduction, will realize how thoroughly
liberal Old Testament scholarship has been based in fantasy. For
example:
[Even in the nineteenth century] in America the Princeton
Seminary scholars Joseph Addison Alexander and William Henry
Green... subjected the documentarian school to devastating criticism
which has never been successfully rebutted by those of liberal
persuasion.... How shall we characterize the trend of
twentieth-century scholarship and its treatment of Pentateuchal
criticism and of the Wellhausen hypothesis?... Almost every
supporting pillar has been shaken and shattered by a generation of
scholars who were brought up on the Graf-Wellhausen system and yet
have found it inadequate to explain the data of the Pentateuch....
We close with an apt quotation from H. F. Hahn, "This review of
activity in the field of Old Testament criticism during the last
quarter-century has revealed a chaos of conflicting trends, ending
in contradictory results, which create an impression of
ineffectiveness in this type of research. The conclusion seems
unavoidable that the higher criticism has long since past the age of
constructive achievement." 11
Incidentally, Archer’s text, A Survey of Old Testament
Introduction has many examples of archaeological confirmation of
Old Testament books; and yet he also points out that an attitude of
skeptical prejudice toward the Bible "has persisted, without any
logical justification."12
That the majority of liberal Old Testament scholars allow their
personal biases to dictate their research methods and
conclusions—merely to support personal views—is no small indictment
given the fact that such theories have been discredited for decades.
What one finds through archaeological research is that alleged
biblical errors have later been shown to be factual truths. What else,
then, can one conclude about higher critical scholarship—other than
the fact that it is the problem, not the Bible? "In the light
of past discoveries one may expect that future archaeological finds
will continue to support the biblical traditions against radical
reconstructions."13
As we have noted, biblical critics have pointed to all kinds of
people, places, and things in the Bible that no archaeological
evidence could confirm. Skeptics rashly heralded such lack of
confirmation as proof of "biblical errors." Consider one more example:
It has become almost a dogma of critical scholarship to insist
that Genesis 14, which recounts the battle between Abraham and his
allies and the four kings of the East, is unhistorical precisely
because the five cities mentioned in the story are never referred to
in any ancient literature apart from the Old Testament. The
assumption is that unless a person, place or event in early Israel’s
history can be validated by extrabiblical documentation it must be
unhistorical. The fallacy in that method ought to be obvious, for if
this principle were applied to all of ancient (and even modern)
history virtually nothing could be recovered from the past in the
name of history. 14
In fact, until scholars can manage to keep their biases against the
biblical text in check and treat it as they do other ancient
documents, probably no amount of extrabiblical supporting evidence
will convince them otherwise. And until this occurs, conservatives
will be correct in referencing such work more as propaganda than good
scholarship.15
Further, archaeologists sometimes admit that their chronology has been
wrong and that this is why there has been a lack of supporting
evidence for the Scriptures. As noted scholar Dr. John Warwick
Montgomery points out,
[American Institute of Holy Land Studies] researcher Thomas
Drobena cautioned that where archaeology and the Bible seemed to be
in tension, the issue is almost always dating, the most shaky area
in current archaeology and the one at which scientistic a priori
and circular reasoning often replace solid empirical analysis.16
There is ongoing debate among scholars as to dates, and even as to
the nature of such buildings as the stables or store houses dated now
to Ahab’s time instead of to Solomon’s.
[David Noel] Freedman, for example, says that "the reason that
the story [of Abraham] has never been located historically is that
scholars, all of us, have been looking in the wrong millennium.
Briefly put, the account in Genesis 14, and also in chapters 18-19,
does not belong to the second millennium B.C., still less to the
first millennium b.c., but rather to the third millennium b-c."17
Most conservative scholars, however, have always placed Abraham
close to the third millennium b.c., about 1900 b.c.
Nevertheless, as archaeological excavations continued in Israel,
time and again what was once an "error" was subsequently confirmed as
fact. Whether it was the fact of a branch of the Hittites mentioned
some 50 times in the Bible (as early as Genesis 10:15), King Sargon
(Isaiah 20:1), Darius the Mede (Daniel 6:1),18
or many others, biblical history was repeatedly upheld:
Archaeological research has established the identity of literally
hundreds of places—in Mesopotamia, Persia, ancient Canaan, and
Egypt—that are mentioned in the Bible. Furthermore, the discovery of
thousands of historical texts in Egypt and Mesopotamia has enabled
scholars to work out the historical chronology of the ancient world in
considerable detail. Historical synchronisms have been established for
dating the accession of Solomon (ca. 961 b.c.), the accession of Jehu,
the Israelite king (842/1 B.C.), the fall of Samaria (722/1 B.C.), and
the first capture of Jerusalem (March 15/16, 579 b.c.).19
(to be continued)
Notes:
1 E. M. Blaiklock,
Christianity Today, September 28, 1973, p. 13.
2 Norman Geisler and Ron
Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences
(Wheaton, IL: Victor, 1990), p. 202.
3 K. A. Kitchen, Ancient
Orient and Old Testament (Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1972),
pp. 20, 20n.
4 K. A. Kitchen, The Bible
in Its World: The Bible and Archeology Today (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 1977), p. 7
5 Edwin Yamauchi, The
Stones and the Scriptures (New York: J. B. Lippencott, 1972), p.
161.
6 Ibid., p. 30.
7 Ibid.
8 Joseph P. Free, rev. and
expanded by Howard F. Vos, Archeology and Bible History
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), pp. 255-257.
9 Kitchen, Ancient Orient
and Old Testament, p. 23.
10 Ibid., p. 172.
11 Gleason L. Archer, Jr.,
A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press,
1974, rev.), pp. 85, 90.
12 Ibid., p. 107.
13 Yamauchi, p. 164.
14 Eugene H. Merrill, "Ebla
and Biblical Historical Inerrancy," in Roy B. Zuck (ed.), Vital
Apologetics Issues: Examining Reasons and Revelation in Biblical
Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1995), p. 184.
15 Ibid., p. 179.
16 In McDowell, Evidence
that Demands a Verdict (1975 ed), p. 65., citing John Warwick
Montgomery, "Evangelicals and Archeology," Christianity Today,
August 16, 1968, pp. 47-48.
17 Merrill in Zuck (ed.), p.
187.
18 Cf. Free and Vos, pp. 108,
170, passim, and John Whitcomb, Darius the Mede (Presbyterian
and Reformed, nd.)
19 Keith N. Schoville,
Biblical Archeology in Focus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1978), p.
167.
|
Apologetics
Authors
Dr.
James Bjornstad
Mrs. Lorri MacGregor
Mr. Marvin Cowan
Dr. John Ankerberg
Dr. John Weldon |
|
|
|
|
THE JOHN
ANKERBERG SHOW |
|
Make a donation to
The
John Ankerberg Show
If you have
been
ministered to today, please help us minister to others by making
a contribution to the ministry.
Please enter gift amount then press
"Make a Donation"
CLICK HERE
TO WATCH ONLINE
DR. JOHN ANKERBERG'S RESPONSE TO CREATION QUESTIONS
Dr. John Ankerberg answers your
questions on creation in the following article available both as
a downloadable PDF and broken down into individual questions for
online reading. Click the link below to read:
Does Scientific Evidence Today Show
that God Created the Heavens and the Earth? And What Does the Bible Say
About When He Created?
|
Copyright 2006, Ankerberg Theological Research Institute
|
