Why Is Biblical Archaeology So Focused on the Old Testament?

UDD BROTHERS

Since its beginnings, the academic study of biblical archaeology has been defined almost exclusively as the archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Age worlds of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel. Generations of biblical archaeologists—whether trained in North America, Europe, or Israel—have largely confined their studies and fieldwork to these periods and the often heavily debated cultural and historical questions that arise, such as the nature of ancient Israel’s arrival in Canaan or the historicity of the United Monarchy.

FROM EDWARD CAMPBELL JR. AND ROBERT BOLING, EDS., ESSAYS IN HONOR OF GEORGE ERNEST WRIGHT (BASOR 220–221, 1975–1976)

Although the term “biblical archaeology” is sometimes used also in connection with Paul’s missionary journeys in Asia Minor and Greece, the scholarly discipline—whether termed biblical archaeology, Syro-Palestinian archaeology, or Levantine archaeology—has traditionally not included the world of the New Testament.^a1 This may seem strange, considering that the New Testament is an important part—indeed, the most important part—of the Christian Bible. Why has the New Testament period (also called the post-exilic or Second Temple period) been left out of scholarly understandings of biblical archaeology, and how did the field come to be defined in such restrictive terms? I believe this neglect can be traced back to two of the founding figures of American biblical archaeology, William Foxwell Albright and his student George Ernest Wright.^b

The academic definition of biblical archaeology stems largely from Albright’s and Wright’s Protestant, supersessionist view that Christians, not Jews, are the “true” Israel and the heirs to the Old Testament, which contains prophecies and revelations that were fulfilled by Jesus and the New Testament. For this reason, biblical archaeology focused on the period of the Hebrew Bible (which Albright and Wright always termed the Old Testament), whereas, rather curiously, the post-exilic world of Second Temple Judaism—the world that Jesus knew and experienced—was considered unimportant or irrelevant.

By the early 1930s, Albright had focused Palestinian archaeology on the Bible, as reflected in the title of his book, The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible (Revell, 1932). His definition of “biblical” prioritized “the religion of the Old Testament, of which the religion of the New was only the extension and fulfillment.”² As a conservative Protestant, Albright was an outspoken opponent of German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s “higher criticism” of the Hebrew Bible, according to which the Pentateuch was composed and edited centuries after the time of Moses, and, therefore, has little or no historical basis.^c

Albright countered Wellhausen’s view through archaeology, which he believed provided scientific, factual data proving the historicity of the biblical narratives, particularly regarding pre-monarchic Israel. The pre-monarchic period was Albright’s main concern because he believed that the “ethical monotheism” inherited by Christianity originated with Moses and had already begun to form in the time of the Patriarchs, not with the later Israelite prophets, as Wellhausen claimed.

Albright emphasized the Old Testament roots of Jesus’s teachings and the importance of the Old Testament to the Christian canon, in contrast to many of his Protestant contemporaries who considered the New Testament unconnected to the Hebrew Bible. For example, in From the Stone Age to Christianity (Johns Hopkins, 1940), Albright states, “every messianic detail in the New Testament has its correspondence somewhere in the Old.”³ He viewed Jesus’s movement as a reaction to the “rigorous legalism” of the Pharisees and other Jewish sects of the late Second Temple period:

Again and again Jesus insisted that He came to fulfil the Torah and the Prophets, not to destroy them. In order to fulfil them, however, He rejected the increasing mass of secondary regulations and restrictions, to some extent following precedents set by the Samaritans, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, but adopting a consistently spiritual attitude to ritual which was foreign to any of these groups.⁴

Here, Albright expresses the common trope mischaracterizing Judaism as “legalistic,” in contrast to the supposed spirituality of Jesus and Christianity. In fact, the very title From the Stone Age to Christianity smacks of Christian triumphalism. Albright’s severing of “Jesus’s religion” (as he called it) from late Second Temple Judaism might explain why this era was excluded from his vision of biblical archaeology. But we are still left wondering why he did not include the archaeology of the New Testament, that is, archaeology connected to the historical Jesus and his movement. Albright, apparently aware of this contradiction, explained:

It is much more difficult to apply the results of archaeological research in Palestine to the New Testament than to the Old Testament. In the first place, the latter spans a period of over a millennium and a half, whereas the New Testament covers less than a century. … Moreover, while a high proportion of the contents of the historical books of the Old Testament are national in scope, the happenings recounted in the New were shared as a rule only by small groups of individuals.⁵

Indeed, despite occasionally recognizing that biblical archaeology extended from the “Stone Age to Christianity,” Albright never engaged with the Second Temple period in his own fieldwork (which focused almost exclusively on Bronze and Iron Age archaeology) and paid only lip-service to the archaeology of the post-exilic/New Testament period. Ultimately, his research, publications, and teaching were driven by his Christian theological concerns, concerns that have shaped and defined the field ever since.

Albright’s legacy was continued by his student, George Wright, who used biblical archaeology as a means of demonstrating to Christians the reliability of the Old Testament, and, therefore, its relevance as the true word of God. For Wright, God’s acts of salvation on behalf of Israel—which could be verified by archaeology—attested to election by grace, a foundational doctrine of Presbyterianism. The implication was clear: Christians (in this case, Presbyterians) had become God’s elect.

Wright employed biblical archaeology in support of the biblical theology movement of the mid-20th century, which attempted to “rescue the Old Testament for the Church.”⁶ Like Albright, Wright considered the Old Testament foundational for the New Testament, identifying the same themes in both testaments. And, like Albright, Wright identified as unique the “ethical monotheism” of the early Israelites, in contrast to the polytheistic religions of other ancient peoples. For Wright, it was the New Testament, not post-exilic Judaism, that fulfilled and completed the Old Testament hopes for salvation and made Christianity the New Israel. Ironically, although Albright and Wright strongly opposed Wellhausen’s claim that there is little or no reliable historical information in the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible, like Wellhausen, they viewed Judaism as having declined in the post-exilic period, severing it from its Old Testament roots to appropriate the latter for Christianity.

To be clear, I am not labeling archaeologists who specialize in the Bronze and Iron Ages (some of whom are Jewish and/or Israeli) Christian supersessionists; rather, I am pointing out that the exclusion of the post-exilic/New Testament period from most forms of biblical archaeology is rooted in the Christian supersessionist and triumphalist views that drove early scholars such as Albright and Wright. Similarly, I am not criticizing Albright and Wright for their Christian faith, but rather aim to show how this faith drove their research agendas, and, ultimately, defined the field of biblical archaeology as we know it today.

Given these problematic origins, however, the time has come to rid ourselves of the Christian theological overburden associated with how the field has traditionally been defined and practiced. It is time to break the existing paradigm, either by disposing of the term “biblical” altogether (which, in any case, means fundamentally different things to Jews and Christians) or by defining it much more broadly, as Albright himself occasionally articulated (but never followed). At the very least, biblical archaeology should encompass the period of the New Testament, while a good case can be made that it should also include the period of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity (late antiquity) and even extend beyond the Islamic conquest.