Bible Books

048

Weighing the Evidence

Is the Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures

Jeffery L. Sheler
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco and Zondervan, 1999) 278 pp., $24.00 (hardback)

It’s the question that gnaws at nonbeliever and believer alike: Can we trust the Bible? Was there a catastrophic flood that wiped out human civilization? Did Joseph, son of Jacob and his beloved Rachel, rise to the position of viceroy of Egypt? Did Moses lead the Israelites on a 40-year trek to the land of Canaan? Can we know the real Jesus through the Bible, or is he hopelessly wrapped in pious myth and later dogma?

That basic question is more pressing today than ever. After a tumultuous half century of archaeological discoveries and sharp challenges to traditional assumptions about the Bible, some have retreated into fundamentalism while others have rejected the Bible in favor of a deep skepticism. Jeffery Sheler, religion writer for U.S. News & World Report, travels a middle road, surveying recent biblical studies to judge how well the Bible accords with the modern study of antiquity. Sheler pronounces the Bible generally reliable; the Bible is neither a fraud nor an imaginative construct, but a living product of the ancient Near East.

Sheler concentrates on the history of Israel during the last two millennia B.C.E. and on the historical Jesus during the first century C.E. Many of the archaeological discoveries and controversies that he covers will be familiar to the BR and Biblical Archaeology Review faithful: the second-millennium B.C.E. setting of the patriarchs, the conflicting explanations for Israel’s settlement of the land (was it a conquest, peaceful infiltration or a peasant revolt?), the “House of David” inscription, the archaeology of the Philistines. Sheler draws on ten years of reporting about religious topics, numerous interviews with prominent biblical scholars and some serious reading of influential books. He presents conflicting conservative and liberal approaches to biblical interpretation clearly and fairly. Is the Bible True? is an excellent and reliable review of the topic.

But like every book, it has its problems. Sheler sometimes bends over backwards in favor of the Bible’s historical reliability. For example, he admits that “archaeologists to date have found no direct evidence to corroborate the biblical story [of the Exodus from Egypt].” He then presents extensive circumstantial evidence linking the setting of the biblical story to the years 1450–1200 B.C.E. in Egypt, including the presence of Asiatic immigrants, their involvement in building projects, Ramesses’ construction of cities in the 13th century B.C.E. (the date to which most scholars assign the biblical story) and, at the end of that century, the Merneptah inscription (1207 B.C.E.), which mentions a people named Israel settled in the hills of Canaan. Historically, what may we reasonably infer? Sheler reviews a range of views—that the Exodus story is pure legend or theological fiction, that it fits the 13th century B.C.E., that it telescopes a series of migrations to Canaan into one account, that it reflects “the recollection of a type of historical experience rather than of a specific historical event.” He concludes with the very conservative view that the Exodus story must reflect a memory of a particular historical event. What Sheler has actually done, however, is to assemble a wealth of evidence suggesting that the Exodus story was constructed after the fact by reciters or authors who knew Egyptian culture and used it to speak of Israel’s origins.

The archaeology of the first century C.E. has not yielded as much information about the New Testament as Israelite archaeology has about the Hebrew Bible. 049However, the discovery of the ossuary of Caiaphas, the high priest who interrogated Jesus, and of an inscription that mentions Pontius Pilate as well as the excavations of Herodian Jerusalem during the last 30 years all illuminate the context of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for their part, have greatly illuminated Second Temple period Judaism, and so provide a wider context to the life of Jesus. Sheler exercises sober judgment in separating reasonable historical arguments about the scrolls from idiosyncratic and ideological claims (such as those of Barbara Thiering and Robert Eisenman) that the scrolls’ Teacher of Righteousness was either John the Baptist or James the brother of Jesus and that Paul was the Wicked Priest or that the community at Qumran was a first-century C.E. early Christian community. Sheler presents the similarities between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament with just the right nuance: They are due to a common cultural milieu and not to direct links. Thus John the Baptist need not have trained at Qumran for his ascetic reform movement, nor does Paul have to be an Essene to use language similar to that of the scrolls.

At times Sheler is a bit too credulous, accepting, for example, the “House of Peter” and the “Jesus synagogue” in Capernaum as first-century sites associated with Jesus’ life. First-century sites they are, but the foundations of a house under a later synagogue are not necessarily a synagogue, much less Jesus’ synagogue. As for the “House of Peter,” Sheler himself lists the arguments against identifying the ruins of a house-church under a later Byzantine church as Peter’s home. Yet he refers to “many scholars” (I would judge them a distinct minority) who conclude that this was Peter’s house, where “Jesus stayed and perhaps lived at the beginning of his ministry.” The Gospel of Mark, probably our earliest source, says that Jesus went to Simon Peter’s house from the synagogue (Mark 1:29) and cured Simon’s mother-in-law there, not that he lived there. Rather, when he returned from a trip, the crowds came to him when he was “in a house”—not specifically Peter’s house.

As he must, Sheler reviews the morass of claims concerning the historicity of Jesus’ teachings and deeds. Though he grants that the Gospels are theological rather than historical documents, he frequently inclines toward arguments that support the historical veracity of New Testament traditions. This leads him to ignore most of the literary evidence that the story of the Magi, the Star of Bethlehem and the murder of the innocents (Matthew 2) are symbolic interpretations of Jesus’ origins and a foreshadowing of his life, not historical events. Though Sheler acknowledges that we have no direct evidence that any of these things actually happened, he repeats a number of defensive arguments that they could have happened. But these possibilities do not rise to the level of historical probability. Referring to “many scholars” again, Sheler frequently cites Donald Hagner’s excellent and learned commentary on Matthew (Word, 1993) but fails to disclose Hagner’s explicit commitment to defending the possible or actual historicity of every event in Matthew (except one, for which he apologizes). As we say in politics, “the fix is in.”

Despite these criticisms, Sheler argues well for his overall conclusion—that the Bible fits into its purported historical context. The flourishing of critical analysis of the Bible in the 19th and 20th centuries has improved immeasurably our understanding of that context, as Sheler ably shows. Sheler understands that simplistic positions will not hold; history does not prove the Bible, and the Bible is not dependent on history. Perhaps most important, he shows respect for Judaism and Christianity and expresses confidence that his historical evaluation of the Bible leaves open the possibility of religious claims concerning a God of faith active in history.

Weighing the Evidence

Is the Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures