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First Person: BAR—Most Loved and Most Reviled

By Hershel Shanks

The First Person column in this issue is written by Professor Hector Avalos, although he will not know it until it appears in print.

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Footnotes

1.

“The SBL,” according to Avalos, “is the agent of a dying profession.” “The vast majority of [its] members are actually part of a religionist enterprise centered on maintaining their elite leisure pursuit, called ‘biblical studies’… Attending a session of an annual meeting [of SBL] is a study in irrelevance.”

Endnotes

1.

Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007.

2.

For an account of the “liberation” of the scrolls, see Philip R. Davies, George J. Brooke and Philip Callaway, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), especially pp. 26–27.

3.

See BAR 29, no. 1 (January/February 2003): 34, 36.

4.

Hershel Shanks, “Sensationalizing Gnostic Christianity,” BAR 32, no. 4 (July/August 2006): 66.

5.

Shanks, “Cites Unseen: Why Do Some Scholars Avoid References to BAR?” BAR 31, no. 6 (November/December 2005): 6.

6.

Shanks, “Shuka Bars BAR,” BAR 29, no. 5 (September/October 2003): 32.

7.

Shanks, “Duke Professor Calls for Public Pressure Against BAR: But Eric Meyers Won’t Take on His Colleagues,” BAR 31, no. 2 (March/April 2005): 6.

8.

Eric Meyers, “Un-provenanced, Unauthenticated: Ethics and the Antiquities Market,” lecture delivered May 5, 2004, Center for the Study of Antiquity, Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, MI. The Lecture appears on the Biblical Archaeology Society Web site, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/bswbOOossuary_Meyers.pdf (accessed August 15, 2006).

9.

See his remarks on the importance of New Testament archaeology in Shanks, “Roundup of Annual Meetings,” BAR 31, no. 2 (March/April 2005): 44.

10.

Shanks, “The Gap between Archaeology and the Bible: Scholars Now Attack Much of the Bible as Unhistorical,” BAR 31, no. 4 (July/August 2005): 62. See also Shanks, ed., Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999).

11.

See Ben E. Witherington III, The Problem with Evangelical Theology: Testing Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, and Wesleyanism (Waco, TX: Baylor Univ. Press, 2005), especially pp. 251–254.

12.

Witherington, “Was Paul a Pro-slavery Chauvinist? Making Sense of Paul’s Seemingly Mixed Moral Messages,” BR 20, no. 2 (April 2004): 8, 44.

13.

Shanks, “Major Players,” BAR 17, no. 2 (March/April 1991): 53.

14.

Shanks, “Major Players.”

15.

Shanks, “A Time to Consolidate: BR to Become Part of BAR—Suspends Separate Publication,” BR 21, no. 5 (Winter 2005): 2.

16.

Shanks, “The Gap between Archaeology and the Bible,” .

17.

See Brian Fagan, “The Next Fifty Years: Will It Be the Golden Age of Archaeology?” Archaeology 58, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 18–23.