Biblical Archaeology, And Several Ways To Do It Wrong

Two recent stories in HP give examples of what I would call poorly-done Biblical archaeology, and a third, a poor response to soundly-done archaeology. The problem in all three cases is a premature assumption of the accuracy of Biblical texts. In one story, Dina Avshalom-GorniIn says she may have found the place where Jesus met Mary Magdalen She assumes that the New Testament story of Jesus meeting Mary Magdalen is accurate, and then speculates about a find based on that assumption.

Then there's this story about a recent find by James Tabor. Tabor is speculating that the find may have belonged to Sadducees. That speculation is based in part on the assumption that the Sadducees were enemies of Jesus and conspired to bring about his death, just as described in the New Testament. I think that all that the NT tells us for certain about the Sadducees is that its authors were hostile to them.

In the third case, archaeologist Ken Dark's speculation that he may have found the town of Dalmanutha, mentioned in the Gospel of Mark and no other known text of the era of Jesus, who's rushing to conclusions: Dark, or Joel L Watts, who insists that Dalmanutha never existed, based in large part upon his conviction that every single deviation from literal geographical accuracy in Mark has been corrected by the author of the Gospel of Matthew? I'd say it's Watts. Not that Watts even distrusts Mark's accuracy, strictly speaking: he speculates that Mark is not so much making mistakes as taking artistic license, and that making up the place-name Dalmanutha is an example of this license. It seems much less farfetched to me that Dalmanutha may have existed, regardless of whether Mark was right that Jesus traveled there, or, as Watts says, Matthew was right in saying that journey was to Magdala, or neither of the above.

In any case, between Dina Avshalom-GorniIn, James Tabor, Joel L Watts and Ken Dark, Dark is the only one not making speculations based upon the assumption of the accuracy of Biblical texts.

Lucan (The Roman Poet) And Mark

Joel L Watts writes,

"Is it unusual to have Mark associated with bad geography, leaving skeptics fodder and archaeologists searching? Hardly. I maintain Mark is not simply wrong or misinformed, but follows stylistic writing patterns developed shortly before the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt but [sic!] Lucan, a Latin poet. If we understand this, we will have no need to search for non-existent towns or wonder how Jesus may have crossed the Sea of Galilee so often and in so short of time."

I assume that Watts means "patterns developed BY Lucan." I was unimpressed by Watts' assertion of Lucan's influence on Mark, but I went searching for similar assertions by others, assuming I would find many. To my surprise, so far I haven't found a single one. However, that certainly doesn't mean that many others don't share Watts' opinion. There is a very unfortunate coincidence at work here: "Lucan" is both a proper noun, the name by which the poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus is best known in English, and an adjective meaning "pertaining to the Gospel of Luke." Naturally, when you go searching for references to the influence of the poet on the Gospel of Mark, any mentions of the poet are going to be needles in the haystack of references to Luke.

So I don't know yet whether Watts is out on his own here, claiming Lucan influenced Mark, or in the middle of the mainstream, or somewhere in between. I also don't know what sort of influence Watts has in mind here: does he think that the author of Mark read Lucan in Latin? or a Greek translation of Lucan? or some other Greek work which was influenced stylistically by Lucan? In any of those cases, it seems to me, the influence of Lucan (AD 29-65) would have to have traveled very quickly from the city of Rome to the remote provinces of Judea and Galilee in time to have influenced the Gospel of Mark, written ca AD 70.

Or does Watts have in mind an influence by Lucan on one or more of the revisers of the Gospel of Mark some time before the text was fixed in the 3rd century?

I think Watts means that the author of Mark was influenced, ca AD 70, either directly by Lucan or by an intermediary or intermediaries who were influenced by Lucan. And that sounds a little bit cuckoo to me, but what do I know about it? The answer is: squat, so far. Perhaps there's a mention of Lucan in Dennis R MacDonald's book The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. [PS, 25. November 2016: There is not.]

The whole topic of the imitation of other authors by the authors of the New Testament is brand-new to me. No reason for Watts to be ruffled because I can't quite follow his proposed connection between Lucan and Mark. I'll bone up on the subject and get back to y'all.

Ken Dark Said That PERHAPS Dalmanutha Has Been Found

Dark mentioned here that his archaeological team may have found the town of Dalmanutha, a town known until now only from a mention in the Gospel of Mark.

Joel L Watts thinks Dark is full of it. In a commentary on Huffington Post, Watts seems to be making some rash assumptions: that Mark's style follows Lucan's. (Lucan's only surviving work, his poem on the Roman Civil War, was left unfinished at his death in AD 65, and Mark's Gospel was written within a dozen years of that. Lucan was popular, but did his influence on other writers extend as far as Judea and Galilee that fast? Hmm.) That Matthew not mentioning Dalmanutha argues against its existence. That Dark is affected by a compulsion to "to locate everything mentioned in Holy Writ." Pardon me, but Watts seems to suffer from a compulsion to dismiss Dalmanutha right away as a fictional literary device. What's wrong with saying that for the moment we don't know whether the newly-excavated site is Dalmanutha or not? I'm perfectly comfortable not knowing for sure yet, just as comfortable as I am not being sure yet whether there was an historical Jesus. Sometimes -- many times -- the only responsible position an historian can take is to say, it could have been like this, or like this, we don't know, so why not try to learn more about the subject, and in the meantime keep an open mind?

I see a widespread compulsion to oversimplify things. For example, in the comments on Watts' Huffington Post article, one reader declares: "The Bible is FICTION!" This simpleminded compulsion to reduce all 2000 pages or so of the Bible to one two-syllable all-caps word is often to be seen these days, and this particular instance wouldn't have been worth mentioning except that it comes from a HuffPost blogger. That's depressing.

Of course, neither Watts nor HP's simpleminded new atheist blogger betrays any particular interest in archaeology per se. Watts is a Christian theologian, still insisting, here and now in the 21st century, that The Answers Are In There (in the Bible that is), and the new Blogger appears to be a professional atheist with no other notable qualifications for employment. Dark is the only one of three with expertise in the field of archaeology -- and the only one of the three who seems to have an open mind about whether the site in question is Dalmanutha or not. The only one of the three who appears to intend to investigate the matter further before coming to a conclusion. The only one of the three whose motives for investigating the matter appear to be actually archaeological and not theological. Regular readers of The Wrong Monkey know that I have a very low opinion of theology. Let me just take the opportunity to point out that my opinion of atheists who have nothing better to do than to endlessly and fruitlessly argue with theologians is about as low. There are much more interesting, much more substantial things in the world, much more rewarding topics of conversation. (Archaeology, for example.)

How To Diss Mythicists

On pages 5 and 6 of The Jesus Legend,the mythicist G A Wells lists 11 "guidelines for hostile writing" to be used against mythicists such as himself: 1) Question the mythicists' qualifications. 2) Avoid rebutting their arguments, and instead condescendingly describe their positions as already discredited. 3) Affix distasteful labels to them, as the label "Hegelian" was attached to Strauss and Bauer. 4) Lump one writer together with discredited ones, and if he himself has criticized the others, don't mention it. 5) Represent minor slips as indications of total incompetence. 6) Make objections to the mythicists' cases as if they themselves had not addressed them. 7) Falsely claim that the mythicists rely on a priori dogmas. 8) Call a mythicist's failure to mention a certain work a "serious omission." 9) Instead of producing arguments, appeal to authorities; also, accuse the mythicists of appealing to outdated authorities. 10) Misrepresent their work, being careful to avoid lengthy quotations which might tend to give your readers an accurate impression of that which you are misrepresenting, and 11) Discuss propositions irrelevant to their work. Wells describes each of these tactics at greater length than I have here; then he goes on, on pages 6 through 9, to show how they all have been used against him.

All in a book Wells published in 1996. It is downright depressing to see how current Wells' list is, and how accurately it describes the average downright rude dismissal of mythicists by most academically-credentialed biblical scholars and theologians who mention them today. And not for the first time, let me object to the very term "mythicist," even though some writers attach it proudly to themselves. I object to the term because it implies people who are asserting, positively, than Jesus was a myth, not a real person, while it is applied to just about every one who is less than certain that Jesus was a real person, and just about everyone who wants to investigate the question of Jesus' existence as if it were not already closed.

Although not every attack upon mythicists -- although I object to the term, I'm not going to act as if it is not the term being used -- follows all 11 of Wells' guidelines, it is depressingly rare to find a description of them --of us. I would like to investigate the question as if it were not already closed -- by a Biblical scholar or a theologian with a PhD, let alone tenure, which does not follow any of them. The latest depressingly crude and insulting such attack of which I am aware, Joel L Watts' screed published in the Huffington Post yesterday, follows a few of them, and invents the new one of not mentioning one single mythicist by name, as if we were not important enough for Watts to name any of us, and as if we were all the same anyway. Watts' article is a beautiful example of 2) and 9) : there is nothing in it even remotely resembling the suggestion of an argument, neither a mythicist argument to be poo-pooed, nor an historicist argument of any kind whatsoever. Jesus was real and mythicists are as stubbornly irrational as young-earth creationists. That is all ye know, and all ye need know.

Well, there's actually one more thing ye might be interested to know. It's something I already assumed, but I don't assume that all of my readers follow such publishing-industry details as closely as I do. It's the reason that Joel Watts is bothering to publish such crude and egregious insults of us in places like the Huffington Post to begin with: because he has a new book out.It's not just insults and intellectual dishonesty -- it's also advertising.