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.

Someone Said Dan Brown Was Right About Jesus and Mary Magdalene Having Been Married

I disagree. I'm not certain that either Jesus or Mary Magdalene existed, let alone that they were married, let alone that they had children and that their descendants survive today. And even if they did I don't assign any special qualities to anyone just because of their ancestors. And the Grail was invented in the 12th century by Chretien de Troyes. And a grail is a cup or chalice. And the business about "san graal" ("holy grail") being a misreading of "sang raal [sang royal]'" ("royal blood") which Brown borrowed from Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, although it's miles more clever than anything Brown will ever think up on his own, is still just clever silliness. And the Priory of Sion was invented in the 1950's by a Frenchman trying to pass himself off as a descendant of the Merovingians and a figure prophesied by Nostradamus. And besides the factual errors Brown insists are facts and which are crucial to the plots of his stories, his books are riddled with errors which are unimportant for his plots. For example, there actually is no academic discipline called symbology, which is practiced by Brown's protagonist Professor Robert Langdon. There is, however, an academic discipline which studies symbols. It's called semiotics, and, ironically, there is an actual Italian professor of semiotics named Umberto Eco who writes fanciful novels, often having to do with wild speculations about the history of the Roman Catholic Church, which are much, much, much better than Brown's, and although Eco's fiction is infinitely more realistic and informative about the reality of both the present and of bygone ages than Brown's, he doesn't have the bad taste to try to pass any of it off as factual, as Brown does with his unfortunate piles of awkward sentences.

Just in case this wasn't already clear: I think Dan Brown's books are badly-written and that people could get a lot more entertainment as well as lot less misinformation from books written by -- well, from books written by just about anyone else.