Phoney Secrets of the Bible
The
other night I had the astonishing experience of viewing a television program
called
"Ancient Secrets of the Bible." The manifest goal of
this show was to disarm skeptics and irreligious carpers and vindicate the historical
accuracy of the Bible. But the funny thing was, this
was not a Pat Robertson production. Rather, this
piece of clumsy propaganda was on CBS. Maybe Jesse Helms is getting some
control there after all.
There was a pretense to objectivity on the program, an attempt to
create the illusion that it was an unprejudiced National
Geographic or Discovery Channel type of program. Maybe this is why they had as
host an actor who plays some adulterer on a nighttime soap opera: no religious
bias in the selection of a host! And they had numerous spokesmen on behalf of
scriptural accuracy who were supposed to be noted Bible scholars,
archaeologists, and linguists. I had never heard of a single one of them.
Further, I would bet my reservations at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb that
all these guys were faculty flunkies at Jerry Falwell's or Jack Hyles's
colleges.
The set-up of the show was to
explore a supposed controversy over the accuracy of the Bible. There are, it
seems, some pesky doubters here and there, but, luckily, scholars like those on
the show (for whom no institutional affiliations were supplied--though of
course there aren't in The National
Inquirer, either, are there? "Top Psychics Predict...!") are willing to take time out of their busy studies to refute
the doubters. And who are these troublemaking hooligans, disturbers of the
peaceful dogmatic slumber of the faithful? The writers carefully picked their
bad guys. There was Zecharia Sitchin,
erudite but delusional author of The
Twelfth Planet, a book that argues that human life was created by space
colonizers, and that the Bible and ancient Assyrian tablets prove this. Yeah,
right.
Then there was Austin Miles, former
Jim Bakker crony and teller of tall tales (in his
interminable and self-serving autobiography Don't Call Me Brother, he hints at vague "inside info" about Marilyn
Monroe's death at the hands of the Kennedys). Miles, depending
on the market he is selling to today, may appear as a chastened born-again
Christian, an agnostic, you name it. This
time, he was a Bible doubter. Again,
easily dismissed. This guy was a circus ring master. How are you
supposed to be able to take his village atheist objections seriously when put
up against supposed Bible scholars?
And finally there was Rabbi Sherwin
Wine, founder of Humanistic Judaism. Let's not be naive: don't tell me they
didn't pick this man (whose every word I agreed with) to give Christian viewers
an easy target, inviting them to view Rabbi Wine as a Jew trying to destroy
Christian faith. Reprehensible.
Had the program bothered to show any
of the very many Christian scholars who reject belief in the historical
accuracy of the Bible, it would not have appeared as a life and death struggle
for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
But the very idea that there is a
blazing controversy over the accuracy of the Bible is itself highly misleading.
The mythic and legendary character of most of the Bible narrative has been
axiomatic for serious Biblical scholarship for
generations. Sure there are sectarians who resent it, like Scientific
Creationists and Flat Earthers, but to depict them as
the mainstream of scholarship as this program did is the wildest kind of
distortion. It is not hard to detect whose hand was at the tiller writing this show.
I haven't seen a more blatant case of network TV making an apologia for
fundamentalism since the TV schlockudrama Fall From Grace, in which Jim and
Tammy Bakker emerged smelling sickeningly sweeter
than Tammy's dime store perfume.
"Ancient Secrets of the
Bible" demonstrated several of the illogicalities and ironies of
fundamentalist apologetics. First was the use made of archaeology.
One of the talking heads gravely noted that we find the name
Sodom included in a list of
cities on trade records from the Ebla Empire. Indeed
we do; unlike the subsequent appeal to the ambiguous Ipuwer Papyrus, claimed falsely by eccentric Immanuel Velikofsky
to be an eyewitness account of the plagues of Exodus,
this was not a total fabrication.
And they rehearsed William F. Albright's
case for locating the ruins of
Sodom and
Gomorrah beneath the
Dead Sea, ignoring the fact that
this identification has been hotly debated by scholars for generations. They
reprised apologist Clifford Wilson's argument that the
Dead Sea
Valley is rife with natural
gas and bitumen pockets, as well as being subject to seismic disturbances, an ideal
recipe for periodic volcanic explosions into the air of molten rock salt.
These, incidentally, are all data I always include in my Old Testament courses.
But what do they prove?
Can they prove that angels visited
Abraham and
Lot? That Mrs. Lot was
magically transformed into a statue for daring to look back at
Sodom's doom? It is obvious
(to anyone not blinded by the desperate will to believe) that the existence and
volcanic destruction of
Sodom proves nothing about
attendant miracles. In fact, as I understand it, the whole point is that
scholars assume the historicity of
Sodom's destruction and
interpret the legend of
Lot and the angels as a subsequent fanciful
account of why God must have had
Sodom marked for doom. They
must have deserved it! And Mrs. Lot, the prototype for the
Morton's Salt label? Obviously she is the product of the
legend-mongering imagination which sought to "explain" the humanoid
shape of a wind-eroded pillar of rock, of which there are several in the area.
But there is a deeper and far more
ironic futility in these attempts to prove miracles by means of rationalistic
science. If we can make the story plausible to the extent of showing on
scientific grounds that
Sodom quite likely did
perish by a fiery rain, we have to that extent shown that no miracle was
required to do the job! Simple seismic factors would have done it (and the
same later in the show where they tried to show that
the
Red
Sea
could have dried up and become crossable by means of unusual weather
phenomena).
The point is to rub the skeptic's
nose in it: "See, heathen scientist? Even you must be forced to
acknowledge that the events recorded by the Bible really happened! We can prove
it on your
own grounds! You need not even resort to
faith!" Uh oh! Anything that can be proven by science does not transcend
science. It is the product of a purely natural, scientifically explicable
process, right? You no longer need a miracle to explain it! As La Place said to
Napoleon, "I have no need for that hypothesis."
Remember how every year around
Christmas time some one will repeat the business about Matthew being right
after all, and that the Star of Bethlehem can now be shown to have been a
planetary conjunction or a supernova or whatever? More of the same! If Matthew
was right, Matthew was wrong: if it really happened but was non-miraculous, the
text is far from vindicated. Rather it has been debunked by its own defense,
since it was plainly trying to describe a miracle, a moving star. Novas don't
hover over individual stables; at least they didn't when I took college
astronomy.
These muddle-headed defenders of the
Bible are doing precisely what the 17th-Century Rationalists did when they had
Jesus walking not on the water, but on unseen stepping stones in the
Sea of Galilee, or having Jesus merely
swoon on the cross to revive later in the tomb and appear alive to the 12. The
events of the Bible are vindicated! They really happened! But, er, of course,
there was nothing miraculous about them!
Hey, let's not dismiss Sitchin and his buddies Velikofsky
and Von Däniken too quickly! Maybe the
Nile did turn Red because
Mars swerved too close to the earth one day, or maybe Jesus was born with no
human father because Mary was artificially inseminated by a UFO! Sure, why not?
As long as the Bible is historically inerrant! That's all that matters, right?
But there is something yet more
ironic about the fundamentalist approach to the Bible, as witnessed by this
terrible television show. As Clark H. Pinnock once
put it, fundamentalists don't like the Bible they've got. There is often a
surprisingly wide discrepancy between what the text actually says and the way
they tacitly rewrite it.
Many fundamentalists (including
Harold Lindsell,
The Battle for the Bible) reread the texts of the gospels as saying that Peter
denied Jesus 6, 8, or even 9 times! Where do they get such a
notion? Each individual gospel gives 3 denials, but
Peter is speaking to different people in different gospels. But since the Bible
supposedly cannot contradict itself (or rather, since some people cannot bring
themselves to admit that it does), we must make room for each, slightly
different denial. By the same logic, Jesus cleansed the
Temple twice. Even Bruce
Metzger says this! Well, by the same token, I guess Jesus was crucified 4
times, and Paul was converted 3 times!
The classic case of fundamentalists
arguing till they're blue in the face (not just the nose) is their devotion to
the Living Bible, a bad paraphrase of an English translation of the Bible (the
American Standard Version). The Living Bible was done over explicitly from a
fundamentalist point of view, to make the Bible sound more like an orthodox
American evangelical document. The
Bible
is inerrant!, they scream, and now that we've got that straight, let's chuck
the real Bible out the window and quote chapter and verse of this wanna-be Bible instead!
"Ancient Secrets of the
Bible" perpetuated the most flagrant case of this Bible substitution I
have ever seen. Mr. Soap Opera Adulterer would ask "Is the Bible story
true?" and then we would get a very badly acted mini-movie of the story in
question. I was surprised at the liberties taken with the
Sodom story, which amazingly
omitted the anti-homosexual rereading of the story so
common
among fundies, but only to replace it with the idea
that the folk of
Sodom were struck down (in a
series of special effects nowhere near as good as in George Pal's
Atlantis the Lost
Continent) for celebrating a
festival dedicated to Astarte.
It was unwittingly hilarious: the
Sodomites do nothing more degenerate than laughing, doing cartwheels, making
vague nasty comments about
Lot, and pretty much just dancing and
smooching in public! Ah, the poor fundies! They have
to show a depraved
Sodom, but they just cannot
bring themselves to show depravity! So, as we always suspected, they depict God
as damning people to the flames just for having a little innocent fun!
But I really just could not believe
my eyes when they got to the
Tower of
Babel. I groaned at the phony
linguists and geneticists explaining with a straight face how all the racial
and linguistic differentiation could so have come about in a single
generation after the Tower. But this was a mere bag of shells next to the fact
that the CBS version of
Babel had nothing whatever to
do with the brief nine-verse account of Genesis chapter 11! On TV we saw the
evil machinations of the bloated King Nimrod as he bullied his architect into
building higher and higher, ordering the sacrifice of 50 infants to persuade
the gods to call off the lightning storms which eventually destroyed the Tower.
Of course none of this happens in the Bible. In Genesis, Nimrod occurs in the
previous chapter and has nothing to do with the Tower. And the Tower is not
blasted by divine thunder bolts, but is simply left half-finished once the
builders' speech is mixed up. And the TV version does not even show the
languages being confused! If this is what happened, the Bible is wrong on all
counts! What Bible are they trying to vindicate?
But for all the incredible
distortion, "Ancient Secrets of the Bible" did point to one very well
kept secret of the Bible, and that is the unsuspected economic substratum of
theology. Can you
imagine a commercial TV network presenting a
truly scholarly documentary about Bible history and archaeology? PBS, maybe, but the networks? No way! If they deal with
religion, it has to be
the same way the TV evangelists deal with it.
It has to be religion that sells,
pop religion that will only tickle the comforting prejudices of a mass audience
attracted to peep shows with lurid titles like "Ancient Secrets
of..." and redolent of Jack Palance and UFOs. A
really scholarly presentation of the matter would have the audience bristling
with boycott threats from Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon. So we get this sort of bread-&-circuses
apologetics instead. Keep the customer satisfied. The customer is always right,
even when it comes to Bible history, apparently.
The scary thing is: this raises the
question of whether the theology of the Bible, which, after all, took shape in
a real social world with economic and political forces no less real than today,
might itself not be in some measure the product of money-manipulation. In L.
Sprague de Camp's wonderful novel The
Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, an adventure narrative set amid the exotic
glory of the ancient
Persian Empire, the heroes find
themselves discussing these matters with a priest of Baal as they pass through
Palestine on their way to
Africa. Times are hard, the
priest laments,
because the priests of Yahweh have begun
aggressively trying to corner the market. All priests made their living by
receiving a hefty share of the food and crops they told the people that the
hungry deity demanded. And the more cults there were in a society, the less each priesthood would receive. So, de Camp's priest
explains, the move towards Yahwistic monotheism in
Israel was simply a
theologically dignified case of economic monopolism! Is
it possible? It is quite clear that the expulsion of other gods from
Israel was at least a flexing
of muscles by the state, a gesture of the domestic government's control and its
freedom from surrounding empires whose gods were also worshipped in Solomon's
Temple. When Elijah wants Baal
worship to end in
Israel, he wants Phoenician
and Syrian influence on national affairs to end.
Theology doesn't hover like a mist
far above real-world concerns. It never did. It has well-buried roots that may
still be visible if you look hard enough for them. Maybe CBS today is just
doing what the ancient Aaronide hierocracy did
thousands of years ago. Ah, the ancient secrets of the Bible.
Robert M. Price