Episode 22: "The Outside" (+)

Two years ago:

My professor, Cameron, met with me on the north lawn of campus. I sat down across from him on a picnic bench, probably hunching my back like I usually do when there’s some burden I can’t shake. At the beginning of the semester I’d asked if we could do this--talk Christian to Christian about religion outside of the context of class. His course was The Emergence of Christianity, which examined the content of the New Testament from a theological perspective as well as a historical one. The "historical" part was what was bothering me.

Over time in Cameron’s course, I was beginning to see the New Testament as he did: a complicated book full of contradictions, unabashed bias and ambiguous real-world accuracy. Because I had grown up with a relatively fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical infallibility, Cameron’s course was slowly beginning to hurt. More particularly, I was frustrated with the gospel authors themselves. From the class, it was clear that their theological aims sometimes overrode their historical factualism. Why had men who claimed to love Jesus--the embodiment of truth--bent the truth to write their books?

I more or less asked Cameron that. He challenged me to look at the problem from a different angle. The authors of the gospels did not have our modern standard of research. Without the conventional tools of investigation we use today to fact check and confirm, these men were left to whatever devices they had in order to create a coherent story. The authors weren’t "liars"--rather, they were theologians with a historical story to tell and limited means to do it. Besides, Cameron said, I wasn’t going to find the truth about Jesus in some book. Jesus was in my heart.

I went back to my room and lay on my bed, feeling renewed.

Now:

Yigal Levin, my Emergence of Biblical Israel teacher, was tearing up the Old Testament as far as I was concerned. As one of my four courses at Hebrew U, this was by far the most challenging. Left and right Yigal was calling Jewish scripture into question, branding example after example of Biblical literature as historically "problematic." Most specifically, he was focused on the dubious aspects of the conquest of Canaan.

Bible Check: The Book of Joshua tells the story of how the title character, a protégé of Moses, led a victorious military campaign of Israelite nomads against pagan Canaanites. As the story goes, the conquest was a merciless endeavor, resulting in the rapid, successive downfalls of several Canaanite kingdoms. The account plants the seeds for the establishment of Israel as a God-sanctioned state.

Yigal lectured and gave readings about why the story of Joshua most likely didn’t happen the way the Bible says it does. From an archaeological perspective--the class’s M.O.--there was a substantial amount of evidence against a literal interpretation. Common scholarly consensus affirmed an Israelite people who emerged a good deal after many famous Biblical sites had been destroyed, meaning the conquest story itself was an anachronism. Yigal also mentioned in class once that he didn’t believe the Israelites "came from anywhere,"--by which he meant he didn’t believe the Israelites escaped from Egypt. If I understand Yigal’s perspective correctly, he believed that the Israelites instead emerged from the Canaanite peoples and after some time became a separate ethnic entity. Although the exodus wasn’t the focus of the course, some of the readings he gave substantiated his opinion about it. According to the material, there are no archaeological finds that shed light on the migration of thousands of Israelites from Egypt to the central hill country of Israel. On top of that, archaeological materials considered authentically "Israelite" have no defining characteristics setting them apart from common Canaanite material culture. A small "twist of the knife" was that the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit had a similar alphabet to Hebrew--and a similar religious mythology. It’s possible that the Israelites derived their religion from the Ugaritic one. Maybe my God was just another god, no more valid than the ones that ancient pagans created.

To Yigal’s credit, I never sensed malice behind what he taught. His teachings came from what he considered to be historically accurate, whether that agreed with the Bible or not. Besides, he wore a kippah--so at least some part of him remained "Jewish" despite his academic studies. It was clear that there was no anti-religious vendetta driving his lectures--but I was still feeling some heavy collateral damage from what he had to say.

In fact, I don’t think "devastated" is too dramatic a word to describe how I handled the information. Everything I wanted from my faith, everything I’d worked for, seemed to be snuffed out. For the first time--ever--I seriously considered whether or not God was real. I became angry at the thought that I had wasted time pursuing a deity that wasn’t there. I remember one particular day in which I felt I was on the outside of what used to be my faith--that God didn’t exist for me. My daily mood took a downturn. I was more irritable, less patient with others. Bitter. The glimpse of who I was without God was looking pretty ugly.

What made things worse was that I could think of absolutely no one to talk to about it. If I went to someone who loved the Bible, they weren’t going to want to hear what I had to say. If I went to someone who didn’t love the Bible, then they couldn’t empathize with how heartbroken I was over it. I thought of myself as caught in an impossible situation.

One night though, my friend Lily called from the States. Despite my reservations, I guess I had reached a point where I really needed to talk to someone I trusted. She listened. I let loose, jumbled as my points were, about my doubts. I especially focused on the fact that I thought what I was reading invalidated the covenant God had with the Jews; if the law wasn’t grounded in history, what good was it? It felt so good to finally get it out, and Lily did a really good job of listening. Once I told her what was on my mind, she told me that the covenant, whatever its origins, still had meaning. And more importantly, she said that none of what I learned in class could disprove the existence of God. That girl has a way of pulling through.

Although what she said was helpful, the comfort didn’t last forever. Soon I was feeling the same again, if not worse. If the covenant was given to the Jews in the explicit context of the exodus, then evidence against the exodus was evidence against the covenant--the foundation of Judaism. Jesus as messiah does not exist outside of Judaism’s covenant theology. My entire faith was on the line.

Once, at the end of a weekly Bible study meeting, I let slip how I was feeling during prayer. My friend Josh offered to lead the next meeting about the topic, as he was studying archaeology and knew the field well. I told him that was fine, although I put no faith in him helping me feel better.

The next week, Josh presented the secular trend among archaeologists with more expertise and articulation than I could have mustered, and I was relieved for it. If I wasn’t going to walk away with warm-and-fuzzies about the issue, at the very least my Christian friends would understand where I was coming from. He responded to every challenge the group gave him without hesitating; Josh knew what he was talking about, and what he was talking about looked pretty bleak for fundamental Christianity. His time spent in the lab and in the field among professionals yielded no "evidence for faith." Josh also laid out the status of Christian scholars in archaeology: Apparently we had been the main contributors to the archaeological dark ages for our strict fundamentalism and aren’t taken too seriously nowadays. Josh said that we had to get on the ball as scholars, or our academic reputations would never mean much.

Some positives, despite the glum:

1) Even in the midst of all he knows, Josh’s faith remains uncompromised. I guess it’s possible to study archaeological evidence and remain Christian.

2) Josh offered some food for thought. Back in the day, he said, opposition to Christianity came in the form of physical persecution. Now, it’s simply taken a new form in academia. Thought that was interesting.

By the end of the meeting, Josh asked if he’d helped me at all. Seeing as how he’d pretty much confirmed everything I was in the dumps about, I couldn’t give him the most enthusiastic answer. But I was glad he had taken the time.

In December, I decided to talk to my teacher, Yigal. I had been avoiding this course of action because I had fallen behind on his readings, and I wanted to make sure I had tried to find answers myself before asking potentially uneducated questions. But as the semester drew to a close, I really didn’t have time to look good for Yigal. I asked him if we could talk and he agreed to during our break. The two of us went into an empty lecture hall and sat down. I wasn’t hoping to recreate my talk with Cameron, but I wouldn’t have minded if that were the outcome.

"I’m having some faith problems in your class," I said.

"Okay…" Yigal said.

I asked how he went about his own faith, knowing what he did about archaeology. He explained that he never felt he had to reconcile his historical studies with his Jewish beliefs. He was not interested in bending scientific and religious truths to form some kind of compromise in the middle. The rules of faith didn’t apply to the rules of the world, and Yigal was content with that.

"But if you don’t believe the exodus happened--"

"It doesn’t matter whether I believe the exodus happened," he said. (He believed, based on factors such as the absence of a historical name for Pharaoh, that Exodus was written on a more metaphorical level than other books.) The important thing was that science didn’t violate his faith; archaeology and the Bible were not mutually exclusive because they were operating from two completely separate modes of thought. It didn’t quite make me cheery inside, but again, it was nice to know that someone could study archaeology and still retain their religion.

The final Bible study that month was about not letting faith lean too heavily on academia. Guilty as charged. The leader of the discussion was a guy named Johannes, a Swedish guy with aspirations to being a Lutheran pastor. He knew about my troubles with archaeology and had invited me to meet his housemate Joel, a thirty-, forty-something-year-old Christian filmmaker who made documentary shorts pertaining to Biblical archaeology.

We got around to the meeting in the middle of December. Joel, Johannes and I had some great pasta for dinner, then sat down in the living room to talk. I spilled my sob story. Joel prefaced his response by saying that I am not the only one who’s ever been through this; in coming to Israel and learning about archaeology, he went through a similar shock. He went on to explain two biggies:

1) In today’s archaeological publishing world, the trend was to blackball Christian scholarly opinion. If the work of an archaeologist adhered too closely to a Bible-as-history perspective, they would never be heard from in publishing. So Christian archaeological opinion was out there, but chances were I would never hear it in a classroom anyway.

2) The theory that the Israelites emerged from Canaanites, instead of invading and conquering Canaan from the outside, is a relatively new theory in archaeological circles. A majority of the Biblical archaeologists Joel had interviewed (and he had tried to hit every big name he could find) still believed that a conquest had happened.

Again, no dramatic turnaround after hearing it, but it was something. Joel also mentioned an archaeologist’s mistake in Jericho that he believed was responsible for why the Book of Joshua isn’t taken seriously among secular scholars today. Besides, he said, how many things had "scholarly consensus" been wrong about over the course of history? Toward the end of our talk, he said that my problem came down to one of two things: Either the archaeological evidence against the Bible was extremely convincing, or my faith wasn’t strong enough. I agreed, although Joel and I probably see his statement a bit differently. Joel related faith directly to the idea of daily immersion in the Bible and finding strength in God’s word. But since the Bible is exactly what I had issues with, I was not up for that avenue of recuperation.

I am, however, up for strengthening my faith outside of the Bible. For a couple of years now, I’ve been pursuing the idea of filling myself with the Holy Spirit, the piece of God that I believe is in all of us. As painful as it’s been to hear the Bible historically criticized, it’s opened up the opportunity step back from it and approach God spiritually, rather than intellectually. If finding the truth about God really is a matter of the heart, then I should be able to engage with him without consulting documentation. We read about Biblical icons who had direct, exciting relationships with God before the Bible even existed. Why shouldn’t I have the same thing? The Bible should supplement my relationship with God, not the other way around.

And besides, I’m not an archaeologist. I’m not a historian. Am I going to have to go through a crisis every time some scholar cripples my historical assumptions about the Bible? Chances are, I will never have the academic credentials to refute every single criticism that comes nearby. I’m not interested in "proving" the Bible anyway. I’m interested in knowing that God is real for me. If I have a relationship with him as my spiritual center, the rest is cake.

So I’m not giving up on the Bible, but as of yet, I’m taking a break from it. For a long time now, I’ve wanted to take off my "training wheels" and really feel God working spiritually in my life, rather than just read about him doing that for others. The Bible has brought me such a long way, but there’s only so much it can do before I have to put down the book and know him through prayer.

And I’m taking this tough, challenging semester as my cue to try.

Shalom,
Eric