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The End of Biblical Studies

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GNPR 70: Biblical Studies?
Marshall McLuhan, of "the medium is the message fame," used to say that his books did not sell well, because they contained more than the 25% of new material that most books did. For most people, "The End of Biblical Studies," a new book by Hector Avalos, Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, will contain material that is at least 75% new to them, even though much of what Professor Avalos has to say has been well known within the Religious Studies community for many years.
What Avalos brings to this book is incredible scholarship, remarkable attention to detail, and, most of all, willingness to tell it like it is. A variety of scholars, among them Bart Ehrman, William Dever, John Dominic Crossan, have been busy popularizing what translators, literary critics, and biblical archeologists, have been saying for years. Much to the distress of fundamentalists, there is no single definitive text of the Bible, the Bible has no claims to distinctive literary merits, and the extensive archeological research of the last hundred years has done nothing but puncture holes in the hope of establishing any claims anyone might have that the Bible is in any way historically accurate. (Avalos has an excellent section pointing to the radical discrepancy between the Big Bang theory and the origins account of Genesis.)
Avalos, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard in Biblical Studies, points out that few people even in very religious America, really read the Bible, and even fewer have anything but a bowdlerized grasp of what is really there. His erudition in this regard is exceptional, taking apart the popular softenings of texts like Luke 14:25: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother...cannot be my disciple." Christian exegetes have soft-pedaled this, but the text really does say "hate," a verb that has no other possible translation. (One Christian exegete says: "this is indeed a hard saying.")
What does Professor Avalos hope to accomplish? As he says: "Our purpose is to excise from modern life what little of the Bible is being used and also to eliminate the potential use of any sacred scripture in the modern world." Jews and Christians are quick to find quotations in the Koran that relate to killing of the infidels, but are eager to pass over all those references to slaughter of the innocents that occur in various books of the Bible.
Avalos makes the case that the Bible was written by primitive people in a cultural context so foreign to our own that the Bible no longer makes sense. "What I seek is liberation from the very idea that any sacred text should be an authority for modern human existence." He refers constantly to the "bibliolatry" that has gotten us into so much trouble historically, and laments that the publishing industry and academia have such a vested interest in keeping such a form of idol worship alive.
"Abolishing human reliance on sacred texts is imperative when those sacred texts imperil the existence of human civilization as it is currently configured. The letter can kill. That is why the only mission of biblical studies should be to end biblical studies as we know it." This is an extremely well written book, but written at a sufficiently popular level that even someone not well versed in biblical studies can benefit from it. Even those who read the Bible continually will find at least 25% new material, and everyone who reads it will come away with 100% satisfaction. You may not agree with what Professor Avalos concludes, but his well-put together arguments deserve your thoughtful attention.

Hector Avalos, associate professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, has written a brilliant and original critique of biblical studies from within. He argues that biblical studies should end, because it is just religious apologetics, not an academic discipline or a branch of scholarship.

Most biblical studies academics think the bible is worth keeping and studying and most are members of `faith communities'. But Avalos shows that the bible is irrelevant, the product of an ancient and very different culture whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature and purpose of the world are not useful or ethical. Religion is a fifth wheel, superfluous to life, a hindrance to all intellectual and scientific advances. It is an illegitimate claim to extra power for foolish arguments. We should not rely on any authority, especially not on a single ancient text.

He investigates biblical studies' various sub-disciplines. He shows that the translations of the bible are largely bowdlerised. Textual criticism has found no original texts or manuscripts, and Jesus spoke in Aramaic, not Hebrew or Greek, so there can be no original, pristine word of God.

Avalos shows how history and archaeology have disproved `biblical history'. He notes that centuries of Jesus studies have not found a historical Jesus: he has no verifiable words or deeds, and there are no contemporary eye-witness accounts. Literary criticism has not shown that the bible is better literature than other ancient works, and the excessive attention paid to this one text has meant that thousands of ancient Mesopotamian texts have never been translated.

Avalos examines the USA-based Society of Biblical Literature, with its 7,000 self-serving members, and shows how it has nothing useful or original to offer. Theology has found no coherent message about God; instead it is inconsistent and arbitrary, trying to rescue the bible through citing bits of texts. Nice people find the nice bits, nasty people find the nasty bits; both say that theirs are the essential bits.

It is often held against atheists like Richard Dawkins that they do not know theology, but they don't need to because others have done the work, like Walter Kaufmann in his Critique of religion and philosophy and now Avalos in this excellent book.

Hector Avalos pulls no punches in describing the current state of Biblical studies as a field of academia in decline. Tackling Biblical archaeology, textual criticism, and theology, Avalos dismantles them in detail, pointing out how they no longer bring anything new to our current understanding of the Bible or the spurious history associated with it. Indeed, he shows that most of what we know undermines the Bible as anything we can fully trust as a source for historical data.

Avalos, a former fundamentalist child evangelist, taught himself Hebrew and Greek in high school in order to better attack the arguments of atheists and non-Christian religions. He found he couldn't buttress or accept Christian apologetics, and ended up leaving the fold.

This is a book that could easily be expanded by fleshing out some of the ideas mentioned in his footnotes. Avalos points out that a great many of the works cited by apologists (Josephus, Suetonius, etc.) are from manuscript copies written in the middle ages, centuries after their authors died...authors who themselves didn't witness first hand the events they describe.

An outstanding book.

"The End of Bible Studies" is the most fun I've ever had reading such an analytical book. I can honestly say that I was in a state of perpetual shock as I read page after page of devastating critique of such a huge and firmly anchored suite of disciplines. After all, what university in the Western World doesn't have a major workforce of teachers and researchers devoted to something-or-other relating to THE BIBLE?

According to Avalos, "Bible Study" is a thoroughly worn out field where nothing new has been discovered or analyzed for decades. Even worse, nothing new can be discovered, short of a major archeological find, which seems very unlikely. Even worse than this, academics are fully aware of the futility of further study. Avalos points this out by quoting extensively from academics who are fully devoted to their profession, but strangely honest about how difficult it is to find anything remotely new to say.

I already knew that the Jewish and Christian bibles were fiction. I had no idea that the profession was so wildly hypocritical. Man, this guy is not afraid to get rude!

This is a GREAT book, impeccably documented. Avalos was a child evangelist who began studying the Bible in high school - in order to combat atheism. He soon found that, under scrutiny, Christianity didn't fare any better than any other religion, and decided the only honest position was atheism. In college, he studied under famed biblical archeologist, William Dever. Subsequently, he received a Master's and PhD from Harvard in biblically based subjects. He has been active in scholarly pursuits involving the Bible his entire life.

Before I forget, I must mention how much fun this book is to read - Avalos giving us snippets of the controversies and politics of biblical academia on every page. An outsider can be the "fly on the wall" while observing insiders discuss topics reserved for scholarly Bible study. These main refreshing themes recur throughout the book:

1. The Bible was written during a time that has zero cultural significance today. The overwhelmingly superstitious nature of the times and the difficulty of simply surviving bears no relevance to our scientific world.

2. Virtually everything that can be learned about the Bible has been learned - yet we still don't have (and won't ever have) a secure handle on events that happened over 2,000 to 4,000 years ago.

3. Scholars in academic institutions studying the Bible are incurably infected with religious bias. Even the secular ones give the Bible an undeserved pass when it comes to putting it on an even playing field with other books of that era.

4. Everything in the Bible has been subjected to such scrutiny, biblical scholars end up with little new to study. They maintain their relevance only amongst themselves - rediscussing the same old issues with only the illusion of significance in today's world.

5. Therefore, biblical studies should be placed where they truly belong - in the garbage dump of the obsolete.

To reiterate the Avalos themes - the whole field is perpetuated by a false sense of significance attached to a book of no more import than other (little read) books of the age; perpetuating jobs for the faithful and sanctifying a collection of largely mythological stories.

Avalos's outrageous book promotes a radical view that would, if obeyed, put him out of a job. He is not advocating abandoning religion, just abandoning authoritative books that condone worldviews our enlightened world is trying its best to leave behind. As Avalos says in his summary, "Privileging the Bible does not help the world except to keep alive a text that repeatedly is used as an authority for violence, racism, sexism, and the like...the more altruistic response is to affirm that the only mission of biblical study should be to end biblical study as we know it."

I couldn't agree more!

Hector Avalos presents in this book a concise summary of the current state of biblical scholarship. He shows that biblical scholarship, far from being a neutral and objective enterprise, is motivated even today by theological presuppositions. I am myself very sceptical about the ability of scholars to reconstruct ancient and medieval history given the limited documents available and the problems with establishing chronology. A reader who is not knowledgeable may be surprised to learn the earliest extant Hebrew manuscripts of the old testament, aside from the Dead Sea scrolls, date to the late middle ages. There is no principled way to know which texts are original, even if we had the earliest written manuscripts. Distortion may be added upon distortion as manuscripts are copied, "corrected" and copied again. On top of all of this is the problem of dishonest and tendentious translations which often deliberately distort the meaning of the original text. In light of this ,no intellectually honest person can believe the Bible to be inerrant. Even its continued relevance is achieved at the expense of faithfulness to the meaning conveyed by the earliest manuscripts in their original languages.

Several months ago, I decided to let my subscription to "Biblical Archaeology Review" lapse because I'd perceived during the past several years that its content had become less scholarly and increasingly apologetic. I'd been a subscriber for over a decade, and along the way I'd added the now defunct sister publications, "Bible Review" and "Archaeology Odyssey," to my list of subscriptions. In short, more and more of the pieces in the magazine were aimed at readers who wanted to see their religious beliefs verified by, and reconciled with, the results of scientific investigation, while too many of the decreasing number of critical articles addressed trivia that offered little for anyone outside the small circle of professional specialists. Now after reading Hector Avalos's new book, "The End of Biblical Studies" (Prometheus Books, 2007), I understand why.

Avalos takes on Biblical studies from the inside: He's an associate professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University with many books and articles to his credit, and a long-time member of the Society of Biblical Literature. His main points are that (1) using the tools of text criticism, scholars have been unable to discover the original text of the Bible, nor--because of the thousands of widely variant sources--can an original text ever be reconstructed; (2) archaeologists and historians have failed to confirm the Bible's narrative, even to the point of leaving in doubt the very existence of such crucial characters as Moses, David, and Jesus, as well as the historicity of the principal stories; (3) the culture that produced the Biblical texts is so far removed from modern culture that the Bible is neither understandable by, nor relevant to, people today; (4) scholars, however, prop up the Bible's public image of relevance to protect their careers, and in doing so, produce work that is largely apologetic, not scientific; (5) the pretense of relevance causes the Bible to overshadow other, more worthy, ancient literature, which is left to languish untranslated and unstudied; (6) society is ill served by a reliance on sacred texts, and we'd all be better off were the Bible to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Avalos shores up his positions well with numerous solid examples, sometimes going into greater depth than necessary, such as in his chapter on the aesthetics of the Bible. Furthermore, he writes clearly and constructs easy-to-follow arguments. Even though his book is aimed at the general reader, he provides hundreds of endnotes and a substantial bibliography, which are of value to scholars and other readers who want to pursue the matter further.

Because Avalos focuses his book so tightly on Biblical studies, he leaves the impression that there are no related topics worthy of examination. He would have been wise to end with a "going forward" sort of chapter, in lieu of the summary he provides, delineating potentially fruitful avenues of study. For example, even though we have no archaeological or historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, we have a lot of information about ancient Christian movements and sects. Just to set the historical record straight, explaining the emergence of Christianity without the heavy baggage of the Christian foundational myth is an intriguing prospect and a worthy goal. Such Biblical scholars as Burton Mack, Robert M. Price, and Robert Eisenman have made significant strides in that endeavor. But this is a minor oversight in an otherwise well-argued and thorough treatment of the topic. "The End of Biblical Studies" should be read by everyone with an interest in Biblical archaeology, criticism, or history.

A top-notch biblical scholar shows how many claims made by biblical scholars, even the secular types, just are not supported by any evidence at all.

A very scholarly work, but also a very good read for non-academics.

An important book.

Avalos exhibits courage by telling the truth about the state of critical bible study and taking on his colleagues. I think he is on the mark and will hopefully stir some honest scientific review of the bible and religion in general. Why do humans still defer to an ancient document that has little historical fact and no real application to modern society?
Bob Schmitz
Oakdale MN

Hector Avalos, in the introduction to this book, says that "The majority of biblical scholars in academia are primarily concerned with maintaining the value of the Bible despite the fact that the important questions about its origin have either been answered or cannot be answered." He continues "The main bond is bibliolatry, which entails the conviction that the Bible is valuable and should remain the subject of academic study." In this book Avalos seeks to show that the Bible is irrelevant in today's society, as it is "the product of a culture whose values about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant, even by most Christians and Jews." Avalos makes his argument from problems in the translations of the Bible, textual criticism, archaeology, the unhistorical aspects of the study of Jesus, literary criticism, theology, and biblical studies in academia, literature, and the media.

When I acquired the book, I was wondering if it would be worthwhile reading, for it initially seemed to me to be rather pointless in its goal. After all, even though it may be academically irrelevant, the Bible is firmly entrenched in our society in the non-academic area, and it is not likely that it will be discarded as a subject that is supposedly worthy of study or of relevance in solving the problems we face in today's world. As long as the Bible remains entrenched in the non-academic world, it is likely that it will remain entrenched in the academic world. However, after reading his book I did gain the sense that perhaps Avalos does make his case, though I thoroughly doubt that this book will have much effect simply because those who should read it will likely not do so.

In any case, I nevertheless recommend it for anyone who wants to learn something about the relevance, or non-relevance, of the Bible in today's society.