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Christianity and Archaeology--An Update
What follows is an e-mail critique by an ordained minister of the Anglican Church in Australia (herein called AA) of a recently published work by a bishop elect of the Anglican Church in England (herein called AB). The archaeology upon which the critique is based derives from Israeli scholars who, after the 1967 war, sought to verify biblical evidence supporting Israel's territorial acquisitions.
"In his writings, AB puts forward the following profile of the historical Jesus (i.e. this is what he thinks Jesus was actually like in the first century and not just in the later faith of the Church). So Jesus saw his life as:
A first century Jewish prophet announcing God's kingdom/empire
God breaking into history in and through him
Summoning other Jews to adopt his vision
Forewarning that God would destroy both city and temple
Engaged in a profound clash with the dominant symbol systems
Understanding himself to be the Messiah
Such a reconstruction of the historical Jesus is actually very close to the Johannine Christ (and thus suspect as the outcome of a historical reconstruction), but it depends in a large measure on the historicity of the Old Testament since AB affirms that Jesus understood himself as the embodiment of biblical hopes and the hope of the ancient prophets.
The problem is (as AB knows very well) that the Old Testament account of ancient Israel and Judah just does not hold water any more.
It is not just that the early chapters of Genesis have had to be discarded as literal events, but so has almost every shred of seemingly historical narrative in the Hebrew Bible--along with most of the Gospels, and the Passion narrative in particular, in the New Testament.
There are no longer serious historical debates between biblical scholars on any of the following:
Patriarchs
Exodus
Conquest/Settlement
David and Solomon
Detailed Israeli archaeological work has shown--doubtless to their chagrin--that Jerusalem was a small walled village prior to the 9th century BCE, and that Judah did not have sufficient population to have any political or military influence in the region.
The action was in the North, but even there it was nothing like as glorious as the Bible would have us think. And in any case, there is nothing to suggest that a new people moved into Palestine in the Late Bronze Age. The so-called "Israelite" settlements in the highlands about 1200 BCE are simply Canaanites with a new zip code.
The current trench warfare between the Bible and archaeology involves the minimalists (who suggest no history of Israel/Judah is possible prior to the exile (in Babylon), and the maximalists (who concede everything up to and including the Solomonic empire, but argue for an emerging Judah/Jerusalem in the 9th to 8th century BCE)
If the historical truth lies somewhere between the minimalists and the maximalists, as good Anglicans will be inclined to expect, there are profound theological implications. One of them, as AB must or should know, is that Jesus is not the embodiment of ancient covenant hopes or the fulfillment of divine promises made to Abraham, Moses, David, et al. Those guys did not exist and God never made any such promises to them.
We therefore have to make sense of Jesus as people who know something that his earliest interpreters did not even imagine.
The way forward does not lie in defending a pseudo-history just because it is sacred Scripture. We have to face the shocking facts that most of the Old Testament is late Judean propaganda. Second temple Judaism, like Christianity and every other human religion, is a human construction by people seeking to respond to the God whom we recognize in the person of Jesus.
We can debate whether Jesus had a bodily resurrection, but what is gained by that, since none of us thinks that Jesus' mortal remains were assumed into a heaven "up there." And a bodily resurrection implies that they must be disposed of in some other, possibly miraculous, manner!
The prior question to the resurrection is, "What happened to Jesus' cadaver?" If we ever solve that, we can begin to ask just what a bodily resurrection might mean in the 21st century as distinct from the 1st--in which dead people were believed often to come back to "this world" or to pass on to "the next world."
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