This ought to be the first rule of “Biblical Archaeology”

“Biblical archaeology” is in “scare quotes” because it’s a highly problematical concept, but more of that later. What I want to address first is what ought to be a first principle for anyone reading about claims for discoveries that are supposedly related to the Bible (Hebrew or Christian) or any religious text, for that matter. It’s this:

If a discovery confirms your pre-held religious beliefs, then it’s wishful thinking at best and even more likely to be a fraud.

As a principle, I think it’s a good one. But it’s one I have rarely, if ever, encountered in so-called “Biblical Archaeology”, which is a sub-discipline that is characterised by a distinct lack of sceptical thinking. Why is that?

Let’s answer that by looking at some recent claims: the “Jesus family tomb”, the “lead codices” from Jordan and the interminable searches for “Noah’s Ark”.

The “Jesus family tomb”

The so-called ‘Jesus family tomb’

In 2005, the Canadian investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici (know to television viewers as The Naked Archaeologist, a rather unappealing designation) entered a tomb originally found during construction work in 1980 at Talpiot (‏תלפיות‎), a suburb of Jerusalem. It seems that he did this without the permission of the Israel Antiquities Authority (העתיקות רשות), which makes it an illegal act. The purpose was to make a documentary with the film director James Cameron, as Jacobovici believed that it was the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and other members of his family. The documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, was released in March 2007, with a follow up book co-authored by Jacobovici and Charles R Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb: the discovery that will change history forever (there are different versions of the subtitle that are less emphatic than this!) that was released a month later.

Both the book and the film have proved controversial, with criticism focusing on statistical claims that allegedly show that the combination of names found on ossuaries recovered from the tomb has only a one in six hundred chance of occurring in first century CE Palestine. They take this to be proof that the tomb really was that of Jesus and his family. There are problems with their argument, though: the statistics used by Jacobovici suggest that there were at least a thousand men named Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a bar Yehosef alive in the first half of the first century CE. As more than twenty-two ossuaries of the right date bearing the name Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a have been found in and around Jerusalem, several of these ought to belong to a Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a bar Yehosef. Jacobovici’s statistical claims only stand up if Yehosef is counted twice (once on the ossuary belonging to Yeshu‘a bar Yehosef and once on the ossuary naming Yoseh, who cannot be shown to be the father of Yeshu‘a)/

The inscription supposedly naming Yehosu‘a bar Yehosef

To make matters worse, they include several additional names in their analysis: Mariamenou-Mara and Yehudah bar Yeshu‘a. The reading of the first name is disputed, her identity as the wife of Yeshu‘a bar Yehosef is entirely speculative and the suggestion that she was Mary Magdalene is also pure speculation. The second name is included to create a son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Why? There is no biblical authority for this move. Instead, it relies on an idea first mooted in the notoriously slipshod but best selling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, that Jesus fathered one or more children, creating a dynasty that survives to the present day. Following the unprecedented success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the plot of which is based around the conspiracy at the heart of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married has now entered popular discourse.

It is not unfair to say that Simcha Jacobivici could not have made his documentary without Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s unfounded speculation about the marital status of Jesus. His contribution to the debate their book engendered uses statistics in a dishonestly tendentious way. Using this manipulated data, he claims to have found proof that a perfectly ordinary tomb in a Jerusalem suburb housed data that completely undermines the core belief of Christianity: that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended physically into heaven. Regardless of the religious dimension, which seems to be to create a Jesus-without-divinity, the claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene is a core prop in the hypothesis by which the Talpiot tomb is identified as that of Jesus’s family. This is an example of using one unsubstantiated hypothesis as a prop for another in order to claim that the original hypothesis is thus proven.

The “lead codices” from Jordan

One of the alleged lead codices from Jordan

In March 2011, the Jewish Chronicle Online, followed by several newspapers (including The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph), carried a story of an amazing new discovery: a group of lead codices or ‘books’ that were claimed to contain Christian texts older than the writings of St Paul (generally reckoned to be the oldest part of the New Testament). Curiously, although the early stories places Robert Feather at the centre of the recognition of the books, The Daily Telegraph focuses on a press release issued by David and Jennifer Elkington. Robert Feather is a metallurgist by profession and a member of the West London Synagogue who has published The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran, which links the treasures listed in the scroll with ’ḫnjtn (Akhnaten) and his city of ’ḫtjtn (Akhetaten). He links the codices with the rebellion of Simeon bar Kokhba in 132-136 CE rather than with early Christianity. David Elkington describes himself as “an Egyptologist, specializing in Egypt-Palestinian links that have inevitably drawn him into the field of Biblical studies” and is the author of In the Name of the Gods: the mystery of resonance and the prehistoric messiah, which is described as a “highly acclaimed academic thesis on the resonance and acoustical origins of religion”.

It’s only the start of the story and already we are in murky waters. Who is the discoverer of the codices? Both claimants refer to their owner, a Jordanian lorry driver called Hassan Saeda (or Saida), while the Elkingtons were in possession of two of the books at the time of their interview with The Daily Telegraph. The power of blogging was soon brought to bear on these issues. It turns out that David Elkington is a graphic designer originally known as Paul Elkington and that his “thesis” was self-published; he had originally contacted Biblical scholar Professor Peter Thonemann of the University of Oxford on 15 September 2010, sending him images of what were clearly the same objects, only they were said to have been found in Egypt. Thonemann was able to identify the Greek text on one of the codices as a bungled copy of part of a Greek inscription published in Inscriptions grecques et latines de Syrie XXI: Inscriptions de la Jordanie, 2: Region centrale, 118. It was thus clearly a fake. Nevertheless, he put out his press release on 22 March 2011 knowing this.

The Elkingtons in a portrait by The Daily Telegraph

In detailing the strange behaviour of David/Paul Elkington, blogger Thomas S Verenna notes that what is “scandalous is the complete lack of journalistic integrity, honest research, and thorough fact-checking. These codices might never have been heard of if the authors of the reports for BBC and Fox News (among others) had just checked with the academic community before publishing the “find”… After examining the almost immediate response to the codices by Biblioblogs, one is confronted with the value of a form of media, which is not peer reviewed or looked over by an editor, which can bring about correct historical information to a large audience quickly. Perhaps blogging isn’t enough; but it is something”.

I couldn’t agree more. What this story illustrates is one of the principal mechanisms by which Bad Archaeology and other pseudosciences are promoted: go straight to the press with a fantastic story secure in the knowledge that the hacks will do little to check its veracity. This is the practice of churnalism, whereby press releases are simply copied-and-pasted or occasionally very lightly redacted for publication. No scholarly articles are written to confirm the legitimacy of the finds, no data is made available for qualified scholars to examine, overblown claims are made for the significance of objects that are not available for examination and those making the claims inflate their own scholarly credentials.

The ‘lead codices’ are a feature of Biblical archaeology that is all too common: the allegedly important object that is supposed to rewrite our understanding of early Judaism/Christianity that turns out to be a fake. The ossuary of James the Just, the Jehoash inscription and the Turin Shroud are just some of the examples of frauds intended to bolster the faith of the pious by providing evidence that their beliefs are grounded in reality or to push a particular version of the past to discredit the religious beliefs of others. In some cases, the motive is simply greed.

Noah’s Ark

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Breughel the Elder (1613)

I’ve covered this topic ad nauseam both on this blog and on the main site, but it’s a hardy perennial of Bad Archaeology. Scarcely a year passes without some new announcement that it’s been located. That’s not what I want to discuss this time, though. What I want to touch on is the curious belief among some of the faithful that objects mentioned as being significant to the religion of the Hebrews ought still to exist somewhere, as I touched on in this post some time ago.

Noah’s Ark makes a brief but significant appearance in Genesis VI.14-VIII.19. We’re told what Noah was commanded to use in his construction. The main material was “gopher” (גֹ֔פֶר) wood; nobody actually knows what sort of wood this was (Wikipedia’s suggestion that it may be a Hebrew transliteration of Assyrian giparu, claimed to mean “reeds” is wrong, as the word means “residence of the enu-priest”, “part of a private house”, “meadow” or “taboo”: this is why Wikipedia entries always need to be checked against more authoritative sources!). Pitch is also mentioned, while it had a “covering” that could be “turned back”. Although it is described as a massive boat, it was supposedly made from perishable materials: wood, even when coated in pitch, rarely survives in archaeological contexts and tends to survive only in very specific conditions (extremely dry, freezing or anaerobic situations). Nothing in the text of Genesis suggests that it was anything more than a temporary home for Noah, his family and the animals they cared for during the Flood. Its usefulness over, it was simply abandoned on the “Mountains or Ararat” by those who descended to the lowlands to repopulate the earth.

Mount Ararat: move along please, there’s no Ark to see here

So why do people want to go in search of it? Putting aside the question of whether the “Mountains of Ararat” (הָרֵי אֲרָרָט) in Genesis VIII.4 refer to the mountain we call Mount Ararat today, by what mechanism do they see the Ark surviving? And surviving as a complete or near-complete ocean-going vessel? Should its preservation be viewed as a miracle performed by Yahweh?

If I were to initiate a search for, say, the shells of the eggs laid by Leda, Han Xiang’s gourd without end or Mami Wata’s grooming set, it is unlikely that I would get many enthusiasts to join me or donate money to my expedition. It is only the privileged position that Hebrew mythology enjoys in Western culture that convinces some people that Noah’s Ark once existed in the real world.

The underlying problem with “Biblical Archaeology”

A great deal of what is presented to the public as “Biblical Archaeology” bears little relation to what other archaeologists recognise as archaeology. The spinning of data to push a particular and tendentious interpretation, the outright forgery of artefacts and the naïve belief that certain objects ought to survive to the present day are not characteristics of scientific archaeology but are typical of pseudoscience.

A great deal of what passes for “Biblical archaeology” consists of a search for sites and artefacts that ‘confirm’ what the Bible says; indeed, this was one of the inspirations behind the development of archaeological excavation. Following the questioning attitudes to religious certainty inculcated by Enlightenment writers, the faithful wanted to demonstrate that their beliefs could not be shaken by rational inquiry but, rather, would be confirmed through it. Unfortunately, the reverse has tended to happen. Archaeology has not confirmed the glories of the Davidic kingdom, has failed to produce evidence for Noah’s flood, has not revealed the location of Jesus’s crucifixion, has not identified a Pharaoh of the Exodus. And it probably never will.

A great many of its practitioners start out from a particular religious viewpoint (usually orthodox Judaism or a Christian sect) and aim to find evidence that backs up their literalist interpretation of the sacred texts. This seems to have been at least part of the motivation behind the forgery of the ‘James the Just ossuary’ and other dubious artefacts traced back to Oded Golan (the other being financial, of course).

In an important book, The End of Biblical Studies (Prometheus, 2007), Biblical scholar Hector Avalos argues that:

Since archaeology has failed to reveal much biblical history that matters, biblical archaeology… not only has ceased to be relevant but it has ceased to exist as we knew it. Instead of revealing biblical history, archaeology has provided a fundamental argument to move beyond the Bible itself. If… biblical archaeology has to serve theology once more to be relevant, its days as a secular academic field are numbered. Either way, biblical archaeology ended in ruins—literally, socially, and metaphorically…

So 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 as an authority in the modern world. Sacred texts are the problem that most scholars are not willing to confront. What I seek is liberation from the very idea that any sacred text should be an authority for modern human existence. Abolishing human reliance on sacred texts is imperative when those sacred texts imperil the existence of human civilisation 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.

Strong words. And perhaps a little over-the-top. But, as Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman show in The Bible unearthed: archaeology’s new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts (2001), archaeology paints a coherent picture of the development of the Jewish people that is completely at odds with the claims of the Bible. No amount of fraud, wilful misinterpretation of data or quests to find the objects that will ‘prove’ a particular religious viewpoint will bring back the innocent and ignorant days when the Bible could be read as literally true.

Another Ark flash-in-the-pan discovery

By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

It’s the nature of such things, I suppose, that discoveries meant to be of earth-shattering importance are announced in a blaze of publicity (front page news, no less, on a number of newspapers) only to fall into obscurity as time passes. An announcement that not only has Noah’s Ark been found (again!) on Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı), but also that complete wooden chambers are preserved is a story that, if true, would change the way in which most people view the world. It would overturn our understanding of history, geology, biology… almost everything we think we know about how the world works. And yet, within days of the initial announcement, at least one of those involved with the project were doing some rapid back-pedalling; the Ministry involved in the ‘discovery’, Noah’s Ark Ministries International (挪亞方舟國際事工), then issued a statement dismissing the author’s involvement. What is going on?

The photograph of a wooden chamber reproduced by many newpapers

Let’s start by looking at what was announced. The press release states that “a Chinese-Turkish exploration team successfully excavated and ventured inside a large wooden structure at an elevation of more than 4,000m above sea level” containing seven ‘spaces’. One of the spaces was frozen but said to contain wood with tenons; the second was L-shaped and also featured wooden tenon construction, although it was said to be “heavily decomposed”; a third was more than five metres high, with wooden walls and a door on one side; another was box-shaped and formed a cube of more than two metres with wooden nails on one side of the wall; a small passage was found linking two other spaces; wooden staircases were found inside the structure; a final space was found, estimated to be 5 by 12 metres. These are remarkable claims, backed up with some photographs of apparently old wooden structural elements. We are also told that “[w]ood specimens were dated as 4,800 years old”, although we are not told how or by which laboratories (although the Christian Science Monitor says that it was radiocarbon dated by a laboratory in Iran). The Ministry quotes Dr Otkay Belli, a respected archaeologist and an expert on the archaeology of Urartu, as describing it as “the greatest discovery in history”.

A diagram of the alleged seven chambers located beneath the glacier

If true, this is remarkable indeed. Not only do we have physical evidence for one of the cornerstones of biblical literalism, we also have confirmation of a story that will undermine much of what currently passes for knowledge of human and geological history. As it is such a powerful claim, the evidence used to back it up must be equally powerful. So how well does the evidence stand up to scrutiny?

A beam with pegs attached to it

Firstly, there is the dating. Noah’s Ark Ministries International has not released any details of the radiocarbon dating. We do not know what was dated or what the actual results were. To say that the “specimens were dated as 4,800 years old” is not to report a radiocarbon date: it is to interpret that date. Presumably, the date would have been 4740 Cal BP or 2790 Cal BC with a margin of error; this has been calibrated from an original radiocarbon determination of something like 4220 bp with its own margin of error. These errors are largely a result of the technique, which counts very tiny amounts of radioactive carbon in a sample by measuring the rate of its decay as it emits radioactive particles, making the initial measurements imprecise. To oversimplify, the larger the sample and the longer the period over which readings can be taken, the smaller the margin of error. But because of these errors, we have to bear in mind that the ‘date’ is not a ‘date’ in the sense that we understand it but a statistical approximation to the age of the sample.

As such, it is very unlikely indeed that the single ‘date’ is the true age of the sample; by allowing one margin of error before and after the ‘date’, we have a roughly 66% chance that the true radiocarbon age falls within this date range; allow two either side, and there is a roughly 97% chance. The date then needs to be calibrated, because the amount of radioactive carbon in the environment has fluctuated through time, which further increases the size of the margin of error. So be told that a sample of wood is “4,800 years old” is meaningless unless hedged with these uncertainties; to accept a press release as a source rather than a laboratory certified date is foolish.

Ice and rubble in one of the chambers

Secondly, there is the location of the ‘discovery’. The team from Noah’s Ark Ministries International has refused to divulge where on the mountain they found the remains. They have said that it is at “an altitude of 4,200m” and that “the wooden structure was permanently covered by ice and volcanic rocks”, embedded in a glacier. Mount Ararat is 5,165 m high, which means that the site must lie inside the top kilometre or so of the mountain. There are several problems here. The first question we must ask is why the secrecy? While it may be important to protect an important discovery from looters, it is also vital to have potentially controversial discoveries validated by one’s peers. To keep them away seems suspicious. Secondly, if the remains are embedded in glacial ice, they are part of a moving body of water, albeit one moving at a very slow speed. Speeds of up to 20-30 m per day have been recorded, but the overall speed is dependent on friction, slope and position within the glacier. The speed is slowest at the edges and fastest in the centre. Nevertheless, we ought to envisage a flow of some sort; to be exceedingly generous, let’s call it slightly under one centimetre per day, giving us 3.5 m per year. Now, a quick look at Google Earth shows the summit covered in clouds that effectively mask the permanently glaciated top of the mountain, which gives a radius of around 5 km for the ice; even at the most generously slow rate of flow, any Ark landing on the very summit of Mount Ararat would have been carried the length of a glacier in just over 1400 years. We must explain why something claimed to be 4800 years old has not been carried down by the glacial flow.

Worse still, Dr Robert Cargill has done some investigation into Noah’s Ark Ministries International and has discovered that it is an arm of Media Evangelism Ltd of Hong Kong, a “charitable Christian organization committed to building a Christian media presence by using every modern means of communication to promote the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ”. In other words, it’s an evangelical organisation of a type more familiar in a USA overwhelmed by religiosity than in communist China. This means that we should examine their claims with even more rigour than might otherwise be the case. Even believers in Noah’s flood as an historic event are distancing themselves from the claims of Noah’s Ark Ministries International.

Apparently fresh straw in a 4,800 year old chamber?

Most damning, despite Noah’s Ark Ministries International’s attempts to spin a bad situation, Dr Randall Price has given his version of the 2008 expedition. According to an email written to a student, the photographs of the interior of the structures were taken inside genuine structures in another part of Turkey, close to the Black Sea. He believes that the wooden beams filmed by the team in a cave on Mount Ararat in 2009 were taken from the site of the real structures onto Mount Ararat by Kurdish workers for the Chinese team; at least, that’s what he says he was told by one of those workers. Randall Price points out that some of the photographs alleged to have been taken inside the frozen Ark have cobwebs, an impossibility in sub-zero temperatures. Several of the photographs also show hay or straw inside the wooden chambers, which must also raise suspicions. Randall Price is a respected archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran and committed evangelical Christian who believes that the remains of Noah’s Ark may some day be found on the mountain, so we must take his accusations of fraud very seriously indeed: he has an interest in the discovery of a genuine Noah’s Ark.

So what is the moral of this story (as if it needs one like some episode of Doctor Who)? It’s not a moral about Noah’s Ark or the gullibility of religious believers. It’s not even a moral about money-grabbing evangelists who are economical with the truth in their efforts to spread the message. It’s a moral about the way the world’s press is prepared to hype sensational ‘discoveries’, repeating the claims of press releases without even doing the most basic checking. This is a practice I’ve already criticised on this blog, known as ‘churnalism’. But the really worrying part of this is that those readers of The Daily Mail, The Daily Express or any other of the so-called ‘newspapers’ that published this ludicrous story will have come away with the impression that Noah’s Ark really has been found. Even if it doesn’t make a vast difference to their lives, it’s there, in the backs of their minds, reinforcing the Religious Education (myths) they were taught as children. Even if, as a nation, we English aren’t especially religious in terms of formal church going, I suspect that there are a lot of people who believe that “there has to be something more”, that the Bible “can’t just be all stories”. That’s the danger: the reinforcement of a superstition-based mindset that underpins western culture.