THE PERILS OF DATING BIBLICAL HISTORY
Compared with Europe, Australia has very clear skies and when, a night or two later I emerged from the supermarket where the steps descend to the outdoor carpark, I stopped. There it was again, in the same position as we had earlier seen it, a star so large and so radiantly bright that it was impossible, once seen, to yank out the car keys, toss the shopping in the boot and drive thoughtlessly away.
This beautiful celestial object was not, in fact, a star but the conjunction of two planets, Jupiter and Saturn that occurs about once every twenty years, in this case 2020. The one I saw was purported to be the best in 800 years (1) and it has been conjectured that such a conjunction produced the Star of Bethlehem that would date Jesus' birth not to the year zero, but 6 or 7 years earlier.
It raises an interesting question: is it possible to date the first Christmas using astronomy? As we shall see, problems emerge when we try to date the Bible. The one here is easy to solve. Old Bibles claim the Wise Men followed 'the star that they had seen in the east' - in Greek anatoli - not in the west where I saw it.
I dusted off my Greek lexicon.
Of the word ἀνατολή, it says: 'a rising, especially of the sun and moon, from the verb ἀνατέλλω to rise up, to come to life.' The Wise Men therefore, could have seen the conjunction 'at its rising' (2). After all, if Wise men from the east followed a star that they had seen in the east, then the gospel has contradicted itself and Jesus was born not in Bethlehem but on the borders of Afghanistan.
A closer look at the gospels, however, casts doubt on the conjunction theory because Luke who, from many readings, gives me the impression of being a careful researcher, states that John the Baptist began his ministry 'in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius'. That is 28 or 29. If John, like Jesus, was about 30 years old when he began his ministry, and Luke tells us that Jesus was 6 months younger than him, then we are back to Jesus being about 30 in about the year 30.
The Emperor Tiberias is easy to date because there is so much contemporary literature about him, in Latin for which we have an unbroken record of literacy. Delving further back to the time of Moses, however, poses problems that scholars have been considering for hundreds of years.
Due to the immense importance of ancient Egypt, it has been customary to start down by the Nile. By means of the Rosetta Stone and the language of the Coptic church, its hieroglyphic script has been deciphered. The Egyptians were copious record keepers, in stone, in plaster and in papyrus, preserved for us by the hot, dry climate. Pictures of foreign visitors were carved into walls and painted into the plaster of its tombs, lists of kings and invasions have been left for us, pottery was preserved as well as furniture, fashion items, jewelry, imported articles, letters and other papyri. The list goes on and on.
 |
| from The Archeology of Crete by John Pendlebury |
If then, a foreign artifact is discovered in an Egyptian tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty, like this Late Minoan 1b pot, it can be said to be the same age. (The Egyptians very considerately labelled everything.)
But how do we work out when the Eighteenth Dynasty was?
In the early days of Egyptology, it was assumed that an Egyptian year was based on the star Sirius which rose with the sun on a day that roughly corresponded with the annual flooding of the Nile. However, an ancient Egyptian papyrus written during the Twelfth Dynasty says, 'the rising of Sothis (and is Sothis really Sirius?) takes place on the 16th of the 8th month.'
It is easy to see why this will lead to problems. The length of a solar year is 365 ¼ days which we correct by adding 29th February every four years. Without a similar correction, 'the 16th of the 8th month' of the Egyptians would be a day out at the end of four years. At the end of forty years, it would be ten days out, and so on all the way to 1460 years when Sothis would once again rise with the sun.
It stands to reason then that the Egyptians, whose superb understanding of astronomy is reflected in their architecture, must have had a 29th February of their own or an equivalent addition that would correct the problem. Unable to find out what it was, the early Egyptologists postulated the 'Sothic rising' which occurs every 1460 years and then looked for references to it in ancient literature that were associated with historical events. Having achieved this to their satisfaction, they then counted forwards and backwards from that date.
However, it has been pointed out in more than one book I have read that the Egyptians did not use such a fixed calendar. If we choose to use it to date Egyptology, our dates may not be correct, then our Eighteenth Dynasty Minoan pot might not be dated correctly, nor anything else from Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia or any other trading partner of Egypt whose goods have been dated by this method. And not only goods, but historical events throughout these lands that traded and fought with Egypt.
The realization that our version of the Egyptian chronology can never be exact has led, of course, to controversy. Scholars have been arguing about it for at least a century, and the biggest argument of them all concerns the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land. The Exodus is of vital importance to Jewish heritage and its claims to the land of Israel and also to Christians because, if it didn't happen, then Jesus wasn't the Passover lamb he claimed to be and didn't need to open the kingdom of heaven to all believers by dying on the cross.
The push to discredit the Bible as an historical document runs hot and strong today, but it is not new. It goes back to the eighteenth century when the first English geologists found fossils on the mountain tops and stopped believing in Noah's Flood. Once Charles Darwin went on to publish Origin of Species in 1859, rubbishing the Bible was on for young and old. And if you can reduce the early chapters of Genesis to a myth, then why not the Exodus?
As Handel's Oratorio 'Israel in Egypt' so beautifully puts it, 'Then there arose a new king over Egypt who knew not Joseph.' 'The Israelites,' we learn in Exodus 1:11, ' built supply cities for Pharoah, Pithom and Rameses.'
Remember that name, Rameses.
Rameses II, who flourished around 1250 BC, was the greatest of all the Rameses and is portrayed in a number of movies featuring Moses. Rameses I reigned for only two years, shortly before him, and there were also Rameses III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI who lived later. The one thing all these Rameses have in common is that during their reigns no archeological evidence has been found for Israel in Egypt or for the Jews wandering around in the wilderness. Worse still, there is no evidence that Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho 40 years later.
(Jericho is the oldest city in the world, dating back to the Natufian culture eleven thousand years ago, right at the commencement of the Agricultural Revolution. Located at a natural spring that still flows today, it had thick walls almost from the beginning of its history and had been settled many times before Joshua destroyed it.)
Happily, the number of suggestions for the Pharoah of the Exodus other than Ramses I - XI rivals Wikipedia. People have been guessing, it seems, for a very long time and the Bible itself does not say that it was Rameses. It does date the Exodus though, in 1 Kings 6:1, Judges 11:26, 1 Chronicles 6.
https://armstronginstitute.org/882-who-was-the-pharaoh-of-the-exodus.
An exodus of the Jews from Egypt (with a 'Moses' leading them) appears to have been known in the ancient world as several writers refer to it.
CLASSICAL WRITERS AND THE JEWS - JewishEncyclopedia.com.
A further aid to dating the Torah (Genesis, Exodus and the other three books of Moses) is by examining style and culture.
https://israelmyglory.org/article/how-do-we-know-the-exodus-happened/
I originally trained in science, so let's leave archeology for a moment and see if science can help us with our dating.
The one scientific dating method that everybody knows is Carbon 14. Carbon 14 is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 5700 (+ or - 30 years). Therefore, 5,700 years after the death of the plant or animal, half the C14 will have decayed away by comparison with its isotope C12 which is not radioactive and does not decay. After a further 5700 years, a quarter C14 will be left by comparison with C12, and so on. In a tiny sample of material that is very old so few atoms of C14 remain that C14 dating becomes unreliable and different laboratories may get different results. As well as this, Carbon 14 falls victim to various environmental influences, so some archeologists like it while others do not. Certainly, it needs to be cross checked with other methods such as dendrochronology, or the ice cores which were used to date the Bronze Age eruption of Santorini.
The geologist Elaine Kennedy sensibly points out that one can argue about the interpretation of scientific data, but not about the data itself. The 'data used by the chronologists is the distribution of radioactive isotopes ... Factors that control the distribution are complex and poorly understood.' (3) In the following article involving the archeologist Israel Finkelstein, there has evidently been a dispute about the interpretation of the data. 'We refer to criticism concerning exclusion and inclusion of data....We also comment on several methodological issues.' (4)
Science, then, must give way to the philosophy that explains what is reasonable for it to achieve and what is not. I recommend 'What is this thing called Science?' by the British/Australian scientist Alan Chalmers (5) a book I read many years ago. 'Once the assumption is made that entities in the world are what they are by virtue of the powers and capacities that they possess...then the laws describing those powers and capacities identified in experimental situations, can be presumed to apply outside of those situations. Nevertheless, ...there are important laws of science that are difficult to fit into this scheme.' p 221/2
So why can't science give you a definite answer on chronology? Here are the words that should give you a clue: Assumption, Presumed, Difficult. Science is a philosophy, not the truth, and I really wish the archeologists who so ardently insist that science can justify their particular opinion would read Alan Chalmers.
Yet still they argue. Journalist Colm Gorey writes, 'There has been much debate for several decades among scholars arguing for different chronologies sometimes only decades to a century apart, each with major historical implications.' (6) The editor of Archeological Diggings (June/July 2004) agrees on the significance of these implications. Being on the wrong side of the argument reduces the 'Jewish people who have such a remarkable historical heritage, to claiming that they are really only a bunch of dissident Canaanites.' The Jews have, it seems, been broadcasting their heritage for a long time for the Roman writer Suetonius reminds us shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70: 'An ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judea at this time would come the rulers of the world....the rebellious Jews read it as referring to themselves.' (7)
If, as its detractors claim, the Old Testament is merely a pious fiction, then what is the justification for anti-Semitism, 'the longest and deepest hatred of human history' (8), what reason for Hitler, what reason for the Holocaust? Sometimes, when the night breeze rustles the leaves outside my window and the owl boo-books in the night, I wonder why it is so important for the Bible and the Jews to be discredited. Is it merely for scholars who have based their entire careers upon a particular dating system not to see their heads roll or do they really hate Jews that much? Or God?
Perhaps it's just personal. In the sequel to his seminal work on Christian apologetics Evidence that Demands a Verdict, (9) Josh McDowell relates the story of a history professor who read his book. It 'contained some of the most persuasive arguments that he had read,' the professor commented glowingly, and he 'didn't know how anyone could refute them.' He added, however, that he himself did not accept them and when asked why, he replied, 'Because of my world view.' In other words, he didn't intend to alter the presuppositions he had started with.
Finally, for those of you who still hesitate to challenge the authority of scholars to tell you what to believe, gird up your loins and read on.
Vinča on the Danube River south of Belgrade was the first site of metallurgy in the world and the centre of an early civilization and extensive trading network across Europe. It was a farming community, manufactured pigments, and even had its own script that I was particularly interested to research. Yet, until I read Europe Before Rome by the American archeologist T. Douglas Price (OUP 2013) I had never heard of Vinča, despite devouring archeology books for half a century. When in April 2024, I took two planes, a tram and a bus and at last arrived at the site, the Serbian archeologist who showed me around told me that Vinča was so important that the Nazis had investigated it in the 1930s on the lookout for an Aryan connection. Not only that, the artifacts discovered there sell on the Black Market for tens of thousands of Euros.
Why wasn't Vinča in my British textbooks? Academic skullduggery, dear friends. The British didn't like the theories of Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian archeologist who included it in her vision of the Civilization of Old Europe. I don't think they liked her either. One, she wasn't British and two, she was a woman.
Am I annoyed? Yes.
2 - Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell and Scott. Oxford University Press 1966.
3 - In Six Days by Elaine Kennedy. Strand Publishing 1999.
5 - AF Chalmers 'What is this thing called Science?' University of Queensland press, 2002.
6 - Carbon dating accuracy called into question after major flaw discovery (siliconrepublic.com)
7 - Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. Penguin Books 1957.
9 - Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell , Campus Crusade for Christ 1972.
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment