Canter Bridge

Thanks are due to an all-star foursome of biblical scholars and archaeologists who consented to being interviewed by Hershel Shanks, the peripatetic editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review (see my review at Amazon.com).

Under the title ‘Losing Faith: 2 Who Did and 2 Who Didn’t; How scholarship affects scholars’, Shanks elicits the thoughts of Bart Ehrman, Bill Dever, James Strange, and Larry Schiffman, four heavyweight and vociferous contemporary scholars.

It is the presumption of many in churches and synagogues that scholarship runs at cross purposes to faith and tradition. It is an open and anxious secret in the company of professional biblical scholars and archaeologists that faith often dies out amid the papyri and the strata. What is more, it is often assumed that the persistence of faith among scholars is a contradiction and an obstacle to honest inquiry.

Shanks merits kudos for gathering these four personalities to talk about their journey from faith to unbelief (for two of them) or from one kind of faith to another (for the other two).

Sadly, only Schiffman seems to have emerged from his scholarship with a traditional faith still intact. An Orthodox Jew, Schiffman is comfortable with the dialectic between scientific inquiry and the authentically theistic faith that is his family’s and his people’s legacy.

Baptist James Strange manages without relating overmuch his admittedly existentialist brand of Christian commitment to his archaeology.

Ehrman and Dever have, for the moment at least, moved on from faith.

As Shanks has so often done, he has broken an uncomfortable silence and allowed us to peer into the hearts and lives of scholars who are men, minds we admire enfleshed in human body and experience.

Yet the interview is fundamentally misleading for its exclusion of others who, like Schiffman from the Jewish side, would happily have articulated how their Christian understanding of God, humankind, and our life in this world have been both transformed and enriched by the life of the mind.

It can be argued that the center of gravity of biblical scholarship has shifted onto the shoulders of such religiously committed biblical scholars and the that ‘biblical archaeology’ is in the throes of seeing its question recast by a smaller of believing practioners.

Throughout the history of the Christian community, it has been said that ‘faith seeks understanding’. Schiffman understands this. Dever, Ehrman, and perhaps Strange found it not to be so.

Were he to repeat the exercise, BAR’s editor would find equally competent scholars whose faith is fuel rather than ballast waiting to articulate their important stories.