© 2003 Ken Glasziou
© 2003 The Brotherhood of Man Library
In the not far distant future, western civilization may face a critical period in which traditional Christian religion will have experienced a collapse.
The reason? Traditional Christianity will be unable to escape the consequences of events now occurring in Israel–the recognition that the Old Testament stories about Moses, Egypt and its seven plagues, the escape of the enslaved Israelites, the Red Sea parting, their 40 years of wandering in the Sinai deserts, the conquest of a new homeland across the Jordan, the crashing down of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still, the fabulous kingdom of David and his heroic deeds, the wealth of Solomon and his temple, all these and much, much more in biblical history were all purely mythical.
A surprisingly large proportion of the Christian community clings to the belief that although the creation story of Genesis may be mythical or symbolic, the remainder of the Bible is “the word of God,” and is historically accurate.
The shock of having to absorb these quite radical changes, and then to subscribe to a new and different belief system, will surely be too much for many who will simply relapse into total disbelief and perhaps complete despair.
As more and more Israelis themselves accept the evidence of their own archaeological investigations, so the traditional Christian belief system will become less and less tenable.
For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.
But not only will Christianity be forced to adjust to the new history of Israel, it will need to absorb and adjust to the effect this new history will have on traditional theology, particularly that relevant to Jesus’ incarnation.
Jesus himself made no recorded comments or claims about his genealogy. However tradition takes heed of the necessity for him to be of the House of David, even to be born in Bethlehem, the City of David, so as to fulfill biblical prophecy (Micah 5:2, repeated in Matthew 2:5 and John 7:42). The purpose of this was to present Jesus as the Messiah–and the fulfillment of biblical prediction.
Strangely enough, the motivation for the archaeological work that brought about such a critical reversal originally had quite the opposite intention. It was meant to verify biblical history.
The victorious 1967 war that consolidated and extended the State of Israel brought with it a need in the minds of many to seek justification for the occupation of the newly conquered territory.
One group put their faith in God’s guarantee of a promised land to belong to the Israelites forever. Another sought their justification through scientific verification of the Biblical Exodus story.
And so, after 1967, a large and enthusiastic body of young, well trained, Israeli archaeologists embarked on their task with the purpose of verifying Israel’s biblical history.
Prior to this new venture, nearly all the archaeology carried out in the Palestine region (with forays into Egypt), had the purpose of confirming the veracity of both the Bible and Christianity. And much of the work was conducted by people who were first, men of religion, and only secondly, archaeologists. But few were well-trained professionals. The confirmation of biblical history was the playground for enthusiastic amateurs.
In contrast, the new group of archaeologists were professional, highly trained, technically competent, and prepared to use all the methods available to modern archaeology.
Whereas almost the sole evidence used for the task of biblical history verification had been excavated finds, the new explorers added the methods of social sciences and anthropology. So alongside excavated artifacts, architecture, settlement patterns, animal bones, seeds, soil analysis, and anthropological models from many world cultures provided additional tools that contributed to the emerging story.
How could animal bones have provided archaeological knowledge? The biblical story of Joseph of the coat of many colors being sold into slavery by his brothers tells how, after casting him into a pit, the brothers saw “a company of Ishmaelites from Gilead with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh going down to Egypt.” So instead of killing Joseph, his brothers sold him into slavery.
This event would have been around 2000 BCE, according to Bible history.
Using evidence mainly garnered from bones, archaeology tells us that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden until around 1200 BCE. Nor were they used in that capacity in the Palestine region until 1000 BCE. Furthermore, camel caravans carrying “spices and balm and myrrh” did not flourish until after 800 BCE and as a component of the Arabian trade that flourished in the Assyrian empire in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.
From the new archaeological approaches also came the data about the life style of populations of the hill country that constituted both the northern kingdom (Israel), centered on Shechem, and the southern kingdom (Judah), centered on Jerusalem. Evidence for the period in which Saul, David, and Solomon became rulers showed that Judah, for example, remained relatively empty of permanent population right up to the time of David and Solomon, with no major urban centers and with no pronounced hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns. At best, Jerusalem was really only a tiny village.
Thus the fabulous stories of the grandeur of David’s city, Jerusalem, and of Solomon’s temple, supposedly in the tenth century BCE, just do not hold up. Judah, in this period, was composed of about 20 small villages and a few thousand inhabitants. So it is highly unlikely that such a sparsely inhabited region and a small village that was Jerusalem could have become the center of a great empire stretching from Gaza in the south, to Syria in the north, and the Euphrates river in the west (1 Kings 5:4).
Besides the absence of any evidence for David’s grand conquests, no trace of Solomon’s fabulous temple in Jerusalem has ever been identified–not in Jerusalem or in any place outside of Jerusalem.
So, contrary to these new studies providing an authentic historical biblical background as a basis for legitimizing Israel’s claim upon newly captured lands, the opposite occurred. The accumulated evidence demonstrated that the biblical stories arose as the result of desperate efforts by a group of authors to provide a glorious history upon which a new nation could be founded.
However, according to the new archaeologists, production of this written record did not occur during the Babylonian captivity of 586–440 BCE (as proposed by some Christian investigators), but preceded the captivity by fifty years or more. And the conclusions made about the history of Israel were vastly different from that of biblical history:
The emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan–they emerged from within it.
There was no mass exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people–the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.
“The early Israelites were–irony of ironies–themselves originally Canaanites.”
What can the Urantia Papers and their readers do to soften the blow for Christians who witness the collapse of their belief system? For that matter, how will Urantia Book readers who take a relatively fundamentalist view of the Papers cope? These Papers treat Moses, the Exodus, the time in the wilderness, Moses’ death and the takeover by Joshua as reasonably close to the biblical account. Modern archaeology says it did not happen.
Likewise with David and Solomon. Although downplaying David from the biblical account, the Papers allow that Solomon had enormous power and wealth. Modern archaeology says the kingdom of Judah was at its lowest ebb at this time and estimates its population as about 5000 scattered among 20 tiny villages. Jerusalem as a major city did not exist. And neither did Solomon’s fabled temple and palace.
No area on Earth compares with this tiny part of the world for the intensity of study already carried out. And it appears that even Christian archaeologists and biblical experts have achieved consensus with the Israelis, agreeing that they have got it right for the major details.
It is possible that the Urantia Papers were specifically designed to help humanity through the troublesome times that lie ahead. Certainly their presentation of Jesus and his revelation of the nature of God is light years ahead of anything else. But whether the Papers will help others to cope with impending change depends on us, their readers.