The Bible’s Buried Secrets

I watched The Bible’s Buried Secrets last night, and my only real complaint is that the so-called “buried secrets” are in fact exposed in mainstream books and articles on Biblical scholarship, and some of it has been common knowledge to anyone who has attended an academic course on the Bible in past century or so. So the big question is how do we deal with the flow of information problem? A key issue is that pastors are in many denominations the “employees” of their congregation, and so although in theory some congregations would say they value challenging sermons from their pastor, if a pastor challenged them with, say, the Documentary Hypothesis, he might find himself needing to seek alternative employment. There, I think, lies a key issue. We can teach pastors about the Bible, but they are then employed by congregations who will fire them for telling them the truth about it. The irony, of course, is that this shows that many congregations think they already know everything they need to about the Bible, and are thus hiring a minister to “tickle their ears” rather than tell them new things. And so one has to turn to PBS rather than the pastor to find out what the pastor learned in seminary.

Here are some other posts from around the blogosphere about the documentary: Jim West (who live blogged it), Alan Boyle (HT Paleojudaica), NT Wrong, Biblia Hebraica, Thaddeus Nelson, , The Archaeological Review.

Here’s an excerpt, if you missed it:

In other ancient near eastern news, Abnormal Interests and The Punching Bag discuss an interesting stele.