“Registered Historical Archaeologist”

That young-earth creationists lie to the general public bothers me. That I once fell for their lies and passed them on to others bothers me a little more.

But I feel genuine anger when my students are influenced by their lies.

Not a semester passes without some student happening across YEC materials and mistaking them for scholarship. That is, after all, their intention. They dress their stuff up with footnotes so that automated systems like Google Scholar will make that mistake, and then lie in wait.

Of course, perhaps I should be grateful. I am trying to teach students information fluency, and unless there were some fakes on which to test their skills, they might not be challenged, or indeed see the reason why critical thinking and discernment are so crucial.

A case in point: A man named Frank Lorey describes himself as a “Registered Historical Archaeologist” on the internet. He capitalizes it, to make it seem like that is a real thing. But if you search for the phrase, putting it in quotation marks, you’ll see that he is the only person using it. To be sure, there are related phrases, but the phrase that he uses does not denote a title, and his own historical expertise has nothing to do with the Bible or the region that it comes from.

This kind of deceptive tactic is downright sinful. That those who engage in falsehood to promote their other falsehoods do so believing they are in service to the Truth is downright diabolical.

Of related interest, see Maura Sala’s Bible Odyssey article on “The Walls of Jericho,” in which she writes, “No archaeological evidence corroborates the biblical account of what happened in Jericho.”