Pseudoarchaeology holds a special place in the hearts of Christians who think the Bible contains real history. After all, this is the one discipline that should attest best to their claims about Jesus and his earliest followers—as well as demonstrate the veracity of the mythic tales contained in the Old Testament.
Unfortunately, real archaeology doesn’t play so nicely with Christian claims about history. Undeterred, a great many of them have invented their own branch of pseudoarcheology that PROVES YES PROVES everything the Bible says. Hooray Team Jesus!
Christian pseudoarchaeology is such a fusty, 1980s-style discipline. It belongs with those urban legends about “Joshua’s Missing Day” and all the rest of those inane tales. Even Answers in Genesis knows better than to parrot these as PROOF YES PROOF of Christian claims. And yet here the field itself is, still a thing!
When I found out that evangelicals still push hard on pseudoarchaeology, I was torn between laughing and sighing. Today, as we move ever-closer to Christmas, this seems like the perfect tie-in topic. The myths Christians have concocted around Christmas don’t play well with real archaeology either, but they—like Joshua’s not-actually-missing day, apparently—will remain popular as long as evangelicals desperately need a really-for-realsies god and a really-for-realsies sourcebook.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/20/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Only pseudoarchaeology can ‘strengthen the Christian witness’
Last week, Baptist Press ran an article about the archaeology program at one of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) branded seminaries. The article’s writers were just thrilled about how archaeology can totally “strengthen the Christian witness.” And that was the very first time I ever heard of this program’s existence.
(“The Christian witness” is Christianese for Christians’ overall effectiveness at recruitment. The phrase combines their overall credibility and reputation with their hard-sales skills and apologetics memorization. Though I don’t think he used those words exactly, Russell Moore was extremely concerned in 2015-2016 about how Southern Baptists’ support of Donald Trump would damage the Christian witness. When Christians use the word “witness” by itself as a noun, though, it just means credibility and reputation. Having a bad witness puts a major negative modifier on all evangelism rolls. When used as a verb, “witness” means to evangelize.)
The program Baptist Press describes in their article is technically called “The Michael and Sara Moskau Institute of Archaeology and the Center for Archaeological Research.” It began in 2014 at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), so it’s been around for ten whole years now. However, it’s not an official major. Instead, students can modify their master’s degrees and doctorates by adding blocks of courses from this program.
Making matters more strange (at least to me), NOBTS chose a very weird way to celebrate this program’s ten-year anniversary. They opened a brand-new display of Old Testament scrolls originally created in the early 1800s. That’s CE, not BCE. They weren’t even dug up anywhere. The Baptist Press writeup contains a strong hint that NOBTS simply purchased the scrolls from its Israeli owners in 2022. That’s not surprising. Nor is this: I couldn’t even find any references to NOBTS acquiring their scrolls in 2022.
If you’re curious, an Israeli site online sells modern ones for $1800-$4000. It doesn’t look hard, either, to find early 19th-century scrolls like the one NOBTS has on display. They aren’t cheap—but they aren’t impossible to find, either.
If you’re wondering, Michael Moskau was a construction contractor from Louisiana who died that same year. He was one of their Foundation Board members. So I reckon we can guess why the program runs at NOBTS and not at one of the bigger SBC seminaries. Also if you’re wondering, I’m not entirely sure either of the program’s two main leaders—Dennis Cole and Jim Parker (who becomes relevant in a minute here)—actually know what real archaeology is. I couldn’t find their resumes, but I don’t think either one has a degree in real archaeology. I know the first guy doesn’t. (Dennis Cole’s LinkedIn and picture archive.) As for the second? I can find nothing about his educational background.
Since its beginning, the NOBTS program has focused on sites in the Middle East. For USD$1000/week, students can even go to Israel to help “biblical archaeologists” (poorly) excavate sites there! That price, incidentally, includes “field trips” to other Israeli archaeological sites as well as meals and lodging in 4-person rooms. But it doesn’t include airfare. As well, I’m not sure how this trip’s organizers plan to ensure the safety of guests.
Either way, Tel Hadid lies east and south of Tel Aviv. NOBTS’s leaders want to excavate it because it seems to show up a lot in various Old Testament myths and in later Christian legends. Notably, the site does not appear to have been inhabited much at all outside of three main periods: the 10th-6th centuries BCE, the 2nd-1st centuries BCE, and then in the modern age by Arabs until 1948 (and gee, I wonder why). So I’m guessing the SBC’s archaeology program would love to find some shred of support for their legends and myths.
Pseudoarchaeology: PROOF YES PROOF of Christian claims
Around the 4th century, Augustine of Hippo lamented the fake science claims his fellow Christians kept making:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth [. . .] Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
Alas, the Christians who need PROOF YES PROOF didn’t listen to him then. And they really don’t care about his opinion now. Between Christianity’s creation and now, Christians have compiled and crafted entire libraries’ worth of false science claims. They need it, too. They must PROVE YES PROVE that their religion is founded on nothing but pure, pristine, perfect history.
That’s why Christian pseudoarchaeology pops up so often with the adherents of literalism. To roughly summarize this ideology, literalists believe that the Bible contains nothing but cold, hard facts. Every one of its stories happened the way they describe. It does not contain a single error about anything—not even the weird bits, like the verse categorizing bats as unclean birds, and certainly not the absolute atrocities, like all the rape Yahweh kept commanding his people to commit.
When literalists encounter the Bible’s more troubling stories, they have to find ways of reconciling them with their notion of an omnimax god obsessed with love and justice. The results are way more troubling. But they keep doing it. I can see why, too. Without a real live god who really lived and died and rose again, their entire claim to superiority falls apart. It calls into question every other claim they make.
I didn’t realize my own religion’s claims suffered from the same lack of support that others did
Mormons make a lot of historical claims as well, of course. The main one of these involves one of the Tribes of Israel sailing to the New World and starting their own civilization there. Joseph Smith claimed this civilization wrote in a language he called “reformed Egyptian.” Even more, he claimed that they used this language to inscribe their holy texts upon golden plates. He found the plates, which allowed him to restart their religion. Hooray Team Joseph Smith!
Unfortunately for Mormons, absolutely none of that has a single bit of support from real archaeology.
When I was Pentecostal, I knew about the issues with Mormon historical claims. I think most of the evangelism-minded Pentecostals around me did as well.
Part of our familiarity with Mormon claims came from simple familiarity with Mormons themselves. My first Pentecostal church had a Mormon church right next door. They shared a very large parking lot. The two churches’ leaders often arranged special events around each other so their respective congregations could use the other church’s side of the lot for overflow. Really, it has always seemed to me to be a very civilized way of handling one’s competition.
(Mr. Captain: Glad they got over that habit of just murdering each other. Oh, the law made them stop. Yeah.)
However, it did not occur to me that my own tribe’s historical claims might suffer from the same problems. It’s always easier to see errors in other belief systems than one’s own. So for a very, very long time, I took my own religion’s historical claims as completely true, as did the rest of my community.
We needed to do that, too. We needed PROOF YES PROOF. Luckily for us, our fellow Christians had created a whole bunch of it!
Pseudoarchaeology during the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars
In the mid-2000s, the Religious Right began pushing very hard on their off-brand archaeology. You can find some of their science claims on a page Answers in Genesis titles “Some Arguments to Avoid.” I suspect even their pet ersatz scientists find these claims embarrassing now, but once a false claim enters the Christ-o-sphere, it never leaves. It becomes part of their natural environment.
One reason the Religious Right pushed that hard involves their attempted takeover of public, taxpayer-funded schools. They really wanted access to the children in those schools. They needed to get those kids indoctrinated before it was too late! For years, they’d been trying to infiltrate science classes with Creationism. Luckily for Team Humanity, they failed spectacularly. But that didn’t end Creationism as a grifting field. Nor did it end the Religious Right’s bewitched fascination with false science claims in general.
In the mid-2010s, at the very zenith of the Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars, Creationism got another serious body blow during some utterly disastrous debates between their biggest pseudoscience names and science folks. But even though the big names in apologetics and Creationism learned to be wary of debates from then on, their overall false science claims never stopped. I still remember the rash of drive-by commenters to Roll to Disbelieve who thought the multiverse provided PROOF YES PROOF of their religious claims.
Their pseudoscience might sound grander than the stupid wagon wheels in the Red Sea that Ron Wyatt pushed decades earlier as Egyptian chariot wheels from the Exodus, but it’s all the same blahblah.
So now evangelicals can study pseudoarchaeology at NOBTS!
What the NOBTS pseudoarchaeology program involves
According to their last year’s course catalog, the Master of Arts in Biblical Archaeology at NOBTS immerses students in Southern Baptist theology, either Hebrew or Greek (I’m guessing koine rather than Attic), and evangelism or missionary stuff—along with a course in “discipleship,” which is a particularly abusive, control-hungry form of church membership. It seems very popular with the Calvinist/Reformed crowd, which makes sense when one remembers that the SBC’s branded seminaries were ideologically captured by that crowd ages ago.
As we see starting on page 144 in the NOBTS catalog, the course names for the actual “Biblical Archaeology” concentration hint strongly that these students won’t be allowed to question anything in the Bible or in early Christian writings.
For that matter, the very name “Biblical Archaeology” makes me think they’re using the word “biblical” in its Christianese sense, not as an indicator of the timeframes they’re studying. In Christianese, “biblical” just means something that completely agrees with the Christian using the term. So “biblical marriage” is the kind that doesn’t work at all but enjoys right-wing evangelical men’s approval, and “biblical counseling” is the kind that doesn’t work at all but confirms right-wing evangelicals’ biases.
And “biblical archaeology” means any sorta-kinda archaeological stuff they can fold, spindle, and mutilate to support their religious claims.
Oh, Ron Wyatt would certainly approve!
The basic problem with an SBC seminary offering any kind of archaeology program
If I sound sharply critical of NOBTS’s archaeology program, it’s because I know the SBC and its leadership. If I saw a program like this at a good seminary, one that actually cares about facts and reality, I’d trust it way more. I’d also know that its students would come out of such a program shaken to the core about everything they’d once believed about the ancient Israelites and early Christians—just as I did when I took Classical History classes in college.
That shaking-up cannot happen within the literalist worldview. They’re like Christopher Reeves’ character in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time. If they encounter a single thing in their entire world that contradicts their beliefs, their entire belief system just falls apart.
Speaking of disproving false beliefs about pseudoarchaeology, Hector Avalos has put paid to the entire notion of “biblical history” and “biblical archaeology.” He was a former evangelical and an archaeologist. Though he’s passed away, he’s left us many videos and books explaining why the Bible’s accounting of history just doesn’t line up at all with what archaeologists find in the field. Here’s a good video to start with, if you’re new to his work:
As Dr. Avalos tells it (with copious photos and supporting evidence), the events the Bible’s anonymous writers describe either didn’t happen at all, or weren’t nearly as much of a big deal as they claim. Worse, as real archaeologists establish solid timeframes for the artifacts and structures they’re finding, the Bible’s accounting of events starts to look more and more made-up.
For example, we have a good idea of what was happening around Jerusalem around the 11-9th centuries BCE, archaeologically speaking. There’s simply no room in the known timeline for, say, a 10th-century Temple of Solomon or Palace of David, nor any evidence of a grand city in the area. And indeed, archaeologists haven’t found any of those structures in Jerusalem so far.
Nor can they. It’d be as impossible as finding a beeping 1980s calculator watch in the belly of a T-Rex fossil that’s still buried in striated Montana stone.
Unfortunately, literalists can’t handle anything but pseudoarchaeology
I just can’t imagine any SBC-branded seminary telling students the truth about the Bible’s stories, though. It’d be utterly anathema to their entire literalism hermeneutic. (A hermeneutic is just the lens through which someone interprets the Bible. Other hermeneutics include seeing the Bible as an analogue of the spiritual world or as an evolving set of moral teachings.) I’m willing to bet the entire contents of my coin purse on these NOBTS courses consisting of all the PROOF YES PROOF that evangelicals can possibly devise.
A 2016 video I managed to find on YouTube sure seems to confirm that assumption, by the way.
Just a minute or so into it, the speaker tells us:
Come along as we travel back 3800 years through history—to the time that Abraham and the patriarchs walked the land of Israel.
No evidence supports the existence of Abraham or “the patriarchs” of the Old Testament, of course.
Putting this entire video into more perspective perhaps, the speaker in the video is Jim Parker. He’s one of the two guys running the NOBTS program. And he doesn’t appear to know that Abraham’s story dates back to 2100-1900 BCE or so. More to the point, Parker also doesn’t appear to know that the Chaldeans, a tribe closely associated with Abraham’s family hometown of Ur in the Old Testament, didn’t exist till about the 6th century BCE.
(BTW: If you watch the NOBTS video, DO NOT MISS the professor at 12:25 in what is obviously a “not a TAME lion” T-shirt. If I didn’t know this came from the official NOBTS channel, I’d have assumed the entire video is a satirical parody of evangelicals and their love of ripping up Middle Eastern dig sites.)
Moreover, a Redditor in 2019 had this to say about the quality of SBC seminaries’ Master’s degrees in general—and he was actually attending NOBTS for his M.Div. at the time!
I am currently working on my M.Div. at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which is one of the six SBC-owned seminaries. Where would be a good place to get a Ph.D. in New Testament, specifically Christianity in its Graeco-Roman context and in the context of 2nd Temple Judaism?
From what I’ve heard it will be hard to get into places like Baylor, Duke, Vanderbilt, PTS, etc with an SBC M.Div.
A commenter replied:
So top New Testament/Christian origins schools are going to be places like Duke (moreso the Graduate Department of Religion than the Divinity School, imo), Candler School of Theology (Emory’s divinity school), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, etc. As you’ve observed though, the MDiv from NOBTS will not be carrying the most merit on its own.
I also laughed at another commenter who joked: “You don’t want to choose TTTS (tennessee temple theological seminary)?”
So I feel extremely comfortable asserting that the archaeology of NOBTS teaches a debased form of archaeology that supports their literalist hermeneutic. They can’t teach real archaeology. The real thing wouldn’t support literalism.
Sidebar: No, we have archaeology at church
Since the whole situation reminded me of the “we have X at home” meme, I made one to commemorate today’s topic:

Evangelicals today need pseudoarchaeology more than ever
In 2021, Relevant Magazine ran an article titled “Should We Still Be Looking for Ways to ‘Prove’ the Bible?” I like it because it portrays a teacher in the 1990s who had a conflict with a student who sounds a lot like my own teenaged self back then. The teacher in its anecdote even sounds like a lesser form of the professor I confronted:
“There’s always some first-year Christian who’s waiting for an opportunity to argue with me in front of the class. They’ve heard a sermon or read a Christian book about evolution and they feel equipped to correct me about evolution or the age of the Earth.”
He pushed his empty plate away, “It’s gotten to the point that I’ll bait them on the first day, so we can just get this nonsense out of the way. I hate it, but I feel like I have to humiliate them or else we end up in an endless cycle of confrontations. Which places an eventual drag on my effectiveness.”
I understood his point. It was the ’90s, and there was a big push toward apologetics.
I’d like to point out that in my situation, I did not feel “humiliated” at all by my own professor. He handled me far more gently and carefully than I likely deserved. In fact, I came out of that confrontation strengthened in ways I wouldn’t even recognize for years. So it makes me sad to imagine the teacher in this anecdote setting out to “bait” and “humiliate” his disruptive students. That’s the opposite of teaching them.
Dysfunctional authoritarians might not respond to such delicate handling. Maybe the teacher in the anecdote needs to slam down hard. But I’ve never tried teaching real archaeology to a room full of Creationists. In the classes I took, too, I was always either the only one there or a distinct minority. So this might well be the only way to deal with the situation.
And the Christians turning their noses up at pseudoarchaeology and other fake science claims
However, that one writer at Relevant doesn’t think that pseudoarchaeology should be part of evangelism:
Yes, Christians should prove their faith. But what we forget is that love is our proof. The value we ascribe to others and the sacrifices that we’re willing to make because of that love empowers even our most remedial discussions about Jesus.
Without a spiritual transformation that’s demonstrable and evident, our apologetics are just another philosophical argument in a world full of fake news, mythologies and conspiracy theories. It’s love that validates our faith and without it, we’re just clanging gongs and clashing cymbals.
So there you have it.
Instead of arguing about fake science and sounding like conspiracy theorists, Christians should simply ensure that outsiders perceive them as just so, I dunno, DIFFERENT, I guess. Once they perceive that quality in Christians, they’ll totally want whatever makes Christians like that!
But maybe that’s why Christianity’s in such a steep decline, hm? They haven’t been distinctively better people than heathens for many decades, if they ever were. Rather, they gained converts through fire and the sword for centuries. For many centuries more, they enjoyed enormous amounts of coercive legal and social power over others. Whenever and wherever they lacked those powers, they had retention problems. Even the New Testament tells us so.
Their propaganda sources love to claim that the religion grew because its adherents were just so, I dunno, DIFFERENT, I guess. But that is absolutely not why it grew. And a lack of performative piety is not why it is declining these days in any nation with true freedom of religion.
I can’t blame recruitment-minded Christians for realizing that the lovey-dovey stuff isn’t working. Of course they’ll decide to go for broke on fake science claims. Arguing is a lot easier than obeying Jesus’ direct commands. That seems more true of the Religious Right these days than it’s ever been.
So groups like BioLogos can argue all they want with SBC leaders’ insistence on Creationism. It won’t matter to most Creationists!
And all of this assumes they’re even using a real definition of love. They redefined it decades ago to allow their judgmentalism and control-grabs.
The big whammy: Real-world claims require real-world supporting evidence
As ethereally Jesusy as our Relevant writer tries to sound, he’s quite wrong about the minimal burden of proof he allows to rest on his shoulders.
Evangelicals in particular push very hard on their claims of an omnimax god who does lots of real things in the real world—especially for his followers. Every miracle claim represents an instance of Yahweh meddling in the real world. Every divine communication, every divine touch, every life-change, is another place where anyone should expect to find evidence galore.
A real-world god who does things in the real world will leave real footprints behind. Evangelicals don’t get to claim miracles and divine contact—and then coyly exempt those claims from real-world examination.
I’ll say this, too: It’s a striking sign of cowardice that evangelicals keep pushing their burden of proof onto their targets. Whenever they do this, it tells everyone observing that they know quite well that they lack support for their claims. It’s fun to tell them so and watch them seethe. Always remember: They are salespeople, not ambassadors—and certainly not the sons and daughters of royalty loftily offering the unworthy scum of the world the chance to join them. They need us far, far more than we need them.
And the way bigger whammy: Pseudoarchaeology is a permablinking dashboard light indicating Christianity’s biggest problem
As I’ve mentioned, my reasons for deconverting aren’t completely identical to my reasons for staying deconverted. Here’s one of the biggest changes in my reasons for not reconverting:
It’s not Christianity’s lack of historical and scientific veracity that bothers me most. After all, all religions except the very newest ones share the same issues. They all make truth claims that are objectively non-factual. Big whoop. I expect that.
What bothers me is what so many Christians do with that lack.
No no no, they can’t have a religion full of beautiful storytelling and often very troubling accounts of how humans related to each other at the dawn and earliest years of our species’ recorded history. They can’t wrestle with those stories and accounts to try to learn how to be better people and neighbors, then go forth and make it happen on the large scale.
There’s no fun in that!
No, they need to be objectively right. More than that, they need to be the most objectively right. And they can’t do that using real science and history investigation techniques. So they just make stuff up till it all sounds good and expect others to just go along with it.
It really wasn’t until I learned about other religions, notably Greek reconstructionist paganism (“Hellenism” or “Hellenismos”), that I really figured out what a terrible and untenable ideology literalism is.
(See also: That time I ran into a pagan fundamentalist.)
That approach to life just doesn’t work for me anymore
In my private life, I’ve learned that every time I base a decision based on shoddy scholarship but strong emotional claims, I get in trouble. And I suspect that’s not a rare failing, either.
So I can’t join groups that use pseudoarchaeology and other forms of pseudoscience to rationalize and inform their decision-making processes. Groups that use those techniques will also use them to rationalize terrible ideas like slavery, female subjugation, and electing blatant conjobs to the presidency. Their adherents have already opened the door to faulty reasoning and acceptance of claims without adequate support. There’s no way those openings won’t be exploited by bad-faith actors.
Without any strong tethers to objective reality, Christians can’t do anything, either, about their embarrassing brethren over at the snake-handling churches down th’holler or screeching at college girls about their sinfulness. All they’ve got is mangled Bible verses, but the other side has those too!
But I understand. As Adam Smith has written, the need for certainty might be one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses. This need triggers our mental antiprocess defenses. It keeps us mired in false beliefs.
If I could give any gift to humanity, it’d be a focus on finding the most compassionate way to bring the truth to life in the modern age. I wish I could open a box like Pandora to let it become our new normal. Until I can, I reckon I’ll just keep writing.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, a Glorious Solstice, and a decently-tolerable Festivus to everyone, however you celebrate. Humanity has (barely) made it through the worst of another winter. May the coming year be better than the last.
NEXT UP: Speaking of atrocity apologetics, wow, evangelicals just cannot let those go. Let’s see how one group of ’em are once again trotting out the most ghastly and horrifying of all apologetics—and why. See you soon!
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