Joel Kramer Interview Part 4

Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry. With me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. Also with us today is a good friend of ours, Joel Kramer.

Joel used to pastor in Brigham City, Utah, several years ago, but for the past many years he has been living over in Israel, studying as an archaeologist, and we have had the pleasure of having Joel with us as we have led tours over into Israel. Today, Joel, I want to talk to you about Jericho because one of the places where we like to go is Jericho. One thing about Jericho is with a lot of things having to do with biblical archaeology, it has its own set of controversies.

Please tell our listeners some of the evidence that you have found that demonstrates the biblical account to be accurate. From Jericho, you can see the plain of Moab. Every time I go there, I can imagine all these thousands of Israelites coming across that plain towards Jericho and how that must have really put fear into the heart of the people that live there. Tell us about the significance of Jericho and why you did a film dealing with the historical evidences for Jericho. Yeah, when I got to Israel and I was looking for what to cover, I asked my professor and other archaeologists that I knew, what is the number one in your minds? What is the number one challenge to the Old Testament? And hands down, everybody would say Jericho.

And I would say that that is accurate. In Old Testament studies, the biggest challenge is Jericho. So my philosophy was a little take on the biggest challenge first.

Well, can I interrupt you right there? Because it's not so much that there isn't a place that they identify to be ancient Jericho. It's the dating, correct, of the conquest. And that's where the real controversy lies.

Well, yeah, I'll say that I took that on as the number one challenge. And before I even go into the evidence, I will say it's a wonderful thing that Jericho is the number one challenge to the Old Testament, because if that's the number one challenge, then it's all downhill from here, then things are great because it should be the number one example used in the Old Testament for how the evidence matches with the biblical account, rather than in that everybody is challenging it. Well, let's talk about some of the major players. You can't talk about Jericho without discussing Kathleen Kenyon.

Yes. So tell us about her and her finds. Kathleen Kenyon, she's not the only one that excavated at Jericho, but she's the most famous. And when she finished excavating there in 1958, then it wasn't excavated until very recently, since then. So basically she was the last one to dig there, and what she said about it stood from the time she finished digging until today.

What I did was I asked my professor, okay, if I'm going to cover her viewpoint credibly, who can I interview that will come from her viewpoint? He said, hands down, a guy named Peter Parr. He is the only one that's still alive that was on her staff.

So I flew him over from England and spent three weeks with him. He's an atheist and he was there to present her side of it. I can tell you at the end of the day, and you can see this in the film that I made about it, Jericho on Earth, he folded. I didn't expect him to do that, but when he saw the evidence, he came to the realization as an atheist. Well, it does seem that something, what the Bible describes happened here.

How did that come about? What did you bring up to him that would get him to at least acknowledge what you were saying is true about the Bible? He had never considered the Bible, and I know that's an amazing thing.

That just sounds odd. It's very odd, but Kenyon tossed the Bible out the window, literally. So when he was studying under her and digging at Jericho and having been raised an atheist, he'd never heard the story that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

Really? Never heard that biblical story. And he dug there as a supervisor from 1952 to 1958.

What he needed was he needed that education. He needed to know what the Bible actually says about this ancient mound. For a moment, let's just put aside all the names of the archaeologists and who dug there and this, that, and the other thing. Let's focus instead on what everybody agrees about. What everybody agrees about is that Jericho, the mound, the tel, this ancient ruin of Jericho, is Jericho.

Everybody agrees with that. That's pretty amazing in itself when we have all these cities mentioned in the Book of Mormon that nobody knows where they are. Everybody knows where Jericho is. No question about it.

No controversy. Okay, so we have this mound of dirt, and not far from there just to the south where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Book of Joshua. So here's this fragments from the Book of Joshua sitting over here in Qumran, these caves, that tells archaeologists what they will find in the mound of dirt of Jericho thousands of years before they ever dig it.

So how do you know what a reliable text is? Well, you have a text that says what you're going to find before you dig. So then they went and dug several different expeditions, went and dug Jericho. But what's the number one thing that the Bible says about Jericho? What's it famous for? It's famous for its walls falling down.

Okay, what did archaeologists find? And agree upon. They agree upon, including Kathleen Kenyon, that the city walls of Jericho collapsed. That's the evidence they all agree on. Their interpretation of why they collapsed or when specifically they collapsed is where the disagreement is.

But are you kidding me? We have a mound of dirt where the Bible tells us that they're going to find a collapsed city wall in here if they dig. And then they dig and they find a collapsed city wall. It's game over right there.

Anybody can understand the significance of that. We can argue all day whether it happened 50 years this way, 100 years that way. But we have to deal with the reality that of all the biblical land, the city that has a collapsed city wall around it is Jericho. Then on top of that, you have a chronology of events that happen in the layer system that you have in a tell. You can tell just from looking at the layer system, it's called a bulk where you've dug, and you have a chronology of events. And so the chronology of events straight from Kenyon's, who was very critical of the Bible, straight from her reports, the chronology of events is that the wall collapsed, the city was burned, then it was abandoned, and then it was rebuilt in the archeological period called the Iron Age, which is the Kingdom Period of Israel.

Well what does the Bible say? The chronology of Jericho is in its history. The wall collapsed.

That event happened first. They went up into the city, the Israelites, and they burned the whole city. We have a burned destruction over it. Joshua put a curse on the city that it would be abandoned for a long period of time, which we have that archeological layer.

It's called an abandonment layer. And then on top of that, we have the city rebuilt in the time of Ahab, the Bible says, which is in this Kingdom of Israel time. So the chronology of events found in the tell match perfectly with the chronology of events described in the Bible. So the only controversy, it's missing the forest for the trees, is going into the detail of trying to determine by looking at pieces of pottery and whether they're bent a little bit this way or bent a little bit that way.

If it happened 150 years, a hundred years, 50 years this way to try to determine exactly the date. And you have archeologists that are famous archeologists. John Garstang saying this dates to the time of Israel and when the walls collapsed in the Bible. And then you have other archeologists like Kenyon that disagree with that. But you have Garstang, a famous archeologist who worked with a guy named Albright, who wrote the pottery chronology that we still use to this day. You can't say that John Garstang doesn't know his pottery. He's the one who wrote the book on it and the only way Kenyon knows when pottery dates to is thanks to John Garstang. No, within secular archeology itself, John Garstang being a secular archeologist, there's archeologists that have published that this indeed does date to the time that matches with the chronology of the Bible. Now you've dealt a lot with pottery, but for many of us, we just see pieces of pottery.

They all look the same. How can you use pottery to tell us the dating? Pottery is used in dating. Inscriptions also are used in dating because the concept behind both of them is that things change over time. So if you can come up with an understanding of when they changed over time, pottery styles, they liked their handles this way in one period and they liked them another way in another period, then you can start to date. But what's communicated in archeology, which you learn when you're a student, is you learn that pottery chronology is a very strong dating system and that it's very reliable and that it really nails things down within about a 50 year period.

No, that is absolutely incorrect. And Jericho is a good example. You can take the things that have been written by reputable archeologists over the years about Jericho and their disagreement on when that pottery, they're talking about the same pottery, they're disagreeing over a period of about 300 years. So if it's so concise and it nails it down to a 50 year period, why is there this disagreement amongst secular scholars over the same pottery that's found in Jericho?

It's not that concise. How do we know when things happened and who did them and everything like that? We find the archeological evidence and then we turn to the ancient text that then interprets what's been found and explains what happens. How do we know what happened to the wall of Jericho? We have the Bible. How do we know when that happened? The most reliable source to date it is the Bible because the Bible has its own internal chronology and you apply that to what you find in the mount and that is your most accurate dating. Pottery is important. The chronology is important but it's not the, the Bible is wrong because although the wall of Jericho fell over because this pot rim is bent over here at a different angle then it must have happened 150 years.

Yeah, no. The Bible told us, told archeologists what they would find, the chronology of events they would find inside the tale thousands of years before they dug it. They dug it. That's what they found.

That's the evidence. So sitting around talking about pottery and 50 years here and 100 years there, I mean put it into perspective of Mormonism with the Book of Mormon. Can you imagine if the Book of Mormon talked about the wall of Zarahemla and that it fell down and they have Zarahemla and this and everybody agrees, secular scholars agree this is Zarahemla and here's what the Book of Mormon is talking about in this fallen wall. That'd be powerful.

Do you think that they would be excited about that? They don't have a piece of pottery for what the Book of Mormon claims. We have Jericho that everybody agrees on. We have a fallen wall. We have a chronology of events that's in the archeological record matching with the biblical record.

Where is the problem? The problem is just in some people are critical of the Bible and so they give their interpretation which boils down to their opinion and speculation of why they think that the biblical account isn't true but is not based on evidence. Here's a general rule in archeology, everybody knows this, that an interpretation of evidence that is based on an ancient text is considered in general more reliable than one that is not. So that's why John Garstang's interpretation that it lines up with the biblical account, the archeology he excavated Jericho, is stronger than Kathleen Kenyon's because Kathleen Kenyon's interpretation of the evidence at Jericho is purely her opinion. It's not based on any ancient text.

She took the only ancient text that talks about Jericho at this period and throws it out the window. Very quickly, tell us about Dr. Bryant Wood. Bryant Wood is a good friend of mine. He is one of my mentors and he is a fantastic archeologist and he says that Garstang, John Garstang, is right and Kathleen Kenyon is wrong. Now his specialty is pottery and he got his PhD from the University of Toronto specifically in the Canaanite pottery that comes from the period of Joshua and the Israelite conquest. And that's one thing that I went through with Peter Parr. I went through the pottery evidence and what Bryant Wood says about it and how he reads it and everything and at the end of the day he said, okay, that makes sense. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Research. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.