Joel Kramer Interview Part 5

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, but we also have with us our good friend Joel Kramer. Joel Kramer used to pastor in Brigham City, Utah, and it was really because of your interest in Mormonism and responding to some of the claims that Mormons have made regarding the Bible that caused you to want to look deeper into the truth claims for the Bible. You ended up moving to Israel, studying archaeology.

You studied under Shimon Gibson, a very prominent archaeologist over there. So why don't we talk about archaeology in general? Because if there's one thing that usually comes up whenever I am having a conversation with a Latter-day Saint is the lack of archaeology for the Book of Mormon. And you would think that if this book is really talking about real places, real events, and real people, that there should be some evidence for it.

And that's one thing that I think God used in my journey towards Christianity. It was first I had to be convinced if the Bible has any type of a spiritual message, the historical message, the archaeological message and such has to be true as well. And I've often told Mormons, and in fact, I just told a couple Mormon missionaries the other night, one of the problems that I have with the Book of Mormon is I can't get past that first hurdle of the historical claims for the Book of Mormon that should have some archaeological claims that back it up.

Let's begin with this. What, in your opinion, is biblical archaeology? In Mormonism, in Mormon scholarship, dealing with this problem of Book of Mormon archaeology, whether you expand it out, or you don't expand it, the traditional understanding that we're talking about, this massive empire, you should have archaeological evidence from that.

We have it for the Roman Empire, for example, which would be comparable. But it also doesn't save the Book of Mormon to shrink it down. Because even the ones that, you know, this limited geography, and they say, actually, well, you know, it was only the size of Israel. So when you say limited geography, you're talking about the limited geography theory that puts the Book of Mormon lands in one little area in central America. They identify that the ones that follow that say that that size of that limited geography is about the size of Israel. Well, we have tons of evidence for Israel, and you want to make it smaller, go ahead.

Make them small like the Philistines. We know all about the Philistines and the Moabites and the Edomites, and the list goes on. So it doesn't save the problems with regards to archaeology with the Book of Mormon to shrink it down to this limited geography. Okay, now, biblical archaeology. Biblical archaeology is made up of two words, biblical and archaeology. And so the archaeology is studying ancient people from what they've left behind, and you usually excavate to do that. But why is it called biblical archaeology? Well, because it's referring to the field when you're digging the time periods and the places that the Bible is specifically talking about, then it's called biblical archaeology.

Why? Because you need to do the digging, that's archaeology, and find the things. But then you need to understand what these things that you just found are, and how they fit into the context, and what their significance is.

That's the biblical part. The Bible is used to interpret what is found in these places and these time periods that the Bible is talking about. And so the greatest tool in biblical archaeology is the Bible, so that we can understand what's being found.

If you don't have an ancient text that's describing the place and the events that happen in the place that you're digging, how will you know anything about what you're finding? And so archaeology is very dependent on ancient texts, and the biblical texts are the most important in this part of the world and in these time periods. Unfortunately, that's the way that the field of biblical archaeology started, with scholars using the Bible as a tool. And then over the years, because as secularism has increased, then they have rejected the Bible more and more, and discarded it, and criticized it, and so on and so forth. And in my opinion, it caused biblical archaeology to just enter what it is in today, which is just pure confusion. Because the whole measuring device that they used to use to understand their archaeology, now they criticize, and now they neglect. Now when you say that, a lot of people would probably be puzzled, because we are led to believe that people who are involved in the sciences are naturally honest people who allow the evidence to help them draw a conclusion. What you're saying here sounds more like people who have presuppositions are approaching the topic with those presuppositions and want to make sure that the conclusion supports the presupposition that they already have. Now this is not to say that in the early years of the 19th century, when a lot of archaeologists were in Israel to find information to verify the Bible, that they were not driven by their own prejudices, because they certainly were. But as you bring out though, it's evidence that draws you to that conclusion, not your presuppositions. And you're saying that that's basically lost now among many archaeologists?

Because a lot of archaeologists, they're not Christians, they don't even really believe in the spiritual message of the Bible at all, which of course can easily lead a person to want to take you away from that spiritual message, because not only would you be held accountable for it, but they would be held accountable for it, and they don't want to be held accountable for the spiritual message of the Bible. That's right, and biblical archaeology as a field really is in science. It's not what happened 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago, 4000 years ago is not observable.

That's true. How do we know what happened? Well, we didn't see it happen, but somebody saw it happen and they wrote it down, and that's where history comes from. And that's why archaeology is reliant on these historical texts. Really, when you're talking about evidence, you're talking about how what's found in archaeology matches with ancient texts. That is a powerful message. That says something.

That verifies something. That's why they don't have that much to say in what they call prehistory periods before texts and before, what do you say? Well, it looks like some people were here and had a campfire. We don't know who they were. We don't know why they were here. We don't know any of their names. We don't know anything about them. How do we know about these people? If an ancient text tell us their names and what happened and why they were there, then we know.

And if they didn't record it, then we don't. You have joined, Eric and myself, in educating groups that we have brought to Israel. So we go into a lot of areas that tourists normally do not go. And to support the point you're making, when we go into Nablus, which is the modern name for ancient Shechem, the well where Jesus met the Samaritan woman, you tell the group that there's really little controversy about this well, that this is the well.

What's the significance of that? Yeah, again, if you just dug and you didn't have the New Testament and you found a well, well it would just join the whole list of all the other wells that have been found and known that are ancient wells. What makes that well so significant to you when I took you there and showed it to you? Because you can read about it in the pages of the New Testament. You can read about a story that happened at that particular well and at that particular place.

This is where Jesus sat and had this profound conversation with the Samaritan woman. That is what makes the well significant. It's not the archaeology that makes it significant. The archaeology is important. They found the well through archaeology, but the Bible is what brings out the significance of it. One of the things when you go to Israel is you find most of these sites, including this well, Jacob's well, is something that is buried in a church, in the basement of a church, or it's featured in a church.

What's the significance of these things mean in churches? Because what you learn in archaeology, you ask the simple question, how do you know an authentic site? How do you know an authentic biblical site? In a nutshell, my answer to that is one thing built on top of another. What you're looking for for authentic sites when you're digging as an archaeologist is one thing built on top of another. Something happens in the ancient past that makes a place like a well or a cave significant because of an event that happened there. And then people who believe in that commemorate it by building something there. And then somebody might come along and they are against that belief so they destroy it. And then somebody wants to desecrate it so they build their own worship place over that place. And then somebody comes back to the original belief and destroys that and puts something there. And so these churches that you see, they're in the stack.

They're more towards the top of the stack of one thing built on top of another. If you remove that church you have something underneath that and something underneath that and something underneath that. So through time these places are marked literally with architecture and with evidence that shows that people have been either holding to this place or desecrating this place over and over and over again. And so you see this long tradition of these places in the archaeology of one thing built on top of another. You said in our trip in 2015 that if you could dig in one place you would love to go to Temple Mount.

Yes. Why would you like to go there? It's a perfect example of what I just talked about. We know that Abraham and Isaac were there. We know that David built an altar there. That Solomon built the temple there. And that that was destroyed. And then we know that it was rebuilt by Zerubbabel.

And then we know that's where Jesus taught from that platform. And then it was destroyed after the time of Jesus in 70 AD. And then in the Byzantine period when the Muslims captured Byzantine Jerusalem, they were taken up onto the Temple Mount and shown where the Jewish temple once stood. And so that was everything behind why the Dome of the Rock was built there on that particular spot. And so again you have the Dome of the Rock that shows where the place was that formerly was the Jewish temple and then the first Jewish temple and all the way back to David and Abraham's altar. You have this whole history.

You have this whole tradition. You can't dig it. That's what's unique about that because it's in my opinion the most sensitive place on earth. If you try to dig it you start a war.

So you can't dig that. But there's other places that you can dig and that have been dug that show the same phenomenon of one thing on top of another. And you can see enough of it on the Temple Mount. You can see the Dome of the Rock that's sitting on top of the rock that is the peak that protrudes out of this gigantic over 2,000 year old stone platform that's built around this mountain, Mount Moriah, to commemorate this place. And then you have Solomon's walls that when Herod built that big platform around it destroyed everything. But you see the walls that Solomon built leading up to that point.

Yeah, it's one thing on top of another. That's how we know these are the authentic places. And then it was important to Christians to mark these places and to build churches there, churches that commemorated those sites. And so when they're commemorating an Old Testament site that's not the end of the archaeology.

That's just part of this stack of one thing built on top of another. And so it becomes very obvious. That's what I found in my time in Israel studying these things is that the reality of these things, the truth of these things is obvious.

It's most often obvious. And the complications come in and the confusion comes in when agendas and biases get involved that try to change the longstanding and ancient traditions of these places. Because they're trying to themselves demonstrate their own belief that the Bible is not true and that these places aren't real.

And so they try to confuse them or they try to come up with a new place to sell a book or whatever their reason is. But the real authentic places are obvious. We've been talking with our good friend Joel Kramer, who has a masters in archaeology, has lived over in Israel for about 10 years and has some incredible stories to tell about some of the digs that he has been involved in over there. And so, Joel, we thank you for being with us today. Thank you. 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 Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.