History Forum / General / Ancient History / August 2007

http://www.cityside.org.nz/node/300

Bible Scholar urges End of Biblical Studies - Hector Avalos

Avalos' new book, "The End of Bible Studies", is due out in July 2007.
Here's the blurb: "In this radical critique of his own academic
speciality, biblical scholar Hector Avalos calls for an end to
biblical studies as we know them. He outlines two main arguments for
this surprising conclusion. First, academic biblical scholarship has
clearly succeeded in showing that the ancient civilisation that
produced the Bible held beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose
of the world and humanity that are fundamentally opposed to the views
of modern society. The Bible is thus largely irrelevant to the needs
and concerns of contemporary human beings. Second, Avalos criticises
his colleagues for applying a variety of flawed and specious
techniques aimed at maintaining the illusion that the Bible is still
relevant in today's world. In effect, he accuses his profession of
being more concerned about its self-preservation than about giving an
honest account of its own findings to the general public and faith
communities. Dividing his study into two parts, Avalos first examines
the principal sub-disciplines of biblical studies (textual criticism,
archaeology, historical criticism, literary criticism, biblical
theology, and translations) in order to show how these fields are
still influenced by religiously motivated agendas despite claims to
independence from religious premises. In the second part, he focuses
on the infrastructure that supports academic biblical studies to
maintain the value of the profession and the Bible. This
infrastructure includes academia (public and private universities and
colleges), churches, the media-publishing complex, and professional
organisations such as the Society of Biblical Literature. In a
controversial conclusion, Avalos argues that our world is best served
by leaving the Bible as a relic of an ancient civilisation instead of
the "living" document most religionist scholars believe it should be.
He urges his colleagues to concentrate on educating the broader
society to recognise the irrelevance and even violent effects of the
Bible in modern life."

This follows on from his article last year on SBL:

Hector Avalos on SBL
Avalos, PhD Harvard 1991, was a fundamentalist child evangelist. Now
he's a militant atheist, the faculty adviser to the Iowa State
University Atheist and Agnostic Society. He's executive director of a
group affiliated with the Council for Secular Humanism that seeks to
debunk religion. He was a fundamentalist Christian and now he's a
fundamentalist atheist. He preached and practiced faith healing from
age 7 to 17 and became an atheist in college.