Christianity’s Massive FORGERY Problem

Does religion kill curiosity?

Thomas Westbrook: There are some rather hilarious instances of religious fraud in the Middle Ages, with multiple churches that claimed to have the head of John the Baptist and half a dozen or so that claimed to have the foreskin of baby Jesus. But how widespread is the problem of religious fraud today, particularly when it comes to fraudulent archaeological artifacts like forged manuscripts?

Dr. Robert Cargill: This is a great question. The idea of holy relics especially, but any kind of fraudulent archaeology, any kind of forged manuscript, it's getting better. I'm happy to say it's getting better, but of course, it's still out there because there's still money to be made, there's still tickets to be sold, and there are still people to convert. I'm saying this because a lot of people are still out there doing it. Some people do it for the money, some people do it for the fame, but some people are doing it because, as one group said, even though they got caught, by the way, "Even though it's fraudulent, as long as people come to Jesus, it's worth it." Of course, this motivation is horrible, but they don't care as long as people believe. So, if you're brought on false pretenses, it's okay.

It has been around since before Jesus, but let's talk about Christian relics. You have this woman walking behind Jesus and she reaches out and she touches his cloak. The text says Jesus felt power go out of him and he said, "Who touched me?" She says, "Oh, no," she's afraid, and he says, "Your faith has healed you." You have this notion that it's not that Jesus can't control his power, but he didn't necessarily know that she was going to do this. She touched something he was wearing, power went out of him, and she was healed. "Oh, the items associated or affiliated with Jesus must contain power." The crown of thorns, the lance that touched him, the Holy Grail, these things, if we can find them, maybe they still contain power. And thus it began.

We don't have physical evidence of Jesus, but in the fourth century, when Constantine, and especially his mom, converts, she wants evidence of this stuff. So she goes over there and she says, "I'm the co-emperor. Where did this stuff take place? Show me where it took place." And they were like, "Yes, ma'am. Right here, right here, right here. Here's the True Cross. Here's the..." and the floodgates were open. People were producing evidence that they could take back to Europe and they could say, "Let's make the nails of the cross into Constantine's bridle for his horse and part of his helmet." If you put together all the pieces of the True Cross, you can make something the size of the Statue of Liberty. This has been the game since the beginning. A lot of it was that holy relics had power for whoever possessed them. They were currency; you could get people to come to your church, you could trade them for other things. And then today, it's to sell books. A lot of it throughout the ages was to get people to come to certain churches for pilgrimages. But that's been the game. There have been a lot of efforts by scholars to try to cut back on this, especially looting and forgeries, good efforts, but it's still very much a part of archaeology, unfortunately.

Thomas Westbrook: If you were to, if you could even, eliminate the financial market for black market biblical antiquities overnight, how much of this problem would disappear and how much would continue as people are "lying for God" because the end justifies the means?

Dr. Robert Cargill: That's a great question. I think a lot of it would go away. Maybe some of it would go away because a lot of people are out there looting or out there forging for money. There's money involved. People will buy black market manuscripts because then they can put them in their Bible Museum, and then people will buy tickets and people will come see things. Since the beginning, it's been about money. But why do people buy those tickets? Why do people go to see these things? It's so that they can affirm their faith or they can confirm their faith. People like having the things they believe in affirmed. Forget religious things, I believe in democracy, so anytime I see democracy work and it's effective and it actually works, I like those things that affirm the things I believe in. Anytime I see something that challenges that, I'd like to see that go away. So, I like to believe in those things and promote those things that affirm that which I believe in.

If I can get a free agent to go to the Red Sox and make the Red Sox a better team because I believe in the Red Sox, I'll want to believe in that. If people are Christian, or whatever religion they might be, and somebody's making a claim about a particular object, whether it be forged, whether it be looted, or whether it be real, they're going to go pay money to go see that. It's not about making the money; it's about affirming a belief, a religious belief.

Thomas Westbrook: Going back to the black market, I do wonder with a lot of these artifacts, even if they're not outright forgeries, a lot of the artifacts that are put forth are unprovenanced. For people who aren't archaeologists, can you explain what provenance means, and more importantly, what becomes permanently unknowable the moment that it's lost?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Oh, this is a great question. This is the chain of custody. It's where was something discovered and what is the chain of custody from the point of discovery? This is why it is important to support credible, licensed archaeological digs, not only to support them but to participate in them. By the way, right now is the season where you can go and look and say, "Oh, let's see who's digging." Go find one of these credible excavations. You can sign up, you can volunteer. Go look at what an actual, real archaeological dig looks like. Go see how real science works. Be a part of this. And then you'll make discoveries of things people haven't seen for two or three thousand years. This is what we want.

What you don't want is somebody digging in some pile of stuff that was sifted 40 years ago that somebody could have contaminated, or somebody could have forged something and thrown it in here and then said, "Hey, look what I found." Provenance is the idea that something was discovered in a fixed locus. We know the context of the objects around it. So, we know that it was discovered at this particular level, at this particular site. We found this coin or this pottery next to it, so that we have credible dating, or at least a relative scale of dating, so we know approximately when it was discovered. And now we know it came from this spot, next to this wall, and since it came from this site, it can tell us something about this site that we're excavating.

My colleague, Oded Lipschits, used always to say this: "Archaeology is not about the stuff. It's about the people who made the stuff." So at the end of the day, what we're trying to learn about is the people. If you're just out there to find things, if you're just out there to find a scroll or a gold coin, you're in it for the wrong business. We do archaeology because we want to learn about people like us thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago. We want to learn what motivated them to do the things that they were doing so that we can learn about why we're doing the things that we're doing. And so, we want provenance because once you buy something off the black market, you're not sure, A: whether it's real, whether it's forged or not, and B: where it actually came from. Because people will lie to you and they'll give you these fake certificates of authenticity or whatever and they'll say, "Oh, no, this came from this very special place. It came from the site of David and Goliath. This is the stone that killed Goliath." People want this confirmation; they want to be able to say this. They'll tell you something came from a pyramid or they'll tell you something came from Megiddo. "This came from the famous cult place." You need to know that A: for certain, but you also, when you sell something on the black market, you strip it. If it's unprovenanced, it's stripped of all of that contextual data that you want, that you really need, that's not only going to tell you about this object, but it's going to tell you about the site that it came from.

So, you need provenance. We're trying to discourage looting as much as we can. We're trying to discourage forgery as much as we can. My colleague, Morag Kersel, has an online project called "Follow the Pots," and this is a website that basically helps to track all of this pottery that's coming out of the ground. It's basically helping to guard against looting that's coming out of all these archaeological sites. We also have various organizations that have committed, museums not to put on display, and journals and magazines not to publish, anything that's unprovenanced. And by saying, "If it's not provenanced, we're not going to publish it," scholars aren't going to talk about it. It's basically going to lose all credibility if it's not provenanced. This diminishes the value of it. If scholars aren't talking about it and museums aren't putting it on display and you're not publishing about it, that diminishes the value and it discourages people from looting things. It makes them work through the licensed agencies. That's the theory at least behind it.

Thomas Westbrook: Aside from the obvious problem with looting and with black market antiquities dealers, there is a common defense that laboratory testing, things like carbon dating, spectroscopy, material analysis, can compensate for missing archaeological context. Can it? What can lab work actually tell us and where does it hit a hard wall?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Lab work can tell us some things. It has some limits. Carbon-14 has limits and all of these different things. But it'll tell you the limit of a particular object. It'll tell you some data about a particular object. But we still don't know where that object came from. They'll say, "Well, this object matches this piece of lead and so therefore, since this piece of lead we know came from this site, then this one must have come from this site as well." Or did this piece of lead that came from this site, was it taken from that mine way over there? And this lead also came from that mine? That doesn't tell us it came from this particular site. Maybe both pieces of lead came from the same mine.

Provenance is really the only way. Something that is in situ, and this is why, if you've ever been on an archaeological excavation, when you discover something prominent, you find it and before you pull it out of the ground, you'll outline it, you'll dust it off. We always say we're sweeping dirt off of dirt, right? And you'll leave it, and then you'll take a photo of it in situ, where it's found there, located in the ground. Then you're going to tag it, you're going to write the locus. Nowadays we're doing digital modeling of it. "This is where this thing came from." Stop the dig, we take off the tarps, we take a photograph of it. This is where it came from. Then we excavate it, we take it out, we tag it, we put it in the bucket, and it's going to go straight to the lab or it's going to go straight to the museum. And it doesn't enter the black market.

What we try to discourage is kids taking Instagram photos of it or Facebook because as soon as those go online, looters follow social media as well. They'll come out in the middle of the night with their metal detectors or whatever and they'll come dig up the site. So, we always try to keep from posting, even if somebody takes a picture, you're basically not allowed to post things, because we don't want people to come in overnight and go looking for more coins or looking for more objects. So, there's a lot of things that we're doing, but lab analysis alone, it can make up for some of it, but it can't make up for the fact of, "This is where we found this thing. Look at the context. We know it came from here." That's the best thing possible.

Thomas Westbrook: I want to apply all of this to a case that generated an enormous amount of excitement among biblical apologists, but not so much within academia scholars and archaeologists: the Mount Ebal lead tablet. Setting interpretation aside completely for a moment, just objectively, what is this object physically, and what are the strongest technical arguments that were made for its authenticity as an early Hebrew inscription?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Yeah, I'm going to be as polite as I possibly can. And anybody who wants to go over to "Bible and Archaeology" and see the videos we made on this, you're welcome to do so. I've got an entire clip list. There is no credible claim for this Mount Ebal metal object. What it is, is it's a clasp. It's some kind of metal clasp, a lead clasp that's a fishing weight. Amihai Mazar says it's a fishing weight. It's deteriorating.

The claim was that it's the oldest Hebrew inscription ever discovered. It is a curse tablet that mentions the Lord, the Hebrew deity. And the whole thing was to undermine the concept that Hebrew was the age that it was and that Moses could not have possibly written the Bible. This one little inscription changed all of this. And of course, all of the scholars said, "Yeah, no, that's not what it is." And it has since been completely and thoroughly debunked. It was so many obnoxious claims all from one object that never went through peer review. They wouldn't show us the pictures, but we got this thing, you know, it's going to be great. The claims alone, the entire academic community went, "Yeah, no."

And then by the time they actually showed us the pictures, the scans that they had, the scan process that they were using is a legitimate scan process. And I did this in the videos that we showed. It is a legitimate thing. You can use CAT scans, you can use these to look at these. And I showed in some of my videos the appropriate use of them and how you can actually read what letters look like inside of these things. So, we know what it looks like. By the time they actually got around to showing the letters, to a person, scholars were bursting out in laughter. And a lot of them just said, "Look, it's unprovenanced. It's clearly nonsense." And so, most scholars did the right thing and did not publish on it because it's unprovenanced, it's a false thing, so they just didn't address it.

But we YouTubers, we were able to go out there and say, "Since this thing was introduced to the world via YouTube, we can go out here and we can combat it in the public arena." And that's what we did. Some of us scholars, some of us tenured professors, are actually out working in the public media, public-facing stuff. And so we took it upon ourselves to go out and address this since that's where it was introduced. Peer-reviewed journals shouldn't be dealing with this stuff because you don't want to promote it. As soon as a peer-reviewed journal addresses this, then it's going to get peer-review status and they're going to say, "Well, this peer-reviewed scholar dealt with it, so now it gives it credibility." And you don't want to do that.

But we took it to task. And when they got around to showing this thing, the letters aren't letters of anything that look like any script. They've got it going all like this, I mean, it is 100% complete nonsense. But we said this from day one, and that's what it is. But man, they got a lot of publicity. They made some really slick videos. They got a lot of people to come out and dig with them. And I must say, and I'm deliberately not saying their name, they were able to get a lot of people to not only come dig with them, but this is an organization whose mission statement is to say that any archaeology that doesn't agree with every claim of the Bible is bad archaeology. So then this isn't science, this isn't scientific methodology. These are apologists. They're apologists that are digging in the West Bank under the auspices of the army, not of the Israel Antiquities Authority. They're settlers, and they're trying to promote settlement in the West Bank. It's just a lot of things that were bad about the motivation behind it. And this leaked out, this was discovered over time, and it has been since completely debunked.

Thomas Westbrook: So what actually, if it wasn't writing, if it wasn't inscriptions, what are we looking at with the Mount Ebal "inscription"?

Dr. Robert Cargill: The Mount Ebal lead object is deteriorating lead. So what it is, is a Rorschach test. So what they got is they got some scans and you can see, it's not like smooth lead. It's deteriorating, it's degrading. And people have done these tests throughout history, you know, scientists have done this. They'll show somebody a picture and then they'll show it in a degraded form, 40%, 60%, 80%, and they'll say, "What do you see?" And depending on what you believe, you might see certain things.

This is a degraded lead surface. Again, Amihai Mazar said it was a fishing clasp, it's a weight. You put your line, you put this clasp, and you clasp it over it. I use bite weights when I go fishing. You want your thing to go down, you put a bite weight over it. The lead is deteriorating, and so they see these lines and these squiggles and so they say, "Well, this is a letter here, and look over here, this is a letter." And in order to make their ridiculous inscription work, there's no lines, there's no script, they've got it going all over and coming back around over this way. I mean, it's absurd. It's like a drunk ant walking around. We made some videos in real time. But when you look back at it, it is so absurd. People say, "Why did you spend so much time with it?" Because they were trying to prey, P-R-E-Y, on people of faith. And they're trying to get them to come out and dig with them. They're trying to get them to come to their talks. They're trying to get them to give money to their organization. And they're trying to basically say that all archaeology that's ever been done up to this point is wrong and "we're correct." And anytime you get somebody who's saying that, you know there's going to be a problem.

Then the members of the team claiming the discovery started arguing among themselves. Then one of the members of that team started seeing these inscriptions everywhere, and I mean everywhere. He was going back to other inscriptions. "Oh, I see, look at over here, I see this." I mean, it was actually quite sad to be honest. That's why I'm not saying their names, it was sad. They were literally seeing things everywhere and it got out of hand and it faded away. And I said at the very beginning: you're never going to see this inscription listed in any volumes of famous Hebrew inscriptions. And there's a reason for that: there was nothing there. It was a Rorschach test. They saw what they wanted to see and they had to violate all kinds of rules of archaeological methodology in order to get there.

Thomas Westbrook: Now, I'm not an expert in ancient alphabets, but at first glance, it appeared that they were spotting letters from multiple different alphabets, like Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, maybe ancient Hebrew or Proto-Canaanite. It's not just that it wasn't going in straight lines, it was all over the place, but also like each individual letter was written completely differently in different parts of the inscription.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Correct. They've said, "This one is this letter over here, and over here we have the same letter." And I was like, "Those don't even look..." You're not even making sense with your own, you can't even call it a methodology, your own methodology is not making sense. You're not being consistent with your own methodology. One of the videos we did, we had some fun with it, but the other ones we're actually trying to take it seriously and say, "This is why this cannot possibly..."

I did one where I looked at the history of the claims about the mountain on which they claimed to have found this thing. And again, we talked about provenance, the object that they claim to have an inscription came from a dump pile. It came from material that had been excavated like 40 years earlier. So, it wasn't provenanced stuff. It was stuff that went to a dump pile. You know what would have been a fun story? Is if they had forged something and then stuck it into the dump pile and then sifted it and said, "Hey, look, we found this thing. It's a really good looking..." I mean, that would have been illegal and horrible, but that would have made more sense than what they did. What they did was just absurd and it ruined people's reputations, but man, it made some money.

And it really got the attention of, there's an issue about settlements in the West Bank in and around Mount Ebal and Gerizim there. And that's what a lot of this was. Members of this organization want the State of Israel to come in and annex this area for Israel. They don't want to leave it to the West Bank. They want to annex it so they can build settlements in there and basically make it a part of Israel, not a part of the land that's set aside for Palestine or for a future state of Palestine. When you start using archaeology as a political weapon, you have a problem. So, you're talking about fundamentalist theology, you're talking about nationalism, you're talking about ideology, all of the things that are wrong were put into this one little object and everybody recognized it pretty quickly. But then of course, as the debunking took place, we realized, "Ooh, this is bad. This is really, really bad." And then it just faded away. And I'm quite frankly glad it went away.

Thomas Westbrook: Another thing that I see a lot of is Christian apologists who will take actual, good provenanced artifacts, cherry-pick out bits and pieces of evidence, and then jump to entirely untenable conclusions by ignoring the rest of the data. The YouTube channel "Expedition Bible" recently did this with the Amarna letters, which are these hundreds of correspondences between the rulers of late Bronze Age Canaanite cities and the Pharaoh in Egypt. Some of these letters mention a group of raiders called the Habiru. And "Expedition Bible" and other religious apologists jumped on this as evidence of the Hebrews in Canaan, but completely ignored other Amarna letters in this same collection of correspondence which shatter this assumption. You guys had a great video response to this on your "Bible and Archaeology" channel. But how often do you find that apologists apply interpretive standards to Bible-era evidence that they would never apply to any other period of ancient history because the reasoning just doesn't logically hold?

Dr. Robert Cargill: It happens, we've seen it with the Habiru or the Apiru, we've seen it with the Hyksos, we've seen it to try to explain the Joseph story. It happens all the time, to be honest. And this is an old theory that gets resurrected all the time. The reasoning for it is again, as I've said: they want some rationale to affirm what they believe when there's no evidence for it and a lot of evidence to the contrary. If you talk to any critical scholar, any archaeologist, they'll say we don't have any good archaeological evidence for the Exodus. We just don't. And we have a lot of evidence to the contrary and there's a lot of internal biblical problems chronologically with any story of the Exodus.

What most scholars accept, biblical scholars but also archaeologists, is that the Joseph story is a story of how the Hebrews or the Israelites got into Egypt so that the Moses story could bring them out of Egypt. But all the archaeological evidence tells us that the people who became the Israelites were Canaanites and they were always there. They're just native indigenous peoples to Canaan that started tribing up and as they became their tribes and as they began to differentiate themselves from the other Canaanite groups, they needed a foundation story. So they bring together some stories of runaway slaves and putting a baby in a basket, same story that you get with Romulus and Remus in Rome and Sargon, one of the Akkadian kings, who gets put in a basket, and so they start putting together all these stories. Maybe they get Enuma Elish or the Gilgamesh story and they get some flood stories and they bring all these stories together, but they imbue them with their own ethics. And they talk about one god, their deity, and they make a foundation story for their people. And that story becomes the story. And they call it, "we conquered this land." No, you grew up in this land, right? But this is how you established yourself and then you created a kingdom. And now we have the kingdom we have with all of its problems and this is where the problems came from. And that's the story we have.

It's a beautiful story. I love the story. And if you go back and look at the stories, they're trying to tell the story of, "here's why we do this." It's just like the Greek mythology. In these stories, they're telling about what it means to be a human. What does it mean to struggle with your parents or what does it mean to struggle with jealousy or with rage? And that's what these stories are doing. We don't have the evidence of an Exodus, we don't have the evidence of a Joseph narrative. But what we do have is beautiful, beautiful literature that I love to teach, that is an identity marker for the Jewish people for ancient Israel. We know about ancient Israel from outside of the Bible, from the Merneptah Stele and from all these others. We knew that they were there in Canaan. How do you do an apologetic for this? How do you try to prove that these stories were true? You've got to use the Apiru or you've got to try to claim the Hyksos, or you've got to do something else to try to make these stories fit, even though the chronology is off. And so what do you do? "Hey, look, we found this thing and it proves everything that we said is true." And that's what's going on with this apologetic. I wish people would let miracles be miracles and you either believe it or you don't, and then you let science be science. I'm more of a fan of that.

Thomas Westbrook: Specifically, is there a reason why the Habiru can't be the Hebrews and why do they keep latching on to this idea?

Dr. Robert Cargill: We have the Habiru mentioned for six, seven, eight hundred years. And they're of mixed ethnic origin. So, we don't know what the word means, if it means like "dusty ones" or precisely what it means, but they're mentioned all over the place. It's not like the Hyksos. The Hyksos are referred to, we know that they ruled Egypt. They were Semitic people, they ruled Egypt for a hundred-year period, and people have tried to make them to use them to explain how Joseph could become number two in Egypt. It's not like that.

The other thing with the Habiru is they're trying to make it the word "Hebrew." So the letters, Habiru, I've got a different theory on that. I think the word Hebrew is much later from across the, it's the word that we get much later. This Hebrew and Abiru has basically been done away with. But every once in a while, these old theories that have been done away with continue to resurrect. Same thing with Jericho, right? With the evidence of Kathleen Kenyon. Jericho was already destroyed by the time that they would have come into the land, but every once in a while someone comes in and says, "No, no, no, no, no, see because of this here." So you still get these Hyksos claims, these Habiru claims, but we don't have any good archaeological evidence for the Exodus. We don't have any good archaeological evidence for the Joseph narrative. We have the receipts of the people who built the pyramids and we have the archaeological evidence of the Canaanites and the pottery continuation there in Canaan. The people who became the Israelites were Canaanites, and to the best of our knowledge, it looks like they created, crafted a nice foundation story from the stories that were handed down to them.

Thomas Westbrook: So we've looked at outright forgery, unprovenanced artifacts that allow apologists to fill in the blanks, or even provenanced artifacts that sometimes will be stretched far beyond what the data allows them to interpret. What are the concrete institutional safeguards though within archaeology, whether it's peer review, stratigraphic documentation, open data, that make large-scale fraud or sustained outreach difficult? And where do you think these safeguards are weakest and could stand to be strengthened?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Good question. Peer review is always a good one. Peer review is the oldest one. A scholar will make a claim or a discovery, but before they can publish in a credible journal, they've got to send it out and the editor of that publication will send it to other credible scholars for review. It's usually two, and it's usually blind, so those scholars don't know who wrote the article and they will say, "Oh, this is a good claim, a valid claim," or not and "don't publish this." There are problems with peer review, there have always been problems with peer review. Often you can figure out, just based on the claim and if you know the field well, you can suspect who's publishing something. You may or may not like that person, and so you might not want to approve an article based on that.

The other thing is peer review is often used to, let's say, guard certain ideas. So that peer reviewer might, and shouldn't do this, but might say, "No, don't publish this because that goes against their personal view." Even though it's a perfectly well-written article and it's a great theory and it takes into account new evidence. Because it goes against what they think, they might say, "No, don't publish this." And so peer review is not perfect, but it is kind of the standard way that we as scholars assess whether something is worth publishing or not.

Now, because we now live in a world where you and I can make videos and talk directly to the public, another way of doing it is via blogs or via YouTube. And I can make a claim as a scholar and I can say, "What do you think?" and they can within a day respond to this. The physics world does this all the time with a device called "arXiv." So they'll make a discovery, and while they're still writing their paper, they can put a draft or a preliminary up on this arXiv and then all of the other scientific community can start, "Oh, yeah, we like this." It's like a Reddit thing, right? Thumbs up, thumbs down. And basically publishing it to arXiv is like publishing it, even though the paper hasn't come out yet. It's a great system.

These are good things. I believe in peer review, I think it's a good one. The other thing is conferences. You go to an academic conference and you present a paper and other credible scholars, and this is where the graduate students have to learn not to be scared, not to be afraid. You always want some senior scholar to stand up and say, "I like what you've done, but you ought to consider this." And then you're always terrified when the John Collinses or the Larry Schiffmans or the Jodi Magnesses come up and start challenging what you have. And you're like, "Yes, I will look into that." But this is how you present your data to other learned people and it comes back. That's how it should work.

Going back to the Mount Ebal inscription, they found this thing, then they made a video and made a website and went straight to the public knowing, knowing, that the academic community was going to laugh them out of the building. And that's why they did what they did. If you're bypassing peer review, or if you're bypassing even the arXiv, or if you're bypassing "Hey, here's what I think, what do you think? Give me your feedback." I wrote an article in "Aramaic Studies" on a verse from a Targum that started out as a blog: "Here's what I think," and I had many scholars respond on the blog and I took that feedback and I worked that into the article. Then I sent it off for peer review and then it got published.

So, there are different ways to get feedback from credible people and then turn it into good scholarship. There are many different ways to do this. What we need to do, and there was a group that met at Duke University back in 2009 maybe, that met at Duke University, this is Eric and Carol Meyers put together this group, that basically brought together scholars that said, "We have got to start, we have to put together a way to combat pseudo-archaeology." We were getting killed; the academic community, especially archaeologists, couldn't keep up with all of the crazy archaeological claims that were being made. "We found the route of the Exodus. We found the nails of the cross." And they were going straight to Discovery Channel or History Channel, this was before I was doing all my work with History Channel. One of the things that got me into working with History Channel so much was I would say, "Hey, I'd love to come on and refute this," and that's what I've been doing ever since.

So some of my colleagues will go make Instagram videos or TikTok videos or YouTube videos. I would go work on television, other people would work on blogs, and we all kind of made our names or had our little niches trying to combat this over time. And then as we developed as scholars, we were able to help contribute. But we all work together; we all know each other, we all work together. The common good or the greater good is at the end of the day, we want there to be good scholarship. Dan McClellan is this unicorn, right? He's out there and he's debunking things and he's doing this wonderful work. But we've worked together since we were grad students. One of the goals is to get this information out there and combat it.

I work within the framework of a big-ten R1 research institution. So, I'm working within the confines of a university, I teach my classes, but I also get to go out on these television shows and get to contribute there. Others will go out on blogs, others will go out on YouTube and do these things. Mark Goodacre is another colleague of mine who used to do this "NT Pod," which he's now bringing onto YouTube. There are a lot of scholars that are really making the effort to combat bad scholarship online. And I appreciate what you're doing because this is part of it, you need good people with big audiences who are willing either to address these things or to bring people in to talk about these things. The more people have access to good scholarship, the better the world's going to be.

Thomas Westbrook: I completely agree. I've been doing this for about 10 years now full-time, and I don't just focus on history. I have probably the biggest series debunking psychic fraud and faith-healing scams. A lot of these faith healers, they come in, they'll pack out a stadium, and then behind them there's a trail of body bags, a mountain high of people who stopped taking their cancer medication. So I've been coming through and pushing back against a lot of this. But one of my obsessions has been the formation of early religion, how much of it is historical, how much of it is not, the psychology of belief. Religious studies aside from theology, more focused on the cultural context from which these emerge and the science behind it. I'm actually in the process of applying for a Master's in archaeology, with applications going out to several universities. Part of my reason for going this route is that while I am obsessed with this topic and I find myself buried in archaeological papers and I love the material, I regularly hit a wall where, unless you're within these academic circles, a lot of these journals are either not open access or if they're open access, their peer review is either nonexistent or shoddy. And so just getting access to a lot of these papers legally is either going to cost you an arm and a leg or it's just going to be outside of the reach of the average person. I see that as one of these hindrances to people actually knowing the scholars' arguments that they're making. So, I find work like yours invaluable where you're actually kind of helping to bridge that gap between the scholars and the general public. So, thank you for what you're doing.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Well, I appreciate that and thank you for what you're doing. I'm actually moving more from the archaeology more toward the general, let's explain some of this stuff to a broader public. But I did field archaeology for a while, did the scrolls, but I'm finding myself being drawn to some other things. Jordan Jones, my grad student who's now finished and he's now doing a lot of these interviews, he loves bringing in these scholars talking about their latest research and basically helping the public understand this. Especially if you can't log in, you have to pay $45. I have a problem with publishers that charge an arm and a leg for these books; it's prohibitive to the public. Whereas YouTube channels, public scholarship, things that you're doing, things that we're doing, this makes this scholarship available. And again, I've mentioned Dan and I mentioned Mark Goodacre, and this is why I like working with History Channel, this is why I like working with groups that will take scholarship and make it something that's digestible to the public. It's not dumbing it down. It's responsible scholarship that makes it available to the non-specialist and I think that's important. Because if we're not doing it as scholars, as learned people who are doing this all the time, then all they're going to get it from is the people claiming, "Hey, look at this fishing weight, this actually proves that all these scholars are wrong." And there's got to be somebody standing up for scholarship to the public. So, what you're doing is great. I have big-time problems with faith healers and these guys, so thank you for going out and doing that. I try to stay in my lane pretty much, but good grief.

Thomas Westbrook: As much as I will acknowledge where my own expertise is lacking, and it very much is lacking, I think that one area that I've sort of thrown off the shackles, and I realize I can bump into Dunning-Kruger and everything, but it's not worrying so much about whether if I make a claim that is grounded in the general academic consensus. I know that there's probably a reason, there's probably a good reason, and I will go and I'll bury myself in the literature for a month or two, learn all the ins and outs, and when I have those "aha" moments, I just take that and translate it to the public. These aren't necessarily my own original ideas, but it's a way to bridge that gap and to communicate that. But if one of our readers sees tomorrow a viral claim about a new Bible discovery or a headline that says that some artifact proves the Exodus or "this inscription comes directly from King David" or something like that, what is the single most important question that they should ask before taking it seriously?

Dr. Robert Cargill: The question they should ask is: Is this too good to be true? Skepticism is good. It's a good thing. We are natural-born skeptics. All of us are. Anytime somebody says something to, "Hey, I caught a fish this big," it's good to be skeptics. The problem is that we are taught, and whether it's a First Amendment thing or whether it's because a lot of us do have specific beliefs, we are taught that it's bad to challenge people's beliefs. You're not supposed to challenge people's beliefs. We are taught that religious beliefs are exempt for some reason from skepticism. So if I make this claim, you're going to get an avalanche of bad press and emails and people are going to wag their finger if you challenge that. But it's supposed to be challenged. I say all the time to my class: If God is who he says he is and the Bible is what it purports to be, it can stand some hard questions. If it can't do that, then it's not what it claims to be.

So, anytime somebody says anything else, is it too good to be true? So let's ask that same question. Let's subject this particular object to the very same rigorous testing that we subject anything else to. If a politician stands up and makes a claim, the other side is going to say, "Yeah, right," and then they're going to look for everything they can do to debunk it. And if they can't debunk it, then they're going to be like, "Oh, I hate to give it to him, but maybe that one thing that he said is true." And this is how we as scholars treat the claims made in the Bible. So I always say, it's not that "the Bible makes one claim that we throw the whole thing out, baby with the bathwater," nor do I say what some other group says: "If the Bible says it, it has to be true and any archaeology that doesn't agree with the Bible is bad archaeology." It's somewhere in between. You take every single claim and you measure that. But it's good to be skeptical when somebody tells you something, at work, at home, is that true? And then you do your diagnostics. "Is this true? I want to give you $20 million if you just send me your bank account." Okay, is this true? Should I do this? Or should I just accept it on faith because it's not nice to challenge that? We don't do it anywhere else except with religion, and we should do it with religion too because if it's a true claim, it will come out in the wash.

Thomas Westbrook: Exactly. Truth withstands scrutiny. Dr. Cargill, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your work?

Dr. Robert Cargill: It's Bible and Archaeology on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, all of the socials. Jordan's doing a really good job with the site there; I come on there every once in a while and talk to them. You can always come sign up for a class at the University of Iowa. Working on a new show for History Channel, and of course all of the reruns of all the shows I've done are on Discovery, CNN, Netflix, Hulu, and of course History Channel. So if you dig around a little bit, BobCargill.com you can always find me.

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