AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Dear John

“What,” you may ask, “about the earth-shaking, mind-bending, front-page story that finally somebody has discovered the cave of John the Baptist?”

Caveat: I have limited Net access (take that, Wired!), and haven’t done extensive follow-up work. This is just a first reaction to the sensational story.

I think that this sort of story is what helped turn me off archaeology; this, and the weeks of grimy labor sifting sand under the hot sun retrieving nothing but potsherds. (For my vast audience of archaeologists — I know you’re out there — I admire the determination that sustains you through work for which I just have no patience.)

This story reflects several problematic tendencies in the popular (biblical) archaeological market. We get their textual siblings over in literary historiography, so I’m not casting stones only at the other interpreters. But there have been heaps of hermits (I just spent way too much time trying to devise a collective noun for anchorites) in the Judean wilderness about whom we know absolutely nothing. We happen to know a little about one of them: John. So when an archaeologist finds a hermit’s cave that fits what we might expect John’s cave to have looked like, someone draws the inference that it actually was John’s cave.

The Bible narratives have a power over the imagination that tempts people to lead way beyond what the evidence offers. That’s a reason I assign Egeria’s Pilgrimage to my Early Church History class; fourth-century pilgrim Egeria keeps encountering the exact place where this or that biblical story took place, such that after a few stops on the pilgrimage even the most credulous student begins to wonder how on earth anyone knew that this is where Moses struck the rock, or where elijah heard the still small voice. In the literary study of the Bible, you can see readers trying to associate the Letter to the Hebrews (for instance) with people whose names we know from the New Testament, rather than allowing that one of countless unknown early Christian authors might have written it. Given “evidence” over here, and “possible answer” over there, people want badly to connect them and eliminate the uncertainty that dogs inconclusive data. Plus, more people will buy a book or watch a TV special is it says “Cave of John the Baptist” than if it says “Cave of Ascetic With Lustration Pools.”

But that’s a kind of argumentation that we would never accept in other spheres. It’s all circumstantial evidence, no positive evidence (as far as I’ve seen); and though we wouldn’t expect to see a stone at the entrance of the cave saying “937 Hermit Drive, Home of John the Baptist,” we have no particular reason to think that this was John’s own actual cave as opposed to the cave of some other hermit who might have looked like John, or a cave that some post-Johannine Baptists used for memorializing John. “Man with wild hair and carrying a staff”? Must be John the Baptist!

Of course, neither of those makes for attention-grabbing headlines: “Cave of Hermit Who Looked Like John the Baptist Found” (observe that this more accurate headline doesn’t exclude the possibility that it was John’s cave). Or, “Cave Shrine To John The Baptist Discovered.” They aren’t startling, because they’re probably truer.

Caveat redux: There’s probably some unreported, more-decisive evidence about this case, such that my specific jeremiad against premature closure in archaeological reasoning makes me look an arrant fool. If I’m wrong about this one, I’m demonstrably right about a stack of other examples that have a moment’s duration as Biblical Evidence, then fall into discredit.

Later: Mark Goodacre covers the news, with fuller examination of various reports and analyses. By the way, he is not the Mark who wrote Mark’s Gospel, nor John Mark who was supposed to have accompanied Paul.

Posted by AKMA at August 19, 2004 08:43 AM | TrackBack