(After my last two monster posts, I think
from here on out I’ll just post my comments on television series as I finish
them, rather than save up all my thoughts on everything for one long post.)
I was
cautious when I saw this in the DVD shops by the riverside. I’m - generally - interested - in - programs - about -
the - Bible, but when you pick up an unknown documentary,
you’ll never guaranteed any sort of quality.
Especially in this day and age when once reputable cable television
channels are making an industry of churning out documentary series on all sorts
of crazy conspiracy theories regarding bigfoot, aliens, or other crazy
supernatural theories.
Given a
subject with as many viewpoints as the Bible, you never know which way it will
go. Will we get the orthodox Christian
view, or the crazy New Age view, or the historical critical view?
The fact
that this series was produced by the BBC reassured me somewhat, so I decided to
give it a try. (Plus DVDs are so cheap
in Cambodia
that I’m encouraged to just take the gamble whenever I’m in doubt.)
Who Killed Jesus
Joshua and the Battle of Jericho
Joseph and his Multi-coloured Coat
The Real Mary Magdalene
David and Goliath
Herod and the Bethlehem Massacre
The Disciples
The Revelation: The End of the World?
Peter the Rock
The series
wasn’t as bad as it could be, but it still skewed toward
credulity and largely ignored the scholarly evidence. Although admittedly some episodes were worse
than others in this regard.
I expected more from the BBC, but a
British friend told me that, despite their reputation, the BBC can actually be
just as guilty of sensationalist documentaries as anyone.
I’m also
reminded of what David Starkey, in the interview accompanying the audio book of Monarchy, said about the
evolution of history programs on British TV.
David Starkey said that at one time, it was common to have on several
different historians who represented several different points of view, and to
let them debate the history as if it were Crossfire. Audiences, however, never warmed to this,
because the average person wanted to hear history as a story. So the trend recently has been to just choose
one narrative and not confuse the audience with conflicting points of view.
This series
seems to embody that principle. Each
episode seems to just pick a point of view and stick with it, and then try and
smooth all the other facts into line.
Interestingly,
though, it’s not the same point of view for each episode.
The episode
on the trial of Jesus takes the Gospel narratives at face value, and doesn’t
really bother with the many historical problems posed by the Biblical account
or the contradictions within the Bible itself (see Bart Ehrman, Robin Lane Fox,
or Dale Martin at the above links for historical problems with the trial of
Christ as presented in the Gospels.)
The episode
on Mary Magdalene is even worse. It
pursues a Dan Brown style conspiracy theory about how Mary’s
prominent role in Christ’s ministry was deliberately
left out of the Gospels. The entire
basis for this claim was apocryphal material from the second century or later, which any reputable historian should have flagged as completely
unreliable. But the BBC presented it as
credible historical testimony.
The episode
on Peter also relied heavily on unhistorical apocryphal material.
The episode
on Herod the Great and the Bethlehem
massacre starts out by acknowledging all the historical problems with the story. (It’s not mentioned in any other ancient
source, Josephus never mentions it, and even within the Bible it’s only mentioned
in Matthew, and is completely left out of Luke’s birth narrative.) But then, after acknowledging these problems,
they spend the rest of the episode examining Herod’s character, and then at the
end of the episode allow Christian apologists to claim that the incident has
historical validity because it seems like the kind of thing Herod would
do. (Of course it seems like the kind of
thing Herod would do! That’s why the
story was fabricated in the first place! No one was going to fabricate an
incident that was completely out of character for Herod.)
The episode
on Jericho has
the opposite trajectory. It starts out
by entertaining various theories which might prove the battle of Jericho has historical
validity. And then, suddenly in the last
20 minutes, the documentary suddenly reverses course, and finally reveals the
latest scholarship that disproves everything the episode had been talking about
until the point.
They reveal
that actually the battle of Jericho and the conquest of Canaan couldn’t
possibly be historical because no outside historical source mentions the
conquest of Canaan; all of the archaeological evidence contradicts the account
in Joshua and shows no evidence of these cities being destroyed at that time;
archaeological evidence, and DNA evidence, all seem to show that if you go back far
enough in history the Israelites were originally Canaanites themselves, not an
outside invading force. (And while I’m
on the subject, linguistic evidence—the fact that ancient Hebrew seems to be a
dialect of ancient Canaanite—also supports this view, although the program
doesn’t mention this.)
So the
conquest of Canaan, and the Exodus from Egypt, are not supported as
historical events by current research.
(The authors at the links above also support this view.)
But then
the episode on Joseph spends the whole time grasping at some very sketchy
straws to try and prove that there might be some historical evidence for Joseph’s
time in Egypt.
But you can’t
really have both. If there was no
conquest of Canaan, and no Exodus from Egypt, then how can you argue for a
historical Joseph?
Apparently
no one was over-seeing this documentary series to make sure that the episodes
didn’t contradict each other.
The episode
on David was interesting. It was an
interesting exercise in taking the Biblical text largely at face value, but
then trying to read behind it to seek out what’s not being talked about. (For example they conclude from the speed with
which Absalom’s rebellion took off that David must actually have been a much
hated ruler in large areas of the country.)
I have a
few nitpicks about this episode—I’m not sure the Goliath account should be
taken as historical—but I’ll leave that alone for now.
My biggest
complaint, however, isn’t so much with the accuracy of this documentary series
as with the pacing. Each question is
teased out why too long before the answer is revealed, and I barely had the
patience for it in the end. I would have
preferred facts and information coming at a faster pace.
All in all,
I wouldn’t really recommend anyone go out of their way to track down this
series, but if you ever catch it on TV, you might as well watch an episode or
two.
Link of the Day
2 comments:
Re: "History as debate," that's one aspect of Ken Burns' style of docu-history that really grates on me after a while. His histories tend to become quite placid and easy to digest without that flint of disagreement. I imagine he'd consider himself a humanist historian, but he swings too close to sentimentalism and nostalgia for my tastes. But it gets people watching, that's for sure.
I have to admit, I actually kind of like Ken Burns documentaries. But this style works better the less you know about the topic. If you happen to know that the topic is a lot more controversial than it's being presented as, then it begins to grate very quickly.
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