This really is bizarre. Was it an April Fool's joke? Randi is too clever to fall for this kind of pseudohistory and conspiracy woo surely?
....
I'll ask Tim ONeil who is very much upo to date on this controversy over to comment.
I'm glad Jerome asked me to comment on this, since we have had this "Nazareth never existed" nonsense come up many times over on the RichardDawkins.net forum. This is a classic example of some weak pseudo scholarship being accepted by people who should be more sceptical simply because it appeals to them. For some fellow atheists to do this is a worry, but not too surprising. But for someone like Randi to accept this silliness and to actively promote it is quite disturbing. He's precisely the kind of person that should have a nose for bogus misinformation being peddled by a crank, not someone actively advertising it.
For those who don't know me from elsewhere, I'm an atheist, secular humanist and sceptic of many years standing. I'm also a keen amateur historian with a degree in history and about 25 years of reading and research in ancient and medieval history under my belt, much of that to do with the origins and early history of Christianity. I learned how to discern "flim flam" (to use Randi's phrase) from real scholarship largely thanks to books and articles by people like Randi and Carl Sagan and am very grateful for the "baloney detection kit" these guys, along with my university lecturers and post-graduate mentors, gave me. That's why it's disturbing to see Randi supporting something that is so clearly hogwash.
Step One in sorting baloney from real scholarship is to begin with the proponent of the idea in question; in this case one Rene Salm. It's useful to look at who they are and, more importantly, what credentials, expertise and training they have. If this critique of the work of archaeologists was being done, for example, by a fellow archaeologist we'd have some justification to feel we were on safe ground. But Rene Salm is
not an archaeologist, has no qualifications, training or experience in archaeology and has never so much as got his boots dirty in a dig. In fact, the only information available on Mr Salm is that he is a composer and former piano teacher.
So my Baloney Detection Alarm Bell is already starting to ring. Sceptics are used to seeing this phenomenon: a self-appointed, self-educated amateur with a radical theory here to tell us that he knows better than the experts. We see this with Creationism and various other kinds of crank and lunatic. Of course, just because Mr Salm is a piano teacher and not an archaeologist doesn't in himself make him wrong. So let's see what else we can use to determine if we are dealing with a legitimate piece of research here.
Step Two is to have a look at who is publishing the writer in question. If we see they are published by an academic press with a strong reputation for rigor and a peer review process, we have some assurance (not total, of course) that what we are looking at is mainstream work which, even if it isn’t by a professional scholar or credentialed expert, has at least been carefully scrutinized by people who are these things and given the thumbs up. Rene Salm fails this test as well – his book is published by the American Atheist Press. That’s a bit better than most of the works of this kind, which are usually published by vanity presses or print-on-demand self publishing services, but it’s not exactly the OUP either.
Step Three is to see if the writer in question is presenting an objective contribution to scholarship or has some kind of agenda, ideological stance or other ulterior motive. Yet again, Salm fails this test as well. Salm, it seems, has his own private theories about the origins of Christianity and its supposed links to Buddhism, having written a long online article on "Buddhist and Christian Parallels" back in 2004. He also says that he is now working on a sequel to his book on the non-existence of Nazareth which he describes as "a new account of Christian origins that will investigate suppressed evidence of Gnostic, Judean, and Essene roots of Christianity." The claim that he has uncovered "suppressed evidence" is something else that should set any sceptic's Kook Theorist Alarm jangling.
Step Four is to see how the writer's ideas have been received in the relevant field or fields and see how many relevant scholars they have been able to convince. As you've probably guessed by now, Salm fails this one too. He's managed to convince
no archaeologists that the accepted idea that Nazareth was inhabited in the Second Temple Period and
no archaeologist holds that opinion to him either. His position has zero acceptance in the field in which he's trying to dabble.
So, by this stage, many of you could be be wondering why the hell Randi is endorsing this guy. Could it be that, despite his complete lack of credentials, training, experience and expertise in archaeology, despite the fact his book has not been peer reviewed, despite his clear ulterior agenda and despite the total non-acceptance of his position by anyone in a position to judge its viability, he still has a solid case?
Well, actually, no.
Salm is a dabbler who started out with his own conclusion - that Nazareth didn't exist - inspired by his personal fringe theories about the common origins of Christianity and Buddhism and who then set out to nitpick the work of real professionals in the field in an attempt to show that they are all wrong and he - the piano teacher - knows better than they do. By nitpicking at the work of the real archaeologists who have done field work on the site, arguing against their dating of structures and finds and redating some of their material Salm has managed to construct a thesis whereby Nazareth was inhabited in the Hellenistic Period, uninhabited in the Roman Period up to the Second Century (ie conveniently jumping the period of Jesus) and was then suddenly inhabited again from the Second Century.
A central plank of his case depends on the dating of Roman Period tombs on the site, which he claims date to later than the experts believe. Unfortunately for Salm the most recent and most comprehensive work on the typology of these types of tombs flatly contradicts his amateurish attempts at dating them - Rachel Hachlili’s
Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices and Rites in the Second Temple Period (2005) is now the standard work on these types of burials and Hachlili's classification identifies several of the Nazareth tombs as being clearly "Type 1" style, ie from the First Century AD.
Salm also tries to pour cold water on the dating of pottery from the site and makes the remarkable claim that "two- and three-inch fragments of pottery vessels are a precarious basis indeed for fixing the type and date of an artefact" (p. 125); an assertion that professional archaeologists would regard with mild amusement.
These two points are key, because Salm's attempt at dating all the material in the tombs to "after the middle of the first century CE" depends on his use of an earlier typology for dating kokhim tombs, which allows him to dismiss most of the evidence that contradicts his thesis at one swipe, since most of it comes from those tomb sites. As he says gleefully "(t)his simple maneuver alone removes 90% of the evidence alleged for the putative town of Nazareth at the turn of the era!" Any finds from these tombs, he argues, which
could be dated to the early First Century - and there are juglets and oil lamps that can be - must, according to Salm, be dated to the later end of their range. Except the typology outlined by Hachlili and followed by actual archaeologists contradicts this and Salm's thesis collapses in a heap.
Salm has been banging on about this stuff online for years, peddling it first on various online fora, then on his nazarethmyth.info website and finally, thanks to the American Atheist Press, in this book. Except no archaeologist agrees with him. Naturally he (and, weirdly, Randi) attributes this to some vast Christian conspiracy. Strangely, he never explains clearly how this conspiracy has managed to entangle the Israeli Antiquities Authority or Jewish archaeologists like Nurit Feig and Zvi Yavnor.
Nor can Salm's conspiracy claims explain the recent roasting he received at the hands of Dr Ken Dark of the University of Reading, an archaeologist and specialist in the Early Byzantine Period who has been excavating in Nazareth for the last five years. Dark reviewed Salm's book in the latest edition of the
Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society (Volume 26, 2008, pp. 140-146) which, despite being couched in the polite terms of British academe, is scathing in its criticism of an amateur trying to second-guess real experts. Dark concludes:
(D)espite initial appearances, this is not a well-informed study and ignores much evidence and important published work of direct relevance. The basic premise is faulty, and Salm’s reasoning is often weak and shaped by his preconceptions. Overall, his central argument is archaeologically unsupportable.
(Dark, p. 145)
So not only is there not an archaeologist on the planet who has come to the same conclusions as Salm, but his work has been reviewed by real archaeologists and found baseless.
Which brings me back to the question: what the hell is Randi doing supporting this amateur crank? We have qualified archaeologists, many of them Jewish and all of them professionals publishing in peer reviewed journals, and Randi expects us to believe a
piano teacher over them? Seriously? In the video above he makes a great deal of the silly Christian tourism traps and pilgrimage bait at Nazareth and then makes out that the non-experts associated with them are the only ones who uphold the idea Nazareth was inhabited in Jesus' time; totally ignoring all the Jewish archaeologists who believe the same thing. He scorns the fundie Christians associated with the Nazareth Village Resort circus saying that "none of them (are) archaeologists", ignoring the rather pertinent facts that Salm is not an archaeologist either and that
no actual archaeologists agree with him. None.
I never thought I'd see the day that Randi - the smiter of amateur cranks - would be championing a kook like Rene Salm. I guess it shows that what is and isn't "flim flam" all depends on your biases.
Although, I found something you may have read before:
