The Bible’s Most Mysterious Figure and the Scribes Who Rewrote Him with Dr. Robert Cargill

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today my guest is Dr. Bob Cargill. Dr. Bob, how are you doing today?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Doing well, Johnny. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Ova: I really appreciate your time today. This is going to be a fascinating conversation.

Dr. Robert Cargill: I'm hoping so. I like doing this. I love public scholarship, and I appreciate the invitation to talk about things we both love to talk about.

Johnny Ova: I really appreciate that. We match today too. I'm glad you got that memo to make sure we match. It's a must. It's top priority.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Wardrobe was busy today.

Johnny Ova: All right, our conversation is going to be a lot about Melchizedek today, so let's jump right in. Melchizedek shows up twice in the Hebrew Bible and once in the New Testament, and yet entire priesthoods and theological systems have been built on top of him. Who is this figure, and why does he matter so much?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Somebody ought to write a book about this guy, right? Melchizedek is like Enoch in this regard. Because he's only mentioned once or twice, depending on how you interpret Psalm 110, and because he's not defined, it allows for him to be redefined. The way I put it to my students: imagine Boba Fett or Hammerhead in the early Star Wars movies. If you have a character like Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, who is defined a lot, you can't really do much with them in later movies. But a character who makes one appearance, you can do many different things with. They were there, they disappeared, and then you can write The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian and all these things in the fan fiction later. Melchizedek makes one appearance in Genesis 14. Whoosh in, whoosh out. So my first book asked, how did he come to be? How did we get Melchizedek in Genesis 14? We also look a little at whether that's the same individual in Psalm 110. And then of course there's an entire reception history. By the time you get to the New Testament, you get him in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and by then he has an entire tradition.

Dr. Robert Cargill: What's interesting, and this is the book I'm working on now, getting ready to send off, the sequel if you will, is the reception history. Many different Jewish and Christian groups interpret Melchizedek differently. They do different things with Melchizedek and leverage him to their advantage. That's what makes him so fascinating. Different groups use Melchizedek to achieve their various goals.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. That goes right into my second question, which is about a claim your book makes: that Melchizedek was originally the king of Sodom and not the king of Shalem. Could you walk us through that?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Sure. I certainly wasn't the first person to propose it, but what I wanted to do was provide the mechanics for how it came about. Not everybody agrees with this, but I think it's right based on the redaction of the text. Let me walk through it quickly. Genesis 14 is two stories. The first is a story about Chedorlaomer, a king who comes in with a group of other kings from Mesopotamia on a campaign through Canaan. Then there are other kings who are going to defend themselves. They're probably vassal kingdoms that were paying tribute and one day, as many kingdoms do, decided to stop. So the overlords say, you can't do that, and they come down to sack them all. You've got five kings versus four kings. I think there's a lot of good evidence supporting this campaign as a historical one. To whatever extent the Bible accurately reflects it, compared with the archaeological evidence we have, it seems pretty close. Then you get a verse that says, and then Abram the Hebrew. We know he's a Hebrew, right? But Abram the Hebrew. So it looks like a second story has been inserted that ties this campaign into the Abram and Lot narrative.

Dr. Robert Cargill: They're going to sack Sodom and Gomorrah and these kings down there, and Lot, of course, is living in Sodom. When they come down to pillage and punish these cities for rebelling, they take Lot with them, and that's the hook that gets Abram involved. He has to go rescue Lot. So he goes up, rescues Lot, and returns all these people and all the goods Chedorlaomer took back to the king of Sodom. That's the story. Now, my argument is this. The text clearly says the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah both fell in battle. Even though it's clearly two stories woven together, the story has been redacted. So if the king of Sodom died, who is the king back there in Sodom? Naturally, if you're redacting the story, there has to be some other king. I argue that if you look at the text and its grammar, and this is a very technical grammatical argument in the book, it's clear that in the second half of Genesis 14 the king of Sodom was Melchizedek. That was fine for a while. But Melchizedek comes out and blesses Abram, and he blesses him by El Elyon, a known deity up north in Phoenicia. We have other inscriptions that say bless you by El, sometimes El and Elyon, sometimes El Elyon.

Dr. Robert Cargill: That becomes a title for the Hebrew God. El, the deity we know from the Canaanite pantheon, becomes just another word for Elohim, for God. And Elyon, which was a deity, becomes the word for God most high, another name for God. So he says, I bless you by El Elyon, and a verse later they put the divine name, Yahweh El Elyon. So all of a sudden you have the king of Sodom blessing Abram, and we don't want that. There's another thing happening too. Shalem is a known town in the biblical tradition, up near Shechem. I make the argument in a different chapter that Shalem is a known town in the north. And there are really no stories in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, that mention Jerusalem, unless Shalem is a reference to Jerusalem. So they develop the tradition that Shalem is just short for Jerusalem. But when you look at all the archaeological evidence, going back to the Amarna tablets and the Execration Texts, Jerusalem is always a long, multisyllabic name.

Dr. Robert Cargill: So I argue Melchizedek was originally the king of Sodom, and they changed a couple of letters to make him king of Shalem, which makes him a different king. Instead of the king of Sodom coming out and saying, thank you for rescuing my people, just give me the people, you keep the goods, and I bless you by El Elyon, they've separated those into two people. Now it looks like the king of Sodom comes out, then Melchizedek appears out of nowhere, blesses Abram, there's a tithe, and we don't know which direction the tithe goes. Then Melchizedek disappears, and Abram continues the conversation with the king of Sodom. You get this really weird situation. Whereas if you look at the grammar and understand it's the same person, the story makes a whole lot more sense. But because of the way the text was redacted and received, once you get into the Christian tradition you have this whole idea of Melchizedek having no genealogy, no father, no mother, a kind of precursor to Jesus. That's the general thesis of the book.

Johnny Ova: That's fascinating. So my question would be, if the scribes changed Sodom to Shalem, what was their theological motivation? What were they protecting?

Dr. Robert Cargill: There's this odd phenomenon: Abram really likes the city of Sodom for some reason. First you have the story where the men are going down to Sodom, and they say, shall we tell Abram what we're going to do? And Abram says, don't do that. If I can find 50 people, will you spare it? How about 45? Would you believe 40? It sounds like Maxwell Smart. He's negotiating with these figures, one of whom is very clearly God, and he says, how about if I can find 10 people, will you spare the city? So Abram is really trying to spare Sodom. Then you have the tradition where he goes down and rescues Lot, and the king of Sodom comes out and has this nice conversation with him, and he gets blessed by Melchizedek. The king says, just give me the people, you keep all the stuff. And Abram says, no, nobody's going to say you made me rich. You keep it. I did this because I'm a righteous dude. So Abram, for some reason, really likes Sodom, which was fine until it wasn't. Until you have the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Then you look back and say, man, he's not only trying to save this city, he got blessed by it.

Dr. Robert Cargill: I have a chart in my book of all the references to Sodom. Either it was destroyed by fire, or it was an incredibly sinful place, with the exception of where Abram is mentioned in Genesis 14. So they needed to distance the patriarch, to distance Abram, from Sodom and Gomorrah. One thing I think they did was take Melchizedek, and the blessing, out of there, so Abram isn't blessed by the king of Sodom. That's step one. The way they did it was by making him king of Shalem. But Shalem was a known place up north, so then you have to make Shalem Jerusalem. And there's another thing that happens throughout the Bible. I don't know if you remember Ross Perot. I'm a little older. He used to say there's a giant sucking sound. That's what he said about NAFTA.

Johnny Ova: Of course I remember Ross Perot.

Dr. Robert Cargill: With Jerusalem there's always this giant sucking sound, where all these traditions, whether it's the Garden of Eden or Mount Moriah, get tied to Jerusalem. The sacrifice of Isaac and all these things end up associated with Jerusalem. So the Shalem tradition gets tied to Jerusalem because the priests want the tradition that even Abraham tithed to Melchizedek in Jerusalem, so you too should be tithing to Jerusalem. But grammatically, I think the tithe went the other way. The king is saying, you keep all the stuff, in fact I'll give you more, I just want the people. Thank you for saving my people. So he gave the goods to Abram. English translations are often not true to the text, because they say Abram tithed. The Hebrew doesn't have a proper noun there. It just says, and he gave him. And if you look at the syntax, the vav-consecutive imperfect, the subject never changes. We're clearly talking about the king of Sodom doing the tithing. So I think they wanted to separate the patriarch from the king of Sodom. But then they wanted it to be Jerusalem, so they had to bring it back to Jerusalem.

Johnny Ova: We just finished a teaching series called Words. I took some of the popular Scriptures and broke them down to show people in the church that when they say, I want a word-for-word translation of the Bible, there is no word-for-word translation. It's impossible. We don't have English words that fully grasp the fullness of these ancient Hebrew and Greek words. So translators take some liberties to do their best to explain what was meant, or in this case, to push something else.

Dr. Robert Cargill: That is exactly correct. I get asked all the time, what's the best translation? I say, come to the University of Iowa, take Greek, take Hebrew, take Aramaic, and learn to read these texts. The reason English translations differ is that different committees from different denominations and groups want to interpret certain things differently to match their theological dispositions. A lot of times it's not that there's no English word for something. There are idioms and phrases in the Hebrew Bible where you have to supply English words, which means saying things the Hebrew doesn't say, in order to make the idiom work. Or in the case of Melchizedek, the tradition by the first century was that Abraham tithed to Melchizedek, so a lot of translations say Abram tithed to Melchizedek, even though the text doesn't say that. I like to point out to my students when I teach Hebrew that the text doesn't say what the English says. So be careful. But you're absolutely right, there's no word for word. Idioms get lost in translation. And it's not just English. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, didn't know what a lot of these words were or how to interpret a lot of this material. Sometimes they made up phrases. Often they just left sentences out, didn't translate them, and moved on to the next verse.

Johnny Ova: Real fascinating stuff. Let's go over to the Dead Sea Scrolls. I know you spent years studying them and the community at Qumran. For people who have heard the name but don't really understand what the scrolls are, what did we actually find in those caves, and why should it matter to anyone who cares about the Bible?

Dr. Robert Cargill: The Dead Sea Scrolls fundamentally changed the way we read the Bible. The documents fall into three categories. The first is the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible we have, by over a thousand years. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest actual copies of the Hebrew Bible we had were from the 11th century. Then all of a sudden you have copies a thousand years earlier. You can compare what we had with what we've now discovered and see a pretty faithful copying tradition. Ninety-nine percent of the letters are right on the money. These were people of faith who took copying the word of God seriously and copied it very faithfully, letter for letter. But as scholars, of course, we want to see the 1 percent that was different. With the translation committees we talked about, a lot of times there's a hole in a manuscript, or we're not sure what the original said. Now you have much earlier copies and can say, that's what it actually said. So we tell people, make sure you buy a Bible published after the 1950s, after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, because the apparatus at the bottom of the page, all that fine print that says some of the earliest manuscripts say this or that, now takes the scrolls into account. We used to think this, but now we know this word is that, because we have 15 copies of the same book of Isaiah or whatever.

Dr. Robert Cargill: That's the first category. The second category is books that didn't make it into the Bible but that we already knew about, books like Enoch and Jubilees. These were non-canonical, but for some reason the group at Qumran had lots of copies of them. Maybe they were part of their canon, part of their Bible. The third group is documents we had never seen before. They all seem congruent in their ideology and theology, sectarian and opposed to the temple Judaism in Jerusalem. Even though they were found in different caves, they talk about opposition to the temple priesthood, how to join this group, how we worship, what it meant, and how we interpret Scripture. That was really important. We know how the Christians interpreted expired prophecies, and we know how the rabbis interpreted Scripture and prophecy. Now you have a window into a group we didn't know about that interpreted Scripture differently. It opens a whole new world: Judaism really was diverse in the first century. The rabbis read it this way, the Christians that way, and this group, which most scholars associate with the Essenes, though we're not sure, as the best candidate, read it another way. It shows you the beautiful diversity of early Judaism.

Johnny Ova: For our listeners, who are new Christians interested in study, or skeptics interested in study: the books of 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon. What are these writings? Briefly explain them and what they reveal about what Second Temple Jews actually believed.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Sure. 1 Enoch and Jubilees, or portions of them, are attempts at rewriting the Bible. You might say, whoa, what do you mean, rewriting the Bible? The Bible gets rewritten within the Bible. If you read 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, and then open up 1 and 2 Chronicles, you're going to read essentially the same story. Chronicles was written later, but it tells the same story as Samuel and Kings. A lot of times it cleans it up, corrects things, adds things, or tells it a little differently. Many of the so-called contradictions in the Bible are just Chronicles changing a number from Samuel and Kings. It's a later retelling where they change a name or something, but it's basically the same story. We see it with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John too. They told the same story four times, and some details don't match up, but it's four tellings of the same story. They do it all the time within the Bible. Then there came a point, in the fifth, fourth, third centuries, where the editors, the redactors of the Bible, said, we're not going to touch this. We're not going to change the letters. They still did, but it became a pretty fixed text. And a lot of people said, we need to tell the story in a way people now can understand. Maybe write it in Aramaic, maybe give more detail.

Dr. Robert Cargill: So we get the Targumic tradition, where they render the text into Aramaic and every once in a while throw in a story or a commentary. Those are the Targums. But you also get complete rewrites. That's Jubilees and Enoch, and they're each trying to achieve something different. Enoch and Jubilees use a different calendar. They didn't like the calendar used by temple Judaism, the solar-lunar calendar. They didn't like the moon. The moon was too fickle, too feminine. They wanted a calendar based only on the sun. The sun comes up, goes down, it's reliable. Now, that calendar is wrong, and after a while you realize you're off a little, but they didn't care. So Jubilees retells the story of Genesis, the biblical story, on a different calendar, using jubilee years, 49 years, seven weeks of sevens. Enoch uses Genesis 6:1 to 4 as a jumping-off point: the sons of God who come down and have sex with earthly women and produce giants. We have this in many mythological traditions, especially the Greek tradition, where the gods have sex with humans and create giants. And they use it to address a problem with the flood story in Genesis 6 through 9.

Dr. Robert Cargill: If you read Genesis 6 in Hebrew, it says God regretted making humans, and his solution was, I'm just going to kill everybody and all the animals and start over. Fine, God gets to do what he wants, he's God. But later people said, I have an ethical problem with that. So when they wrote Enoch, they said, no, here's what happened. The sons of God came down and had sex with women, they created these giants, and the giants were eating all the resources on earth. When they ate up all the resources humans could eat, they began eating the humans. And God, in his wisdom, realized the only way to save mankind was to kill the giants. So he told Noah to build an ark, and he would flood the earth, and the flood would kill all the giants. Yes, it kills everybody else as well, but they were bad anyway. Then he saves humanity and starts over. So in Enoch, God floods the earth basically to save humankind, whereas in Genesis 6 he's punishing humans: I regret this. I like comparing it to fan fiction and Star Wars. You have plot holes in the Bible just like in Star Wars. What do you mean Luke Skywalker can blow up the Death Star with one shot from outside? Who designed this thing? Then you get Rogue One, and they say, no, he did it on purpose, it was all part of a plan.

Dr. Robert Cargill: That's what you get with these rewritings of the biblical text. With Jubilees and Enoch, they say, I know it looks bad here in the flood, but here's what actually happened. And while they're at it, they do it on a new calendar so it conforms to their group's faith tradition. The Genesis Apocryphon is another one, in Aramaic, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So you have a lot of these rewritten texts that were read alongside the biblical text, either as commentaries or as replacements, whole cloth.

Johnny Ova: It's fascinating. It just breaks boxes down. Rewriting the Scripture, retelling it. It comes back to people thinking God was up in heaven writing down these letters, putting them on a paper airplane, and throwing it down to be caught inside a book. When you explain to Christians that in the first century they weren't walking around with Bibles in their hands, that it was put together later, we should be taking a look at that. I'm obviously a pastor, a self-proclaimed Christian, and we don't look like first century Christians in the way we engage with the texts. I think it's a bubble where we assume we always had this. So honest study of what we're looking at is vital.

Dr. Robert Cargill: I agree, and I make this point at the end of my book, The Cities That Built the Bible. I like your paper airplane analogy. The Bible didn't just float down from heaven. The church existed before the Bible did. Faithful Jewish individuals who believed Jesus was the Messiah were venerating the Hebrew Scriptures, and they were writing to each other about Jesus, like Paul's letters. Maybe they wrote some accounts of Jesus' life. Maybe one church in Corinth had a letter, and Galatia and Ephesus had different letters. Then over time they said, I got this letter, let's swap, let's make copies, and they began to pull these together. Hundreds of years later they began to decide what they considered the Word of God, what they considered authoritative. We need to remember this process took centuries, and it was the church, people of faith, deciding which books would be in the Bible. The Bible didn't create the church, the church created the Bible. People of faith put this book together. They were still writing, still editing, still redacting. And once they decided on a canon, they said, this is what we believe, now let's hold true to it. But it was a long period of editing, redacting, deciding and arguing about what we believe, because there was so much diversity within the faith.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Christianity was never a single belief. Just like Judaism, there was always tremendous beauty and diversity in the early tradition, and I don't think it ever went away, even once they decided. That's why one place in the Bible says, sell all you own and give it to the poor, and another place says, if you don't work, you don't eat. There was always diversity of opinion within the text, and they preserved it all, in the Hebrew Bible too. There's something that speaks to everybody, because there was tremendous diversity in the early church and in early Judaism, and they canonized a lot of it.

Johnny Ova: Great points. We're going to hit two sides of a coin here. You served as editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, one of the most respected publications in the field, and you've also built a reputation for calling out fake and sensational archaeological claims. What are the most common types of bogus claims people fall for when it comes to the Bible and archaeology?

Dr. Robert Cargill: The claims people fall for most are usually the ones with the quickest answers, the ones that solve all the problems with one magic bullet. Somebody comes out and says, we found this thing, and it's going to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and that Hebrew is older than all the other languages, and you start ticking them off. It's going to prove all these archaeologists are wrong and everything my group has been saying is correct. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The reason those claims are so popular is that they play right into people's faith. The thing I have the biggest problem with is individuals who prey, P-R-E-Y, on the faith of honest people of faith, to get them to buy things, tickets or books or whatever, or to get them to believe something that's supposed to be in the realm of faith. This is where I really have a problem with apologists. Some things are supposed to be in the realm of faith. We don't have evidence. There is no physical evidence of Jesus. We don't have literary evidence outside the Bible for Jesus until the late first or early second century. He's very much a figure of faith. We don't have evidence outside the Bible for the patriarchs. These are things you either accept on faith or you don't.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Once you get down to the kings, David, Ahab, Omri, Hezekiah, we have all kinds of archaeological evidence, and a lot of it corroborates claims made in the Bible. I teach courses on this and I love doing it. But when people make pseudo-archaeological claims about the route of the Exodus, or about discoveries that are really Rorschach tests, that's where I push back, and I try to always do it on the merits of the argument. I really don't like it when people take advantage of people of faith by giving them something that's clearly not true, that clearly doesn't follow the rules of engagement, the rules of science and methodology, just because they want their name in the paper, or want people to give money to their organization, or come on their dig with them.

Johnny Ova: You see it a lot. It's the fight with truth. Even Jesus and Pontius Pilate: what is truth? The way I take that to heart is that people want their beliefs affirmed rather than getting their beliefs from what's true. So I definitely agree with you. When people know something isn't true and keep using it anyway, we see it all the time. I see it with all the end-times predictions. Every flood, earthquake and war, this is it. You roll your eyes. Then they write a book, make a million bucks, push the goalposts back, and we keep rinsing and repeating without holding anybody accountable. So the flip side of that question: what are some of the most significant archaeological discoveries that actually confirm or illuminate the biblical text?

Dr. Robert Cargill: At the University of Iowa we created Bible and Archaeology, our YouTube project. Like you, we hold podcasts and have discussions with other scholars about their books and research. One of the most common requests we get, besides please debunk this latest ridiculous claim, is this very question: what are the pieces of evidence? One of my favorites is the seal of Hezekiah. We have a seal impression with Hezekiah's signature, essentially. That connects with the Sennacherib Prism, which talks about Hezekiah being shut up like a bird in a cage, the siege of Jerusalem, where Jerusalem somehow survived and wasn't taken. We have that in 2 Kings 18. I love that piece of evidence. You have the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, where Omri is bowing down. These aren't flattering pieces of evidence, but they show that ancient Israel existed and was often a vassal kingdom to Assyria or Babylon. The decree of Cyrus, the Cyrus Cylinder, never mentions Jerusalem or Jews in particular, but it gives a general decree of emancipation: all these people the Babylonians had brought in can go home. It may not say exactly what Ezra 1 says, but it shows the Persians were willing to let people go back and to rule basically through the temples. So you can see that the context of the biblical story is at least made possible through these.

Dr. Robert Cargill: When I teach my Cities of the Bible course, I walk through these pieces of evidence. The Tel Dan inscription is another great one I love to talk about. A lot of people want to claim it's evidence that David existed. What it may be evidence of is an Aramean king claiming to have conquered the king of Israel and the king of the house of David, so Judah, which referred to itself as the house of David. So what we know is that about 150 years after David, Judah called itself the house of David. Is that hard evidence David existed? No, but it's a pretty good circumstantial case that these people called themselves the descendants of David, the house of David. Then further down, the Pilate Stone doesn't say Pilate crucified Jesus, but we know Pilate existed. We have coins of Pilate. That's what I like to do. The more honest we are about the evidence, without making it say more than it does, the more people can judge for themselves. That's one of the things we do at Bible and Archaeology. We're honest about the evidence, and people can make informed decisions for themselves.

Johnny Ova: The cities you wrote about in The Cities That Built the Bible, places like Tyre, Babylon, Alexandria and Jerusalem, played a massive role in shaping Scripture itself. How does understanding those cities change the way you read the Bible? How does it help?

Dr. Robert Cargill: In The Cities That Built the Bible, I tried to lay out the process of creating the Bible, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. How did we get the Bible? I wanted to tell the archaeological story of these cities as representative of both the people and the material culture that contributed to making the Bible. Take the early Phoenician cities. Byblos is where we get the word Bible. Phoenicia is where we get the alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from an early Proto-Sinaitic script, a kind of transition from hieroglyphs and hieratic, and it becomes the Hebrew script and the Aramaic script, and you can trace it down to the Greek script, then Latin, all the way to English. So I wanted to show where the alphabet and the letters come from, where the papyrus comes from, where the word for book comes from. Then we looked at Ugarit, the transition from cuneiform into this Semitic language. Where do these gods come from? We read about Baal and Asherah and Anat and Yam and Mot, usually with the prophets screaming at the Israelites to stop worshiping them. Please, for the love of God, stop worshiping these other gods. And you think, what do you mean, other gods?

Dr. Robert Cargill: The Ugaritic texts I walk through show where these gods came from and why they were so popular. So I'm saying, here's the physical evidence, here's where we discovered it, here's what the texts say and what they tell us. It tells the origin story of Baal. We always read, Baal is terrible, stop worshiping Baal. OK, what's the backstory? I'm trying to do what Disney is doing with Star Wars, telling the backstory of all this. Then we look at Nineveh, so you can tell the story of Jonah. What is Jonah actually saying? Is it about a big fish, or is it trying to say something else? I go through each of these cities and tell the story of ancient Israel and the New Testament, but at the same time I'm telling the story of how the Bible was put together.

Johnny Ova: That's fascinating. Correct me if I'm wrong, but specifically when it comes to archaeology and evangelism and faith, you're saying let the archaeology speak without adding to it. You could find something that proves somebody existed, like Hezekiah, but that doesn't mean it proves he did A, B, C, D and E. All we have proof of is that he existed. That's the lane. Whether you put the pieces together for yourself is up to you, but let the archaeology speak for itself.

Dr. Robert Cargill: That's it. If you're a confessional person, a person of faith, I think it's better as a scholar to present the evidence we have: here's what we know and here's what we don't know. That's how you earn trust with people. I'm not going to claim an artifact, a material object, says more than it does. This is what it says. If after I show you all the evidence you want to build a circumstantial case, saying, even though we don't have hard evidence that Jesus existed, I can make a pretty good case that this rabbi from Galilee existed, got some followers, and the things he did and the things they did with his message changed the world, and I want to believe in that, that's fine. But I'm never going to lie to my audience or my students about the material we have. I'm certainly not going to claim to have discovered something that won't pass peer review or follow standard archaeological methodology, just so I can say everyone else is wrong, I'm right, come dig with me and buy my books. I think you be honest and let things that are in the realm of faith remain in the realm of faith. At the end of the day, that's what it's about: acting in good faith, whether you're a confessional person or not.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Cargill, this has been great. I have one more question, and it's a tough one. I'm not asking you to answer from a theological perspective, just straight. You've spent your career navigating this space between rigorous scholarship and faith, and a lot of people in our audience are pastors and church leaders who love the Bible deeply. What would you say to someone who is afraid that digging into the academic side of Scripture might damage their faith?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Good question. The joke is that once you go to seminary, you lose your faith. I have plenty of confessional colleagues. A lot of the people I work and dig with are pastors, or work at Christian universities or Jewish universities. At the end of the day, and I don't want to repeat myself, I think you have to do what's best for you and act in good faith. If you're honest with the material, you can say, I know the text says the earth was created in six days, but I also know the science doesn't support that. And I also know this was the story they had, the best they had before we had science. That's why I say, don't try to solve the problems with apologetics. Apologetics isn't going to get you where you want to go, whether you're a person of faith or not. Understand that they wrote down stories based on what they had. They wrote Genesis 1 based on this tradition and Genesis 2 based on that one. They had a flood story and put it at the beginning. This is the history they were telling. But what are they actually trying to do? They're trying to tell the story of their people and infuse it with their ethics, what they believe and what happened to them. And it's Israel. Literally, they're struggling with God, struggling to understand who they are, their place in the world, and their relationship with this God. At the end of the day, aren't we all just trying to do that?

Dr. Robert Cargill: Why am I here? How can I make the best life for my kids? What does it all mean? That's what we're all trying to do. So if we're honest about that, you can come to a place where you read the Bible and say, I see what it says. It says it's OK to own slaves, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to take that literally. I know it says six literal days, and I'm not going to take that literally either. But I'm going to hold on to some of these things. Some of these things I believe. I like to tell the story of my first boss in Israel, Vassilios Tzaferis, of blessed memory. He was the director of excavations and surveys for the State of Israel. He was Greek. He used to be a monk, a deacon in the church, a faithful guy, but also the director of excavations and surveys. I asked him one day, while I was going through my Master of Divinity, Vassilios, how do you believe these Greek Orthodox traditions and yet know the archaeological record? How do you reconcile this? He said, I'm Greek. That's what we believe. I didn't get it at first. Then I said, that's actually the best answer I've ever heard. He said, this is the science. I live every aspect of my life in a world bound by science, math, reason and logic, and you can't ignore that.

Dr. Robert Cargill: But I'm also a person of faith, and it's a miracle. What I believe is that this man died and was resurrected. That's a miracle. You can't prove miracles. So why try? This is what I believe. I live in a scientific world, and I believe this miracle took place. I'm Greek. I believe it. That's what my community believes. This is my tradition. Then he lit up a cigar, as he was wont to do, and we sat down at the beach and smoked cigars. That was the end of my attempt to pursue anything in apologetics, because he made it that simple. Of course science is real. Of course scientific methodology is real. You can't ignore math and science. And you also can't prove miracles. You either believe this or you don't. Trying to prove all these miracles, the sun standing still, you can't do it. Just accept that this is the faith tradition and you can't prove it. So stop doing apologetics and just say, I'm a person of faith, and when I die, I hope to God this is what I've invested my eternal soul in. I believe this. And in all the other areas of my life here, I'm going to live to be the most righteous person I can be. I'm going to follow the rules of science. I'm going to take my medicine and listen to my doctors. And I'm going to help my kids live a better life than I had. That was the best advice I ever had.

Johnny Ova: Really amazing time today, Dr. Cargill. You've been so generous with your time, your wisdom and your knowledge. We're going to link all your books in the description. I can't thank you enough for your time today.

Dr. Robert Cargill: Thank you, Johnny. I really appreciate the time with you. Great questions today.

Johnny Ova: Thank you.