During the first part of the century, the Bible was going through some hard times. Higher critics were pulling it to pieces; scientists were mocking it; historians were disregarding it. Bible-{ g4 } believing Christians were on the defensive.
In the relatively new scientific field of archaeology, Christians found a ray of light. Some scholars like William Ramsay . {The Cities of St. Paul, 1907, and The Bearing of Recent Research on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, 1914) brought news of how archaeological findings were supporting the historicity of Luke and John, But at times the research of Christian archaeologists was suspect; and the professional world charged that they simply found what they wanted to find.
Then along came William Foxwell Albright. He had all the credentials. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and field experience at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, he became editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools ofOri-ental Research, a position he held for thirty-eight years. He was also appointed professor of Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins in 1929 and held that position the rest of his life. With honorary doctorates from Yale, St. Andrews, Trinity College (Dublin), Utrecht, Oslo, and Uppsala, his scholarship was impeccable and his output prodigious. He wrote more than a thousand books and articles. And when he spoke, people listened.
Over the years of his archaeological research and studies, he became more convinced, not less, of the reliability of the Scriptures. Probably more than anyone else, he was responsible for the discrediting of the very speculative Graf-Well hausen theory of the origins of the first five books of the Old Testament. That turned liberal thinking on its head.
The capstone of his books was The Archaeology of Palestine. In it he traces what archaeologists had found out about Palestine
from the very earliest ages through New Testament times, ough many scholars had denied that Moses could have had
lng-t0 d° With the ״Books of Moses,״ the Pentateuch, Albright wrote, ״New discoveries continue to confirm the his-ton cal accuracy or the literary antiquity of detail after detail in 1 .... It is sheer hypercriticism to deny the substantially Mosaic character of the Pentateuchal tradition."
Slm11ar dating and authorship problems with the Old Testament poetic books, he said, ״Modern critical scholars
have been disposed to date most of it after the Exile____In the
light of the Ugaritic remains of Canaanite religious literature many of the Psalms must be pushed back into early Israelite times, not later than the tenth century. There is thus no longer any reason to refuse a Davidic date for such Psalms."
Citing critical views that, ״less than half a dozen books of the { New Testament were written in the first century a.d,, and the Gospel of St. John was written as late as the second half of the second century," Albright concluded that recent archaeological discoveries ״have dealt the coup de grace to such extreme critical views."
Albright was no fundamentalist but he acknowledged there was more to be found out than even the best scientists can discover. ״Though archaeology can clarify the history and geography of ancient Palestine, it cannot explain the basic miracle of Israel's faith, which remains a unique factor in world history.
But archaeology can help enormously in making the miracle rationally plausible to an intelligent person whose vision is not shortened by a materialistic world view."
And as Albright was working on his manuscript, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, further establishing the antiquity of the biblical texts.