Truth matters to me. In an age of misinformation and “fake news” it is often hard to distinguish fact from fiction.  As a teacher, it is important to me that my students learn how to ask questions and seek out truth. It’s not easy. It is even harder teaching biblical studies. Students often have to choose between what they are learning in class and what they are hearing from their Sunday School teachers, or parents, or church leaders. The distinction between what one believes to be true, due to faith, versus what is verifiably true, is often a clear one. But just because you want something to be true, does not make it true. It genuinely upsets me when misinformation about something as foundational as the bible is spread around, and it’s even worse if it is done intentionally. (That would be lying.) If you learn something to be true that challenges your faith – good! The sandy shores that our faith lives are often built on can get swept away by the incoming tide of reality.[i] One of the major points of education is to challenge ways of thinking – and believing. Even Paul calls us out on this, “When I was a child , I used to talk like a child, think like a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.” (1 Cor 13:11 NSRV) We live in an amazing age of science. Archaeology, anthropology, paleology, paleography, epigraphy, and others all contribute to understanding the biblical texts.

I received a targeted add for printable sheets that give a summary of information of every biblical book. It only applied to protestant canons, naturally, with an acquiescence to what they call they Apocrypha on the ordering page. (The Apocrypha refers to the books that Protestants removed from their canon but Catholics have had since the fourth century CE.) I was pretty optimistic. (Well done, you advertisement targeting algorithm!) I thought that this might actually be a helpful educational tool to use with high school students. Then I came across their example page.

The example page that they used to promote the set was the “info sheet” for the book of Joshua. The sheet claims that the book of Joshua was written in 1375 BC by none other that Joshua, himself. It was at this point that I sighed, and admittedly, kept scrolling.

The Old Testament (or the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, that the Christian Old Testament is based on) was written in Hebrew. That is universally accepted among academics. Hebrew is not verifiable as a written language (outside the bible) until about the 10^th century BCE; somewhere around the turn of the millennium, 1050 – 950 BCE. The earliest evidence of this writing is proto-Hebrew which is just beginning to emerge as a language distinct from other Canaanite languages of the time. Some of the examples are simple abecedaries.  The oldest part of the Tanakh is found in the book of Exodus, in a poem called, “The Song of the Sea” which dates to about 950 BCE.
The book of Joshua is dated to the late 7^th century BCE to the early 6^th century BCE. In other words that “info card” is propagating something false. The book is also considered to be ahistorical, which should be good news as the books of Joshua and Judges are largely about the ethnic cleansing of the Promised Land (AKA, Canaan) as commanded by God. So, the character of Joshua is a folk hero in an early written “history” (which was, no doubt, based on oral history.) The character Joshua is not doing any writing – especially in Hebrew – the written version of which will not exist until the turn of the millennium. The book important ethnographically as a self-reflective cultural identity of a people seeking to understand themselves as “other.”
So, maybe these are not the best “info-sheets” to hand out to impressionable students.

I firmly believe that one’s faith should be informed by the active pursuit of truth. Augustine’s, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum” (Faith seeking understanding) is a good reference point, and is the touchstone, as it were, of the history of the intellectual tradition in Christianity. As I tell my students, I don’t teach “faith.” Faith is a gift from God. It is, as a heroine of mine likes to say, like falling in love. It is by it’s nature unreasonable and often inexplicable. It is up to us to know as much as we can about the things we believe in, so that, like Paul, we can become intellectual grownups. Then we will truly own our faith.

[i] I’m using MT 7:24-27 liberally