It wasn't hard to have a soft spot for Steve Allen. This was a guy who stood up against Hollywood's immorality, in spite of being neck deep involved with that institution; a guy who wants to encourage critical thinking. Good show. It's a shame he didn't apply that to his two studies of the Bible - titled, first, Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, and second, the even more creatively-titled More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, both published by our dear friends at Prometheus Press. At least you won't have trouble remembering if you want to buy both titles.

Not that any soft spots will equal sympathy for what amounts to a really poor job. Okay, so Allen admits up front that he's not a qualified Biblical scholar; but in this day and age when postmodernism would have the average Joe believing Michael Jordan over Enrico Fermi on matters of nuclear physics, simply on the basis of the former being a celebrity personage, it's more than a little irresponsible for someone like Allen to go on record this way on a topic he knows nothing about. He should have stuck with what he knew - writing songs for his Hollywood brethren and books on becoming a comedian, like the one he wrote called How to be Funny.

What, though, does Allen claim to have going for him? He claimed to have done "painstaking reading, analysis, and consultation of sophisticated scholarship" - all right, what does that mean? As the text progresses, it becomes clear that "sophisticated", "the best Christian scholarship," etc. means, "those who agree with Steve Allen" - and that tends to be folks who treat the Bible like a washrag, as becomes clear from Allen's "Select Bibliography." You won't find much in the way of conservative scholarship here...no Craigs, no Blombergs, no Steins, no N. T. Wrights, no Witheringtons, not even so much as a Dunn...but whoops, there's Allegro with his bit on the sacred mushroom, and Eisenman with his Dead Sea Scroll conspiracies; there's a few by G. A. Wells (no, don't panic: Allen's not so irrational as to be a Christ-myther); there's the Encyclopedia Brittannica; there's Homer Smith's Man and His Gods (as Glenn Miller has wryly noted, a kidney specialist!); there's a pack of them 1800s freethimkerslike Stanton and Ingersoll and Paine (the latter two are actually referred to as "well-qualified scholars"!) -- as well as a good sampling of liberals like Bultmann, all supplied with the old "most scholars" shebang appearing in a variety of formats. Conservative scholars...? Oh, yeah, Billy Graham makes an appearance, so I guess we've satisfied the matter of balance! It seems that all that Allen did was pick up whatever was most convenient (and agreeable) and then assumed he had done the job -- better not look further; you'll have to actually deal with the data, then! (It's not surprising to hear that half of the manuscript of the first book was written in hotel rooms, with the Gideon Bible in the drawer as the primary source!)

And so, what of the "scholarship" contained in this duet by the composer of over 4000 songs who fancied himself a lay expert on the Bible? In his first book Allen makes the rather ironic statement that "there is an enormous gulf between reading something and having an adequate understanding of it," and by golly, do the contents that follow ever make that crystal clear! Much of the contents consist of good old "arguments by outrage" and we need not detain ourselves with those -- Allen seems to prefer a God who would play the role of Caspar Milquetoast, simply patting us on the head when we are disobedient. Let us, however, for the sake of proving that Allen's books can be safely ignored, take a look at some of the biggest factual errors in the whole magilla:

• One that sticks out like a sore thumb to my thinking is Allen's non-knowledge of the restraints and capabilities of oral tradition in the ancient world. As we have recounted in here, ancient memorial capabilities were far above our own (as indeed they had to be!) and were supplemented by various tactics (i.e., poetic parallelism, strong visual demonstrations, etc. - and in the case of Jesus and the disciples especially, a paradigmitic teacher-disciple relationship) of the sort found today (in more trite forms) in memory seminars. But Allen knows of none of this (and apparently presumed that his own personal preference to carry around a tape recorder to remember things was some sort of universal reflection), and so he remarks several times about "our fundamental weakness in remembering, unaided, over periods of time, and statements that consist of more than a few words" - which he takes as an indication that we can't be sure we have the accurate words of Jesus in the Gospels. Thus he says also that "if the memory of those humans who actually saw and heard Jesus of Nazareth is no better than that of the human race generally then it is unlikely that the New Testament record about him is totally accurate." Well, Allen doesn't tell us how "accurate" he thinks the record is, but the bad news for him is that ancient memory was a lot better than ours, generally speaking, and between that and the oral tradition-keeping processes we have described elsewhere, there is very little chance that defective memory could have played any role in loss of the true words of Jesus. (It's not entirely Allen's fault, though, since he quotes Robert Funk's uninformed notion that orality equates with a lack of certainty in transmission! We've noted that the Jesus Seminar takes a backwards glance when the matter of oral tradition comes up!)
• Related to the above, catch this comment: "There was no method of shorthand description during that historical period, and, even if there had been, everyone who has ever been quoted, even by experienced professional journalists, is aware that totally accurate quotation at length is impossible." Our critic needs to learn a bit about scribes in the ancient world and their capabilities, in addition to the above! There was a method of shorthand available, and scribes were trained for accuracy in a way that our modern journalists can only dream about. (Dare we note that getting a sensational scoop seems to be of far greater concern to today's media than getting the story accurately...as Allen, with his own campaign against garbage television, certainly ought to have known!)
• I must, however, give kudos to Allen for shaming Christians as a whole for their general Biblical ignorance. He notes that in a poll only 58% of those asked could name the Gospels; one-third could not identify Nazareth (the city, not the heavy metal band), and a quarter could not identify Calvary. On the other hand, as Allen and many other skeptics show, just a little knowledge that isn't enough can be even more dangerous than none at all!
• Allen's also has a tendency to ask odd questions. For example, reading Acts 1, he notes the choice of Matthias over Barsabbas as a replacement apostle, and then declares that it is "odd" that after Acts 1, "there is not a single further word in any Christian writing about either of these two men, a strange literary fate for an actual apostle." Okay, I'll bite. Why is it odd? Isn't this assuming that a) these men went on to do something worth recording, and finding that a problem b) in an era when there were not that many literate people to record things in the first place, c) there was not much in the way of resources to write long accounts, and d) what we have left from that era amounts to enough to fill a three-foot bookshelf? There were also hundreds of Roman senators and officials who, in the Roman view of things, were far more important than some backwards Jews in Palestine, and yet we don't hear a single word about most of them in what we have left, and many more are mentioned only once by some historian and we never hear a peep out of them again. So perhaps the ancient world was filled with "odd" writings - or more likely, our critic is being a bit of a temporal provincialist, as Michael Crichton would say. (By the same token, other members of the Twelve disappear just as quickly...after Acts 1:13, Thomas, Simon the Zealot, and others are a mere memory.)

  And likewise elsewhere - for example, regarding God's demand upon his people to perform circumcision, aside from pulling up a totally off-the-wall sociological explanation that it was a custom derived from castration, Allen comments: "When one considers how many important moral questions the Lord might have taken upon this most auspicious of occasions, the choice to require a minor physical operation seems incredible." Uh, okay - what moral questions, exactly, and what makes one think that anyone would have paid attention in the first place? And what about having respect for ancient peoples who saw extreme significance in this sort of rite? Allen seems to have unlimited confidence in the human capacity to get down to brass tacks.

• Of a particularly humorous bent, and proof that Allen's research priorities were off-kilter...He notes Matthew 5:13 -- "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?" Allen found this puzzling, so he wrote to various salt companies and asked them whether salt ever lost its flavor. They assured him that it didn't, so Allen put down Jesus here for a dumbbell error. Well, of course, it's Allen's time to waste if he wants to, but rather than writing to salt companies he should have picked up a commentary or a Greek concordance. The word here is moraino, meaning "to become insipid; fig. to make (pass. act) as a simpleton:--become fool, make foolish, lose savour". In the context of this verse, it refers to believers being the "salt" of the world. Now believers themselves won't lose their "saltiness" except in one way - by becoming like the world. Hence, if Allen wanted to know how salt "loses" its savor, the answer is by contamination. (I have also been advised, but have not been able to confirm, that Dead Sea salt, unlike our modern, refined table salt, does lose its flavor. A reader noted that the explanation may be that "ancient 'salt' wasn't pure sodium chloride, but NaCl mixed with other rock and mineral matter; if it was allowed to get moist, the NaCl would dissolve out and leave behind a pile of tasteless dirt. Thus, in order for the salt to preserve its savor, 'the world' had to be kept out of it." It is also noteworthy that in context, this isn't salt used for consumption in the first place! Malina and Rohrbaugh note [Social-Science Commentary, 50] that the "earth" here alludes to an earthen oven outside the house which was used to bake, and had a dung heap nearby; the dung was used as fuel and was salted to use as a catalyst to make the dung burn. The reference is to salt that is so exhausted that it no longer makes the dung burn -- not to how tasty the salt is! This goes to show just how little Allen tried to look into the context of these passages.)

• Daniel chapter 7 and visions of that sort are described as a "strikingly poor method of conveying messages from God to man." Hey, not to ancient peoples in oral-based cultures, not at all. Presumably God should have used a fax machine or a laser printer?
• And, of course, a litany of all the usual, which we and others have covered in a variety of essays on this page - the JEDP theory of the composition of the Pentateuch; the idea of pagan borrowing for Christian ideas; anti-Semitism in Luke-Acts (at least an SBL paper by Jack Sanders has been cited, but there have been many, many more items published across the philosophical spectrum that reach the opposite conclusion); the code of Hammurabi as the source for the Ten Commandments; ignorance of typology; more chronological snobbery (viz. "simple agricultural societies"); complaints that there is no description of Jesus' appearance in the Gospels (for good reason: physical description was used in ancient times in conjunction with the pseudo-science of phrenology!); the idea that one can be a Christian without believing that Jesus was God (!); declarations of various verses as "puzzling," "not clear," "no one has ever known what this means" etc. (in most cases, actually false, and it is only Allen's sources that do not know the meanings!); presumption of modern values on ancient peoples, a la C. Dennis McKinsey; misapprehension of rabbinic teaching practices (the old "hate" citation in Luke 14:26!) -- and finally, perhaps the source of all this venting indicated, where Allen tells us that he is "deeply ashamed" of having held his previous Bible-believing and Catholic beliefs - and goes on to say that the only atheists he has met have been men of principle. I suppose that could be right - chances are that he's never met Joe Stalin, for example...

In closing, Allen should have stuck with his day job entertaining people. And rather than titling those books as they were, they should be renamed, after a previous book written by Allen. The new titles should be: More How to be Funny, books 2 and 3.