Hector Avalos has become an idol of sorts (albeit not a particularly well-supported one) for his latest diatribe, The End of Biblical Studies. Not surprisingly, this extended temper tantrum comes from the steamworks of Prometheus Press -- the atheist-humanist publisher which is so schizophrenic that it produces everything ranging from serious philosophical works to X-rated videotape guides. (Perhaps normal it would be for a very large, multinational publishing conglomerate, but not for a small press with a specific philosophical orientation and mission.) Early on Avalos delivered a briefer version of the core of this book as a paper to the Society of Biblical Literature (it's online here). The extended version in this book would undoubtedly never pass academic peer review (not because of its bite the hand mentality, as Avalos would claim, but because of its poor treatment of the data), and so would never appear from a reputable religious press like Fortress or Eerdmans, or doubtfully even Polebridge, though that does remain possible.

Our account will proceed from here with page by page commentary.

15: Here Avalos lays out the mission statement to "end Biblical studies as we know it." The observation is made that the book will "review the history of academic biblical studies as primarily a religionist apologetic exercise."

Herein lies an obvious indication of Avalos' lack of mature argumentation. To point out at all that any field of study is "religionist" or "apologetic" is mere well-poisoning. Avalos would hardly accept as a worthwhile point to make (much less an argument) that his career has been one of "primarily an irreligionist/anti-religionist apologetic exercise." Whining about prior commitment of an author is not an argument or a point, but a way to sway opinion cheaply. Every paper written by any scholar or person arguing for a point of view -- whether true or false -- is an "apologetic exercise." Apologetics can be made for everything from Christianity to Islam to the use of specific spices in a certain recipe to...ending Biblical studies as we know it. To say that something is an "apologetic exercise" or enterprise is precisely nothing worth saying. That Avalos resorts immediately to such descriptors indicates a radical immaturity and weakness in actual arguments (which we will also show).

Avalos further claims that academia is "part of an ecclesial-academic complex that collaborates with a competitive media industry." Much of this is developed in a later chapter of which we will say little, since it is outside our expertise. However, the immediate impression cannot be but one of extreme paranoia on Avalos' part (if not rather a great deal of insane jealousy for lack of attention to his own agenda, as we will see).

16: Avalos refers to "bibliolatry" in the field of Biblical studies. Dr. Jim West has spoken to this use of terminology:

Here’s what he has (amidst a description of the SBL and its membership) - “The main bond is bibliolatry, which entails the conviction that the Bible is valuable and should remain the object of academic study” (emphasis his). I’m not sure why he defines the word ‘bibliolatry’ so idiosyncratically but I suppose it’s so that he can set up academic study of the bible as a straw man. Apparently Avalos believes that members of the SBL worship the Bible- for that, and that alone is what the word ‘bibliolatry” means.

His suggestion, though, that the SBL is populated with persons who bow to the Bible is both inaccurate and unjust. That the Bible is an object of study does not mean that it is an object of worship, any more than mice as the object of study makes those who study them miciolotrists.

What these opening lines suggest, it seems to me, is a desire to excoriate any sort of biblical study and paint those who practice it as foolish toadies. Whether or not readers are convinced by Avalos remains to be seen. What also remains to be seen is whether or not he is able to study the subject at hand fairly or if his own bias will continue to raise its head. His apparent disdain of the lack of objectivity among students of the Bible seems to be matched by his own lack of objectivity concerning those who do study the Bible.

West has hit the nail on the head. Avalos has purposely chosen a loaded word -- "bibliolatry" -- to poison the well. He has also redefined it to suit his purposes. This is not a sign of a reasoned, mature approach by someone who has the truth on his side.

On this page Avalos also lays out his theses, which sum up as follows, and to which we add comments:

1. Modern scholarship has shown that the Bible was written by people whose view of things is no longer "relevant" -- even to most Christians and Jews today.

   We can stop here for an important point. Avalos repeatedly bleats the word "relevant" as if by so doing he is making an argument or worthwhile point. In the process, he also contradicts himself and proves himself a hypocrite as well as a demagogue intent on nothing but furtherance of his agenda, regardless of truth. Once again West hits the nail on the head:

   What’s fascinating here is Avalos’ absolutely and totally utilitarian perspective- which he applies ONLY to the Bible. If something doesn’t help the world become a better place, it should be done away with. But Hector doesn’t go quite that far. He doesn’t call for an end to baseball, art galleries, Paris Hilton, Fox News, Lindsey Lohan, ice hockey, soccer, politicians, lawyers, or television. Yet to be consistent (which is not what he’s interested in, i.e., consistency) if Avalos really, actually believes that the sole purpose of all human pursuit is the betterment of the world (whatever that’s supposed to mean), then why does he single out the Bible and biblical studies in particular as the biggest offender against human ‘progress’?

   Avalos clearly and obviously has a secular humanist ax to grind and he wishes to grind it on the field of study that he himself chose and which continues to feed him and his family. It isn’t the Bible’s failure to contribute to human betterment (but this accusation in and of itself is quite foolish and narrow-sighted- one need simply think of the ethical exhortations contained in the Ten Commandments to realize that Avalos is simply way off base here) that bothers Hector. It’s something else. Biblical studies is just his whipping boy...

   And J. D. Walters of the Christian CADRE has said correctly:

   There is certainly nothing wrong with his suggestion that more people should engage in 'practical' pursuits for the benefit of humanity. But the idea that this should happen at the EXPENSE of people entering academic work is completely off base. A modern civilization such as our own needs all kinds of specialists, including doctors, lawyers, scientists, businessmen, farmers and yes, academicians. I do not want to think about what would happen to civilization if people got the idea that only 'practical' pursuits are worth time and effort. A kind of Orwellian pragmatism would prevail, in which perhaps food and technology production would be at an all-time high and perhaps everyone would be fed and clothed, but there would be no intellectual culture to speak of, no free exchange of ideas, no enrichment through art, music or literature (they would have no intrinsic value anyway). I simply cannot bring myself to abandon the Renaissance ideal of education, which indeed involves learning 'for its own sake', not just what will make fields more productive or cars more efficient, although those pursuits definitely have their place.

   Now I must acknowledge in fairness that Avalos mirrors my own points -- made in other venues -- about how certain portions of the Bible are indeed not "relevant" to modern life and practice. I have indeed told Sunday School members jokingly that they do not need to read Leviticus and have my permission not to (in line indeed with what Avalos says on page 20, though his estimate of "99 percent" of the Bible not being missed is more likely an expression of his own loathing for the text, rather than an honest estimate; my own estimate would be more like 65% of the text, most of it the OT). The flaw here is that Avalos defines "relevance" only in terms of what Hector Avalos (or secular humanism as he sees it) finds important and what he thinks is immediately relevant. And in so doing, Avalos reveals his greatest hypocrisy, as Walters points out:

   ...He complains that scholars and translators have focused their energies on the Bible as opposed to "thousands of other non-biblical texts of ancient cultures": "In archaeology, new inscriptions, even the most fragmentary and the barely comprehensible, are announced with great fanfare when there is a remote connection to the Bible. Meanwhile, thousands of more complete texts of other cultures still lie untranslated." But by his own admission there is nothing of intrinsic value in works of literature, so why should it matter that these other texts are ignored? If the Bible only retains its relevance and value becuase of the academic sanction of biblical scholars, how much more so would be the case with these other texts?

   We will see more about this "intrinsic value" issue later. But more seriously, I would maintain that Christians ought to read such books as Leviticus once or twice in a lifetime; but why if they are not relevant to modern life and practice? The reason is that they are relevant to us in the same way that the practice of family history is relevant to us. That Great Uncle George was an aviator who flew a Sopwith Camel is not "relevant" to getting an oil change done on my car, or making decisions about my health insurance. But only a pedantic fool would rant about someone being interested in (not "obsessed with" which is a matter of degree) what their Uncle George did. As West has noted, there is more to human pursuit than this. If Avalos truly wants a world of utilitarian pragmatism, then it is time for him to clean his own house first. Robert Price writes and reads horror stories on the side -- these don't have any intrinsic value, so when will Hector go to Price's house, thrash Price for his stunning indifference to human need, and then burn his Lovecraft collection? (After all, that paper could have been used to heat the homes of the poor, or produce manuals on how to better humanity.)

   Avalos rants on page 17 that the Bible is "a product of an ancient and very different culture." Well, so what? If such a point were made about Avalos' Latino ancestors and their writings, we'd likely hear charges of racism and bigotry bouncing off the ceilings of Avalos' lecture hall until 2035. Normally, that a culture is different invokes a clarion call for tolerance; but we'll see what Avalos' own call is very shortly, and it smacks of bigotry. (Ancient, of course, has nothing to do with anything; as if indeed relevance or truth were decided by looking at a clock.)

   Now for the other point to be derived:

2. Biblical studies maintains the illusion of relevance by using flawed methods and power plays.

   Whether indeed the methods are flawed -- or Avalos' arguments are -- we will discuss within chapter addresses. As for power plays -- what Avalos refers to as "universties, a media-publishing complex, churches, and professional organizations" -- Avalos simply needs to get over himself, as the parlance says. This is a persecution complex at work. If Avalos can't compete in the free market of ideas, he needs to consider whether it is because his ideas are flawed and/or unpersuasive.

   The accusation of such power plays is one I have seen before. In my prior work as a prison librarian I received many requests for materials by such writers as Yosef ben-Jochanon, Ivan van Sertima, George James, and others of what is called an "Afrocentric" persuasion. Repeatedly these authors would whine on and on about how the very same elements named by Avalos conspired by the same means -- flawed scholarship and power plays -- to cover up the truth. Am I thereby saying Avalos may be dismissed at once by this means? No; that still has to be proven other ways. However, I am saying that the paranoid power-play plea can be safely ignored. It is "been there, done that....get over yourself." (It is also a way of covering up your lack of quality presentation under every other circumstance I have encountered. How's that for a poisoned well?)

   17: I have sympathy for the point that churches try to hide "objectionable" parts of the Bible from members. Recently my (now former) pastor, when reading an account of how David killed hundreds of Philistines to fulfill a dowry for Saul, studiously avoided the word "foreskins" in describing the nature of the dowry. This is wrong to do, and it should be stopped. It is far preferable to show why, as applicable, objections to such content are out of order than to gloss them over.

   18-9: Likewise I am sympathetic to the problem of Biblical illiteracy; indeed it has been a "selling point" for many of my ministry activities and I have used some of the very same statistics Avalos cites. However, Avalos fails to recognize the true cause of Biblical illiteracy; it is not because people have read the Bible and decided it is irrelevant, but rather, as Walters has rightly noted:

   In the end, I think that Avalos' commentary is a sad reminder of the state of disarray in the SECULAR academy, not the religious community. There is indeed a crisis of purpose in the modern academy, as academicians like George Marsden and C. John Sommerville have been arguing for a long time. But this is due to the postmodern rejection of truth and the suspicion of meta-narratives, not due to an excessive focus on faith-based perspectives. The Christian worldview has the 'cultural capital' to unite the pursuit of learning with real service to humanity, to say nothing of an immensely satisfying conception of "all truth as God's truth" which makes all fields of inquiry valid and significant. Compared to the great intellectual vision of the likes of Augustine and Aquinas of old, or more recently Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd, Hector Avalos' vision seems incredibly thin, excessively pragmatist and very uninspiring.

   22: After a few more paragraphs of ranting in the same vein about relevance and Biblical studies as biased, etc. Avalos enters into a critical juncture -- which he passes through as quickly as he can. As West has observed, if what Avalos says is true, then hosts of other fields should likewise be dispensed with. Avalos all too briefly tries to evade the force of this point by pointing to "[p]arallel critiques in other fields of study," particularly English and literature, as professions primarily concerned with promotion and maintenance of their own power." (Though as far as he reports and I can tell, there is no call being made for an "end" to English and literature studies.) As noted, such whining may be taken with a grain of salt: It comes from people who inevitably are whining because they don't get the attention they think that they deserve: With the Afrocentrists, Shakespeare is always studied at the expense of Egyptian literature; for Avalos, his pet Mesopotamian texts (and his special projects on Latino studies and people with disabilities) are suffering because there's too much focus on the Bible. It is not that such studies, to the extent that they are valid, should be neglected, or that they have not been. Knowing the texts of cultures other than our own (whatever our culture is) is essential to a well-rounded education. I personally enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez more than I enjoyed Ernest Hemingway. The point is that jealousy and a temper tantrum is not the answer to the matter. In the end, only inconsistency and hypocrisy can come of this, as Walters shows when he sums up Avalos' argument:

   Avalos next outlines a bizarre theory of the social construction of value, according to which "Shakespeare's works, for example, have no intrinsic value, but they function as cultural capital insofar as 'knowing Shakespeare' helps provide entry into elite, educated society. The academic study of literature, in general, functions to maintain class distinctions rather than to help humanity in any practical manner."

   According to Avalos, Biblical scholars use the Bible in much the same way as a self-preservation device. However, to paint this in an either-or fashion is simply silly, and a reflection of Avalos' ingrained fundamentalist mindset. He whines of seeing SBL scholars allegedly trampling poor people on the way to sessions. Beg pardon, but isn't Avalos assuming that these scholars do not participate in charitable pursuits at other times? Isn't he also assuming that these allegedly-trampled "poor people" are helpless to correct their situation? What exactly does he propose that these scholars should have done? Were there no social services available? Aren't there already numerous (Christian! -- and other religions perhaps as well) charities dispensing aid to the poor? If one of these scholars had handed a homeless person five dollars, would he then whine that they didn't make sure it was spent on food and not alcohol? Are street handouts really a solution? Avalos reduces the matter to an inane level for no other purpose than to slight SBL members unjustly and convict them without evidence.

   This sort of whining, however, is little better than the Da Vinci Code canard that "history is written by the winners" -- to which it is properly added, "and complained about constantly by the losers." The proper response in such cases from someone like Avalos would be to make a reasoned case for more attention to what he is doing; in short, to get on the playing field and compete. Instead, like a spoiled child, Avalos decides that it is better to just blow up the field with a nuclear bomb and then let the air out of the ball. Of course, as Walters pointed out, Avalos hypocritically doesn't think that any of this should happen to the part of the field he is working on now. On page 24 he is supposedly going to answer the question, "...why not extend our thesis to all ancient literature?" Instead he rants about why it should be applied to the Bible, and quickly makes the excuse that "[f]ixation on the Bible also diverts attention from the thousands of texts of other cultures that still lie untranslated." Oh? But aren't these texts also "irrelevant" to making life better for humanity? Wouldn't it be actually better to leave them untranslated instead of making the same error as we did with the Bible, according to Avalos, and distracting people from more important things like feeding homeless street people? Avalos can't seem to decide what he wants to do. He wants to rip up the playing field, but he doesn't want it too ripped up because then he won't be able to work on all those untranslated texts. This is the sort of schizophrenia that comes out of blind, mouth-foaming hatred that might be expected from a former child evangelist venting against his former faith -- but not from a reasonable scholar. In the end this is clear as Avalos declares that his focus is on the Bible because "we perceive [it] to be the most egregious and historically important example." That this excuse happens to give Avalos time to remain employed up until those other Mesopotamian texts are translated should be noticed before too much seriousness is applied to his whining about power plays.

   On this page also Avalos rants about anti-Semitism in the Biblical text. He does not argue examples here, so not much can be said in that regard, but he accuses scholars of "paternalistic deception" for allegedly sanitizing such texts. He needs examples to prove this alleged deception; the scholars clearly refer to potential misunderstandings which permit anti-Semitic interpretation, so to refer to them as deceivers is unwarranted without more proof.

   26: A telling and honest statement that may explain Avalos' bigotry above: "Phrased more frankly, religious pluralism is good as long as it does not interfere with secular humanism's goals." Now all Avalos needs to do is defend his worldview cogently. That won't happen; on this page we also learn that Avalos became an atheist in high school because it was the "most honest choice" he could make. It is doubtful from his work that Avalos could argue for atheism cogently, and it seems likely that we are enduring his attempt to validate his decision after the fact and that he could defend atheism no better than a high schooler even now. He certainly won't be answering Alvin Plantinga any time soon.

   27: Avalos comments that at SBL meetings since 1982, "I have encountered only about a dozen memorable papers." I was unaware that the purpose of academic papers was to entertain Hector Avalos, but let's consider that a moment. The irony in this is that Avalos is forced to admit that his own papers were "not much better" and then in later chapters will whine that few people showed up for his sessions on Latino studies and the disabled. Really? Maybe his papers were just not memorable enough. Or maybe the other scholars saw it as a case of him speaking to particular subjects as an "elite leisure pursuit" of his own preference -- after all, some of them may have wanted to hear sessions on some other ethnic group, like African-Americans, or Swedes, or Pakistanis; or some other group with physical disadvantages, like cancer patients, hemophiliacs, or people with cold sores. (I'll also note the possibility, given Avalos' temper tantrums here, that they knew going to a session with Avalos would subject them to a harangue of the highest order.)

   Avalos whines further that he saw few papers geared to "help people live in a better world." As West notes above, however, it is clear that Avalos only cares about this where Biblical studies are concerned. Since that is so, two can play at that game. Avalos apparently spends some time watching squirrels in his yard he has named Rusty and Skippy [11]. Why is he spending so much time watching squirrels for amusement when he could be out feeding a homeless person? What did his playtime with Rusty and Skippy do to make this a "better world"? There's a picture of Avalos wearing a nice suit on his faculty page -- why is he doing so much to promote a vision of capitalistic success and why did he spend so much money on a nice suit when he could have used that money to support orphans? What did his article in the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology in 2003 do to make life better for suffering Serbo-Croatians or starving Bangladeshi? Maybe he'd say he knows better now? Well, what's he doing to show that he has repented of wasting his time with such things as an article on Zechariah Sitchin in Price's Journal of Higher Criticism?

   Or maybe Avalos would care to explain how his publisher, Prometheus Press, made the world a better place with their X-rated videotape guide.

   In the end, even from this introduction, Avalos plainly reveals himself as nothing more than a childish hypocrite who is working out his anger over his former faith -- and this will be seen further as we look at the chapters where he makes claims of fact about Biblical studies.

   Discuss this article here.

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