Ignorant screed of the day

A recent letter to the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review:

I am becoming more and more disgusted with the filth you people publish, namely dealing with pagan religions. The title of your magazine is BIBLICAL Archaeology Review. I don’t need to know anything about pagan religions. Either it’s from the Bible, or it’s garbage. Please amend your ways.

Dan Phillips
Graysville, Georgia

Biblical Archaeology Review is a magazine that I discovered about a year ago, and I am a subscriber; it does a good job of making research accessible to interested amateurs.

I was relieved — and surprised — to notice that the irritable correspondent wasn’t one of my Wake Forest, North Carolina, neighbors; I’m sure that the letter expresses a sentiment that most would agree with.

What the letter-writer, and probably a majority of devout Christians, fail to understand is that Jewish and Christian thought represent points on a continuum of thought; they didn’t spring-up overnight from nowhere, like toadstools. They each had antecedents, and each has descendants. The rise of Judaism was not an endpoint, though people have willingly died for it, and Christianity is not an endpoint, though people have willingly died for it. Each, someday, will be one of those strange things that people believed in olden days.

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