4 ms·

This isn't really what happened. Plenty of Christians are still interested in levantine excavations, and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblic

• thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls That's not what people wanted. The Pilate stone records the existence of a person named Pilatus. We infer that this was Pontius Pilatus, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that. But it does nothing to confirm a Biblical narrative. Calling it "satisfying evidence" is similar to picking a fight with someone, losing as badly as you can imagine, and then issuing a press release afterwards to the effect that that outcome was what you wanted all along. By contrast, a major controversy arising from Mesopotamian archaeology was the discovery of the Mesopotamian flood myth, which severely undermined the Bible by being the obvious source of the myth of Noah while contradicting it in pretty much every particular. That's the kind of thing that destroyed popular interest in Mesopotamian archaeology.