BBC has announced that an atheist Hebrew scholar (Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou) is going to host its new series on the "The Bible’s Buried Secrets." It’s going to explore modern archeological discoveries and how they might influence our understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Now, I think some people would freak out because , “How can a person of anti-faith properly represent the faith text we call the Bible?” But I don’t share that view at all. There’s no problem hearing it from an atheist, and in fact what you might hear is a completely unbiased perspective instead of a doctrinally limited one. In fact, this is one reason why I wish I had taken Greek from the atheists in my philosophy department back at Illinois, since I’d know they for sure weren’t importing any doctrinal bias into the vocabulary. (Although it would have been ancient, rather than Koine Greek.) But part of my non-objection to this is that when I went to Israel, I learned a ton about my Christian faith from a Jew who probably knows the New Testament better than 90% of Christians. Sometimes outsiders have a unique capacity to show us things that insiders can’t.
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