10 Hoaxes That Purported to Prove the Bible

Christian Bible inerrantists and literalists look to archaeology to back up scriptural narratives. Many discoveries have indeed proven that many things the Bible says are accurate. However, disturbing evidence, or in some cases, non-evidence, has also come to light. For instance, archaeology can find no proof that patriarchs like Abraham existed, no indication that a great exodus from Egypt ever took place, nor that Canaan suffered a blitzkrieg and sudden takeover by Joshua.

Archaeologist William Devers clarifies, “Archaeology certainly doesn’t prove literal readings of the Bible. It calls them into question, and that’s what bothers some people. Most people really think that archaeology is out there to prove the Bible. No archaeologist thinks so.”

So believers, and as we shall see, even skeptics, fabricate the evidence to supply the lack of it.

Related: 10 Ancient Fan Fiction That Fills Gaps in the Bible

10 Paluxy River Footprints

In 1908, numerous fossilized dinosaur footprints were discovered along the banks of the Paluxy River in Texas near Glen Rose. What made this site controversial were man-like tracks on the same bed of limestone alongside the dinosaur tracks. According to creationists, this was proof that humans and dinosaurs were contemporaneous and that the evolutionary time scale is wrong, vindicating the biblical account of a young earth.

In 1938, paleontologist Ronald Bird saw unmistakable human footprints and other tracks that appeared human. Upon investigation, he uncovered a nefarious scheme by the locals trying to survive the Great Depression. They had been digging up and selling the dinosaur prints to tourists for $10-$25. But with the best tracks running out, one George Adams, an excellent sculptor, turned to carving new ones, including some six giant human footprints 16-20 inches (40-51 cm) long.

There are indeed genuine man-like tracks at Glen Rose. However, subsequent investigations have shown these to be eroded, barely discernible remains made by a three-toed bipedal dinosaur, and traces of claw marks can be seen. But the admission of fraud and simple misidentification of genuine prints have not swerved biblical literalists from touting the Paluxy River site as proof of Bible inerrancy.^[1]

9 The Cardiff Giant

Genesis 6:4 says, “Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.” George Hull mulled over this verse as he lay in bed one night, flabbergasted at the literal interpretation some Christians read into it. But Hull, a cigar maker and staunch atheist, had the idea that he could use this to scam Christians and make a quick buck.

With the help of sculptor Edward Burkhardt, Hull had the image of a 10-foot (3-meter) tall giant carved out of a block of gypsum. Two years and $3,000 ($60,000 today) later, the “petrified man” was ready. Workers poured sulfuric acid over the naked figure lying on its back, giving it an aged and eroded look. Hull then had it transported to Cardiff, New York, close to the so-called “burned-over district” that had been swept by the fires of religious fervor during the Second Great Awakening.

Hull buried it on the property of a distant relative and accomplice, William Newell. On October 16, 1869, Newell hired two unsuspecting workers to dig a well on the site. As expected, they uncovered the “giant,” and the news again torched the district. Newell started charging admission to the thousands who wanted to see the wonder. Many devout left convinced of the Bible’s truth. Others were more skeptical.

The Giant became a popular attraction, and Hull sold it to David Hunnum. The showman, P.T. Barnum, wanted a piece of the action but, failing to buy the Giant, had a replica made. But many locals remembered seeing Hull move a heavy shipment through town and became suspicious. Paleontologists who examined the Giant pronounced it a fake. Knowing the jig was up, Hull owned up to the hoax and boasted that his Giant was the authentic fake and Barnum had a fake fake. The public was so intrigued by the hoax that the Giant continued to draw crowds.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” Barnum allegedly said of the whole affair. The quote may be apocryphal, but it remains true today as it was back then.^[2]

8 Noah’s Ark

Finding the remains of Noah’s survival ship may be the Holy Grail of biblical archaeology, validating the Genesis story of a worldwide flood. The search for the fabled ark goes back to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. Many alleged sightings have been recorded in the mountains of Urartu (Ararat) in Turkey, which is identified in Genesis as its landing place. There appears to be a boat-like feature on the site, with measurements approximating that of Noah’s ship.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the area was heavily explored and investigated by a team led by nurse-anesthetist turned pseudo-archaeologist Ron Wyatt. His claims of finding petrified wood and metal artifacts were a sensation but were subsequently debunked. The boat-like shape was demonstrated to be a natural rock formation. However, in 1985, after watching an evolution vs. creation debate, a man named George Jamaal decided to hoax creationist Duane Gish by claiming to have found the ark and thereby expose creationist gullibility.

Jammal, a humanist, presented himself in a letter to Gish as a “good Christian” who wanted to prove the Bible. He concocted a story of having traveled to Turkey, where he and a friend found the ark in an ice cave. Jammal took out a piece of its wood as evidence. Skeptic Gerald Larue got wind of what Jammal was up to. When Sun International Pictures invited Jammal for an interview, Larue suggested soaking a piece of wood in teriyaki sauce, wine, alcohol, and seeds and then baking it in the microwave.

Pretty crude, but Larue didn’t intend the hoax to hold up. He also had a beef with Sun International, which unsatisfactorily edited his interview for their Ancient Secrets of the Bible program. Larue now wanted to expose Sun’s sloppy research and credulity. As expected, Sun swallowed Jammal’s story hook, line, and sinker during the “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark” segment in February 1993. Larue admitted to the hoax in June, and both Sun and Gish’s Institute for Creation Research (ICR) ended up with their credibility severely damaged.^[3]

7 Sodom and Gomorrah

Historians and archaeologists have speculated that the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which the Bible narrates were destroyed by fire and brimstone from an angry God, lie somewhere around the region of the Dead Sea on the east side of the Jordan River. Scouting the area near Masada in 1990, our intrepid Ron Wyatt again claimed another blockbuster discovery: the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah themselves.

Wyatt found a couple of structures he identified as a “ziggurat” and a “sphinx” covered with some sort of ash and a sulfur ball. But just a casual look at the alleged ruins is enough to show that they were natural formations of soft sedimentary rock with some lamination and eroded by wind and rain into suggestive shapes.

The ash was taken to an Australian laboratory, where chemical analysis revealed gypsum-like minerals, not the type one might find in burned buildings. The abundance of carbonates also would not have survived the heat. As for the sulfur ball, it is nothing extraordinary, as these are commonly found with salt formations around the Dead Sea.

These findings, nonetheless, the Wyatt Archaeological Research (WAR) continues to peddle this and other bogus “discoveries” made by its late founder.^[4]

6 Pharaoh’s Drowned Army

“Mr. Ron Wyatt is neither an archaeologist nor has he ever carried out a legally licensed excavation in Israel or Jerusalem,” warned a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1993. “We are aware of his claims which border on the absurd as they have no scientific basis whatsoever nor have they ever been published in a professional journal.”

Many Christians still gobble up Wyatt’s claims, and one they get excited over is his supposed discovery of the remains of Pharaoh’s pursuing army beneath the Red Sea. Wyatt said he was exploring the area of the Gulf of Aqaba he believed to be the site of Israel’s crossing using standard recreational scuba gear when he found ancient chariot wheels, human and horse bones, and other wreckage 200 feet (61 m) down. Immediately, believers pounced on this proof of the Exodus story.

But how could Wyatt, using scuba gear designed for 125-130 feet (38-40 m), have reached 200 feet? Besides, most scholars agree that the Gulf of Suez, not Aqaba, was the point of crossing. And Exodus describes the Egyptians being destroyed “in the middle of the sea”—2,800 feet (854 m) down even if the Gulf was the site—not 200. Bones of humans and horses? If the remains of Titanic’s dead could not survive being consumed by fish, crustaceans, and seawater for just a century, neither should we expect those who drowned 3,500 years ago.

Wyatt claimed to have retrieved the hub of a wheel but never submitted any artifact for scientific investigation. The videos he made of the coral-encrusted debris were dismissed as a hoax. One of Wyatt’s sons even admitted that one of the chariot wheels was planted by his father. In 2014, the fake news website World News Daily revived the hoax by publishing a story about chariot wheels being found, this time by Egyptian archaeologists.^[5]

5 Ark of the Covenant

Ron Wyatt has been called the “Indiana Jones of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.” Like the cinematic hero, he claimed to have discovered the Ark of the Covenant under the Old City of Jerusalem in 1982, exactly beneath the very spot where Jesus was crucified. SDA prophetess Ellen G. White had foretold in 1901 that “in God’s appointed time,” he would reveal where the ark and the tablets of the Ten Commandments had been hidden. Wyatt’s discovery appeared to fulfill the prophecy.

While touring the area around the Garden Tomb, Wyatt allegedly had an out-of-body experience. He pointed to a spot while hearing himself say, “That’s Jeremiah’s grotto, and the Ark of the Covenant is in there.” He and his team began digging and stumbled upon what seemed to be post-holes cut into the bedrock. One had a crack that continued down to the ceiling of a subterranean chamber where the ark was kept. So where was the evidence—actual artifacts, pictures, videos?

Images taken of the ark, which were never made public, all came out blurry and messed up. Wyatt explained that a bright light came down and surrounded the ark while he was filming. Apparently, God didn’t want the ark exposed to prying eyes. “Four angels stood before him, and he was told that the time is not yet for the world to see this discovery with their own eyes, but the time is coming when the inhabitants of the world will have a universal, religious law enforced upon them,” said the 2016 book describing the incident.

Wyatt clearly was either deluded or a consummate liar, and his own church denounced him as a fraud. But this story has an unexpected twist, which we will reserve for later.^[6]

4 Goliath’s Skeleton

In 1993, Weekly World News, a tabloid notorious for its fictional stories presented as news, published an article claiming that the bones of Goliath, the giant killed by a young David, had been found in Israel. It included a picture of a skull damaged by a slingshot and quotes a non-existent archaeologist “Dr. Richard Martin,” saying, “We found the skull in the Valley of Elah, in the foothills of the Judean Mountains, where David’s battle with Goliath took place. The skull is huge and clearly belongs to a man of enormous stature.” The remains were dated to 3,000 years ago, just the right time as the narrative in First Samuel.

In February 2018, the Daily Voice rehashed the hoax, this time with more photos. The story circulated online, prompting gullible believers too lazy to fact-check to gush, like this one from Facebook, “The skeleton of Goliath found in Jerusalem. The word of God is so true! Please keep sharing this to spread the gospel.” Share, that is, some Photoshop creativity.

The two images showing archaeologists bending over the giant skeleton were entries to an online Photoshop competition. The 2008 contest titled Archaeological Anomalies 12 on the Worth 1000 website was simple: “You are to create an archaeological hoax. Your job is to show a picture of an archaeological discovery that looks so real, had it not appeared at Worth1000, people might have done a double take.”

A third image was that of a sculpture by Italian artist Gino de Domonicis. Titled Calamita Cosmica, the giant skeleton toured Europe before settling in the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome, Italy. The photo was taken in 2007.

What is the moral of the story? Google has a Reverse Image Search. Use it.^[7]

3 Jehoash Tablet

The Bible paints a picture of ancient Israel’s Golden Age when the wise King Solomon ruled an empire stretching from the Euphrates to the border of Egypt. The problem? The only evidence for this fabulous age is the Bible. No one else in the ancient Near East seemed to have heard of it. The excavated buildings once considered part of Solomon’s vast construction projects turned out to have been made by someone else. What about the king’s most grandiose project of all—the great Temple to Yahweh?

Not an artifact has ever been uncovered of a Temple existing in the time of Solomon in the 9th century BC. So when a stone tablet surfaced in Israel in 2001 with an inscription bearing a resemblance to the text of 2 Kings 12 describing the repairs done to the Temple by King Jehoash around 800 BC, there was excitement.

The Geological Survey of Israel pronounced it genuine, but it didn’t satisfy experts who were bothered by the tablet’s lack of provenance. There was no authentication or record as to where it was found. It did have the patina of calcite (calcium carbonate) expected of stone found in the environs of Jerusalem. However, closer investigation also revealed the presence of microfossils of marine organisms called foraminifera on the tablet.

Foraminifera, which are found in chalk, do not dissolve in water and cannot occur naturally in calcium carbonate patina. The patina must be an artificial mix where chalk was used to obtain calcium carbonate. The stone itself was not the usual basalt commonly used in ancient inscriptions, but greywacke, which is not native to Israel. The Jehoash inscription was a clear forgery.

In 2003, an antique dealer named Odad Golan was arrested for creating the inscription as one of a gang of international forgers. Though the prosecution failed to convict him after a nine-year trial, it insisted that the fake tablet was still an “antiquity” and must be turned over to the state for safekeeping rather than returned to Golan.^[8]

2 James Ossuary

Let’s face it: There is actually no hard evidence that a man named Jesus of Nazareth, described in the Gospels, ever existed. All that seemed to change in the early 2000s when an ossuary—a burial box for bones—turned up in the antiquities market. It had the inscription in Aramaic, “Ya’akov bar Yosef ahui d’Yeshua”—”James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” It would be the first archaeological link to Jesus… if it was genuine. Suspiciously, the man who owned it and arranged for its display at the Royal Ontario Museum was… Oded Golan. Yes, that Oded Golan.

The ossuary’s provenance was undocumented. Golan said he purchased it from a dealer in Jerusalem for a few dollars in the 1970s. He stored it in his balcony, where, apart from occasional scrubbings, it was largely ignored, Golan, being unaware then (or so he said) that Jesus had a brother named James. A curator at the Israeli Antiquities Authority remembered seeing the box at a dealer’s shop in the mid-1990s, but then, it only had the words “James, son of Joseph”.

Closer scrutiny indeed revealed that the ossuary was an authentic 2,000-year-old artifact. Still, the words “brother of Jesus” were added by a modern forger to the original inscription. (Link 22) In addition, the patina on the forgery, unlike the rest of the box, was inconsistent with the natural accumulation of two millennia. The oxygen isotope values also did not fit the age of the ossuary and the conditions of the dark, damp tomb the ossuary was kept in for all those years.

Some still staunchly dispute these findings, but the overwhelming consensus is that the James ossuary, at least the second part of the inscription, is another Oded Golan fake. Notwithstanding, true believers are still drawn to it, and Golan, who profited handsomely from the Ontario exhibition, is set to earn more from future public viewings.^[9]

1 Jesus’ Blood

Remember Ron Wyatt coming upon post-holes in the Garden Tomb area, which led him to the chamber where the Ark of the Covenant was hidden? Those post-holes were for the crosses Romans used to crucify their victims on the site, one of which was Jesus himself. The Ark rested directly below the very spot where Jesus died.

Wyatt noticed a strange black substance had dried along the cracks of the ceiling above the Ark and had dripped down on the outer stone casing of the chest itself. “When Christ died, the earth quaked. The rock was split right below His cross, and this crevice extended right down into the hidden chamber, which contained the undefiled ‘earthly’ Throne of God—the Ark with its Mercy Seat,” Wyatt explained. “After He was dead when the centurion stuck his spear into Christ’s side and pierced His spleen, the blood and water came out, falling down through that crack and was sprinkled on the Mercy Seat.”

“Indy” Wyatt reportedly took a sample of the dried blood to a Jerusalem laboratory (a contradictory story said the lab was in Nashville), following instructions from an angel. The lab allegedly found that the blood cells were still doubling and were somehow still “alive” and had only 24 chromosomes—23 female chromosomes and one Y chromosome from another non-human source. When asked by the Israelis what it was, Wyatt cried out with deep emotion, “This is the Blood of your Messiah!”

It was all a total lie. Aside from the discrepancy in where this lab was located, mature blood cells cannot divide or double. Twelve years after the Ark was found, Wyatt said he still had to have the blood tested, contradicting his earlier story. No sample or lab report was ever made available, the lame alibi being that Israeli authorities forbade Wyatt to reveal his discoveries “as it could cause a war in the Middle East.”

It is hard to see how anyone can believe such a transparent hoax. It is a testament to the power of belief—and Barnum’s cynical observation—that many still do.^[10]