Joseph P. Free And The Romance Of Biblical Archaeology

By Timothy Larsen

[Timothy Larsen is Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill. An earlier version of this article was delivered at the opening session of the 48th Annual Wheaton College Archaeology Conference, 14 November 2003.]

The cause of evangelical biblical archaeology in general, and at Wheaton College in particular, owes a considerable debt to Dr. Joseph P. Free (1911–1974). Free founded an influential learned organization for the advancement of evangelical archaeology, the Near East Archaeological Society. His publications, especially his widely disseminated Archaeology and Bible History, significantly influenced several generations of evangelical scholars. Archaeology and Bible History was first published in 1950, and a fifteenth printing appeared posthumously in 1992.[1] In 1936, Free introduced the first course in biblical archaeology at Wheaton College, going on to create a full major in archaeology, beginning in 1940. He also launched Wheaton College’s summer archaeological expeditions, which still exist today under the appellation “Wheaton in the Holy Lands.” Not least of his services to the discipline of biblical archaeology was founding the Wheaton College Archaeology Conference, a significant annual event. He was the director of the Dothan excavation, an important site in terms of biblical archaeology. Free was a visionary, an entrepreneur, a spokesperson and advocate for the discipline of archaeology, a pioneer and a founder, as well as a field archaeologist. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that everything that Wheaton College has achieved in this disciplinary area it owes to him. An examination of the road that Free took to these achievements will serve to place his work at Dothan in context, and it will also serve to illuminate more generally the evolving relationship between evangelicalism and the discipline of archaeology in the twentieth century.

The dust jacket of the first edition of Archaeology and Bible History explained Free’s academic ascent to his place as head of the Department of Archaeology at Wheaton as follows:

As a prep school student in his early teens, he became interested in archaeology when the headmaster at Stony Brook, Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein, showed the boys an ancient clay cone inscribed with cuneiform writing. Later his interest was renewed when, as an undergraduate at Princeton University, he lived next door to Professor George Elderkin, the excavator at Antioch, and a few doors from T. Leslie Shear, the excavator at ancient Corinth. In subsequent years he specialized in archaeology and Biblical studies. 

Dr. Free holds the A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, and for ten years carried on post-Ph.D. work in the field of archaeology and Near Eastern studies at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Here we have what would appear to be a portrait of a man who set his heart on archaeology as a teenager, trained with the best at Princeton, and then added to it the latest methods being developed at the University of Chicago—a pedigree that would have pleased any Ivy League university, let alone a fundamentalist undergraduate school out in the prairies. Nevertheless, like a good Agatha Christie novel, this “about the author” write-up has a certain flair for misdirecting the reader.

The truth is that for quite some time it was not at all apparent that Free was destined for a career in the field of archaeology. All of his degrees at Princeton were in what his doctoral supervisor referred to in a letter of reference as the “Romance Department,” no doubt shorthand for the romance languages wing of the Department of Modern Languages. Free wrote an undergraduate thesis on “Romanticism in Balzac.” His Ph.D. thesis was a literary study of Rousseau. How far Free was from the discipline of archaeology when he joined the Wheaton College faculty in 1935 may be gathered from how he filled out the application form. Asked to list his “Major subject or subjects,” he put, “Modern Languages (French, Span., Italian[)].”[2] To the follow-up question, “Minor subject (what you can teach if necessary),” he responded, “English, German, Latin, and most any of the humanities.” This is a man who unequivocally saw himself as a linguist, and a modern linguist at that. Beside that final, accommodating catch-all phrase (“and most any of the humanities”), the furthest stretch is Latin. Not even the biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew made it on to this rather long and obliging list. As Wheaton was not then currently offering archaeology, it probably would not have been a good idea tactically to have added that subject, but one might have expected to see “Old Testament” or “Bible” or “Ancient History” or some such adjacent discipline.

Joseph P. Free took his place on the Wheaton College faculty as an assistant professor of French in the Foreign Languages Department. A more mischievous, alternative title for this article on Dr. Joseph P. Free’s career might have been “pardon my French.” His disciplinary migration, however, had formally begun already in his second year at Wheaton, 1936, when he taught Wheaton’s first course in biblical archaeology as a kind of intriguing side interest. By 1940, he had secured a formal joint appointment. Moreover, it was clear which half of his work was capturing people’s imaginations. Wheaton’s yearbook, the Tower, said this of him in 1940, “Although best known among the students for his interesting lectures on travel in Palestine, Dr. Joseph Paul Free is officially recognized as assistant professor of French and Bible Archaeology by those who search the catalogue.”[3] The page for the French Club had a picture of him in front of the Sphinx with the caption “Dr. Free Free.”[4] By 1942, in terms of his faculty identity, the transformation was complete. His title had become assistant professor of Bible and Archaeology. He was still in the photograph for the French Club, but was also pictured for the first time in the Seminary Club. By the following year, the French Club had been dropped as well: he had set his hand to the plow and was not looking back.

In other words, Free’s education in archaeology was entirely informal. On his application form, he noted that he had also taken Greek and Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary, by which we can infer that he did not take any courses related to biblical history or Old Testament studies. Therefore, if any of his formal studies at Princeton were in fields directly relevant to his new career they must have been general education courses or electives taken as an undergraduate. His ten-year period of post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute was, alas, less than it would seem. A “professional biographical data” form in his Wheaton College personnel file dated 1959 has these years more precisely delineated as 1940–46. There was, however, no actual post-doctoral status to be had at the Oriental Institute.[5] What Free actually secured was the designation “student-at-large.” In this capacity, he took one course in 1940, the standard historical survey, a two-hundred level course, “History of the Ancient Orient.” He took no further courses until 1946 when, in line with his linguistic bent, he took two three-hundred level courses in the Akkadian language, “Inscriptions of Neo-Assyrian Kings” and “Neo-Babylonian Documents.” This was the full extent of his formal relationship with the Oriental Institute.

One wonders if his desire to study Akkadian went all the way back to that clay cone “inscribed with cuneiform writing” that Frank Gaebelein had shown him as a boy, underlining once again that his interests at that time in his life were really linguistic rather than archaeological. What explanation, then, can be found for his disciplinary migration? On a more superficial level, as the Tower caption indicated, there is no doubt that Dr. Free did long to be free, that his personal temperament was marked by wanderlust. Former students remember him fondly as a dynamic figure. They also recall, however, that he often found a reason to be away even during term time when he had a scheduled class period. Professor Arthur Holmes recollected that Free would write out a full lecture for his teaching assistant to read out verbatim—complete with jokes and all.[6] Professor Walter Elwell reminisced that Free was in the habit of lecturing into a tape recorder while traveling and then having the tape played to the class in his absence. Students used to fantasize that, instead of taking notes, they would merely have the lecture recorded, thereby leaving Free’s classroom occupied entirely by machines![7] It is significant that the first mention in the Tower of his new disciplinary interest said that his lectures were on travel in Palestine. Free had started what was formally and tellingly entitled the “Holy Land Cruise” (the precursor to “Wheaton in the Holy Lands”) in the summer of 1937, and thus was offering guided tours for some years before he became involved in actual field work.[8] Having come to Wheaton as his very first faculty position, as an assistant professor in what was only his fourth year of teaching, Free put in a request that at the end of the semester he could immediately begin a sabbatical that he had decided should be fifteen months long. (Need it be added that the administration did not oblige him in this matter?) One way of looking at how Free’s time at Wheaton College ended is that he simply wandered off and never came back. His typed-out “professional biographical data” form, dated 1959, has him down as Professor of Bible Archaeology. His file was then updated by administrators with handwritten notations: firstly, “on leave of absence 1960–61,” then “also 1962–63,” then “again, 1964–65,” next comes, “Offered indefinite ‘break,’” and finally, “no official connection.” President Armerding informed the Dean in a memorandum dated 23 March 1965 of this decision, noting that “we should no longer carry Dr. Free’s benefits for him, as might be true in persons expecting to return to full-time teaching here.” A statement written “for the record” by the Dean, noted the President’s opinion that “regular faculty status normally implies an on campus teaching relationship with student contact.”[9]

A more substantive explanation for Free’s disciplinary shift, however, is the prompt provided by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.[10] In the 1930s, nowhere was this conflict more heated than amongst Presbyterians. On his application form, dated 4 January 1935, Free had put his denominational identity as simply “Presbyterian.” During the following year, however, Presbyterians would divide along fundamentalist-modernist lines. The fundamentalists who would be ejected from the Presbyterian Church USA included not only J. Gresham Machen, who had resigned from the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary because of what he perceived to be the growing influence of theological liberals, but also the president of Wheaton College, J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., who no doubt had been particularly glad to hire Free because he was a fellow Presbyterian.[11] As he was living and worshipping in Princeton during the first half of the 1930s, Free would have watched this controversy heating up from a front row seat. Free’s 1935 application to join the Wheaton College faculty was supported by three letters of reference. One of these was from Dr. O. C. Engle, who taught the adult Bible class at Free’s home church in Princeton, Second Presbyterian. In his letter, which was addressed specifically to Dr. Buswell, Engle enthused about Free, “He is a thorough fundamentalist and a strong contender for the ‘faith once delivered unto the saints.’” During this application process, almost everyone went out of their way to locate one another on the ecclesiastical map. Free himself confessed that his doctoral supervisor was “a deist or Unitarian,” but asserted bluntly that his other two referees were “both saved people, and speak the same language that we do.”

Free’s continued immersion in the fight for the fundamentals amongst Presbyterians is indicated by another form in his personnel file. It was sent to all faculty members by the Dean in 1962, requesting that they supply information regarding their ordination or other ministerial credentials, if any. Free wrote in reply that he had been ordained by the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in September 1942. “Evangelical Presbyterian” had become the official name of a denomination only in 1961, and thus one must swim up past where this rivulet had branched off to get back to 1942. Such a journey would place Free, one infers, in the Bible Presbyterian Church at the time of his ordination, a break away denomination from Machen’s break-away denomination.[12] Buswell himself was a Bible Presbyterian man in 1942, having parted ways with Wheaton and taken a post at an educational institution serving that denomination. One might speculate that Free’s ordination in September 1942 was prompted by his more general career realignment at that time: 1942 was also the year both that his title was changed to place him exclusively in the Bible department and when he began his association with the college’s Seminary Club. Already in 1945, Archaeology and Bible History existed in what was very close to its final form in a bound, typescript version. In it Free is very comfortable identifying himself casually as a fundamentalist (“as fundamentalists we do hold that.. .”).[13] In the first published version (1950), this was altered to read, “as believers in the fundamentals of the faith, we do hold that.. .,” although in an appendix he made it quite explicit that the label “fundamentalist” was an apt synonym for the terms he usually employed such as “Bible believer.”[14] His denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, founded Covenant Seminary in St. Louis in 1956, and Free was a keen supporter of that institution for the rest of his life. He even flirted at one point in his career with joining the faculty at Covenant, and the seminary was remembered in his will.

The connection between biblical archaeology and fighting modernism is, of course, Christian apologetics. If Free really was, as Dr. Engle had assured President Buswell, “a strong contender for the ‘faith once delivered unto the saints,’” then biblical archaeology was arguably the best weapon to have in that struggle. The historical veracity of the Bible was under attack by higher criticism—a discipline that was viewed by modernists as thoroughly scientific, but by fundamentalists as spurious as well as corrosive. Fundamentalists deemed archaeology, on the other hand, to be a truly scientific discipline that would confirm the trust worthiness of the biblical record. Biblical critics theorize (and are often wrong), but archaeologists discover the facts, and the facts are on the believer’s side. This dynamic was a well-established one by the mid-1930s. Published in 1910, the very first volume of The Fundamentals, the series that gave fundamentalism its name, contained a whole range of articles endeavoring to expose, as one title put it, “Fallacies of Higher Criticism.” Moreover, it also included an article by M. G. Kyle entitled “The Recent Testimony of Archaeology to the Scriptures. “Joseph P. Free began to teach archaeology at Wheaton College in 1936, the year that marked the final rupture in Presbyterianism: the fight was at its height and able men were needed to answer the call to war.

The earliest record of Free’s interest in archaeology that has been found is a letter from Frank Gaebelein dated 1 May 1933. It seems out of place in files that almost all date from the 1950s, perhaps indicating that Free himself saved it precisely because it was a marker of where it all began.[15] Free had given a talk on “Palestine” to the boys at Stony Brook School, his alma mater, and Gaebelein wrote to praise it. The assessment is almost entirely on issues of pedagogy, and it has a remarkably contemporary ring to it. Free is credited with having engaged his hearers early on and having pitched the material at the right level. He is commended for having used multi-media resources (“The motion pictures seemed to me extraordinarily well taken and well arranged”) and for—that most important of all criteria—having not spoken for too long. Only the last line moved toward engaging with the actual subject matter. In it Gaebelein complimented his former pupil for the way that he introduced the useful notion “that first-hand investigation in Palestine tends to confirm the Bible.” When Free applied to Wheaton, his other reference from a “saved” person was written by his pastor at Second Presbyterian Church, Dr. D. B. Tomkins. Tomkins observed, “He teaches most acceptably the young people’s Bible class.. . Mr. Free is no perfunctory teacher but has a very definite aim in his teaching and that definite aim is to win these young people for Christ.” As an undergraduate, Free had done his own existential wrestling with issues of faith and doubt, so his personal experience taught him that young people struggled in this way and needed help that was relevant and compelling.[16] These evangelistic, apologetic, and pastoral concerns are the soil from which Free’s commitment to archaeology sprung.

Free’s very first article on archaeology also underlines these origins. It appeared in 1939 in the Christian Victory Magazine and was tellingly entitled “Archaeology Confirms the Bible: A Practical Use of the Results of the Excavations.” Here is a portion of its introduction:

[A]rchaeology confirms the Bible, showing that its historical statements are true and accurate. This confirmation is of great aid in dealing with people who doubt the reliability of the scriptures.. .. Almost every young person who has been in high school has heard from someone that the Bible contains errors and that it is not an entirely trustworthy book. A person who has such doubts in his mind will reject Christ on the ground that the scriptures are not to be trusted.[17]

The heart of the article is three case studies that are used to make the point that erstwhile reigning, skeptical assumptions about specific, historical references in the biblical narrative have been overturned by archaeological research: the Hittites, Solomon’s stables, and King Sargon. The final section of the article includes several personal testimonies in which Free made various individuals receptive to hearing “the way of salvation through Christ” by removing their doubts about the Scriptures through informing them of how modern archaeological findings demonstrated the Bible’s reliability. The final paragraph summed it up:

There are many people who have wrongly assumed that our Bible contains errors, and they let this stand between them and the Lord. The writer hopes that these and many other facts of Bible archaeology may be used by the reader in bringing others to know Christ, by removing doubts as to the accuracy of the scripture.

In the next five years, Free published a whole string of articles in popular Christian periodicals that had an overtly apologetic purpose. Some of the titles of these were “Archaeology Confirms the Conquest of Canaan” (Josh 6—12), “Can A Young Man Trust His Bible? Archaeology and the Book of Judges” (Judg 1, 4, 8, 9), and “Archaeology Confirms the Kings of the Bible” (2 Kings), all for Christian Victory Magazine. For His magazine, he wrote a two-part article in 1944 under the general title of “Archaeology and the Accuracy of Luke.” In 1943, he gave a lecture at the University of Michigan on “Archaeological Discoveries and Christian Faith Today.” It is not hard to imagine why Free would have decided that this kind of frontline work for “Christ and His Kingdom” (to evoke Wheaton College’s motto) should take precedence in his own career over studies of seventeenth-century French literature.

An apologetic purpose runs strongly throughout Archaeology and Bible History. Free announced at the very beginning when introducing the whole discipline of biblical archaeology: “[I]t may be said that two of the main functions of Bible archaeology are the illumination and the confirmation of the Bible.”[18] He saw every part of his book as fulfilling one or the other of these functions, and even gave his readers helpful guidance on how they could skip the “illumination” sections and thereby just use the book “as a compendium on the subject ‘How Archaeology Confirms the Bible.’”[19] One edition of the book, published in 1973, even added on the cover as a sort of subtitle the clause “Archaeological discoveries confirm and illuminate the sequence of events in the Old and New Testaments.”[20] The degree to which Free had one eye on contemporary issues of Christian life and faith might be measured by the fact that he included an appendix which argued that the Bible did not support even the moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Under Dr. Free’s leadership, the archaeology program at Wheaton College was imbued with this apologetic approach. For years, the college’s archaeology courses were advertised in the official literature of the department with the sentence, “The vast amount of material which illuminates and confirms the Scriptures is essential to any educated Christian, whether layman, teacher, or missionary.” On the brochure for the Eleventh Annual Archaeology Conference in 1966—the first year that Free was no longer on the faculty—this sentence appeared as usual, only minus the words “and confirms.” A promotional brochure publication circa 1956 entitled “Twenty Years of Archaeology at Wheaton College” included a telling section that is worth quoting in its entirety:

ARCHAEOLOGY AND FINALITY—Often Archaeological research opens up new questions for discussion. But more often it solves problems previously raised. As Melvin Grove Kyle, Professor of Archaeology at Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, remarked, “The archaeological method is a method of facts; it seeks not merely to discuss problems, but to solve them.”

This is not merely reminiscent of the distinction between the erroneous theories of the higher critics and the genuinely scientific discoveries of the archaeologists made during the fundamentalist—modernist controversy: it is lifted straight from it. Kyle we met earlier as one of the contributors to The Fundamentals. He was born in 1858, and died in 1933. All of his advanced degrees were from Allegheny Theological Seminary. That the sole quotation from an archaeologist in a brochure from the second half of the 1950s which advertises the archaeology programs of a liberal arts college should come from such a source is indicative of the department’s self-understanding and positioning at that time.

Joseph Free wrote Archaeology and Bible History before he had ever begun to do field work himself. His seminal book was already in print when he gave assistance to the official team excavating at Dibon under the direction of Fred V. Winnett in 1950–51. For the 1952 campaign at this site, Free became an official member of the staff.[21] What eventually became the Dothan excavation was the result of an initiative by Phillip E. Howard, Jr., the editor of the Sunday School Times. Howard had been inspired by reading Archaeology and Bible History and came up with the idea of an excavation under the direction of Dr. Free sponsored by the Sunday School Times and Wheaton College. In the prospectus for the project, Howard asserted that the “first and most important” objective of the excavation would be to “increase people’s confidence in the Bible as the Word of God.”[22] Dothan was chosen as an apt site, and the Sunday School Times did indeed provide the initial funding.

Free’s work at Dothan began in 1953, and continued every year thereafter through 1960, and again in 1962 and 1964. In many ways, Free had now arrived as a field archaeologist. The results of his first season at Dothan, as well as many subsequent ones, were published in a prestigious journal in the discipline, the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.[23] He struck up professional friendships with such luminaries in the discipline as G. Ernest Wright and William F. Albright, who corresponded with him, encouraged him in his work, and came to speak at the annual archaeology conference. Nevertheless, how much Free continued to view the Dothan excavation through his original grid of “confirming and illuminating” the Bible may be observed in a letter he wrote while working there in 1962:

Our excavation at Dothan has thrown light on every principal Biblical period, beginning with the thousand year period before the days of Abraham (3000–2000 b.c.) Right now, on our fifth day of excavating, we are in the period of Solomon’s time (950 b.c.) in the area where Mrs. Free is supervising, preparatory to going down to levels of the time of the Judges and then the era of the Patriarchs. In another area we are uncovering buildings from the days of Alexander the Great. In a third main area we are uncovering houses of the days of Solomon. Our excavation at Dothan has confirmed the fact that Dothan was a thriving city in the days of Joseph, as implied in the record of his finding his brothers near that city in the period 1900–1800 b.c. (Genesis 37:17). The digging here has also shown a sizeable town in the time of Elisha, as indicated in II Kings 6:13. Many other aspects of Biblical history have been illuminated and confirmed by the Dothan excavation.[24]

In the middle of the 1960s, conflict in the Middle East brought Free’s life and work there to an end. He accepted a position as Professor of Archaeology and History at Bemidji State College. During these years, he excavated in Minnesota, shedding light on Native American culture a millennium ago. To the end of his life, Free was faithful to his Savior, a “Bible believer” who held firmly to the gospel and lived in the light of it. I imagine him at Bemidji saturated with love for Jesus Christ, still a “contender for the ‘faith once delivered unto the saints,’” still as ready as ever to defend the veracity of God’s Word, still keenly vigilant for effective ways for sharing the plan of salvation with the people who crossed his path. I imagine him also, however, still filled with intellectual curiosity, a true archaeologist with an archaeologist’s instincts and passions. As a young man, Free was no less “a thorough fundamentalist” because he was spending much of his time thinking rigorously about seventeenth-century French literature. At some point after 1935—it is hard to say just when—he had emerged fully in his chosen discipline—this time it was archaeology—once again. The romance of archaeology had won out over romance languages. I see Free meticulously investigating the buried remains of the material culture of Native Americans, not because it would promote evangelism, not because it was a form of apologetics, not because there was a struggle on for the soul of the church, but simply because he was an archaeologist: archaeology for archaeology’s sake, to the glory of God, the Lord of History, the Lord of Time, Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer.

Notes

1. Joseph P. Free, Archaeology and Bible History (rev. Howard F. Vos; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).
2. This document and, unless otherwise indicated, all such documents mentioned in this article, can be found in the files for Dr. Joseph P. Free held by the Wheaton College Archives, Buswell Library, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
3. Tower, 1940, p. 18.
4. Tower, 1940, p. 164.
5. The information in the remainder of this paragraph is based upon records at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.
6. Personal interview with Professor Arthur Holmes, 4 April 2003, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
7. Personal interview with Professor Walter Elwell, 4 March 2003, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
8. “Holy Land Cruise” is the title of an entire page on these tours in the Tower, 1941, p. 206.
9. Dean John H. Fadenrecht, “Field Archaeology at Wheaton College,” 6 July 1965.
10. For a scholarly account of this controversy see two sources that together complement one another in terms of their chronological scope, George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870—1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), and Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
11. For a scholarly biography of Machen that also makes a significant contribution to understanding the controversy as a whole, see D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
12. For a thorough guide to these various denominations, see George P. Hutchinson, The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Evangelical Synod (Cherry Hill, N.J.: Mack Publishing Co., 1974).
13. Joseph P. Free, Archaeology and Bible History [bound manuscript] (Wheaton, Ill.: Wheaton College, 1945), 2.
14. Joseph P Free, Archaeology and Bible History (Wheaton, Ill.: Van Kampen Press, 1950), 4, 347–50.
15. This letter is located in the file cabinets in the work and storage room of the Wheaton College archaeology program in the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
16. See Free, Archaeology and Bible History, viii, where he confessed that “in college days he came to the place where he wondered whether God existed or not.”
17. Free’s articles were typed out and bound together: Joseph P. Free, Articles on Archaeology [bound manuscript] (Wheaton, Ill.: Wheaton College, 1945), 1.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., x.
20. Joseph P. Free, Archaeology and Bible History (Wheaton, Ill.: Scripture Press, 1973).
21. Fred V. Winnett and William L. Reed, The Excavations at Dibon (Dhībân) in Moab (New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1964), 12, 37.
22. This document is also in the file cabinets of the work and storage room of the Wheaton College archaeology program in the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.
23. Joseph P. Free, “The First Season of Excavation at Dothan,” BASOR 131 (October 1953): 16-20.
24. Letter from Joseph P. Free to O. P. Harnish, 23 April 1962.