Veteran UFO and alien abduction researcher Raymond Fowler has recently released a new book called “Unmasked: The Holey Bible and the Ugaritic Texts.” The “e” in “Holey” is intended, as Fowler joins the steadily increasing aggregate of Biblical scholars who argue against the so-called “inerrancy” of the Bible. On his book’s cover, Fowler goes so far as to label the portrayal of the scriptures as the perfect word of God as “The Ultimate Hoax.” 

Unmasked: The Holey Bible and the Ugaritic Texts 

By Raymond Fowler

It was not always thus for Fowler. He became a Fundamentalist Christian during his high school years and attended Gordon Christian College near his hometown of Wenham, Massachusetts, majoring in Bible studies and Greek. After graduation, he planned to attend Fundamentalist Bob Jones University but demurred due to family and financial obligations. Nevertheless, this all clearly serves to provide Fowler with the proper credentials to be a Bible-believing Fundamentalist Christian.  

But that was destined to change. In the new book’s preface, he writes: “For those that know me, the subject of this book is a radical departure from the

Fowler declares flatly that he has written “Unmasked” to “expose and help dismantle the conservative doctrine of Biblical inerrancy,” which he believes has resulted in many otherwise good people feeling that unbelieving family members and friends are destined for eternal damnation. The mistaken belief in inerrancy also encourages abuse based on ethnicity, sexual orientation or political opinions. It further teaches generations of young children to reject the findings of science in favor of “the pseudoscientific mythological beliefs of the past.” 

In defense of the Bible, however, Fowler does acknowledge that it contains inspirational teachings of love, morality and forgiveness that in turn lead to caring and giving societies. Over many centuries, the Bible has been both inspirational and destructive to society when taught as God’s perfect word.  

“However, based upon the recent discovery of the Ugaritic texts,” Fowler writes, “the use of mythic historiography by its writers, and the findings of archeology, it will be shown   the inerrant position held by conservative Christianity is based upon a Bible full of mythological holes that need to be replaced with facts.”  

Ugarit was an important seaport city in the Ancient Near East, dating back to the Bronze Age. The Ugaritic texts were accidentally discovered in 1928 by a Syrian farmer plowing his field near a town called Ras Shamra fifty miles east of Cyprus. The farmer’s plow struck what looked like a square rock sticking out of the dirt. When he pulled it out of the ground, it revealed an underground vault undisturbed for thousands of years. Inside were found vases, jugs, gold, sild pieces of ivory and clay tablets inscribed with strange writings from a time mostly lost in history.  

The amazing discovery came to the attention of a French archeologist named Claude Frederic-Armand Schaeffer, who excavated and conducted research at the Ugarit site from 1929 to 1939. When the clay tablets were translated, they chronicled a succession of cultures dating from the 7th or 6th millennium BC to about 1195 BC. Learning about this northern Canaanite civilization helped to clarify difficult passages in the Old Testament and reveal many of their mythological origins.  

To go a step further, the content of the texts greatly impacted, even upended, previous interpretations and beliefs about the Biblical scriptures.

Fowler draws on the research of Biblical scholar Mark Smith, who has held positions at New York University and Princeton Theological Seminary, and who specializes in the Hebrew Bible and Late Bronze Age Ugarit. Smith argues that the parallels between the Ugaritic and Biblical texts are so rich and specific that it is obvious that the two share an overlapping cultural matrix. It is evident that early Israelite polytheism and later Israelite monolatry and then even later monotheism evolved from Canaanite polytheism, the Canaanites being the ancestors of the early

Israelites.  

The Ugaritic texts also give evidence of being the original source for the names, titles, divine imagery and poetic forms later appropriated by the writers of the Old Testament to describe the God of the Israelites. Coupled with the findings of archeology, we see that many of the Old Testament stories are fiction and based upon myths that were commonplace in the local Mesopotamian culture.  

The Canaanites who preceded the Israelites worshipped a four-tiered family of gods headed by a supreme father god named El, who was the Creator of All Things. It was believed that he lived high upon an insurmountable mountain in a magnificent mansion. He was also said to live at “the source of two rivers,” where the waters of the heavens and earth meet. El was married to Ashera, a goddess wife who bore him 70 sons, all of whom dwelled in mansions of their own and were themselves regarded as gods. Therefore, according to the Ugaritic text, the early Canaanite Israelites were polytheistic. 

The Divine Council

In Genesis, in the original Hebrew, we read that Elohim created the heavens and the earth, not Yahweh, as many assume. Elohim, plural for El, refers to the Divine Council or to El and his sons. Yahweh, familiarly also called Jehovah, was just one of El’s 70 sons.  

When we read “Let us make man in our image,” we now understand it as a reference to God as a plural entity, or El and his sons. Many have wondered down through the ages who were the associates God was referring to when he used the phrase “our image” and not simply the single image of himself as the sole creator. The polytheism discussed here answers that question and many others. 

While these facts, laid out by Fowler in less than the first 20 pages of “Unmasked,” clearly serve to undermine the historicity of the Old Testament and the very foundations of Judaism and Christianity, we cannot simply ignore them. Many of us are taught from childhood that the Bible is the perfect word of God, free from any error or contradiction the mind of man can raise against it.