It is understandable, then, that most of their conclusions were influenced by what the Bible said and not necessarily by what the evidence indicated. With time, that changed. The conclusions of higher criticism gained respect and withstood attempts to discredit them. More and more, archaeologists began to see in their excavations indications that the Bible record wasn't always accurate in what it had reported, until it became rather commonplace to see archaeologists openly disputing biblical accounts that had once been revered as sacred history. He ridiculed Professor John H. Morison, who had apparently said in Biblical Archaeological Review that he shuddered at certain traditional views of the Bible that some Christians have, but I am not at all embarrassed to say that I shudder to think of what kind of world we would be living in if our human ancestors had tenaciously clung to the old and stubbornly resisted the new.
Progress can occur only when some dare to try the new.
Joseph Callaway had been a conservative Southern Baptist and former professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary before he went to Israel to engage in archaeological work. He excavated the ruins of the ancient city of Ai, whose destruction by Joshua's army is alleged in Joshua 8. According to biblical chronology, the sacking of Ai would have occurred around 1426 B. C., but Callaway's work indicated that the Bible was inaccurate in this claim. There was a great walled city there beginning about 3000 B. C., more than 1800 years before Israel's emergence in Canaan. But this city was destroyed about 2400 B. C., after which the site was abandoned.