Beck giving commencement speech at Liberty University 2010 Graduation, for which he ironically received an honorary degree!

A politcally liberal website posted a video of a clip from Glenn Beck’s radio show from last week.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005270013 

He tries unsuccessfully to explain the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

His scenario is that at the Council of Nicea, Constantine had the church write the Apostles’ Creed and make the first bound edition of the Bible. Anyone who disagrees with this is a heretic, so off with your head! Then some folks took the Bible books that were left out of the Bible and put them in clay pots and hid them in the back of some caves to hide them from Constantine. This, says Glenn Beck, is the reason there were scrolls found in the Qumran caves.

Wow! This is powerful ignorance. 

This is one reason I don’t watch Glenn Beck’s tv show on FOXNews, or listen to his radio show. He’s an amateur. I recall seeing him a few months ago interviewed on a Barbara Walters special, in which he said that the things on which he informs his viewers, he reports as he learns it! In other words, he has no credentials to be the jack-of-all-trades expert on all things political (or in this case, historical or religious). Like a high school student throwing together a report at the last minute, he throws together a lot of factoids and concepts that seem to match, with little or no real substantive knowledge of the greater context of the matter at hand. In short, although Glenn Beck has been successful at capturing the imagination of a lot of frustrated Americans in the wake of the election of Barak Obama, and been a leader and promoter of the Tea Party Movement, please, please, please check the facts he gives on any topic. You never know when he might launch off into another knuckle-headed foray like this again.

Rush Limbaugh is another conservative talk show host who blows my mind when he dabbles in religious topicality. Politically, he’s well-informed. His commentary is also highly motivating when it comes to living the life of American, self-sufficient, rugged individualism. But when it comes to religion, Rush is a blind guide. Looks like he’s not alone.

For some reliable reading on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see this. Not to mention the slightly more reliable (than Beck, that is!) Wikipedia article on the scrolls.

For reliable reading on the Council of Nicea, see this from a Roman Catholic source, and this quick summary from a Protestant source.

For reliable reading on the Nag Hammadi Library (for which Beck was apparently confusing the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to the modern liberal mythology about the gnostic gospels and the Council of Nicea), see this.