Gerald Alexander Larue (June 20, 1916 – September 17, 2014) was an American scholar of religion and professor emeritus of gerontology, a former ordained minister who became an agnostic, archaeologist, debunker of biblical stories and accounts of miracles, and humanist.
Biography
Larue was born in Calgary, Canada, into a family of a salesman. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Alberta in 1943 and was ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1945.
Over the next eight years he led congregations in Canada and California while completing his theological studies. In 1953 he earned a doctorate from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, where he also studied archaeology. Even during his years in School of Religion he questioned religious dogma. According to his son's account, professors called him Heretic Larue, as he was treating religious studies more as historical or scientific facts that could be challenged. He gave up the pulpit in 1953 because, he later told the Orange County Register, "while I was doing good things in society, there was no intellectual growth for me." He regarded the existence of God as "an open question."
In 1958 Larue joined faculty of University of Southern California as a professor of biblical history and archaeology. In the 1960s he took part in digs in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East, returning with artifacts preserved in a USC archaeological collection.
Larue gradually turned his attention to topics such as the Bible's views of sex and gender and ancient practices surrounding death and dying. Larue joined the USC Davis School of Gerontology in 1981 staying as a professor until his retirement from USC in 2006.
He was a long-time supporter of the Council for Secular Humanism, and a co-founder of its inter-disciplinary Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion in 1983, becoming its first president until 2003. He received the Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association in 1989.
Larue was on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine from its founding in 1992 to the time of his death. In 2004, Larue received a Leibovitz Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service to Seniors.
Larue died at age 98 in Newport Beach after a stroke.
Critique of Supernatural
Larue's articulate critiques of religious dogma, supernaturalism and pseudoscience made him one of the most prominent in the field. During an academic career spanning five decades, Larue became a widely cited expert on topics including Satanism, visions of Mary, and death and dying. Over the years he addressed many other biblical stories. He hypothesized that an earthquake, not God, caused Jericho's walls to collapse, and that Lazarus did not rise from the dead but awoke from a coma.
He once told a woman whose silver rosary turned to gold during a pilgrimage to a Marian apparition site to dip the rosary in tarnish remover. She declined, but Larue persisted in his battles against what he called "magical thinking." Larue "had a strong regard for truth and limited patience for obscurantism. He had one foot in the real world and one foot in the ivory tower," said Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Noah's Ark Hoax
Larue was at the center of a controversy over an elaborate hoax in which his friend George Jammal claimed that he had found Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. The forged discovery was featured on a 1993 CBS documentary titled The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark, which made a case for the existence of the ark as described in the Bible. Hosted by Darren McGavin, the special featured interviews with John C. Whitcomb, Philip C. Hammond, Charles Berlitz, David Coppedge, Carl Baugh and Tim LaHaye.The centerpiece of the film were the claims of ark discovery and presenting a piece of wood from the vessel. After the broadcast Larue exposed the claims as a hoax—and himself as an advisor to the hoaxer—in an interview with Time magazine.