FORT WORTH—Steven M. Ortiz grew up in east Los Angeles, attending a Southern Baptist church with his then newly converted father and listening to sermons from a pastor who was always citing the background of the biblical text. The historical and cultural background of the Bible

intrigued him, he recalled.

“My personality is the type that I want to touch and taste it,” said Ortiz, reflecting on his journey from a curious kid to a Ph.D. archaeologist who has worked with some of the foremost scholars in his field. The day the TEXAN interviewed him in his office at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, his adrenaline was just beginning to subside from the week before, when the seminary’s I. Ruth Martin Collection of archaeological artifacts, dating back to the Iron Age (1,000-586 B.C.), was “rediscovered” after being stumbled upon deep in the bowels of the climate-controlled library archives.

It seems the collection was inconspicuously marked, boxed and stored amid aging church music documents on the bottom of a shelf. A week-and-a-half later, Ortiz was lecturing a handful of students in the newly minted seminar room that now houses the Martin collection. Many of the more than 100 pieces of pottery, including cuneiform tablet writings, jars, oil lamps, plus ancient coins were already displayed in glass cases.

The recovery of the artifacts, which join other artifacts in the Charles C. Tandy Archaeological

Museum at Southwestern, gives students a tangible sense of biblical history, he said. “For the program to have a dedicated seminar room for the students to get hands-on experience is very important,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz joined the Southwestern staff this fall as associate professor of archaeology and biblical backgrounds and director of the Tandy Museum, coming from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. After Hurricane Katrina sent the Ortizes to Grapevine to be near family, Ortiz found

support as a fellow professor at the Southern Baptist sister school in Fort Worth.

Eventually, that relationship developed into an opportunity to revive the archaeology program at Southwestern, which discontinued its program in the early 1990s. This fall Ortiz has been busy teaching several courses and designing a curriculum to propose to the school’s trustees at their spring meeting for the master of arts program in archaeology and biblical studies.

Eventually, the goal is to offer a doctoral degree in biblical archaeology. Seminary President Paige Patterson told trustees at their October meeting: “Literally, there are only a handful of schools in this country that even offer a doctor’s degree in archaeology now. For us to be able to step into that vacuum at this time is absolutely beyond any thought that I would have had to hope for. … It’s terribly important as an accompaniment to Old Testament and New Testament studies.”

The revived M.A. program, the first step Ortiz said, will be one of only two among SBC seminaries—the other is at Midwestern Seminary—and one of the few programs at evangelical Christian schools where scholarship will include archaeological digs and exposure to some of the world’s leading scholars. Ortiz said most programs involve studying about archaeology;

Southwestern’s program will be unusual among evangelical schools in that it will expose students to primary archaeological research as well as biblical backgrounds.

Ortiz said if all goes as planned, master’s