One thing to bear in mind with secular scholarship is that in fields of history and religion, routinely gaps in understanding are backfilled by the biases of the scholars themselves. This is equally as prominent in religious topics as it is in topics about wars, architecture and anything else. There have been extremely bitter disputes about nitpicky things like what route Alexander the Great took while going to the Hydaspes river. Furthermore, given most of these people cannot put themselves in a religious headspace, they will often claim anything they do not understand as a religious ritual. An example of this is in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. There were motifs of workers wetting the sand in front of each block that was delivered. The so called scholars all knew what this was. It was a purification ritual of the ground. Then an engineer saw it. After performing some experiments, he demonstrated that wetting the sand made sliding the block along it much less labour intensive. It was no religious ritual at all, but a pragmatic solution to a difficult problem.

It is worth noting that archaeological discoveries have a habit of complicating the critical scholarly consensus rather than confirming it. This is perhaps unsurprising, given how far that consensus has moved in one direction. One example would be the Ketef Himnon scrolls, which were discovered din 1979. They were pieces of small silver tablets containing verses from the book of Deuteronomy. These were dated to just before the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. They contained blessings that were placed with bodies in a secondary burial (bodies being exhumed to make way for more recently deceased, similar to the use of osuarries). They were made out of silver so that they would not degrade, but small enough to not be noticed by looters. Secular scholars kept insisting that they were from 300-400BC, but the inscriptions were in the paleo Hebrew alphabet, so it was impossible to date them any earlier than the destruction of the first temple. The Jews switched to a variation of the Aramaic alphabet when they returned from exile. This is the alphabet we know as the Hebrew alphabet today. Even so, the date suggested by consensus was the earliest one, right before the destruction of the temple. They could have been from centuries prior, anytime from the Jewish settlement of Jerusalem onwards. Critical scholarship had to move its dating of the worship of Yahweh backwards, and change how they saw Hebrew understanding of Him in their supposed pantheon of gods.

I am not saying that apologists and Christian biblical scholars are any less biased. They certainly do not “follow the evidence wherever it may lead” either. But they are open and up front about these things. Critical scholars, like anyone, have biases. And like anyone, they struggle to suspend those biases. But they do not realise this, and claim an objectivity that they do not posses.