Historical Reliability
of the Bible
|
The Bible is a valuable collection of historical sources, which is much better than a history text book. First-hand accounts by prophets, compilations of court records, and ancient stories preversed on and collected. Differences and difficulties have not ironed out or harmonized, and this adds to the veracity of these accounts. Even in the Gospels, where later authors saw the earlier accounts, discrepancies are left as in the eyewitness accounts which the gospel writers want to preserve. These historical sources are far more believable than a tidied up history. |
| There are many examples where archaeology and other sources verify Bible events, but most events will never be confirmed. Ancient history is poorly preserved, and most events in the Bible have no importance in the realm of political history. Also, leaders only recorded their successes publicly - so we shouldn't expect to find a monument to escape of Israelite slaves from Egypt! But we do find records of many other Bible events. |
Let me tell you a little of my history:
My father was born and
lived in 19th century Hong Kong where he owned a bank. I was educated at
my father's old school in Brighton and then studied medicine in Cardiff.
Becoming a Christian changed my perspective completely. I become a Baptist
minister in Cardiff and later the denomination seconded me to the academic
world in Cambridge. I listen to Ska music and bluegrass.
This account is like Bible history – it is factual, but confusing and
contradictory.
- Surely I've got the century wrong – my father can't
have lived in the 1800's!
Explanation: he was born in Hong Kong
right at the end of the 1800's
- My father's school can't be in the UK
- he was born and lived in Hong Kong! Explanation: He was British, and
sent back for his education
- This account implies my family was rich,
but wasn't. I had free school meals.
Explanation: My father's
bank went bust
- This implies that I'm a Doctor of medicine, but my PhD
is in ancient Judaism
Explanation: I didn't finish medicine and
I switched to theology
- This implies that I became a Christian just
before switching to theology
Actually I at was at age 12. This
account is the logical, not chronological order
- it uses approximations like "40 years" just as we use "scores" or "centuries"
so sometimes things appear to be in the wrong century or last too long
- it lists things one after another which may be concurrent – like the Judges
(the Judges ruled in different places in Israel, so probably overlapped)
- it often uses a logical order instead of chronological - so we're shown Jesus clearing the Temple just before his arrest, though John puts it two years earlier
- it says things which don't make sense because we lack background information, like me attending my father's British school even though he lived in Hong Kong
Every now and then the archaeologists come up with another piece of the
puzzle
- though there'll always be more pieces missing than found, esp
for older times
- there were a flurry of these a century ago when
people like Albright first discovered ancient Near Eastern history through
archaeology
- before, people used to say things like: Hittites are an
invention of the Bible
- now the British Museum has a huge Hittite
collection
- the walls of Jericho discovered by Garstang were redated by Kenyon as 1550BC
- this is far too early for the Israelite invasion, so suddenly the Bible was 'wrong'
- but Kitchen points out the Bible and the site shows it wasn't rebuilt till the 9th C
- so whatever existed in Joshua's day was eroded by 400 years of wind and sand
- it is only the layer underneath this one which would survive to be discovered.
- no-one expected to find that, hidden in the sands. And yet this has happened
- Prof Andrew George of the University of London has been quietly publishing papers on a stele discovered in 1917 and now owned by the Schoyen Collection
- its discovery in Iraq sounds like something out of an India Jones
movie:
- realising that the world war was bringing armies to the area,
the three archaeologists decided to remove the three pieces of the
monument to safety
- they went to Germany, London and the USA but the
piece in the USA was lost
- and that missing piece contains a detailed
map of Temple at the top!
This backs up the reference to Babel in Nabopolassar's cylinder
inscription
- it records his dedication for the colossal ziggurat at
Babylon and how he built it
- he made millions of bricks and rivers of
bitumen to waterproof the surface
- but he says he was rebuilding a
much older and famous unfinished ziggurat
- the mud structure had
bulged because it lacked a top, so occasional rain got in
- why was
this former ziggurat unfinished without any temple to cap the top?
- it
seems we've found the 3 millennium old mystery which Genesis referred
to
(More at http://www.schoyencollection.com/historyBabylonian.html
and http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/3858/2/TowerOfBabel.AfO.pdf)
Discoveries like these can't confirm all the historical details in the
Bible
- they can merely show, now and then, a few details of
corroboration
- and our piece-meal knowledge means that often we
misinterpret them
- we may be misunderstanding the archaeology or the
Bible text or both
The Bible is a very valuable and believable set of ancient historical
documents
- they are, of course, copies of the original, like all
other historical documents
- sometimes, like ancient Near Eastern
documents, the language was modernized
- though the Bible has much less
modernization than similar documents
- sometimes, like all copied
texts, there are scribal errors
- though unlike other copied texts,
subsequent scribes haven't corrected them
- we read in 1Sam.13.1 "Saul
was one year when he became king and two years he reigned over Israel" –
ie he died at the grand age of 3!
- something has gone seriously wrong
here, and many translations try to fix it
- but Hebrew scribes never
tried to fix it because they didn't know the original
- this is the
best kind of historical document. One with errors which aren't fixed
-
occasionally scribes did make changes, but they carefully listed them
-
eg "The Lord stood before Abraham" became "Abraham stood before the
Lord"
(because "the Lord stood before" is idiomatic for "the
Lord was a servant of")
The Bible's a remarkable collection because it covers so many years and
cultures
- and often made much more fascinating by comparing with other
old texts
- the Tabernacle became real when we discovered Egyptian
tabernacles
- in Egyptian tombs we found the remains of similar wood
& leather worship tents
- references to this Balaam were found scratched in a wall in Deir 'Alla about 800BC
- this doesn't make the talking ass any less strange !
- other strange things were recognized as strange by the editors; eg Joshua's long day
- I have an explanation which takes this literally without stopping the earth
(see http://www.christianitymagazine.co.uk/embarrassingbible/joshua10.aspx)
but the ancient authors didn't, and you can see them struggling when they say: And this is also recorded in the Book of Jasher" – ie someone else corroborates it.
- the editor of Deuteronomy records King Og of Bashan as the last giant of Raphaim
- but feels this needs proof: "you can see his 12' bed in the capital of Ammon" (3.11)
The Bible is better than a history textbook. It is a collection of
historical documents
- it isn't a tidied account where various sources
are made to agree with each other
- we have something much more
valuable: original documents, preserved unchanged
- first-hand accounts
of prophets, reports culled from court documents, and stories
- stories
were preserved better than written history by being told by each
generation
- anthropologists find that such stories are preserved
remarkably, word for word
- these collections were edited very early
and then left alone – copied faithfully
Historical documents are much better than history, because the problems
remain
- historians try to fix the problems, solve the contradictions,
merge the accounts
- historical documents tell things from particular
angles, with their own timelines
- they hardly ever agree with each
other, and when they do, we are suspicious
- agreement suggests that
someone copied another, or both copied the same source
Historical documents (like history books) are biased. We must always
remember this
- ancient kings only ever recorded successes and never
failures or defeat
- King Sennacherib's boasts in his Prism: "I shut up
[King Hezekiah] like a bird in a cage’ – but he doesn't mention that the
siege ultimately ended in failure.
- so don't bother looking for
Pharoah's account of the Exodus slave revolt
- Moses' band may have
been large, but it was unimportant; and Egypt lost
Actually, there are a few attempts at writing history in the New
Testament
- in the 4th C BC Thucydides invented the modern historical
method
- he collected various sources and tried to construct a
reasonable account
- historians didn't just collect facts, but
investigated motives and significance
- 1st C Dionysius of
Halicarnassus said such history was "accurate" (Gk. akribos)
- and Luke
says he set out to write a history which was akribos" (Luke 1.3)
- this
is a history which tells more than facts: it includes how and
why
Mere facts can be misleading, like when I told you I listen to Ska and
Bluegrass
- I only listen to Ska when my daughter's band is playing,
and although I love the high-energy bluegrass instrumentals, I find most
of the songs too sentimental.
- a good historian in the 1st century
would explain that to his readers
Ancient historians put words in people's mouth, or explained their
thoughts
- this tells the reader what their motives were and how they
reasoned
- but modern readers don't get this. We quote people. We
don't make up words
- but actually a quote can be more misleading than
stating what they mean
- a reviewer says "It is amazing rubbish" and is
quoted as "It is amazing"
- ancient readers expected their historians
to explain what people meant, and do that by putting the explanations into
their mouths
- for example, Josephus records a long speech by the
zealot Eliezer at Masada, about the motives and hopes of his
movement before they all kill themselves.
- the reader doesn't say to
himself: Josephus can't have known what Eliezer said, seeing that he and
all his listeners committed suicide when he had finished
- the readers
knew that Josephus made up the words, but they trusted that he knew the
movement well enough to accurately use this to explain the movement
-
it is, perhaps, a form of faction – a mix of fact and fiction – of the
best kind
- it tells us history more accurately than just facts could
convey it to us
- he fails because, like other Gospel writers, he depends on eyewitness reports
- Richard Bauckham recently pulled together all the evidence for eyewitnesses
- it horrified some scholars but others were surprised at the amount of evidence
- it certainly explains why sometimes a person is named, like Simon of Cyrene
- they are named as the source of the story, whereas most people are anonymous
- and taking Peter seriously as a source for Mark means he can disparage Peter
- how else could Mark depict Peter (the great church leader) failing so often
- but a Gospel writer can say these thing if he is citing Peter's own stories
However eyewitnesses are fallible and have their own viewpoint
- judges warn juries that witnesses who disagree aren't necessarily lying
- in fact witnesses who agree too well have probably colluded to tell a story
- the Gospels don't bother to correct eyewitness reports, even for the
resurrection
- John records only that Mary Magdalene came to the
tomb
- Mark and Luke say that Mary mother of James was also there
-
Matthew simply says that “the other Mary” accompanied her
- but Mark
says Salome was also there, and Luke says Joanna was there
Of course the stories can be made to agree fairly easily:
- ie
perhaps John and Matthew didn’t bother to list everyone who was there
(in John Mary gives away that she wasn't alone by saying "we
saw…")
- and perhaps Luke's "Joanna" was Mark's "Salome" (ie she had
two names)
The point is that the Gospels don't try to agree with each other
-
Matthew and Luke knew what Mark had said but they didn't change their
story
- and John probably knew all the other three and still stuck with
his version
- they weren't competing or trying to correct each other.
It was their version
- the point of the story wasn't the absolute
detail, but the wonder and reality of it
In other the Bible is made of historical sources – it isn't a tidied up
history book
- it records events in order to teach us about God, not to
teach us history
- it accurately records meaning and relevance rather
than order and bald facts
- and mostly it concerns people who were
irrelevant to recorded history
- because it concerns God and his
interactions with ordinary people, like us
I finish with a
personal gripe. The battle over the name David
- about 30 years ago
archaeologists and historians gave up on King David
- no-one ever found
any reference to any "David" anywhere outside the Bible
- finally
historians rewrote OT history so this wonderful king is merely an
ideal
- David is now regarded as unhistorical as King Arthur and his
knights
- and André Lemaire said he found another in the cracks of the Moabite Stone
- in 1997 Ken Kitchen found "the highlands of David" in Shishak's inscription in Egypt
- suddenly we had 3 references to King David, in 3 nations surrounding Israel:
- in the North by Damascus, in Moab in the East and in Egypt in the South
- there are still none found in Israel, but so little survives from 3000 years ago
The maddening thing is that most historians won't change their minds
- their initial argument was very weak – based on the absence of evidence
- they managed to make this into a coherent picture with various theories
- and spent their careers disputing the data in the Bible
- so when the evidence turned up they started dismissing the inscriptions
- as if they don't want to let the facts interfere with their conclusions
- and I can't help but take it personally!
- this is a wake-up call for anyone who bases a theory on the absence of evidence
Extra: Arguments from silence:
Marco Polo made no mention of China's Great Wall, paper, foot-binding or tea. He claimed to be in the service of Kublai Khan for two years but we have no Chinese records about this person.
The principal historians of ancient Greece, Herodotus and Thucydides, make no mention of Rome, even though Romans had been fighting their neighbours and growing in power for a century.
Pliny the Younger and Suetoneus tell us about the eruption of Vesuvius, but neither mention the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They aren't mentioned till 100 years later by Dio Cassius who can't have been an eyewitness (Roman History 66).
Extra: Differences in eyewitness details and historical accounts
The various accounts of the death of Julius Caesar are confused. We have various accounts by Suetonius, Seneca. Plutarch and Dio Cassius which differ considerably. They give different names for the leader of the group, give different reasons why they supposedly approached Caesar, describe different ways in which they grabbed hold of him, the person who stabbed first, where he stabbed him, and only agree that the group stabbed him 23 times – something which must have been ascertained after the event.
(C) Dr David Instone-Brewer 2011
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