Occasionally, I get mail. The following are a couple of questions sent to me on behalf of someone asking about the historical reliability of Scripture. I am a systematic theologian, and not primarily a biblical scholar or a historian, and people trained in these areas could no doubt address these issues with more sophistication. At the same time, one of the things that theologians do is to try to address the questions that ordinary people ask, and this notion that the Bible is historically unreliable, closer to “fairy tales” than history, seems to be common in contemporary secular culture these days.

I am not a biblical scholar myself, but I read people who are, and, at the least, I can pull together what others who are more competent than myself have said about this topic. Perhaps ordinary lay people will find this helpful. The footnotes and bibliography will provide some guidance for further exploration.

If the Bible contains some truths and some stories, how do you determine which is which and who is the arbitrator of that “truth”? What is the evidence? I understand from a religious standpoint, this is a very dangerous and slippery slope that you may not want to explore, but I believe there are significantly more stories and embellishments in the Bible that render it essentially more philosophical or historically unreliable rather than factual.

Can Christianity exist if Judaism is proven false? In my mind, it seems I have a near-logical proof (at least to a degree of reasonableness) developing that indicates that the basis for Judaism is not valid (not dissimilar to the origin of Mormonism). If true, what are the implications?

History or “Story”?

The question needs to be more carefully put.

As stated, the question seems to equate “truth” with “factual” or “philosophical,” and “stories” with “historically unreliable.”

The real concern seems to be about the historical reliability of the Biblical narratives specifically as historical accounts. To address that question, it is necessary to provide some preliminary clarification. “Narrative” is probably a better word in this regard than “stories” because “stories” (as used here) seems to be equated with non-factual fiction. However, it is even misleading to equate “fiction” with “untrue.” Fiction can be “unhistorical,” and yet, in its own way, address issues of “truth.” For example, Aesop’s Fables are fictional accounts that communicate moral truths.

Narrative covers several possible categories.

(1) Fictional narratives are works of the imagination that do not pretend to recount events that actually happened.

(2) History-like narratives are narratives that resemble the recounting of actual events, but may or may not be historically factual. History-like narrative breaks down into approximately the following categories.

(2a) Narrative history is the recounting of events that are supposed to have taken place in time and space.

In discussing narrative history, additional qualifications are necessary.

English does not make a distinction between “history” in the sense of actual events that have taken place in space and time, and “history” as a written account of those events. German makes a helpful distinction between historie (actual events that have occurred in space and time) and geschichte (written accounts of historical events).

Most events that take place in space and time (historie) are never recorded, and for that reason are never mentioned in historical records (geschichte). After the lifetimes of those to whom these events occur, if they have not been recorded in some way, they are lost forever to human memory. In addition, many events that do become part of the historical record cannot in principle be verified. For example, Plato’s Dialogues are the only written records we have of the actual teaching of Socrates. Most scholars presume that Plato gives a fairly accurate account of the character and teaching of Socrates, but because Plato is the only written account of Socrates’ teaching, there is literally no possible way of verifying what the actual Socrates was like beyond Plato’s Dialogues. If we trust Plato, we trust his account. If we don’t trust Plato, we really have no idea what the actual Socrates was like.

In that regard, it is important to note that much biblical narrative is similar to Plato’s account of Socrates in that there are no parallel contemporary historical accounts that might either confirm or contradict the biblical account. For example, the Old Testament contains the only ancient account of the early history of the nation of Israel. Israel as a people came into existence in the late Bronze/Early Iron Age, after civilization had existed for thousands of years in Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, unlike Ancient Sumer or Egypt, Palestine did not have developed urban centers that left numerous contemporary written artifacts, for example, the clay tablets of Sumer that are the first known examples of written language. There are no early written records outside the Bible that make any references to the history of Israel. The first reference to “Israel” occurs in an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription from the late 13^th century BCE that commemorates a Pharaoh’s military victories. We learn from the description only that “Israel” was located in Palestine.

An Egyptian inscription from the tenth century mentions Phraoah Shoshenq’s military campaign in Palestine, mentioned also in 1 Kings 14:25-28. The first reference outside the Bible to a Hebrew king occurs in Moabite king Mesha’s reference to king Omri, discovered in 1868. King Mesha is mentioned in 2 Kings 3:4-28. Omri has only a minor mention in 1 Kings 16:15-28. Did Omri exist? Both the Hebrew Bible and a Moabite king’s reference indicate that he did. Can we know much about Omri apart from these two brief mentions? No.

Besides written references, archaeological evidence is important, but it is nonverbal, and so cannot tell us much about the specifics of history. There is archaeological evidence for Late Bronze Age settlements during the period of Israel’s early history. Archaeology can tell us something about the material culture of the inhabitants of Palestine during biblical times, but cannot tell us anything substantial about Israelite history.¹

What this means is that in the same way that we are completely dependent on Plato for knowledge of Socrates, for a knowledge of Israelite history, we are entirely dependent on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

It is also important to recognize when speaking of “narrative history” that “historical accounts” are never simply a case of recounting historical events “as they actually happened.” Narrative history is necessarily selective, focuses on events that are relevant from some particular perspective, omits most events, and is accompanied by some interpretative criteria for selection, but also for the implication of the events recounted: Not only “what happened?,” but “why does it matter?” Moreover, a certain imagination is required on the part of the historian as he or she provides a retelling of “what happened.” An historian is not a digital recorder or a camera. A written account is not a sound or video recording.

Even in cases in which the occurrence of basic events is agreed on, there can be considerable difference in terms of interpretation about the meaning of those events. For example, contrast the interpretations of the American War Between the States. Was the American Civil War about slavery or rather about states’ rights?

(2b) Biography is a specific category of narrative history that recounts the life of one or more individuals or perhaps even groups.

(2c) Imaginary history is the recounting of some actual historical events accompanied by imaginative invention to “fill in” unknown or missing details. Film biographies (“based on true events”) are necessarily of this kind, and create conversations or accounts of “historical” events that provide an imaginative construal of “something like” what happened. Many imaginary histories are more imaginative than “factual.” A film example of such “imaginary history” would be Schindler’s List. Some written biographies are of this kind as well, for example, Mark Twain’s biography of Joan of Arc.

(2d) Historical fiction is imaginary narrative placed in a particular historical period that does not recount actual historical happenings, but “fits” the period. A recent example would be the television series Downton Abbey.

Crucial to evaluating the historical reliability of Scripture is assessing where it fits within the above four (2a-2d) categories.

In reading Scripture, it is also important to remember that the Bible is not a single book, but a collection of numerous shorter documents or texts (“books”) written over a period of hundreds of years by numerous authors, that some of these texts are compilations and revisions of earlier texts, that these texts belong to different genres (types of literature), and that in order properly to interpret a text, it is necessary to determine what kind of genre it is.

Much of the Bible is composed of texts of non-historical genres, for example, law (in Levitucus, Deuteronomy), poetry, wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job), writings of prophets, (Isaiah through Malachi) worship texts and prayers (the Psalms), letters (the apostle Paul, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, James, Jude, 1, 2 and 3 John), and two books written in the strange (to modern people) genre of apocalyptic (Daniel and Revelation). These texts are not histories, and were not intended to be, although they may contain history or historical accounts within them, or they can be be found as parts of books that contain histories.

Much of the Bible does indeed consist of history-like narrative. In terms of deciding genre, it is necessary to ask how one goes about determining what kind of “history” is in these narratives. Are they examples of narrative history, biography, imaginary history, or historical fiction?

Although the task might seem initially difficult, one can usually discern a genre through certain kinds of common-sense tests of literary context. For example, does the text place itself within known historical or cultural contexts? Does the text make claims for itself that it is recounting actual history? Are there clues within the text that seem to reflect actual historical events as opposed to creations of the imagination?

Common-sense criteria can be applied to other ancient texts besides the Bible to assess their own genre. For example, Homer’s Illiad and Oddysey are history-like narratives that some believe might have minimal historical basis in fact. Historians have speculated that there might have been some kind of war between Greece and Troy hundreds of years before Homer wrote. However, aside from fantastic stories about gods and heroes, one-eyed giants and witches, Homer’s story has that “once upon a time” feeling about it that cannot be tied to actual history. In contrast to Homer is Herodotus’ Histories or Thucydides’ History of the Pelepponesian War. These not only claim to be records of actual historical accounts, but preserve the kinds of specific historical details that one expects to find in actual history.

Similarly, Plato’s Dialogues may contain a certain amount of imaginary reconstruction of the conversations between Socrates and his acquaintances, but they provide details about Socrates, his teaching, his friends and acquaintances, his conflict with the Athenian authorities, and his death, that without doubt have solid historical events behind them. In contrast, Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a Sophist in his satirical play The Clouds, and, in that play, Socrates behaves in a manner completely inconsistent with Plato’s portrayal. No competent historian prefers Aristophanes’ account to Plato’s.

History in the Bible

When looking at historical narrative in the Bible, it is important to remember that the history portrayed in the Bible would be the kind of history written in the ancient world and not, for example, the kind of history one might find in a nineteenth-century biography of Abraham Lincoln. Nonetheless, ancient people did experience historical events, they could remember things, they could tell the truth, they could consult others about things they had witnessed, and there is no reason to presume in advance that because the books of the Bible were written in the ancient world, they cannot provide examples of reliable history. To apply to other ancient historical texts the skepticism that many apply to the Bible would mean that we could know absolutely nothing about the ancient world.

The Bible does contain several examples of first-hand historical accounts in books that are not primarily historical narratives. For example, the Old Testament writings of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, contain first-hand accounts of events they themselves experienced leading up to and during the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah, and the exile of the kingdom of Judah into captivity in Babylon.

The Old Testament also includes first-hand accounts in the historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Written from Nehemiah’s perspective, the narrator of Nehemiah identifies himself as “I” throughout. The Book of Ezra, written approximately the same time as Nehemiah, mentions Ezra in the third person, but beginning in 7:28, the perspective shifts to the first person (“I” and “me”), then shifts back to “Ezra” in chapter 10.

While not written from the first-person perspective (“I”), the two books of 1 and 2 Samuel contain accounts of the monarchy of David that have the hallmarks and details of having been written by contemporaries to those events, and scholars have identified two sources as the “Court History” and the “Ascension Document.”

In addition to these first-hand accounts, much of the Old Testament contains a broad narrative of the history of Israel that breaks down into two historical periods: from the age of the patriarch Abraham to the exile of the nation of Judah into Babylonian captivity; from the return from captivity to the inter-testamental period (the period between the end of the OT and the NT).

Within these written histories of the OT, there are references that indicate they go back to even earlier sources. For example:

The creed of Deuteronomy: “A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 26:5-9).

The Song of Moses, describing the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 15).

References to earlier sources: “Therefore it is said in the Book of the Wars of the Lord” (Numbers 21:14). “Are these not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?” (1 Kings 15:23)

The broad outline of OT history is as follows:

(1) Beginning with the patriarch Abraham and his family moving from the land of Ur (in modern day Iraq), and concluding with the descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob living in Egypt (ca. Pre-1500-1240 BCE, book of Genesis).

(2) The account of Moses and the Exodus of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt (1240 BCE-1200, Exodus through Deuteronomy).

(3) The subsequent history of Israel in the land of Canaan (1200-1000, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth).

(4) The history of the three first Israelite kings, Saul, David and Solomon, (1025-928, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings).

(5) The subsequent division of Israel into northern and southern kingdoms up to the time of the exile (922-537, 2 Kings).

6) The return of a handful of Jews from captivity in Babylon to the land of Palestine, and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem wall and temple under Ezra and Nehemiah; the period of the Persian empire (539-333, Ezra, Nehemiah).

Numerous sources lie behind these historical accounts, and they were complied over centuries, but there is no question that the biblical writers themselves considered this material to recount actual historical events. There is also no reason to doubt that the basic historical outline is correct.

Turning to the time between the writings of the Old and New Testament, several books of the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon provide historical records concerning the Maccabean revolt of Jews against the Seleucid Empire (1-4 Maccabees). 1 and 2 Maccabees are considered canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, and 1-3 Maccabees are considered canonical by the Orthodox Church. Scholars (including Protestant scholars who do not recognize the Apocrypha as canonical), consider 1 and 2 Maccabees to be substantially reliable historical accounts.

7) The Hellenistic period beginning with Alexander the Great, followed by the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires, Maccabean Wars (332-63 BCE, Apocrypha).²

Like the Old Testament, the New Testament contains historical references in texts that are not primarily historical narratives themselves. For example, Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians includes an account of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and the first written account of witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection (1 Cor. 15:1-11). Paul provides a first-hand account of his own conversion from Judaism to Christianity, his first-hand acquaintance with the apostles Peter and James, as well as an account of the disagreement in early Jewish Christianity about the conditions for admission of Gentile Christians into the church (Galatians 1:13-2:14.) This material largely parallels similar material in the historical account of the Book of Acts.

Outside the four Gospels, other incidental references to first-hand knowledge of historical details would include a reference in 2 Peter to the transfiguration of Jesus: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:16-18). The letter of 1 John also makes claims to firsthand knowledge: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1-3)

However, as in the OT, the most important sources of historical information about Jesus and early Christianity are the narratives found in books that purport to be narrative history: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), as well as the early history of the Christian church known as the Acts of the Apostles.

The writer of Luke’s Gospel claims to have consulted eye-witnesses: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught”(Luke 1:1-4). The ending of the Gospel of John also claims to rest on eyewitness testimony: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). The “disciple” referred to here is the “beloved disciple” mentioned elsewhere in John’s Gospel (John 13:23; 18:15; 19:27; 20:2;-4; 21:7, 20, 23).

There are other incidental references in the Gospels and Acts that point to first-hand historical reminiscences, e.g,. the story of the young man who “fled naked” at the arrest of Jesus (Mark 14: 51-52); the “we” passages in the book of Acts (16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–8; 27:1–28:16). There are accounts of Jesus’ actions that would have been considered scandalous at the time, and so would be unlikely to have been “made up”: references to Jesus having failed to perform miracles on certain occasions (Mark 6:1-6), the failure of Jesus’ own family to believe in him (Mark 3:21), the failure of Jesus’ closest disciples to understand that his ministry would end in failure and death, and Jesus’ strong rebuke of his close disciple Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33), John the Baptist expressing doubts about Jesus (Matt. 11:1-3), the accusation that Jesus spent his time with disreputable tax-collectors, prostitutes, and sinners (Luke 15:2), that Jesus had women disciples (Luke 8:2)., that Jesus was crucified as a Messianic pretender (Mark 15:26). There is a kind of accumulation of details in these stories that make it clear that Jesus behaved in ways that were scandalous in the culture of his own time, and not at all the way that a proper religious leader should have behaved. These are not the kinds of stories that writers would have “made up” about someone they claimed was the Messiah – because they don’t fit expectations!

In addition, the Gospels and the Book of Acts contain references to numerous contemporary historical figures known from other historical sources: Herod the Great and his descendants (Luke 1:5; 23:6-12); Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea (Mark 15); Augustus Caesar (Luke 2:1), the procurator Antonius Felix (Acts 24), Herod Agrippa, the last Jewish king of Judea (Acts 25).

In the same way that the books of Genesis to 2 Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah in the OT provide an overall narrative of the history of Israel from the time of Abraham through the return from the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, so the Gospels and the book of Acts (combined with the letters of Paul) provide a common historical narrative that agrees about the following:

(1) Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew who grew up in the village of Nazareth in Galilee. He was the son of Joseph and Mary (although not the biological son of Joseph). Joseph was a carpenter (as was Jesus).

(2) At approximately the age of thirty, Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. John was a kind of desert hermit who patterned his ministry on that of OT prophets such as Elijah.

(3) After Jesus’ baptism, he went into the desert for a period of fasting and prayer.

(4) After returning from the desert, Jesus began an itinerant preaching ministry, mostly in Galilee. The center of his preaching concerned the coming of the Kingdom of heaven/God. (Jesus likely used the language of “kingdom of heaven” since pious Jews did not use God’s name.) Jesus preached that this kingdom was both present in his own ministry, but also had a future dimension in which God’s kingdom (rule over earth) would be fully realized.

(5) Jesus gathered about him a group of followers, and specifically a group of twelve “apostles” (who symbolically represented the twelve tribes of Israel).

(6) Jesus’ normal method of teaching was through the use of parables, symbolic stories that made a key point about God’s kingdom that subverted normal expectations.

(7) In addition to his teaching, Jesus was known to have been an exorcist, a healer, and a performer of miracles.

(8) Jesus had a special ministry to those on the fringes of society: the poor, women, and those who were considered outcasts for moral reasons (tax collectors, “sinful” women). On a few occasions, Jesus even ministered to Gentiles and Samaritans (despised by Jews of the time). Jesus caused scandal by sharing meals with such people, something pious Jews of the time would not have done.

(9) During his life and ministry, there was much confusion and debate considering Jesus’ identity. Jesus’ usual way of referring to himself was as “the Son of Man,” echoing a title from the OT (Ezekiel, Daniel 7). Even during his own life, there was controversy about whether Jesus considered himself to be the Jewish Messiah (Mark 8:27-30). Jesus seems to have accepted the title, but rather radically re-interpreted it in terms of the Suffering Servant found in Isaiah 53. Jesus was not a conquering King, but a Messiah whose way led to the cross.

(10) Central to Jesus’ understanding of his own identity was the way that Jesus addressed God – as “Father.” This was unprecedented, as Jews understood God to be the father of the Jewish nation, but no Jew before Jesus seems to have identified God as his personal Father. Moreover, Jesus distinguished between God as his own Father (“my Father”), and the way in which God was Father of his followers (“our Father”). Jesus spoke of his own relationship to God as one of Sonship, which, again, he distinguished from the way in which his followers were “sons” or “children” of God (Matt. 11:27).

(11) One of the more controversial claims that Jesus seems to have made concerned the destruction of the Jewish temple. This was so controversial that it seems to have been one of the key charges levelled against Jesus at his trial.

(12) Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus (along with his followers) left Galilee to go to Jerusalem to celebrate the annual Jewish Passover festival. Jesus began predicting that his opponents would kill him in Jerusalem. The Gospel records indicate that his closest followers refused to believe that this was going to happen.

(13) On the Sunday before Passover in probably 30 CE, Jesus rode into Jerusalem riding on a donkey (which seems to have been a deliberate symbolic reference to a passage in the OT book of Zech. 9:9, referring to the coming of Jerusalem’s king). Jesus was met by a huge crowd, who greeted him with cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David!,” waving branches from palm trees, indicating that the crowd recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the fulfillment of the OT promise of a future king of Israel.

(14) After riding into Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple grounds where he used a hand-made whip of cords to drive out “money changers” and animals from the temple grounds, protesting against turning temple sacrifice into a profit-making enterprise.

(15) The combination of the Palm Sunday entrance along with the temple-clearing and Jesus’ predictions of the destruction of the temple seems to have led the Jewish leaders and Roman authorities into forming an alliance against Jesus – whom they now viewed as a political and religious threat.

(16) Jesus spent the last several days leading up to the Passover meal on the temple grounds, both teaching and debating with various Jewish leaders.

(17) At the feast of Passover, Jesus celebrated a final meal with his closest disciples, and at the traditional blessing of bread and wine, Jesus identified his coming death with Jeremiah’s new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34) and the bread and wine of the meal with his own body and blood about to be “sacrificed,” fulfilling the sacrificial imagery of the Passover.

(18) After this meal, Jesus and some close disciples went to the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, where Jesus engaged in prayer. Judas, one of Jesus’ closest twelve disciples, arrived with a group of armed soldiers, to whom he betrayed Jesus.

(19) Jesus was tried and condemned to death in an overnight trial, involving collaboration between both the religious leaders of the Jewish people as well as the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate.

(20) On the following morning, Jesus was crucified as a Messianic pretender (King of the Jews), which the Jewish leaders interpreted as punishment for an act of religious blasphemy, but the Roman leaders used to put down a political threat.

(21) On the following Sunday (the “first day of the week”), some of Jesus’ followers visited the tomb in which his body had been buried, and found it empty. Over the next several days, different followers of Jesus (including first a group of women, but later his closest male disciples) claimed that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them.

(22) It was this claim that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to large numbers of his disciples that led to the beginning of what eventually became Christianity (1 Cor. 15).

(23) The Acts of the Apostles is the historical account of the rise of the Christian movement and its eventual spread from Jewish followers of Jesus to a group containing Gentiles as well. The first half of the book recounts the beginnings of Jewish Christianity. The second half records the conversion of the Jewish persecutor Saul to Christianity, the change of his name to Paul, and the records of Paul’s journeys as a missionary to Gentiles. The book of Acts concludes with Paul’s arrest and imprisonment in Rome.

Broadly speaking, the seven points listed above about Israel’s history, and the 23 points listed above about the biography of Jesus as well as the early history of the church, are points on which all historians should be able to agree, whether Christian or not. They are as well established as any events in ancient history.

History as Revelation and Redemption

However, there are three additional factors in the biblical accounts that make them inherently controversial, and which mean that no account of the historical foundations of Judaism and Christianity can simply be historically neutral.

First, integral to the historical accounts of the Old Testament are claims about the nature of God and reality that are inherently controversial, and about which one cannot simply be neutral.

While all ancient cultures believed in many gods (polytheism), Judaism was unique in the ancient world in believing in only one God (monotheism) who had created the entire universe. Israel’s claims about this one God were uniquely tied to history in that the history of the Old Testament writings is a national history of the Jewish people only insofar as it is primarily a history of this one God and his covenant with the descendants of Abraham who became the nation of Israel. The central message of the Old Testament is the history not only of the nation of Israel, but of the one God who has created the world and who has a special relationship with the one nation of Israel. Thus, Israel’s understanding of history is directly connected to the nature of its faith in the one God. Israel’s understanding of history could be summarized in the expression “covenantal monotheism.”

Biblical history begins “before history” with the first words of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen, 1:1). The history of Israel as a people begins with God’s call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1). The history of Abraham’s descendants is full of events in which God acts and speaks (Gen. 15:1; 32:22-32).

The most important event in the history of the nation of Israel is the Exodus: God’s deliverance of the peopl of Israel – Abraham’s descendants – from slavery in Egypt. The history begins with God’s speaking to Moses from a burning bush (Exodus 3); God rescues Israel from their Egyptian enemies at the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14); God gives his law to Israel (the Ten Commandments) by speaking to the people at Mount Sinai.

The subsequent history of Israel is a history of God’s speaking and acting in such significant events as the appointment of David as the people’s king (1 Samuel 16). The later history of Israel largely focuses on the OT prophets. In each case, the prophet claims to have been called by God and given God’s message to speak to the Jewish people (Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1; Ezekiel 1).

The OT also points forward to a future in which God will bring history to its final goal, God will destroy evil, and God will rule over a new creation through his chosen Messiah, who will be a descendant of King David.

The central message of the New Testament is the claim that this same God who created the universe, and who has a unique history with the Jewish people, has become present in a special way in one human being – Jesus of Nazareth – and God has raised this man Jesus from the dead. There simply are no books in the entire New Testament that do not teach that Jesus of Nazareth is God’s unique Son (God come among human beings as a fellow human being), is the promised Messiah (Christ) of the Old Testament, was crucified by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, but rose from the dead, and will return at the end of history to rule over a new earth where evil will have been destroyed.

So the first controversial point is that the history of Israel (the Old Testament) and the history of Jesus and the church (New Testament) is not simply the history of one ancient people among the many peoples of the ancient world, but is a history in which the God who created the universe is at the center.

The second (less controversial, but still significant) point is that the history of Israel is unique because Israel invented history. While the Hebrews had much in common with other ancient cultures, they were unique in their concern with history. There is nothing else like it in the ancient world. Although ancient cultures kept court records, Israel was the first nation to attach importance to its own historical events as a continuous historical narrative, and to gather together various sources to write this continuous history of their nation. The Greeks (and later Romans) were the only other history-writers of the ancient world. Herodotus, Thucydides, and others wrote histories of the events of their time, but the ancient Greeks did not write the kind of continuous history found in the Bible because they did not understand history to have any long-term goal or plan.³

This leads to the third point – that Israel invented the notion of meaning or purpose in history – that history moves in a particular direction from beginning to end (what is called “linear history) and that history has a goal or purpose toward which it is moving. This notion of linear history contrasts with the notion of cyclical history common in Eastern religion and even among the Greeks.⁴

This biblical notion of linear history became the common view in the Western world, and has been taken over by modern non-Christians as the notion of “progress.” When people speak of being on the “right” or “wrong” side of history, they are understanding history in terms of a kind of providence that only makes sense if there is a God who has created the world, and is moving it toward a particular goal.

Secular progress is a modern idea, existing only for the last couple of hundred years or so, and is confined largely to the industrialized West. It has appeared in two varieties: Marxism and Enlightenment liberalism. Marxism has largely disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but modern liberalism continues wherever modern capitalist consumerism exists, in both conservative and progressive varieties. Clashes between conservative and progressive liberalism, as well as post-modernism cast doubt on whether secularism can offer a meaningful account of the meaning of history. Can history have a goal and meaning without a personal source of meaning?⁵

The biblical view of the meaning of history has also brought us notions such as liberty, justice, equality, separation of church and state, priority of love over law.⁶ The church is the largest group upholding this notion of history. It is international, is the largest worldview in the contemporary world, and has endured for two thousand years.

What is History?

This leads back to the initial question: What is the genre of the books of the Bible? Story? Philosophy? History?

Clearly the genre of the Bible is not philosophy. Philosophy came into existence in ancient Greece, beginning with the Pre-Socratics, and was more fully developed by Plato and his disciple Aristotle. Subsequent schools of classical philosophy include Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Episcureanism, etc. Christian versions of philosophy appeared in medieval Scholasticism, and in the modern world, modern philosophy begins with Descartes, followed by schools such as empiricism, idealism, and various modern schools such as existentialism and phenomenology.

Philosophy is a systematic rational and logical reflection on the nature of reality as a whole, based on rational reflection alone. The claim of philosophy to be based exclusively on rational reflection distinguishes philosophy from all religion, and certainly from the literature of the Bible, but also from history. The Bible does contain wisdom literature, for example, the book of Proverbs, but even a cursory comparison with anything written by Plato or Aristotle makes clear that biblical texts are not the same kind of literature as “philosophy.”

The Fact/Value Distinction

The real concern of the contrast between “truths” and “stories,” between “factual” and “historically unreliable” seems to be that the Bible purports to belong to the genre of history, but is actually not history (“historically unreliable rather than factual”), contains “some truths,” but is mostly fiction (“stories and embellishments”). This way of posing the question reflects a “fact/value” distinction rooted in modern post-Enlightenment understandings of rationality. That is, we can distinguish between two kinds of affirmations:

“Facts” are objective and can be known with certainty. Facts are morally and philosophically “neutral,” and they belong to the category of the sciences. Such facts are delivered to us by groups of people designated as “experts” in modern culture. The realm of objective “truth” is the realm of fact.

“Values” include the categories of morality, religion, philosophy, and perhaps politics. Values are subjective; there is no way of rationally deciding between conflicting values, and they belong to the realm of “subjective” opinion. There are no “experts” who can decide between one set of values and another. In the area of “values,” all “truth” is subjective. What may be “true for you” is not necessarily “true for me.”

The “fact/value” distinction seems evident in the way in which the initial statement is phrased:

Fact = “historically reliable” and “factual”, based on “evidence”

Value = “stories,” “some truths,” “philosophical”

It is not clear where “history” fits into this divide. On the one hand, there seems to be a commitment to “history” as objective (“evidence,” “factual”). On the other hand, there seems to be an assumption that at least as practiced by biblical scholars, “history” belongs to the realm of subjecive values, and is thus a matter of mere opinion: “How do you determine which is which? What is the arbitrator of ‘truth’?” (in quotes). The “stories” in the Bible are “philosophical,” “historically unreliable,” not “factual.”

Before addressing the question of whether biblical history is historically “reliable,” the “fact/value” distinction must first be challenged. Significant work in modern philosophy and particularly philosophy of science has rejected the notion that the fact/value distinction works even in the area of the physical sciences. The writings particularly of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi have challenged the notion that science is an objectively neutral discipline that deals only in “facts.” Rather, as Kuhn demonstrates in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all scientists operate with interpretive “paradigms” that structure the very questions that scientists can address, and scientific progress takes place not by simple acquaintance with more “facts,” but with cleaner and more elegant theories (paradigms) that enable the scientist to “make sense of” or interpret facts.⁷

Modern theories of the study of history (historiography) recognize as well that “history” is not merely a reconstruction of the “facts.” Granted the distinction between history as objective events in time and space, and history as a written or spoken reconstruction of those events, all “histories” take the form of narrative, and are, in a sense, “telling a story.” Historians have much in common with the creators of fiction. They create literary constructions with main “characters” and “plots.” They select from some events over others as relevant to the “story.” The stories have a beginning, end, and middle, and eventuate in a “conclusion.”⁸

So the distinction between “stories” and “truths,” or “stories” and “factual” will not work. All historical accounts are “stories” in the sense that they are literary composition, and reflect the view points of their creators. A the same time, recognizing that historical texts are literary compositions does not mean that there is no distinction between fiction and history, and that there is no way to distinguish between fictional narratives and historical narratives. The essential difference is that, however “history-like” fiction might be – for example, the “historical” Napoleonic-era naval war novels of Patrick O-Brien – the story itself is not based on “real events” that occurred in time and space, but arises from the author’s imagination. In contrast, in the writing of history, the story is “representational”; it purports to be an account of real events that actually occurred in the past.

The Bible as Story and History

In the last several decades, Biblical scholars have recognized the significance of biblical texts as literary compositions, and the result has been the appearance of the new discipline of “narrative theology,” including narrative analysis of biblical texts such as the Gospels. Studies of the four Gospels over the last several decades indicate how each Gospel can be appreciated as a literary narrative with a distinctive focus – Matthew emphasizes Jesus as the “New Moses” who reinterprets OT law, Mark emphasizes Jesus as the “crucified servant-Messiah,” Luke emphasizes Jesus’ ministry to the poor, to outcasts, and to women, John focuses on Jesus as the “Word become flesh” – but each Gospel also agrees concerning the basic outline of the historical “facts” about Jesus’ life, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection.

Granted then that the biblical texts are literary compositions that tell the “story” of the relationship between the God of creation and the people of Israel, and the “story” of Jesus as God’s Son, are these texts also “history” in the sense of being representational of actual historical “events”? Are they “history” or are they “fiction”?

Only context can determine the genre of a particular texts or group of texts, but on any common sense reading of biblical texts, they purport to recount actual history. As is evident in the seven summary points above concerning the Old Testament, and the twenty-three points concerning the New Testament, there is a broad historical narrative that holds together the Old Testament and the New Testament writings.

Not only does this general history provide a broad outline that ties the two Testaments together, the biblical writers themselves make occasional claims that they are referring to actual historical events. As noted above, writings from both the Old and New Testament contains “I” statements recounting actual historical events. Luke’s Gospel begins with claims to have consulted eyewitnesses, and having ascertained their historical reliability.

More important, as shown above, a key theme holding together both the Old and New Testaments is an understanding of the meaning of history – that the historical events recounted in both the Old and New Testaments unite a single “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. This means that the very existence of Israel as a nation, and of the church as a people is directly tied to the factual nature of the biblical witness as history. If the overarching biblical narrative as a whole is “fiction,” then both Judaism and Christianity are inherently nonsensical. As the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:14 “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

At the same time, as also shown above, both the Old Testaments and New Testaments make fundamental theological claims about their history that are inherently controversial. Biblical history is not a neutral history, but a salvation-history, a history in which the one God who has created the world, is a key actor. The Old Testament is a history of God’s “mighty acts,” of God’s covenant with and creation of the actual nation of Israel. According to the Old Testament, without God, there would be no Israel. A central claim of the entire New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth was not merely a wise sage or a religious leader, but that the same God who made a covenant with Israel was present in a unique way in Jesus of Nazareth. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, biblical scholars have emphasized that the entire New Testament is written from the perspective of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

This connection of Israel’s and the church’s understanding of history to God’s actions in the history of Israel and Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, as well as to an overall meaning to history means that how we evaluate the historical reliability of the biblical account cannot be divorced from what we believe about its central character. The most fundamental biblical claim is that God created the world, and he raised Jesus from the dead. If we grant the possibility that a Creator God exists, and that he would do things like deliver a nation from slavery and make a covenant with them, or that he would raise Jesus from the dead, then we are much more likely to consider the possibility that the biblical narratives are reliable witnesses to actual historical events. If, on the other hand, we reject the notion of a Creator God, then we also have to reject the fundamental historical claim that runs throughout all of the texts of both the Old and the New Testaments. We would have to deny from the outset that biblical texts are historically reliable witnesses, but this would not be a claim based on the examination of the documents themselves, but one based on our prior convictions about the nature of reality.

What is important to recognize is that there is a fundamental choice that must be made, and it is not one that can be decided by historical study simply as history. Historians can either affirm or challenge certain aspects of the historical record in the Bible. Was there a king David? Are there references to OT kings (like Omri) outside the Bible? Did Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate share a kind of joint rule over the Jewish people during the 20s and 30s of the first century? Is the account of the history of Israel in the OT consistent with what we know of the ancient Middle East from written records and archaeological findings outside the Hebrew Bible? Does the book of Acts accurately describe the Mediterranean world of the first century?

What historians cannot do simply as historians is to decide the basic question: Did the biblical God create the nation of Israel and its history? Did this same God raise Jesus from the dead? This is the sort of question that historians cannot resolve not because the biblical record either does or does not provide enough historical evidence, but because if God exists, God is not “one more thing” in the world he has created. The God described in the Bible is not the kind of finite “being” whose existence or non-exisxtence could be “proved” or disproved” by historians.

Biblical Scholars and Historiography

This leads to your last question: “How do you determine” the difference between fiction and “history”? “What is the evidence?”

As stated, the question seems to imply something like the equivalent of an infallible “history pope,” that there is some single individual or group of individuals who can settle questions of historical reliability in a simple “yes” or “no” manner. Alternatively, perhaps the question presumes historical skepticism – that there simply is no way in which we can have any reliable knowledge of past events.

Neither approach fits the contemporary situation. It is only in the last couple of centuries that there has come to exist a modern “science” of the study of history and its principles, a field called “historiography.” Earlier, I wrote of two different uses of the word “history”: (1) as actual events having occurred in the past, whether recorded or not, and (2) as records of such events: written or “narrative” history. But there is also a third sense: (3) history as a scientific, systematic, and critical attempt to accurately assess and reconstruct the history of the past. This is the kind of “history” pursued by modern historians, and it did not really exist until the nineteenth century. Earlier, I had distinguished between the kind of history contained in the Bible (ancient history) and a nineteenth-century biography of Abraham Lincoln. That nineteenth-century biography would have been an example of history in the third sense. Biblical history is history in the second sense, but it is not history in the third sense because the modern science of historiography did not exist until the nineteenth century.

The initial goal of modern scientific historiography was to reconstruct the past “as it actually was” (Leopold von Ranke). Ironically, later historical study showed that this goal had not been as objective and disinterested as it claimed to be. Nineteenth-century historians tended to view history from the point of view of Western Enlightenment rationalism, as a story of the progress of modern science and reason over earlier dark ages of ignorance. Modern history tended to be a history of “great men,” neglecting the social history of ordinary people. It was most especially a history of great white European men. It was also a history of politics, a history of kings or presidents, of wars or revolutions. If all history tells a story, modern scientific “history” told its own story.⁹

A generation ago, historians were already beginning to raise questions about the tension between history as an objective reconstruction of the past and the historian’s own perspectives.¹⁰ The rise of post-modernity has created a kind of crisis for historiography, with some going so far as to claim that objective history is not even possible: all reconstructions of the past are simply different proposals to validate some particular identity, or attempts to exercise power over others.

Ironically, each of these two approaches to the study of history in its own way reflects the fact/value division mentioned earlier. The nineteenth-century approach understood history to be a matter of appropriating the “facts.” History was an “objective science.” The post-modern approach rather comes down on the “values” side of things. History is subjective opinion, reflecting the perspective of those who write it: “The winners write the history.”

What both extremes miss is the insight already introduced above by recent discussions in the philosophy of science. History is indeed an objective science insofar as historical events actually occur, and humans are rational beings, capable of recording these events, commenting on them, and interpreting their meaning. The existence of language means that human beings are capable of communicating to one another about objective realities in ways that can be understood. But history is not merely a neutral accounting of “events as they occurred.” Those who write history always write from some perspective, they are members of communities, and language itself is a communal activity. So there is never only one correct account of the past.

Within the last century, there has emerged a kind of consensus about the relation between the ways in which we come to know things (epistemology), between history, language, and culture. History as “events in the past” no longer exists. What do exist are both artifacts (whether physical or written) and texts. Contemporary knowledge of the past is a kind of “conversation” between those who live in the present, and those who lived in the past by interacting with both artifacts and texts from the past. The historian needs to be aware as much as possible of his or her own contemporary cultural settings and biases, but also must try to enter as much as possible into conversation with those who lived in the past, bridging the gap through a kind of merging of “intellectual horizons.” It is important that in the process of engaging this conversation, the contemporary historian be aware of and not uncritically impose his or her own preconceptions as a modern person into the past. As this conversation takes place, the contemporary reader is as likely to be transformed by his or her encounter with the past as he or she is to find themselves “correcting” the past. If no transformation takes place, it is quite likely that the modern reader has uncritically dismissed the voices from the past by filtering them through a contemporary worldview or perspective.¹¹

This tension between events “as they actually happened” in the past and the contemporary interpretive paradigms that historians bring with them when they ascertain knowledge of the past (“what happened?”) and its implications (“why does it matter?” “what does it mean?”) is at the forefront of any account of Biblical history. Crucial to disagreements between biblical scholars who study the biblical narratives as history is not primarily disagreement about the basic facts – which all competent biblical scholars acknowledge – but about interpretation of those facts. As noted above, there can be no neutral account of the history recounted in the Bible because the historian has to make an initial decision concerning the central character in the history. Whether or not one is open to the existence of the God who is at the center of the biblical account sets the possible parameters about how one will interpret the texts as historical records.

There is not just one, but three basic different contemporary approaches to how one interprets the Biblical texts as historical records. Somewhat paradoxically, the three approaches correspond roughly to the three modern approaches to historiography mentioned above.

At one extreme is the approach of what I will call “fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism tends to understand the Bible in a manner similar to the way that Muslims understand the Koran or Mormons understand the Book of Mormon – as a single book delivered by God directly from heaven. Despite its insistence that the Bible is entirely a divine book, Fundamentalism tends not to be much concerned with the Bible as either an account of historical events or as an interpretation of the meaning of history – except in the sense of refuting any challenge to the Bible’s historicity in every detail. Fundamentalists are much more concerned about such things as building amusement park physical replicas of Noah’s ark than they are a careful historical reading of biblical texts. For fundamentalists, the Bible is simply an account of things “as they actually happened.”

At the opposite extreme is what I will designate as a hermeneutic of “suspicion” or a hermeneutic of “discontinuity.” This approach tends to follow the Cartesian methodology of “doubt”: whatever cannot be proved with absolute certainty must be rejected as “unlikely” to have happened. There are contemporary biblical scholars who reject the historicity of everything in the Bible until the time of King Omri as the first biblical figure known to us from history outside the Bible. In the area of the New Testament, the “Jesus Seminar” of the 1990s famously used the criteria of “dissimilarity”: anything that the Gospels said about Jesus that had parallels to contemporary Judaism must be rejected because the Gospel writers might have borrowed it from Judaism. Anything that the Gospels said about Jesus that had parallels to the first-century church had to be rejected because it might have been borrowed from the first-century church. The result was a minimalist account of Jesus, but also a Jesus who was entirely unique, one who had nothing in common either with first-century Judaism or with the first-century church.

Various writers in the school of “discontinuity” seem to have three things in common: (1) they reject out-of-hand the single claim that is at the heart of both the Old and New Testament – that the texts of the Bible are a history of a God who does things. (2) They provide numerous alternative accounts to the history found in the Bible, but they also provide widely differing accounts. Old Testament examples would include:

(a) The patriarchs were not historical figures. There was no Exodus from Egypt. The ancestors of Israel were a group of nomads who gradually settled down and took up farming in Canaan (Albrecht Noth and Martin Noth).

(b) The inhabitants of Palestine did not come from elsewhere. They were neither conquerors or nomads, but peasants who emerged from the local population (Norman Gottwald).

(c) The Israelites and Judaeans were two separate peoples who only came together temporarily during the rule of Kings David and Solomon. However, David and Solomon were largely legendary figures (J. A. Soggin, M. Maxwell Miller, John Hayes).

(d) The entire story of the Israelite monarchy was created during the Persian period. The writers of Genesis-Kings created a past that never existed (Thomas L. Thompson).

Note that the above scholars not only reject the biblical accounts as “unhistorical,” they also disagree with one another, and their alternative histories can be designated as “fanciful” reconstructions.¹²

Concerning the historical Jesus, skeptical scholars have claimed:

(a) Jesus was a moralist humanitarian who proclaimed the “fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of man” (Adolf Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl).

(b) Jesus was an apocalyptic who mistakenly thought that the end of the world would come in his lifetime (Albert Schweitzer).

(c) Jesus was not an apocalyptic at all. He was rather something like a first-century Roman cynic philosopher (Dominic Crossan).

(d) Jesus was not an apocalyptic, nor a cynic, but a religious “sage,” something like a new-age guru (Marcus Borg).

In addition to rejecting the key biblical claim about divine revelation, and positing numerous but disagreeing alternative histories, these writers tend to share a third characteristic. They read back into the biblical record reflections of their own contemporary concerns. Gottwald’s peasant rebellion has similarities to the civil rights movements of the 1960s. George Tyrrell wrote as long ago as 1909 that “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darknesss, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.”¹³ When the Jesus Seminar was writing in the 1990s, it was remarked that their Jesus looked a lot like a tenured professor in a college philosophy department who was skeptical of the values of conservative late-twentieth century American politics.

There is a third approach to studying biblical history that I will designate as a hermeneutic of “trust” or a hermeneutic of “continuity.” Unlike fundamentalism, this approach takes biblical history seriously as history, but unlike the school of discontinuity, is not inherently suspicious of the central claims of the biblical texts.

The texts of the Bible have been studied more than any other written texts by more historians than any other texts. There are Christian scholars who are competent trained historians, who have studied at and teach at major universities. These scholars have no single approach because they are experts in different areas: ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, Greece, the Roman empire, Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, extra-biblical texts. Simply as historians, they are as competent as the skeptics. They make different kinds of arguments, depending on their areas of expertise. They cannot “prove” that particular historical events actually happened any more than skeptics can “prove” that they did not happen. In particular, historians cannot prove the central claims of Christian faith because those claims are tied up with the affirmation that the God who created the universe has spoken and acted in various ways, and if this God exists, God is not one finite being among others who can be measured and tested like a chemical mixture in a test tube. What believing Christian scholars can do is to examine the biblical texts as historical texts, and attempt to make persuasive arguments that one interpretation of the historical past is more plausible than another. In this sense, those who argue in favor of the basic accuracy of historical events recounted in the Scriptures are doing the same kind of thing as are the skeptics. Against the skeptics, they are arguing on the basis of a commonly available set of texts that a reading that is in accord with the central affirmations of biblical texts (that God has acted and spoken in the history of Israel and Jesus) is more plausible than one that rejects this central affirmation as mistaken or even fraudulent. Ultimately each reader has to decide for him or herself which arguments and interpretations he or she finds most plausible. At the same time, wherever people come down, it is important to recognize that the final judgments will not rest on historical arguments alone, but will necessarily include theoretical judgments about the very nature of reality.

The following is a short bibliography of historical studies that I have found helpful. They cover a lot of territory. Some are older. Some are more recent. They provide examples of the kind of work that biblical scholars who take biblical history seriously engage in.

Old Testament

Rolf A. Jacobsen/Michael J. Chan. Introducing the Old Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey. Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2023. Any one who wants to talk about the Old Testament should be familiar with the basic issues, and that’s the information that introductions provide. This one was just published, and does a good job of laying out the territory without imposiing a particular point of view.

V. Philips Long. The Art of Biblical History. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994, This is a superb introduction to the issues that must be addressed in studying the Bible as a historical record.

John Bright. A History of Israel, 4^th. Edition. Westminster, 2000. This is an updated version of what is now an old text. Some readers hate it because it is not fundamentalist. Some hate it because Bright actually takes biblical history seriously. Certainly something more up to date is needed, but nothing comparable has been written to replace this.

R. E. Clements. A Century of Old Testament Study. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1976, 1992. Somewhat outdated, but a historical overview of the history of Old Testament study.

James Hoffmeier. Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

James Hoffmeier. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

New Testament

Craig A. Evans. Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006. Some of the concerns are now out of date – the Jesus Seminar, The DaVinci Code – but this is still a very helpful general introduction to historical study of Jesus.

A. N. Sherwin-White. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 1963. Sherwin-White was a Roman historian who argued convincingly that the Book of Acts and the accounts of Jesus’ trial in the Gospels accurately portray Roman law and political office in the period of the mid-first century. Sherwin-White compares the New Testament accounts favorably to Herodotus.

Richard A. Burridge. What Are the Gospels? A Comparison With Graeco-Roman Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge Universithy Press, 1992. Burridge argues that the best genre parallel to the NT Gospels is that of Graco-Roman bios (biography).

Joachim Jeremias. New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. New York: Scribners, 1971. Jeremias translated the Greek of Jesus’ sayings in the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Mathew, and Luke) back into Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), and discovered puns, rhymes, and other characteristics obvious in Aramaic, but lost in translation into Greek. Jeremias concluded that this pointed to historical reliability for an Aramaic source for Jesus’ Gospel sayings.

Richard Bauckham. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2^nd edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017. Bauckham argues for the historical reliability of the Gospels as eyewitness testimony.

Ben Witherington III. New Testament History: A Narrative Account. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. This is not a history of the New Testament books, but a general history of the events covered in the New Testament from 356 BC-96 AD. Witherington is one of the most prolific New Testament scholars living today, having written dozens of books.

Biblical History and Mormonism?

Can Christianity exist if Judaism is proven false? In my mind, it seems I have a near-logical proof (at least to a degree of reasonableness) developing that indicates that the basis for Judaism is not valid (not dissimilar to the origin of Mormonism). If true, what are the implications?

I don’t know what your argument would be, but there really could be no “near-logical proof” that indicates the “basis of Judaism is not valid.” That is not the kind of question that could be settled by “logical proofs.”

At any rate, Judaism and Mormonism are so different as to be comparing apples and oranges. Judaism is both the history of a people and a collection of texts (the Hebrew Bible). Judaism is the history of an entire people that begins somewhere around 1700 BCE (with Abraham), continues with the establishment of Israel as a people with the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the law at Sinai (Moses), leads to the establishment of a twelve-tribe settlement in Palestine (Joshua, Judges), a united monarachy (David, Solomon), a divided monarchy (books of Kings), exile and return (prophets, Ezra, Nehamiah), followed by Greek and then Roman rule, leading to the New Testament period. As the history of the Hebrew people is an extended history covering around a thousand years, so the Bible itself is not a single book, but a collection of texts compiled over this same period of time. Thousands of manuscripts of the Bible exist. Both Judaism and Christianity continue to exist as historical successors to the ancient people of Israel.

In contrast, Mormonism is the invention of a single man (Joseph Smith), who claimed that a book was given directly to him by an angel, which he later translated into English with magical spectacles. This book tells the story of a people who existed over a thousand years earlier, left no historical records, and who no longer existed as a people at the time of Joseph Smith. There are no surviving manuscripts of the Book of Mormon in its supposed original languages. The only evidence for the existence of the people described in the Book of Mormon is Joseph Smith’s claims about a visit from an angel.

One of the most significant differences between Mormonism and Judaism is, as I mentioned earlier, that Judaism is the history of a people over a couple of millennia. Mormonism is not a history, but a claim about a magical book. That Jews and Christians continue to exist as successors of those communities who wrote the books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament while there are no living descendants/successors of the people described in the Book of Mormon is a fundamental contrast between historic Judaism (and Christianity) on the one hand, and Mormonism on the other.