Historical accuracy of Bible?

Question

This isnt a question about religion, it more of a question of is the Bible a scitificly and historically accurate document. Ive asked this a few times and ever time I get a Christian who comes on and rants about how of course the Bible is accurate and how divine ti is. And then I get a few athiests who come on and rant about how nothing about the bible is true and how hipocritical and the bible is and how no intelligent person would take it seriously. THIS IS WHAT I DONT WANT. Im not look for accuracy from a religious stand point, im looking at accuracy from a historical standpoint. Is the bible really a good source of historical events that actually happend. More specifically the New Testament, its kinda hard to talk about historical accuracy with the fall of man in the begining.

Answer 1

The bible is something you either need to have complete faith in or none at all. Ive gone along time believing in god yet questioning everything trying to draw up some conclusions. But i realized, after talking with someone, that you need to believe in it all, hands down, then your faith will be peacefull. Im not a bible thumper, its just something i decided to do.

Answer 2

You have to accept that your question is perfectly framed to draw kooks out of the woodwork on both sides of the religious "fence".I do think you are approaching this from the wrong starting point, though.
I would look at the Old Testament first, for these reasons:

The Bible (O.T.) is a setting down of the long history, mythology, and philosophy of one particular group of people who inhabited the Ancient World and who were in regular contact with other peoples. The handing down of these thoughts in an oral culture does two things. First, details become obscured and some of the narrative necessarily undergoes alteration---"editing", if you prefer. Second, the Main Threads of the story are held constant. We see the same forces at work during the Dark Ages, Troubadors and minstrels passed on, preserved, and embellished the legends belonging to other cultures. So we have King Arthur, El Cid, Roland, etc.
The point is that eventually if the oral tradition is sustained, eventually the culture will write down these things, and change ends for all practical purposes. That is what the Old Testament represents--------the half realized, half recognized cultural yearning for a meaning of life among one particular people.
Is there true history there? Of course. The hard part is filtering it out from the parts that just make it a good story. But, the Old Testament is intact. That's why I say it's the better place to start.
As for the New Testament, there are very serious problems with the question of "truth". The anonymous authors of the N.T. were only a splinter group of the early Christians. A huge body of writings exists (This was a period when at least the wealthy and powerful were literate) outside of what some factions recognize as the one and only true revealed word of God. Politics in the early church advanced some portions and suppressed others.
In addition, we have to remember what the authors(?) of the N.T. were really trying to do-----nothing more nor less than an advertising campaign in favor of one view of the message and reality of Jesus. There motives were not exactly pure, so while the O.T. was produced by people trying to preserve a cultural identity and would, as a consequence, contain a lot of true history, the N.T.was produced by people trying to further an ideology and world view, using whatever means and language seemed to be working. Truth and true history in such an incubator is likely to be stillborn.

Answer 3

How long do you have? The answer to this question can take hours of writing. I will summarize it as briefly as I can. For a detailed discussion of this matter, check out Josh McDowell's book, "Evidence that Demands a Verdict."

Is the Bible historically accurate needs two approaches. First, is what we have in the Bible today what the original authors in the first century wrote? The answer to that question is yes. There are over 24,000 manuscripts (hand-written copies) of the New Testament available today. Some of these date as early as the first century, so anyone can compare what we have today with copies from the first, second, and third centuries.

Compare that to any other ancient writing, and you will see that nothing comes even close. There are only 10 manuscripts of Caesar's works, and not one of them dates earlier than 900 AD.
Plato's works have only 7 manuscripts, and again the earliest copy dates from 900 AD. There are 49 copies of Aristoltle's works, but the earliest copy dates from 1100 AD.

The second question, the one you seem to be asking, is whether or not the actual content of the New Testament is historically accurate. Again the answer is yes. This has nothing to do with whether the philosphy or theology of the Bible is accurate; we are simply discussing the material that can be ascertained historically.

Several of the writers of the second century describe their personal accounts of discussions with people who had spent time with Jesus (Polycarp, Ignatius, Papias, etc.) Tacitus, a Roman historian (not a Christian) born in AD 52 or so, wrote his history of Rome around 112 AD. He speaks of Christianity in his reference to the burning of Rome (64 AD). In his Annals, he alludes to the death of Jesus, called the Christ, who was put to death by Pontius Pilate (Annals XV.44) Lucian of Samosata, wrote in the second century as a satirist, mentions Christ and the Christians numerous times. Josephus, a Jewish historian, also gives historical accounts of Jesus and the early Christians. Seutonius, another Roman historian, along with Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, a Roman province in Asia Minor, also disuss Jesus Christ and the Christians. Numerous other accounts can be found in both Christian and secular writings of the first and second centuriers referring to various aspects of the life of Jesus Christ and the activities of the first century church.

As far as place names, historical events of the Jewish or Roman governments, etc., not once has any biblical reference contradicted the historical and archaelogical record.

There is a lot more to be said, but I will let these suffice for now.

Answer 4

Exactly what kind of answer do you want? There has been plenty of archaeological discoveries that have verified that the places and cities described in the Bible existed when a particular biblical book said that it did, looked exactly the way that the book said that it did, and was destroyed approximately when the Bible said that it was. And the existence of certain Biblical people, like David or Pilate, have been verified by finding their names on ancient monuments.

Obviously, it is difficult to verify or deny the occurrence of certain specific events (like, did Jesus go to Jerusalem on a certain day and chase people out of the temple, for example), due to the fact that newspapers did not exist. However, references to certain events that happened in the Bible have been described in passing in historical documents written by people who were neither Jewish nor Christian, so it appears that certain events described in the Bible actually did take place.

Of course, there is no archeological evidence to date that actually disproves any part of the Bible.

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...Frank Morrison, a British lawyer of the 1930s, undertook an expedition to collect circumstantial evidence to disprove the resurrection. Such evidence, of course, is admissible in all courts of law in civilized countries to prove or disprove events of which there are no living eyewitnesses. When he analyzed the evidence, he reached a stunning conclusion: The resurrection had actually taken place! Morrison presented his case in his book, "Who Moved the Stone?"...
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Over the years there have been many criticisms leveled against the Bible concerning its historical reliability. These criticisms are usually based on a lack of evidence from outside sources to confirm the Biblical record. Since the Bible is a religious book, many scholars take the position that it is biased and cannot be trusted unless we have corroborating evidence from extra-Biblical sources. In other words, the Bible is guilty until proven innocent, and a lack of outside evidence places the Biblical account in doubt.

This standard is far different from that applied to other ancient documents, even though many, if not most, have a religious element. They are considered to be accurate, unless there is evidence to show that they are not. Although it is not possible to verify every incident in the Bible, the discoveries of archaeology since the mid 1800s have demonstrated the reliability and plausibility of the Bible narrative. Here are some examples.

The discovery of the Ebla archive in northern Syria in the 1970s has shown the Biblical writings concerning the Patriarchs to be viable. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place names in the Patriarchal accounts are genuine. The name "Canaan" was in use in Ebla, a name critics once said was not used at that time and was used incorrectly in the early chapters of the Bible. The word "tehom" ("the deep") in Genesis 1:2 was said to be a late word demonstrating the late writing of the creation story. "Tehom" was part of the vocabulary at Ebla, in use some 800 years before Moses. Ancient customs reflected in the stories of the Patriarchs have also been found in clay tablets from Nuzi and Mari.

The Hittites were once thought to be a Biblical legend, until their capital and records were discovered at Bogazkoy, Turkey...

For many more archaeological evidences in support of the Bible, see Archaeology and the Bible

Author: Bryant Wood of Associates for Biblical Research
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...Sir William Ramsey's vindication of Luke's writings is a classic example. The findings of archaeology have in fact reversed the opinions of a number of former skeptics. Among these is the scholar Dr. William F. Albright, who writes:

"The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible [by certain schools of thought] has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of numerous details."

Recent archaeological discoveries include both the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:1f) and "The Pavement" (John 19:13). Their existence was doubted just a few decades ago. Confirmation of the accuracy of the setting of Jacob's well has also been found (John 4). Such findings have caused many scholars to reverse earlier skeptical opinions on the historicity of the Fourth Gospel. Its author has demonstrated an obvious intimate knowledge of the Jerusalem of Jesus' time, just as we would expect from the Apostle John. Such detail would not have been accessible to a writer of a later generation, since Jerusalem was demolished under Titus' Roman army in 70 A.D.

Also, the recent recovery of a Roman census similar to the one in Luke 2:1f, and the historical confirmation of his "synchronism"in Luke 3:1f, underscores the care Luke took in writing his Gospel (Luke 1:1-4).

Critics of Luke's Gospel often retreat into non-verifiable and subjective opinions, but they have not overthrown Luke's historical confirmations. By extension, the other two "Synoptic" Gospels of Matthew and Mark, painting essentially similar portraits of Jesus' ministry, are also trustworthy accounts of his life.

Additionally, outside the Bible, Jesus is also mentioned by his near-contemporaries. Extra-Biblical and secular writers (many hostile) point to Jesus' existence, including the Roman writings of Tacitus, Seutonius, Thallus and Pliny, and the Jewish writings of Josephus and the Talmud. Gary Habermas has cited a total of 39 ancient extra-Biblical sources, including 17 non-Christian, that witness from outside the New Testament to over 100 details of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection...

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Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament
by Ron Rhodes

There are more than 24,000 partial and complete manuscript copies of the New Testament.

These manuscript copies are very ancient and they are available for inspection now.

There are also some 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers and several thousand Lectionaries (church-service books containing Scripture quotations used in the early centuries of Christianity).

Bottom line: the New Testament has an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting its reliability.

The Variants in the New Testament Manuscripts Are Minimal
In the many thousands of manuscript copies we possess of the New Testament, scholars have discovered that there are some 150,000 "variants."

This may seem like a staggering figure to the uninformed mind.

But to those who study the issue, the numbers are not so damning as it may initially appear.

Indeed, a look at the hard evidence shows that the New Testament manuscripts are amazingly accurate and trustworthy.
To begin, we must emphasize that out of these 150,000 variants, 99 percent hold virtually no significance whatsoever.

Many of these variants simply involve a missing letter in a word; some involve reversing the order of two words (such as "Christ Jesus" instead of "Jesus Christ"); some may involve the absence of one or more insignificant words.

Really, when all the facts are put on the table, only about 50 of the variants have any real significance - and even then, no doctrine of the Christian faith or any moral commandment is effected by them.

For more than ninety-nine percent of the cases the original text can be reconstructed to a practical certainty.

Even in the few cases where some perplexity remains, this does not impinge on the meaning of Scripture to the point of clouding a tenet of the faith or a mandate of life....
...By comparing the various manuscripts, all of which contain very minor differences like the above, it becomes fairly clear what the original must have said.

Most of the manuscript variations concern matters of spelling, word order, tenses, and the like; no single doctrine is affected by them in any way.

We must also emphasize that the sheer volume of manuscripts we possess greatly narrows the margin of doubt regarding what the original biblical document said.

If the number of [manuscripts] increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is not so large as might be feared; it is in truth remarkably small....