Recorded History?

Question

Are the books of the Bible considered to be an accurate source of history or not? How would the answer to this question be determined? Would the resulting answer you give be any different if the book was not religious in nature? Are any other religious books considered historical accurate and valid as resources of truth for research?

Are the heiroglyphics considered to be historically accurate... by this I mean their view point of truth... are their any other Jewish historical documents that would correlate or contradict the bible? How do you differentiate between truth and myth when it is not really possible to know?

So is history really a system of belief just as much as fact? I mean a great deal of history is perception... for example the Babylonians would have a very different point of view of history compared to the Israelites, and what is the difference between fact and belief in view points?

Answer 1

They are a historical document in the sense that they describe what the persons who wrote them thought to be true or what they wanted others to believe as true. For anything else they should better be cross-referenced with other text sources or archaeological evidence (as should happen with any book).

Answer 2

It wasn't before but now there are parts that are becoming more accurate. One example is the story of Noah's Ark. All cultures have a massive flood story. Especially those that were in existence at the time. This and the archaeological/geological proof makes that story accurate.
As a previous responder said if you can find other things to correlate with the Bible it makes the history much more believable. The first 5 books are considered the books of law and history in the Jewish religion.

Answer 3

Well, how do you verify that a document is indeed historically accurate?

Most of the time you can't prove that a writing is historically accurate just by itself. Frequently, you have to compare the document in question to other historical documents that are already established to be really historically accurate.

In the case of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, parts of it are unsupported by historical records. As far as I know, the notable parts of the Old Testament that are unsupported by historical accounts are (obviously) the Genesis, and Exodus.

Believe it or not, but the great exodus of the Hebrews as it is told in the Book of Exodus is not mentioned or written in any Egyptian writings of that time. This is odd because ancient Egyptians are known for their habit of writing or recording important events that had happened in their country.

So with these parts of the Bible unsupported by any historical document, how can you trust the whole of the Bible as an accurate source of history?

It has never been, and it will never be a historically accurate source of history.

I don't know much about other religious books but I'll that those too, being religious hence their writings will be a hodge podge of truth combined with myths and mysticisms, are inaccurate accounts of history.

Answer 4

The bible is not generally considered to be a historical text. It is a religious text and tends to discuss matters through narative and anecdotal reference.

What I mean is that particularly in the New Testament, very few of the people actually involved were of historical importance in their day. So there is VERY little to corroborate their story.

History is a science just like any other, you build evidence and facts up until you have a case for staing something as a theory or if you have hard evidence you may be able to state something for a fact.

When dealing with ANY kind of testimonial be it from the Bible or from some legal text from an empire, or the news of the day.

It's just like the news today or maybe think of it more like intelligence gathering, if you have one witness saying that someone did something, that's interesting but not helpful unless you can get other witnesses or better yet disinterested parties who corroborate the story told.

So what is interesting is that when it comes to facts not central to the themes of the naratives being told, the Bible has had a tendency to be fairly accurate or in some instances even metaphorically accurate in many instances.

This is true with MOST other religious texts, in that metaphor and prophecy and sometimes just outright fabulation cloud our perception of history through most religious texts, however there is often a kernel of truth to the basic idea since that was deemed important to pass on to children and others.

For example, while the Ressurrection story of Jesus was really the case and as fabulous with shining beams of light and all, someone outside of Jesus' circle of friends might have gotten wind to the local government that a condemed prisoner escaped that somehow a prisoner had "faked" their death and escaped punishment, it might be that the Christian faith was just the sad tale of an escaped death row inmate who got nailed to a cross - twice. We know two things for certain, that Pilate sentenced a man considered a troublemaker amongst the local people to whatever fate they saw fit, and that he died in the mid-afternoon. This was discovered not long ago within an archaeological dig containing Imperial "court" records.

As a case in your question, this is no more so than many other texts.I like Heroditus's Histories, is not completely accurate and does tend to imbellish a very little bit but instead of fabulation, it's packed with common reasonable guesses where the author doesn't have actual knowledge or Heroditus relies upon speculation of 2nd hand witnesses. When you compare Heroditus to other historical accounts , you can feel pretty good when the accounts match up.

Consider for example the story of the "Lost city of Troy", (It was untill Schlieman in 1870, considered just as lost and imaginary as Atlantis.

Perhaps one of the best or most iconic ancient texts other than the Bible is the Illiad. Its chock full of Gods and Heros and tragedy. However, Except for the discovery of the actual City of Troy, there is not alot of historical evidence to back up the claims.

If however there was a text like the works of Thucydides regarding the specifics of a military campaign, supply line problems and paperwork, etc it would make the case alot better for the actually military / historical reasons for going to war.

Thucydides himself was a military commander in the war itself and therefore had tragic realistic first hand knowledge of the war. It was not romanticized very much and is generally considered an excellent historical reference upon which much is based, no so much because Thucydides himself was such a great writer but because nearly EVERYTHING he mentions has been able to have been corroborated as being accurate and distinctly lacking in any fabulation.

Whether other religious texts are considered as valid resources for truth, sometimes, it's important to realize that a religious text may be ALL we have of a civilization.

Consider the Mayan Codex, before the Codex was well understood and deciphered (after nearly 50 years of continuous effort), it was though that the Maya and other city states of the new world were fairly peaceful but did engage in limited wars and blood rituals (which was obvious from the basic iconography of the records), what was discovered AFTER the codex was deciphered was that there were in fact a series of competetive city-states in nearly constant bloody wars, with overall Meso-American society broadly comprised of a peasant class, a large warrior class and a class of elites and rules.

The mayan codex is a religious document but it is also a historical document, a stylizd and literal set of pieces of art.

The reason for the misunderstanding was that we only had partial knowledge of the religious scripts and could not interpret many of the non-religious writing system involved.

The numerical system is still not completely understood and there are still many questions left unanswered.

Answer 5

You're really asking two separate questions. Is the Bible valid as a historical source, and is it your history. Like most ancient histories, the history recorded in Genesis came down through oral tradition. Is oral tradition considered an accurate source of history?

Well, my opinion is that there is not an accurate source of history. ALL history comes down through the perceptions of the people who tell it. Did Genesis come down through someone's perception? I was written, people think, by Moses ... (not Adam). Yes ... then it is history. And then ... yes, oral tradition is an accurate source of history.

However, the Bible is a source of the history of the Jewish people first, and I believe is up to the individual to decide if they believe it to be their history as well. For if they don't and it is, well ... they chose wrong right? And if they do and it isn't, what is that going to change? So ... do you BELIEVE that it is your history. Jews do. Christians do. Do you.

Answer 6

No one considers the bible to be an accurate account of history except for people with no ability to discriminate. Still, there are parts of the bible that do enlighten on certain aspects of history.