The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Mudhammam]

The OT contains a lot of important historical and geographical information, especially about conflicts the early Hebrews confronted. True, it's full of myth and embellishment, but so was practically every ancient text prior to (and still many following) the 5th century. It isn't until Thucydides that we have the first serious attempt (Herodotus notwithstanding) at reporting events free of nationalistic and religious fervor, and even then we have to take account of blatantly false information and individual bias.

The OT is terrible as history, even forgetting all of the ridiculous miracles.  For example, the Jews were never enslaved en mass in Egypt, nor did they wander the desert for 40 years.  It is so unreliable that nothing in it should be believed, unless confirmed by some independent evidence.  And then one is simply believing the independent evidence, not the OT.

You have to learn to contextualize. The Pentateuch is a very different collection of texts than the Books of Kings or the Books of Chronicles. One cannot read Job or the poetry of the Psalms and treat it as one would the rebukes and oracles of prophets such as Ezekiel or Isaiah. Even though the story of Moses is fictional, it can still offer useful information about different customs, traditions, and perhaps even a former Jewish presence in Egypt, in much the same way that Homer's Iliad probably represents a 12-century BC conflict in which a city northwest of Mount Ida and later represented by King Priam's Troy came under siege and was laid to waste. One is never wise to "simply believe the independent evidence." That's a very naive approach to history. Sure, we may give more credence to certain sources, as we do the Assyrian sources relating the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian king Sennacherib and as contained in the Annals of Sennacherib and the second Book of Kings, for example. Here we have an event told from the perspectives of both parties involved. According to the Assyrian account, Sennacherib was acting upon "a trust(-inspiring) oracle (given) by Ashur, my lord," which ensured "a defeat upon them" to the extent that "I laid waste the large district of Judah and made the overbearing and proud Hezekiah, its king, bow in submission." This "trust(-inspiring) oracle" (whatever their superstitious practices included) is confirmed in the biblical account, as according to Sennacheribs’ message delivered to Hezekiah recounted in 2 Kings 18:25, he asks the Hebrew king, “Is it without the LORD that I have come up against this place to destroy it? The LORD said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.” Sennacherib, of course, means Ashur, as he himself is recorded to have credited in his Annals. In 2 Kings, "Hezekiah stripped the gold from the temples of the LORD and from the doorposts that Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid and gave it to the king of Assyria," details we conversely know are trustworthy as in the Assyrian account, Hezekiah sent “me, later, to Ninevah, my lordly city, together with 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, precious stones, antinomy, large cuts of red stone, couches (inlaid) with ivory, nimedu -chairs (inlaid) with ivory, elephant-hides, ebony-wood, boxwood (and) all kinds of valuable treasures, his (own) daughters, concubines, male and female musicians.” Another telling piece of information is the conclusion of the siege, which informs us just how far we should trust such texts in the Bible. In 2 Kings, "the angel of the LORD" comes at night and strikes down "185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians," an embellished number typical of such historical revisions. The biblical account portrays the Hebrews as victors, outlasting the siege, while the Assyrian account depicts themselves as victors and fails to mention any deaths in the Assyrian camp, whether by disease or fatigue (if the Assyrians were in fact forced to retreat by such natural causes); each sides portraying themselves the winners in exaggerated fashion is common throughout ancient texts of various cultures (and today, for that matter). It doesn't render them totally false. It just means we take things with caution here and a grain of salt there. In this case, among many, both supplement one another and give a fuller account of the siege, neither of which would be as credible by themselves. Such corroboration strengthens the reliability of a book like 2 Kings in giving us the names of Hebrew kings and their geopolitical conflicts, however little actual details we can glean beyond that, and has no bearing on Genesis, Exodus, etc. and vice versa.

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Randy's arguments are hilarious. Standard uninformed apologetics horseshit. He even cites Paul as the author of first Timothy, which almost all credible scholars now recognize as a pseudegraph written in Paul's name late in the first or early in the second century, and calls Luke a "skilled historian."   Because, you know, nothing says "skilled historian" like borrowing entire sections of another work and failing to cite your source, or showing zero skepticism in reporting run-of-the-mill miracles that were common in the ancient world and which were often highly doubted by actual historians. Then there's his whole dating scheme, also rejected by most historians, probably because his arguments are so pathetically weak, i.e. Acts cuts off before mentioning Paul's death... therefore it must have been written prior to 62 AD! Or... maybe Luke died before he finished it? Or maybe he didn't have any "sources" for information following Paul's imprisonment? Or maybe he was aiming for a poetical conclusion that signaled a call for Christianity to ascend upon Rome as it so tragically and ultimately did? Who knows? And that's the point: he doesn't, so he just spouts off whatever conforms to his unfounded, highly implausible, pre-conceived notions that he feels are necessary for his faith which in fact has nothing to do with historical accuracy, logical thought, or scientific plausibility.

Bottom line:
Let's pretend all of the Gospels and epistles were written between 60-100 AD. Is that an argument that can establish that anyone of the largely unknown authors was an eyewitness to even a single miracle? Nope.