The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Randy Carson]

You believe much.  You know little.

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

[DeistPaladin]

You believe much.  You know little.

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

I've already debated this topic, these "arguments" of yours are not new. Because I'm bored and don't want to retype everything, here's a link:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-15499.html

[dyresand]

My foot is more historically accurate than the bible because everything in the bible is fiction.

[Minimalist]

You believe much.  You know little.

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

You're late to the party and you expect everyone to play your game?  Fuck off.  Use the search feature.  I'm not your fucking secretary.

[Simon Moon]

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

I've already debated this topic, these "arguments" of yours are not new. Because I'm bored and don't want to retype everything, here's a link:

It amazes me that every theist that comes to an atheist forum believes they are the ones with the smoking gun argument that will convince us heathens to believe their particular brand of unsupported assertions. 

As if we have never heard their flawed arguments before. 

[Esquilax]

You believe much.  You know little.

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

Well, some of that is just Min being Min; think of him as the forum's angry grandpa, I guess.

But also? This isn't new stuff for us; many of us have been dealing with these arguments for years, we've typed out our responses to them more times than I can count, and we're tired of it. You've come into this fresh, but we didn't start existing the moment you came here to make your arguments; we have our own histories with these concepts.

For my part, I don't really care if you can prove historical accuracy, because that wouldn't prove the mystical stuff that's at the heart of your religion. See, you're discussing historical academia now, which means there's a very important component of that you need to keep in mind, which is that the bible is not the only historical text to make supernatural claims. And the way historians deal with the supernatural claims in any other one of those texts is to ignore them, or take them as the superstitions of the time, not to be classified as real historical events. An account of a Roman battle contains a reference to a supernatural portent that helped them win the battle, the historians do not conclude that actual supernatural forces are involved, and there's a reason for that; the supernatural, as far as we can tell, does not factor into the real world.

So if historians won't accept supernatural accounts as fact even from otherwise reliable historical documents, then there's simply no reason to expect that arguing successfully for the bible as a historical document will demonstrate the truth of your religion. I'm certainly not going to make a special case exemption and allow your holy book to take on the reputation of historical accuracy while simultaneously skipping a couple of steps in the process. You're going to need a little more oomph, to make the case you're actually trying to make; you're not going to be able to just slip the crazy claims under the guise of the mundane ones.

[robvalue]

Yeah. At some point you're just going to have to say, "And I choose to believe what they say really happened, and happened exactly as they said it, and the supernatural causation they attributed was correct." Or, "This story is special because ... and this makes this the one real religion."

And if you don't say that, you need to come up with an argument so blinding that it will take us by storm. In my opinion it's a near impossible, if not actually impossible, task to demonstrate even vaguely let alone beyond reasonable doubt that the supernatural stuff happened. I don't care if we could talk to eyewitnesses right now who saw Jesus be ressurected. It's not enough evidence for a sceptic. And similarly, you would not believe a group of 4 people who said they have just been abducted by aliens, without a whole lot of evidence, right? Or would you?

Why do people take testimony from around that time as somehow magically true? People could be fooled or plain make stuff up back then just as well as they can today, you know. Just saying, "Well, I don't think they made it up or were fooled because..." is not going to cut it.

I'm just trying to save some time and sweat here. This is the only part that matters, you can have the whole rest of the bible word for word for all I care, and you could even say all the accounts are eye witness accounts and were exactly what people believed happened. That is your absolute best case scenario. And even then, it's not good enough. Belief does not make fact.

[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.

---

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. 

[Pyrrho]

Nestor, I think we are more in agreement than not.  It is our quick and dirty summaries that seem out of sync, not so much the details.  The superficial summaries might be the only disagreement we have on this, and I am not inclined to try to get you to alter your summary to match mine.  Perhaps, yours is better, but I think it is not enough to tell the right story.  But you are right, neither is mine.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Well, your "world-class" scholar had his silly "Telephone Game" analogy dismantled by yours truly, so I've got that going for me. 

Sorry, but you did no such thing, because you've skirted the essence of the argument, which is that the Bible has been translated into several different languages serially, and then (again, mostly serially) transcribed by hand. Ehrman maps some of the changes in Misquoting Jesus. You'd do well to read it.

The only thing you did to the "Telephone Game" analogy is skirt its point.