(June 28, 2014 at 4:14 pm)rasetsu Wrote: The bible is unreliable as a historical text. It's also unreliable when it comes to the culture of the time. Nothing is what it seems. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman make the case that the torah was codified in the 6th and 7th centuries B.C., yet it claims to describe a period long before then.We don't have to take it's claims about dates at face value to squeeze the juice from the lemon. The lemon says "try me, I'm an apple" - so I squeeze it, just to make sure the lemon isn't fucking with me for shits and giggles.
Quote: In doing so, its authors appear to have created anachronisms by describing prior centuries using the context they were familiar with at the time they were writing. And examples such as the geographical mistakes in Mark make it clear that there is no part of the bible which is left untouched by persistent issues of unreliability. It's impossible to say which parts of the text are actually historical and which are merely fanciful, so the whole is useless for historical information.Yet we do conclude that Kings probably describes the sort of low lvl warfare that was common to the experience -of the author at the time of the work- fairly accurately. That prophets do seem to be inline with other surviving socio-political commentary and diatribes -of the time that any particular "prophet" was "prophesying". That both of these things are attested to by independent lines of verification. I wouldn't call it more or less reliable than any other book about ghosts, personally. They might get the part about ghosts wrong - but as human authors they will invariably tell us about the time in which -they- are writing. They can do this by accident, even if they don't intend to.
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