The Bible and Historical Documents

[max-greece]

Not so much as a tax receipt for 5,000 anchovy pizzas.

[Minimalist]

You have to ask yourself how did the documents - even partial documents - that we have today survive? They survived because someone down through the ages thought it worthwhile to copy them.

That there are no tax records or census records or land ownership records is not a surprise. These items have a short useful shelf life. There are instances in the ANE where we have cuneiform tablets with rather mundane trade and taxation items but the reason we have them is because they were carved into mud brick tablets which were baked when the palaces/storehouses they were in were burned.

Much of this mundane record-keeping writing was done on broken bits of pottery called ostraka which were meant to be used and discarded. When an archaeologist finds one today it is worthy of a paper for peer review but to the people who wrote it originally it became garbage and was probably tossed in the trash. That is one of the main things to keep in mind about archaeology. It does some of its best work going through the garbage.

The Romans used various writing methods. One of the most ingenious was the pugillarae which was a wooden tablet covered in wax. These were not intended as permanent records and in fact were frequently re-cycled by simply heating the wax. The writer used a stylus to note whatever he wished to note and the Romans did have a means of linking several pugillarae together.

For important records or books parchment was used but parchment's stability is almost totally dependent on weather conditions. The Dead Sea Scrolls lasted as well as they did - and it is a mistake to think that they are intact - because they were stored in jars in one of the driest places on earth. Similarly, many documents come out of Egypt in papyrus or parchment because of the generally arid conditions. But in the rest of the empire, almost all of it located near coasts or in wetter climes one could not expect parchment or papyrus to survive the ravages of time.

The fact that we have as much from Antiquity as we do has to do with three factors. In the West, xtian scribes were instrumental in copying books which had some religious attachment. In the East, the Byzantine empire survived in one degree or another for 1,000 years after the fall of Rome. Moreover, Arab scholars translated the documents into Arabic as they fell into their hands and for all three groups, regardless of their motivations, we owe a debt of thanks.

But they didn't copy tax records or trial transcripts. In fact, most of the trial literature we have dates from the time when xtians were inventing the great persecutions which they supposedly endured. See Christina Moss' "The Myth of Persecution" for a full explanation of that.