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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: The Bible as History
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TallPoppy
Shipmate
# 16294
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Posted
I was reviewing a book on re-interpreting the Bible recently, and wanted to know more about the history of the Bible (as an historical document).
What I found was fascinating. This is from Wiki.
"The historicity of Jesus concerns whether Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical figure, whether the episodes portrayed in the gospels can be confirmed as historical events as opposed to myth, legend, or fiction, and the weighing of the evidence relating to his life...
The historical reliability of the Gospels refers to the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents. Some scholars state that little in the four canonical gospels is considered to be historically reliable. Almost all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus. The only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. Elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, the miraculous events including the resurrection, and certain details about the crucifixion."
I'd be interested in
a. any suggestions for further reading, online sources or books
b. comments on this line of study.
TP
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Papaver exaltatum
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain"
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Meike
Shipmate
# 3006
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Posted
I’ve recently started to read a book on the historicity of the gospels titled "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony" by Richard Bauckham. I find it very promising so far.
You can find a review here, if you are interested.
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“A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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TallPoppy
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# 16294
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Posted
Really interesting.
I suppose I am coming at this with my science/health writer hat on. When I write on a topic, I look at secondary sources eg summaries from reputable bodies like NICE, or NHS Choices, but I like to read original scientific papers too, to see exactly what was said by the scientists who carried out the original research.
So I thought - how would that work with the Bible?
And I was quite dismayed to find that there are no contemporary documents, and no autograph documents, for the four Gospels. Everything is written after the date of the events themselves, and then copied out several times (not sure how many times?) so what we have is second hand, third hand, fourth hand, and could have been edited and amended at every stage, as the political and religious context changed. I guess changes of meaning would have occurred with translation as well.
As a science writer, I would not touch the result with a barge-pole, as any kind of factual account of what actually happened. Historically as I understand it, we can only be sure that Jesus was born and that he was crucified.
I need to think on this a lot more!
TP
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Papaver exaltatum
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain"
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Raptor Eye
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# 16649
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Posted
The Bible is a collection of theological documents. Most of them were derived from passed on verbal accounts. I understand that the people took and take a pride in passing on verbal accounts accurately. However, some of the Old Testament 'books' have clearly been compiled from more than one source which don't match exactly. That is to be expected.
As I understand it, most scholars agree that the gospels were all written around 30-40 years after Jesus was killed. Those which were included in the New Testament were the accounts written according to eye witnesses. It's important that there were four and that they differ, as they're all angled differently - much like four newspapers through which we can read the true stories.
There are many books to choose from depending upon your own starting point, but please be aware that the Bible is not and was never a history book.
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Be still, and know that I am God! Psalm 46.10
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DOEPUBLIC
Shipmate
# 13042
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Posted
A context
History of the bible
The tension in the walk of faith is that each of us are 'living epistles' as well. Leading to the central dynamic of conflicts being desires of spirit and truth.
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Asking about the historicity of the Bible is not the same as saying it is a history book. It is to ask about what we can say about the historical circumstances that led to the different books in the Bible to be written.
Scholars make guesses at the way Shakespeares plays are shaped by the historical events of his time even if what they portray is fictional. Describing the historical factors influencing him in writing King Lear does not stop it being fictional.
So for instance someone who claims the book of Jonah is an example of a post-exilic midrash story, is making a historical claim while specifically denying that the events described actually happened.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
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TallPoppy
Shipmate
# 16294
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Posted
Very thoughtful responses, thank you, and some excellent links, much appreciated.
I suppose the Shakespeare analogy interests me as I studied English. The plays were 'made up stories' though there was obviously an overlap with history with some of them!
However, not one autograph copy exists of a single Shakespeare play so we do not know how 'corrupt' or accurate the printed copies we still have might be. Some seem to be more reliable than others eg Hamlet I think is a bit dodgy!
Anyway, thanks again for considering and responding to my original post. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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Papaver exaltatum
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain"
Posts: 2389 | From: Southern England | Registered: Mar 2011
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by TallPoppy:
And I was quite dismayed to find that there are no contemporary documents, and no autograph documents, for the four Gospels. Everything is written after the date of the events themselves, and then copied out several times (not sure how many times?) so what we have is second hand, third hand, fourth hand, and could have been edited and amended at every stage, as the political and religious context changed. I guess changes of meaning would have occurred with translation as well.
As a science writer, I would not touch the result with a barge-pole, as any kind of factual account of what actually happened. Historically as I understand it, we can only be sure that Jesus was born and that he was crucified.
The problem lies in the nature of all ancient documents. IRRC we have no accounts of any event that were written immediately after the event took place. Moreover, all ancient documents were copied and recopied. If you decide you can't believe the gospels, by the same standard you can't believe other ancient documents.
quote:
However, not one autograph copy exists of a single Shakespeare play so we do not know how 'corrupt' or accurate the printed copies we still have might be. Some seem to be more reliable than others eg Hamlet I think is a bit dodgy!
In Shakespeare's time 'original' manuscripts did not have the same prestige as they do now. It seems likely that the copies of Shakespeare's plays that we do have are taken from the copies that were used by the director and cast during rehearsal. If you are interested in Shakespeare, you might enjoy the book, Contested Will.
The idea of autograph copies being special is a modern concept. In Shakespeare's day, the production, not the manuscript, was what was important.
Moo
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
I agree with Moo. All ancient "histories" suffer from the same issues as the Biblical texts do -- uncertain authorship, distance in time from the events described, and lack of original manuscripts.
In fact, in the case of the gospels, if they weren't religious texts I think they would be viewed as pretty solid historical evidence. Imagine any other first-century historical figure for whom we have four biographies, all believed to have been written within 30-50 years of his death, agreeing on most major points of the story but each adding details that others leave out, two or possibly three written by people who were believed to have been eyewitnesses and the fourth including a helpful introduction explaining the author's research methods and telling that he interviewed eyewitnesses -- for any other historical person of that era, this would be considered an amazing treasure trove of historical evidence.
But because it's Jesus, and the writers and texts all became key to a religious movement, the gospels are often discounted as historical texts because they're also religious texts -- which I don't think is actually fair.
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Books and things.
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Moo and Trudy are right. My dissertation was in textual studies (early 1600s, just after Shakespeare) and people in my field would kill, some of them, for a hundredth of the textual evidence that exists for the New Testament. Seriously, I had maybe ten manuscripts (most of them ranging from 10 to 60% of the text only, BADLY badly corrupted) and 12 printed editions, which could be proved to be copies from one another, making them basically equal to a single source. The text was in a truly lousy state, with variant readings all over the place, at least half of it added years later than the rest of it, and some of it so bad there was nothing to do but add appendices because you couldn't work it into the main text. And I was considered lucky!
That's for a 1628 text.
Now take the New Testament documents. Get hold of a copy of Nestle Aland Greek New Testament (I think they're up to what, the 28th edition now?) and if you don't read koine Greek, go and find someone who does. (Most LCMS pastors do, and probably a lot of other mainstream denom pastors.) Have them walk you through the textual apparatus. That is a series of cryptic notes on every freaking VERSE in the New Testament showing you exactly where every word came from--which manuscripts have what readings, and which have variants--and what those variants are. You can look for yourself. There are no scholarly mysteries here (just the boring work of looking up all the little squiggles to figure out what squiggle means what manuscript).
If you do this, you will see that there are only two or three variants in the whole NT that are actually of any size. One is the ending of Mark, several extra verses (you can find this footnoted in most English Bibles). One is John 8, the first few verses dealing with the woman caught in adultery. And I think there's a verse or two in Romans that appears in one place in certain manuscripts, but maybe 20 verses away in others. (People, refresh my memory if I'm forgetting anything.)
That's it. Seriously, that's all. The rest of the variants are on the order of "Jesus Christ" vs "Christ Jesus" or occasional changes in verb tense (for example, "Jesus goes" as opposed to "Jesus went"). The article "the" gets left out sometimes--which rarely makes any difference at all in Greek grammar. No major doctrine of the Christian faith is affected at all.
And it's not hard to resolve most of these variants. There are rules of textual science for figuring out what the original text was, given a handful of copies. You can look at the copies and work backwards with a great deal of precision. I've done it myself. And none of this is done in secret, either. There is an international community of scholars who have been working on this text across denominations, in many countries, for hundreds of years, revisiting their research every time a new manuscript shows up. Which happens quite a lot, since the NT was widely copied. There are like, thousands of manuscripts, many of them very early and in very good shape. (pardon my pout--it's just not fair, my field is the Renaissance and we don't get anything LIKE that kind of good luck. Self-pity party over).
Seriously, we have people onboard Ship demanding modern miracles, and asking why God doesn't do them where they can see. Well, folks, the textual strength and purity of the New Testament text is a freaking miracle and you can go and test it for your very own selves. There is simply nothing else like it--nothing at all, at all, at all.
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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TallPoppy
Shipmate
# 16294
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Posted
Well, you have taken me aback - with such interesting and well informed responses.
I suppose I was much taken with 'autograph' copies because we do have the original handwritten versions for more modern works (of art) eg Mozart's Requiem, and the original manuscripts of literary works - I remember visiting the British Library and seeing Emily Bronte's manuscript poetry. It took my breath away to think her hand in life had touched that very page.
The contextual information of the 'standard' to be expected of ancient manuscripts was very useful, therefore.
Plenty to chew on! And thank you. ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
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Papaver exaltatum
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain"
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Flubb
Shipmate
# 918
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Posted
The historicity of the biblical text was pretty much assumed and 'confirmed' by discoveries up until two seminal books published in the 1970's. The first was Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition and the second, Thomas L Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives which both scotched the previously held ideas that the texts in front of you were 2nd millennium texts, and in fact were riddled with data that actually point towards a 1st millennium composition. Having destroyed the notion of the Patriarchs as real people, that opened the floodgates for the rest of the 'history' of the bible to be likewise critically examined.
To cut a long story short, apart from quite conservative scholars, most people now agree (although there are degrees of agreement) that the 'history' of the bible is nothing like history as we understand it in modern terms, and in many cases seems to be theologically motivated (rather than historically), but also written as a way of understanding the present time. So when you read Exodus, it's not really about what happened c.1440 BC, it's more about what happened around the time of the Exile (there's a lot of disagreement about dates of composition so I've just picked one). Many 'historical' details and elements are actually from the time period when the text was finally composed/redacted, rather than being from the past.
We now live in a split world where the positivist minimalist schools argue that there is virtually no 'history' worth anything in the bible, and the centrist/maximalists who suggest that there are kernals here and there, or in some cases, a good swathe of plausibility structure.
If you want to examine the minimalists (the texts aren't useful as history), then anything by Thomas L Thompson, Niels Lemche, Philip R Davies, Mario Liverani, Donald Redford, John Van Seters, and Keith Whitlam.
If you want more centrists (the texts might have something useful), then Israel Finkelstein, later William Dever, Lester Grabbe, David Ussishkin, Amihai Mazar, possibly Nadav Na'aman.
If you want more conservative (the texts contain quite a bit), then Lawrence Mykytiuk, Alan Millard, Kenneth Kitchen, Richard Hess, William Hallo, and Avraham Faust.
Super-hardline conservatives would be someone like Bryant Wood.
There's quite a bit of crossover, so there's an element of arbitrariness in this separation (most conservatives acknowledge a good number of the points made by minimalists/centrists- in fact, most have had to move quite closer to the center because of them).
If you want over-views then I'd suggest Megan Moore and Brad Kelle's Biblical History and Israel's Past which outlines most of the arguments over the years. You could throw in Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Lester Grabbe's Can a 'History' of Israel be Written?, and any of William Dever post 2000, but if you browse the other authors above, (and you have time and money), you'll get all sides in their own words.
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Originally posted by Flubb:
quote:
f you want to examine the minimalists (the texts aren't useful as history), then anything by Thomas L Thompson, Niels Lemche, Philip R Davies, Mario Liverani, Donald Redford, John Van Seters, and Keith Whitlam.
If you want more centrists (the texts might have something useful), then Israel Finkelstein, later William Dever, Lester Grabbe, David Ussishkin, Amihai Mazar, possibly Nadav Na'aman.
If you want more conservative (the texts contain quite a bit), then Lawrence Mykytiuk, Alan Millard, Kenneth Kitchen, Richard Hess, William Hallo, and Avraham Faust.
Based on the names I recognise that's really good advice and I plan to look up the names I don't recognise. However I'd suggest that Liverani is a centrist and not a minimalist. (This may be the most recondite and annoying thing I have ever posted. ) I'd also add Eric Cline (centrist) and Robert Drews' book on the Bronze Age Collapse (minimalist, at least WRT the relevant texts) and am currently looking at Francesca Stavrakopolou's "Land of our Fathers" (centrist in methodology and minimalist in sentiment). Gottwald and Von Rad were once great names but are now dated (but still worth reading, bracket them with the conservatives), Whybray's book on The Pentateuch is still good (centrist). If you want fairly popular commentaries on the Old Testament Goldingay is readable and conservative.
For the purposes of full disclosure I'm probably a centrist on the OT but it's definitely worthwhile to read a spread of books to get an impression of the nature of the debate. Good hunting!
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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pimple
Ship's Irruption
# 10635
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by TallPoppy: and no autograph documents...
I'm not certain about that. This is the disciple who wrote these things... has generally been taken as a reference to the fourth gospel as a whole. But what if "these things" refer only to certain specific occurrences seen by one disciple and written down by another, with the one who saw them required to make his mark in the margin or at the foot of the page? These "affidavits" - if that's what they are, appear seem to have been incorporated into the body of the accounts, with of course the unknown mark missing.
But you're right in that no original witnessed account survives, so far as we know. New discoveries turn up every day, however. Watch this space! ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
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In other words, just because I made it all up, doesn't mean it isn't true (Reginald Hill)
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