How do you determine the trustworthiness of historical evidence?

Eric_PK

Well, first off, you shouldn’t believe in all the information in your high school text books. Even the best history is written with a specific perspective, and textbooks are not the best history. Not only that, but history is written by the winners.

Having said that, there are standard ways that historical scholars use to judge the amount of credence given to a specific source, and how much corroboration is necessary to accept the evidence.

It also depends up how ordinary the information is. If a source says that George Washington was born on Feb 22nd, that’s a fairly ordinary bit of information, and of now big import if he happened to be born on the 23rd.

Or, to put it another way, the exact date on which he was born is not of much import to anybody.

Religious claims are extraordinary ones, and generally based on very sketchy evidence, so it’s rational to be more skeptical about them.

George Ricker www

In evaluating historical claims, nothing should be taken on faith.

That means seeking out a variety of sources, allowing for the biases and distortions that are apt to be present in any historical narrative, and, always, looking for independent corroboration of the details of that narrative.

Certainly, a stong part of the evaluation of any historical claim involves an assessment of the motives of the person or persons making that claim. Is the goal to justify the actions of a military commander or political leader? Is it aimed at providing legitimacy for a new government or discrediting one? Is it intended to provide support for a religion or an economic system? Or is the objective to report what happened as fairly and accurately as possible? Obviously we would prefer that all such narratives proceed from the last perspective, but we know that often they do not.

Finally, one must consider the consequences of accepting a narrative that is inaccurate or untrue. If I accept an erroneous account of the Trojan War, for example, it’s not a matter of any particular importance to me personally. My life will be relatively unchanged as a result. However, if I accept the teachings of a religion that calls on me to make fundamental changes, that’s a different matter entirely, one that requires considerably more care on my part.

The problem for Christians is that when their holy books are evaluated by the same standards as other historical texts, they come up short. While there are some historically accurate things in the Bible, the most important matters contained therein must be accepted on faith because there is no independent supporting evidence that they happened. But, as I said at the outset, when evaluating historical claims, nothing should be taken on faith.

brian thomson www

What I see here is yet another false dichotomy – believe or disbelieve – while I think there are degrees of belief, and corresponding degrees of evidentiary requirements. When it comes to history, “fact” is an unattainable ideal, since history is written by fallible people.

If you were to ask me to make a major, life-altering change, such as adopting your religion, then yes, I would expect solid, unambiguous, irrefutable evidence. The total absence of such evidence means that I will remain an atheist for the foreseeable future. It really is that simple.

For other questions, however, I ask myself just how much I care. For example, I know that Shakespeare’s historical plays (e.g. Julius Caesar) contain errors and fabrications. Is that a problem? No, it’s Art, and I have no significant “investment” in the truth or otherwise of this history. Even if I refer back to sources such as Cicero (contemporary) or Plutarch, there is still uncertainty there, but I do not feel that I need to be 100% certain about such matters of history. (Don’t get me started on Caesar’s own egotistical writings!)

My opinion is: if you go through life, dividing up everything you perceive in to “believe” or “disbelieve”, you risk missing out on subtleties of artistic meaning and culture. “Fairy tales” are not intended to be read as “true”, but they do contain elements of truth, and valuable lessons about life. I’m not saying that you (or anyone else) really thinks this way in all matters: it’s just that questions of religion always seem to lead to this false dichotomy: us or them, in or out, believer or disbeliever. For nearly every question I encounter, I’m not 100% in the believer or disbeliever camp, nor would I want to be. However, if I consider what a religion would demand of me, I would need to be near-100% certain, which implies the need for solid evidence to back its claims.

Paula Kirby

One of the fundamental principles of history is that every account is, inevitably (and whether intentionally so or not), a biased account and that you therefore need strong corroborating evidence before you accept claims as true. Naturally, the more extraordinary the claim, the more independent corroboration you require. Clearly the writers of the New Testament were men on a mission, men with an agenda. That is utterly transparent. Any proper historian would therefore look for corroborating evidence from those who did NOT have an agenda – and in the case of something like the resurrection, for instance, that means OUTSIDE the New Testament.

Furthermore, historians would look for corroborating evidence from CONTEMPORARY sources. A mention 50 years later is evidence ONLY that the story was still circulating 50 years later, not that it was actually true. (Remember that the gospels were not written until several decades after the events they claim to describe.)

There were plenty of contemporary historians at the time of the alleged resurrection, people keeping a record of what was going on in various outposts of the Roman Empire. And yet there isn’t a SINGLE contemporary account confirming that a felon had been executed but had risen from the dead. There isn’t even a SINGLE contemporary account (outside the NT, which cannot be taken at face value for the reasons already given) that there was a missing body.

Furthermore, the bible refers to LOTS OF graves opening at the moment of Jesus’s death, and LOTS of holy people rising from the dead and going on walkabout in Jerusalem and showing themselves to “many people” (Matthew 27:52-3). But again, there isn’t a SINGLE record of this outside the NT. If this had really happened, it would be an EXTRAORDINARY occurrence: there is NO WAY contemporary historians would have forgotten to mention it.

By the way, there’s another aspect, too, which is that the miraculous occurrences which form a central part of the Jesus story (virgin birth, a man with special powers raising other people from the dead, himself being executed and resurrected after three days) were well known motifs in other tales across the Middle East at that time. This strongly supports the interpretation that, in the bible too, this was just a story that was told, rather than actual, historical fact. Why should a story that had been circulating across the region for hundreds of years, suddenly be assumed to be fact? A historian would require strong independent corroboration before accepting such a thing.