Does the life long history of the Jewish people substantiate the Christian bible, in all regards and aspects, thank you for taking the time to answer.
Posted: August 17th 2009
Reed Braden www
The Old Testament is the main account Jewish history. There is very little recorded history of the Jews outside of the Old Testament. However, that doesn’t mean it was either written at the time of the event or intended to be accurate in the first place. A lot of the text reads as if it was intended to be allegorical.
I would venture to guess that the strictly historical, not spiritual, records in the Old Testament are partially true, but even some of them are demonstrably false. For example even most Israeli anthropologists will concede that the Jews were probably never held in en masse captivity in Egypt.
There is really no way to verify the accuracy of much of the history in the Old Testament since it is so far removed from the present.
Posted: August 26th 2009
SmartLX www
No.
The argument here is that you have millions of Jews over thousands of years, and if there was a shred of honesty in any of them the events of the Bible couldn’t possibly be made up.
The problem is that the longevity of the Jewish culture has created tremendous opportunity for distortion of the truth, either purely via the “Chinese whispers” process or through the sincere propagation of major early exaggerations. If God’s supposed acts didn’t happen, the fact that so many generations of Jews thought they did doesn’t reflect poorly on their honesty, merely their accuracy.
Posted: August 22nd 2009
Steve Zara www
No. There is a real problem with Bible, which is the content.
How do we judge if a historical document has some truth? We compare it with existing documents, and we see if what the document says is reasonable. If a historical document said that Julius Caesar did not exist, we would have some problem with it. If a historical document said that Alexander the Great was abducted by aliens, we would be very skeptical indeed about its validity.
The Bible is packed full of miracles. That basically disqualifies it as a document that should be considered with any weight as a source of historical truth. At best, we have to chop out the miracles and hope to interpret what is left.
In fact, those who believe that existing historical documents help validate the bible have things the wrong way around. Agreeing with the Bible should cast some doubt on such documents, as the contents of the Bible are so beyond normal experience.
Posted: August 22nd 2009