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IS THE BIBLE HISTORICALLY TRUE?
Is the Bible right after all? Is it historically
accurate? This is an important question. For if the Bible is not
true in the historical details it records, then one has to ask how true it might
be in other things. Since the faith of Jews and Christians depend on the
historical circumstances narrated in the Bible, the question about the
historicity of the Bible is ultimately a question about the validity of the
faith.
This question is addressed in the book The Bible as
History by Werner Keller. In the postscript by Joachim Rehork, the
importance of the question is first addressed:
For the majority of Bible readers . . . as well as
for a large number of Biblical scholars, a great deal still depends on the
question whether statements in the Bible can be proved. The Dominican
father, Roland de Vaux, for example, one of the most prominent figures in the
history of Biblical antiquity, regarded the capacity to survive of the Jewish
and Christian faiths as dependent upon the agreement between “religious”
and “objective” history. He stated his opinion thus: “. . . if
Israel’s historical faith does not have its roots in history, then it is
wrong and the same is true of our faith.”1
Now what about the answer to this question? Is
the Bible historically true? Rehork writes:
It is full of problematical statements with the
consequence that representatives of the most diverse disciplines,
“schools” and opinions have racked their brains again and again over
contradictions, repetitions and inconsistencies in the Biblical
text–inconsistencies of which the following are a few examples.
Then Rehork lists some examples of which I number three
here:
1. In the Bible there are two accounts of the Creation
(Genesis 1: 1-2, 3; and Genesis 2:4ff). In the first of these two accounts
of the Creation, God created man last; in the second, however, God
created him first, that is to say, before all other creatures. In
one case God created mankind from the beginning as “male and female”; then,
however, only the man came into being from “the dust of the ground”, while
woman was formed subsequently from a rib of the man.
2. The name of Moses’s father-in-law has been
transmitted in three different forms, once as Jethro (Exodus 3:1; 4:18;
18:1-12), once as Reuel (Exodus 2:18) and finally as Hobab ((Judges 4:11).
3. How could Moses describe his own death (Deuteronomy
34)? Or to put the question another way: can the first five books of the Bible
really have been written by Moses when they tell us of his death?
After listing such problems, Rehork continues: “These
are only a few examples of inconsistencies in the Bible.”2
Rehork is careful to clarify that the question about the
Bible being true can be answered on different levels. He is not concerned
in the book with those truths for which history cannot provide confirmation.
Belief, religious conviction, and the subjective feeling that something is
right fall within a domain outside of historical confirmation. History
cannot prove or disprove a document of faith. Where historical
investigation ends, faith begins. We can produce proofs for or against the
Bible as a historical source, but the Bible has a different level of being
right.
But is the Bible always right? Rehork poses this
question and then in his answer reveals something of the difficulty some
scholars face in trying to make clear their findings. He writes that as
far as Biblical statements are confirmed by archeological discoveries and
parallel sources we can answer in the affirmative. For statements that are
not so confirmed, we can look for another form of rightness. The Bible is
right in some passages in giving us some insight into the thought and behavior
of the people who wrote the book. And perhaps one day we will be able to
affirm that the Bible is right after all, “as seen through the eyes of the
people of its times!”3
Such ambivalence is an indication of the sort of
difficulty Biblical scholars face when they cannot make their findings clear.
On the one hand he affirms that the Bible is inconsistent; on the other
hand he affirms that the faith is fine. On the one hand he was able to say
about the Bible: “There is no end to the problems.”4 On the other
hand, he finds a way to maintain that the faith is true.
I conclude by referring back to what Father Roland de Vaux
said: “. . . if Israel’s historical faith does not have its roots in
history, then it is wrong and the same is true of our faith.”5 We began
by asking whether or not the Bible is historically accurate--whether it is true.
We have seen that it is “full of problematical statements,” that it
contains “inconsistencies” and that there is “no end to the problems.”
NOTES:
1. Werner Keller, The Bible as
History, 2nd revised edition (US: Bantam, 1988) p. 434
2. Ibid, p. 435
3. Ibid, p. 438
4. Ibid, p. 436
5. Ibid, p. 435 |
