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The vast majority of scholars agree that Mark was written first, around 70, Matthew and Luke in the 80s or 90s with Mark as source material, and John is usually dated 90 to 110.
So, the vast majority of scholars are wrong.
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These are simple facts. I don't see a conspiracy to date them later; indeed, the pressure would be on from most quarters to date them as contemporaneously as possible.
That is good.
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Of course even if they were written in 35 AD they still make extraordinary claims that require extraordinary substantiation and multiple attestations from independent sources in order to be believed.
No they don't require attestations from independent sources to be believed. Where is the law that even suggests such a thing?
And just because you say they were not does not mean anything since you also can't prove it.
You have no evidence of this.
Of course I do. It's called the Bible. And yes, I can prove the Bible by the Bible. It is an historic document. It is its own witness to the truth. It needs no external witnesses. You will see when Christ returns how true it is. But by then it will be too late. You will be brought into salvation into God joy and peace and righteousness, immortality and incorruption.
Being in a religious compilation does NOT automatically remove any ancient writing from a historical context, which you seem to be implying.
I agree with this well thought out and written response that I came across on Quora to the question:
What evidence is there that the Bible is a reliable historical document?
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The main difficulty involved in answering this question is the idea of the Bible as a "document". It isn't. As the secondary question mentions, it's actually a "collection of documents". In fact, it's a small library of many texts, from a variety of genres, written in several languages over a period of centuries. The only reason people think of it as "a document" or "a book" is that we tend to find this collection published in a single volume, and even that has only been common since the invention of the printing press made this practical - prior to that single volume Bibles existed but were rare because they were (i) huge and (ii) consequently hugely expensive.
So this makes it hard to summarise how "reliable" or how much "credibility" the Bible has historically, since we are talking about a collection of works which range from poetry, genealogy, myth, aetiology, apocalyptic vision, letters, prophecy and lots more beside.
If we just focus on the texts within the Bible that make or seem to make historical claims, things still remain tricky. Some of them are apparently talking about remote periods of history for which we have very little external documentary evidence with which to check or assess what is being claimed. The events detailed in Exodus, Judges or Kings in the Old Testament are difficult to even pin down as to when they are supposed to have happened. Of the documentary evidence we do have - mainly inscriptions - nothing supports very much of what these Biblical texts claim, though this is partly because very few of these sources have anything to do with the region in which the Biblical events are supposed to have taken place.
Take the whole story of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt, Moses leading them into the desert, their wanderings in the wilderness for forty years and their conquest of Canaan. There is no mention of any of this in any Egyptian material, no evidence of any wholesale enslavement of Jews or any mention of Jews at all, no evidence that Moses existed, no archaeological evidence of any sojourn in the wilderness and no evidence of some invasion and conquest of Canaan.
Current scholarship regards the idea that there really was a Moses and that the events of Exodus actually happened as remote and consider these stories to be a coalescing of many traditions written down in the Seventh to Eighth Centuries BC to give the Israelite kingdom/s of that time a united history. They appear to look back to the period known as the Bronze Age collapse, about 500 years earlier, and reflect (fairly dimly) the decline of Egyptian hegemony and influence over what was to become Jewish territory. This means relying on, say, Exodus for historical information is a bit like trying to use Geoffrey of Monmouth's legends of King Arthur to try to work out what was happening at the end of Roman Britain 600 years earlier - any history that may be in there is obscured by layers of story, folklore, legend and myth.
Even for later periods, the evidence that would allow us to check the later Bible accounts is thin on the ground and rarely confirms much at all. The books of Samuel and Kings detail the magnificent kingships of Saul, David and his son Solomon, with their vast wealth and the submission of distant rulers. There is barely any external evidence to support any of this. The only external reference to David seems to be a stele at Tel Dan, which includes in its inscription the word "bytdwd", which many (but far from all) scholars interpret as "the house of David". This is a Ninth Century BC reference to the defeat of the King of Israel and his ally "of the house of David", so is more evidence that someone later was claiming to be David's descendant, since this is dated to about a century after David is supposed to have reigned.
Apart from this, there's pretty much nothing to support the Biblical accounts and no evidence that any historical David was anything more than a hill chieftain. Again, in their descriptions of large armies, glittering palaces and foreign submission the later accounts project the conditions of their time several centuries later (and some fantasy) onto a much more remote period. This is much like the way medieval Arthurian legends depict Arthur as a high medieval king with castles, cathedrals and knights even when they are claiming he lived at the end of the Roman Empire when none of these things existed.
By the time we get to the events depicted in the New Testament, we are on firmer ground regarding the context at least. Jesus is depicted as being born in the reign of Augustus and dying in the reign of Tiberius and, compared to the periods in which the Old Testament stories are set, this is a well-documented period. The problem is, amongst the historians of the time, no-one much cared about Jewish affairs and even they didn't bother to say much about peasant preachers like Jesus. So, not surprisingly, we have no mention of Jesus outside of the gospels until well after his lifetime - the first coming in the works of Josephus and the second in Tacitus. These do no more than note he was claimed by some to be the Jewish Messiah and that he was executed by the Romans.
So when we get into the detail of the gospel accounts of his life and career, it's impossible to confirm anything much at all. The stories of his miracles and his supposed resurrection are even more impossible to verify. When we come across similar stories in other ancient texts, of course, he don't accept them as historical. Augustus' mother was said to have conceived miraculously thanks to the god Apollo, Julius Caesar was said to have ascended into the heavens after his death and Vespasian was said to have healed a blind man and a cripple. But when we read these stories we don't accept them as historical - we read them as evidence of the kind of things ancient people believed and the kind of stories they told about significant people. The most sensible and consistent approach is to take the same attitude to the very similar stories about Jesus.
Some of the elements in the New Testament do touch on things we can check. So Luke 2:1-2 says that Jesus was born during a census ordered for "the entire Roman world" and says this happened when "Kyrenios ( Κυρηνίου) was governor of Syria". There was never any census of the whole Roman Empire, but there was a census of Judea taken when the Romans brought that territory under their direct administration. And this was administered by a "Kyrenios", since that's the Greek form of the Roman name Quirinius and the governor in question was Publius Sulpicius Quirinius.
But even when the gospels mention seeming historical details like this, things get problematic. The story in Luke claims Jesus' parents had to travel from Nazareth in Galilee to "Bethlehem, the town of David" in Judea for this census because his father Joseph "belonged to the house and line of David" (Luke 2:4). But Roman censuses had no interest in where your ancestor 1000 years earlier came from, they were for taxation purposes. As someone from Galilee, Joseph would not be involved in this census of Judea at all - Galilee was a client kingdom and not administrated or directly taxed by Rome. So the whole story of the census seems to be a narrative attempt to get Jesus' parents to Bethlehem for him to be born there, as a way of countering the Jewish objection that Jesus could not be the Messiah because the Messiah was supposed to be a Judean from Bethlehem, not a Galilean from Nazareth. In other words, this seemingly historical element doesn't seem to be historical at all.
This is undercut still further by the very different account of the birth of Jesus told in Matthew, which knows nothing of any census or of any prior habitation in Nazareth. This version has Jesus' parents as residents in Bethlehem and tells a totally different story about them having to flee Herod the Great and settle in Nazareth later. This achieves the same result of having a Galilean Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, but contradicts the Luke account. And Herod the Great died in 4 BC, which is ten years before Publius Sulpicius Quirnius' census in 6 AD, which makes fundamentalist Christian attempts to untangle this historical mess and reconcile the two accounts consistent failures.
Apologists for the historical reliability of the gospels and other New Testament works like to point to elements or details which can be confirmed by archaeology or documentary sources. On close examination, these usually turn out to be things that anyone who lived in the First Century world would know or things that anyone with some knowledge of Roman Palestine in that general period would be familiar with. Given that these are First Century documents this is not very impressive. It's a bit like saying that many of the elements in Shirley Maclaine's books existed in the late Twentieth Century, like the MGM studios, the Academy Awards ceremony and JFK Airport, therefore her New Age claims should all be accepted.
Ultimately, these various texts need to be handled with a very careful, judicious and fairly sceptical attitude. This is how all ancient texts are examined - by looking at when they were written relative to the events they mention, who wrote them and why, what their purpose and objective is likely to have been, what biases they had, where they got their information and how well it stacks up against what we know from other sources and from archaeology. In some ways some of the things in these Biblical texts check out. Others don't. And some simply can't be checked at all. The historical elements mentioned in them need to be handled with great care and never accepted at face value. And the most sensible approach to the miraculous stories is to treat them the way we treat Suetonius' story of Augustus being conceived by Atia being visited by Apollo in the form of a snake - we treat it as a story and nothing more.
Our ancestors were not so equipped. So what writing DID exist was of an entirely different character and had very different goals. The use of time itself was so vastly different from our sequential and linear use today that any chronology we might try to draw is unreliable. They were predominantly event-oriented, not time-oriented. This means that the order of events was not important, just the existence of them. I could go on, but I hope this serves to illustrate what I am referring to.
The Bible was written over a period of 14-1500 years, by over 40 authors, from 3 different continents.
I don't find much value in arguing that the bible is a credible source for anything with it's track record not to mention many of the myths it contains.
Being in a religious compilation does NOT automatically remove any ancient writing from a historical context, which you seem to be implying. We agree about the silliness of Bible literalism, but that has nothing to do with what parts of the compilation of writings in the Bible contain historical elements. Dismissing them ALL is just as silly.I suspect it is an accurate depiction of our ancestors' barbarity as they were evolving their understanding of God. Fiction today is written AS fiction. You cannot assume the same was true of the narratives in our ancient past. The cognitive landscape among our ancestors was very different from the ones that exist today, even among the more barbarous of us. The vast majority of us are trained in the left-brain disciplines of reading, writing and mathematics which significantly alters our way of seeing and interpreting reality.
Our ancestors were not so equipped. So what writing DID exist was of an entirely different character and had very different goals. The use of time itself was so vastly different from our sequential and linear use today that any chronology we might try to draw is unreliable. They were predominantly event-oriented, not time-oriented. This means that the order of events was not important, just the existence of them. I could go on, but I hope this serves to illustrate what I am referring to.
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Originally Posted by Matadora
I agree with this well thought out and written response that I came across on Quora to the question: What evidence is there that the Bible is a reliable historical document? What-evidence-is-there-that-the-Bible-is-a-reliable-historical-document
The Bible was written over a period of 14-1500 years, by over 40 authors, from 3 different continents.
I don't find much value in arguing that the bible is a credible source for anything with it's track record not to mention many of the myths it contains.
But, but. but . . . you said you agreed with your source, yet this statement is a direct contradiction of the "well thought out and written response" you cited. You simply reiterate your blanket dismissal despite the more moderate and reasonable assertions within your own cited source.
But, but. but . . . you said you agreed with your source, yet this statement is a direct contradiction of the "well thought out and written response" you cited. You simply reiterate your blanket dismissal despite the more moderate and reasonable assertions within your own cited source.
It seems like you are playing semantics with me.
The source is great in pointing out that the bible is not a historical document with much credibility at all.
I agree with that to the point of what is there to argue? Nothing since it's clearly not a credible or historical document.
But, but. but . . . you said you agreed with your source, yet this statement is a direct contradiction of the "well thought out and written response" you cited. You simply reiterate your blanket dismissal despite the more moderate and reasonable assertions within your own cited source.
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Originally Posted by Matadora
It seems like you are playing semantics with me.
The source is great in pointing out that the bible is not a historical document with much credibility at all.
I agree with that to the point of what is there to argue? Nothing since it's clearly not a credible or historical document.
I hope this is clear now.
No, your source does NOT agree with your blanket dismissal. It acknowledges the more moderate view that there are historical elements and non-historical elements. There are some that can be validated but others that are too far in the past with minimal to nonexistent other sources to validate them. There are problems with chronology, but I explained that they did not have a linear or sequential mindset regarding time. They were completely event-oriented with little regard for when or in what order the significant events happened. In short, you are engaging in confirmation bias by selectively reading you own source.
No, your source does NOT agree with your blanket dismissal
Actually I think it does. Did you not read it? Did you just skim over it? Did you miss the last paragraph?
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Ultimately, these various texts need to be handled with a very careful, judicious and fairly skeptical attitude. This is how all ancient texts are examined - by looking at when they were written relative to the events they mention, who wrote them and why, what their purpose and objective is likely to have been, what biases they had, where they got their information and how well it stacks up against what we know from other sources and from archaeology. In some ways some of the things in these Biblical texts check out. Others don't. And some simply can't be checked at all. The historical elements mentioned in them need to be handled with great care *and never accepted at face value*.
And the most sensible approach to the miraculous stories is to treat them the way we treat Suetonius' story of Augustus being conceived by Atia being visited by Apollo in the form of a snake - we treat it as a story and nothing more.
You are clearly grasping at straws here...or you just conveniently overlooked this last paragraph.
Did you also miss these comments?
Some of them are apparently talking about remote periods of history for which we have very little external documentary evidence with which to check or assess what is being claimed.
Of the documentary evidence we do have - mainly inscriptions - nothing supports very much of what these Biblical texts claim, though this is partly because very few of these sources have anything to do with the region in which the Biblical events are supposed to have taken place.
Take the whole story of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt, Moses leading them into the desert, their wanderings in the wilderness for forty years and their conquest of Canaan. There is no mention of any of this in any Egyptian material, no evidence of any wholesale enslavement of Jews or any mention of Jews at all, no evidence that Moses existed,no archaeological evidence of any sojourn in the wilderness and no evidence of some invasion and conquest of Canaan.
This means relying on, say, Exodus for historical information is a bit like trying to use Geoffrey of Monmouth's legends of King Arthur to try to work out what was happening at the end of Roman Britain 600 years earlier - any history that may be in there is obscured by layers of story, folklore, legend and myth.
Even for later periods, the evidence that would allow us to check the later Bible accounts is thin on the ground and rarely confirms much at all.
The books of Samuel and Kings detail the magnificent kingships of Saul, David and his son Solomon, with their vast wealth and the submission of distant rulers. There is barely any external evidence to support any of this.
Apart from this, there's pretty much nothing to support the Biblical accounts and no evidence that any historical David was anything more than a hill chieftain.
The problem is, amongst the historians of the time, no-one much cared about Jewish affairs and even they didn't bother to say much about peasant preachers like Jesus. So, not surprisingly, we have no mention of Jesus outside of the gospels until well after his lifetime - the first coming in the works of Josephus and the second in Tacitus. These do no more than note he was claimed by some to be the Jewish Messiah and that he was executed by the Romans. So when we get into the detail of the gospel accounts of his life and career, it's impossible to confirm anything much at all.
The stories of his miracles and his supposed resurrection are even more impossible to verify.
But even when the gospels mention seeming historical details like this, things get problematic. The story in Luke claims Jesus' parents had to travel from Nazareth in Galilee to "Bethlehem, the town of David" in Judea for this census because his father Joseph "belonged to the house and line of David" (Luke 2:4). But Roman censuses had no interest in where your ancestor 1000 years earlier came from, they were for taxation purposes.
So the whole story of the census seems to be a narrative attempt to get Jesus' parents to Bethlehem for him to be born there, as a way of countering the Jewish objection that Jesus could not be the Messiah because the Messiah was supposed to be a Judean from Bethlehem, not a Galilean from Nazareth. In other words, this seemingly historical element doesn't seem to be historical at all.
And Herod the Great died in 4 BC, which is ten years before Publius Sulpicius Quirnius' census in 6 AD, which makes fundamentalist Christian attempts to untangle this historical mess and reconcile the two accounts consistent failures.
Apologists for the historical reliability of the gospels and other New Testament works like to point to elements or details which can be confirmed by archaeology or documentary sources. On close examination, these usually turn out to be things that anyone who lived in the First Century world would know or things that anyone with some knowledge of Roman Palestine in that general period would be familiar with. Given that these are First Century documents this is not very impressive.
Does not matter if it's called the Book of Rubbish...what it's called means absolutely nothing.
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Originally Posted by Eusebius
And yes, I can prove the Bible by the Bible. It is an historic document.
No it's not a historical document because it's not reliable or credible.
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Originally Posted by Eusebius
It is its own witness to the truth. It needs no external witnesses.
This is a crock and it's not how the world works
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Originally Posted by Eusebius
You will see when Christ returns how true it is. But by then it will be too late. You will be brought into salvation into God joy and peace and righteousness, immortality and incorruption.
No I won't see what you think you or I will see. You have allowed yourself to become indoctrinated by fundamental christianity...which is why you say all the bizarre and nonsensical things you say.
No they don't require attestations from independent sources to be believed. Where is the law that even suggests such a thing?
Unless a person is gullible they do not accept extraordinary claims unless they can be verified to some decent level of confidence. One of the ways you do that is to compare multiple independent sources.
Of course I do. It's called the Bible. And yes, I can prove the Bible by the Bible. It is an historic document. It is its own witness to the truth. It needs no external witnesses.
Special pleading.
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