You haven't read Herodotus, obviously :)
Submitted by Heather on July 10 1999 at 14:58:09
In reply to Not true! Submitted by Triple Q on July 10 1999 at 11:58:50
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Or any classical historian, I'd guess. Everything that you get in the Bible – myths, legends, outright fiction – appears in every other classical work of history. Of course, you're right that this immediately puts all stories in the Bible under suspicion; I never denied that. But you have to understand that, from the ancient point of view, such writing wasn't lying. Thucydides, faced with reconstructing a speech that neither he nor anyone else had taken notes on (because everybody was too buy preparing for war) felt no qualms about constructing his own version of the speech which was far more rhetorical than the original speech must have been but which caught the gist of what was said. Most of the Old Testament stories are (it is clear from what we know) as historically accurate as the ancient lives of Alexander the Great; the Gospels are considerably more accurate than the average history books in ancient times. As far as I know, no other incidents in the ancient world have four accounts written about them. Even if we take into account the overlap of the Synoptic Gospels, the New Testament is still a cut above the average for ancient historical writing, while the Old Testament is no worse than comparable documents. No mainstream biblical scholar believes that every single story in the Bible is literally true; no mainstream biblical scholar ever believed that. (You should read the biblical scholarship of the early Christians; they loved to find symbolism hidden in every verse.) These days, the problem isn't finding biblical scholars who believe that the Garden of Eden actually existed; the problem is finding biblical scholars who won't immediately write off the possibility of supernatural events occuring. Heather |