By theory, I assume you mean hypothesis here.

@snb - Its just an aside in a footnote, but I'm talking about the difference between a scientific theory, and a scientific-flavored theory supported with what I (and surely others?) refer to as The Unscientific Method.

@snb - Oh, I see. I'd used that word in the body too, in the loose popular sense. I guess for consistency I really have to either use the proper scientific term, or delete the entire footnote based on scientific terms. I'll do the former. Thank you.

Suffice it to say that @T.E.D. does not speak for all Christians regarding the historical reliability of the Bible. The viewpoint presented here is of the more... liberal variety.

@BradleyDotNET - While I do have my faith, I'm not actually endeavoring to express any "viewpoint" here, other than the current scholarly consensus among historical experts on these subjects. I suppose you could point to the footnote, but I'd call that more of a plea in favor of the Scientific Method, rather than any particular religion.

@T.E.D. I'll take your word for it, but in your fourth paragraph your first sentence is reasonable, but the next three seem to indicate its not important if the Bible is historically accurate or not. Below the line would seem to continue the theme. Regarding the footnote, I would claim that rather than starting with a theory we "want" to be true, we start with a claim we "know" (believe) is true and interpret the evidence through that lens (or worldview). Not important to the "scholarly" aspects of your answer, which I have no issue with.

AnswersInGenesis is a pseudoscience site. Nobody, whether or not they think the Bible is divinely-inspired, should pay any attention to those cranks.

@BradleyDotNET - Well, it had better not be super important for the Bible to be "historically accurate" in a modern sense, because it isn't. Again, people of faith of course may chose to believe differently if they really really want to, but as History (the topic of this site) its essentially a settled matter.

@Davislor Science that has a different worldview can still be science, it just has a few different assumptions than you do.

@T.E.D. It seems to me a slippery slope when you start saying specific verses/sections of the Bible are not true. For example, if Abraham didn't exist as you claim, then Matthew's claim about Jesus' lineage must be similarly false. While his lineage wasn't central to his ministry it being false certainly casts doubt on the rest of Matthew. And if you remove the reliability of the Gospel then we as Christians have a serious problem.

Secular history aside (our knowledge is of course incomplete) you have to decide who to trust, God or Man.

@BradleyDotNET Well, I hate to break it to you, but the general consensus is that lineage stuff was added in after the fact by Jesus early Jewish supporters to support his "Messiah" claim. To Jews at the time, a Messiah was supposed to be of the lineage of David, and they already had issues with the many other ways he was un-Messiah like.

@BradleyDotNET ...and no, this is taught this way in most Mainline seminaries. That accounts for millions of Christians in the USA alone. There's no serious problem here. Its just studying what we have.

I'm very aware that stuff like this is taught in "mainstream" churches. There's lots of stuff I disagree with there though :).

As far as additions go, it would have had to be very early. We have copies of the gospels dating to just after Jesus' death.

@BradleyDotNET I'd suggest you read some of the stuff of Bart Erhaman, because that's flat out wrong. The earliest actual physical copies we have for the gospels I believe are more than 100 years later, and a lot of them differ in wording from each other.

Moreover you still have the same slope; if that was added by someone not divinely inspired now you have the claim that not all Scripture is divinely inspired

and so you now have to pick and choose which pieces you think are "actually" real

Lee Strobel would disagree with you :)

@BradleyDotNET Well, you could do that. But a more sensible thing to do is what Historians do with all their historical sources; study them and use their brains to figure out what's most reliable and what is least.

...more to the point, if you're not up for doing historical analysis, and don't believe in its methods, you frankly don't belong on this site. That's how we do things here.

As I pointed out to Davislor; it depends on what set of facts you assume to be true. Science and History can both be done from a secular worldview, an evangelical worldview, or even a "mainstream Christian" worldview. Sometimes you get different answers.

@BradleyDotNET And that didn't fly, because its wrong. That may be how literalists do things, but that's not at all how the Historical Method works.

Don't get me wrong; I don't think an SE site is the place for such debates (especially not History.SE which almost certainly starts from a secular worldview). My original comment was just meant to imply that some (a significant fraction at minimum) Christians do accept the historicity of the bible.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree

I'm happy to have the discussion, but I think we're a bit far apart atm

I honestly, sad to say, have this same argument with a lot of folks on this site, who have ASSUMED that everything in The Bible is BS, and refuse to look at the basic historical analysis that has been done on it for the last 200 years.

To which you seem to claim it is only partially BS... which can cause issues with the more important points

@BradleyDotNET Again, I think this is only because you choose to be. I'm not trying to push my faith on anyone (at least not right now). This is a History site, and if you come here asking a question, you must be prepared to get an answer based on the historical analysis that has been done on that topic.

that's fair; I wouldn't expect any different

As it happens, rather a lot of historical analysis has been done on The Bible, and I reported that.

like I said; the only reason I said anything is I didn't want people to get the idea that all Christians agree that the Bible is only accurate in part. Perhaps I erred in thinking that point worth making.

I have no doubt that you accurately represented the worldwide majority of historians

@BradleyDotNET Ah, see I don't think there's a soul here who doubts that point.

lol, I'll blame you if someone comes up to me someday and makes that claim then :)

The thing I have to fight here a lot is the perception that all Christians are unthinking literalists, incapable of looking at their scriptures objectively like other sources.

perhaps the perception to fight is that a literalist means an unthinking person

We also get a lot of literalist Hindus posting "historical" questions about their scripture's mythic figures, and I have to treat those questions the exact same way.

sure

@BradleyDotNET Perhaps it does. :-)

I'm a literalist and I think quite a lot :)

Here in Tulsa, I'm kind of awash in literalists. I can't go eat a pizza without listening to theology students from Victory or ORU argue over their great new ideas for how to reconcile some of the myriad obvious inconsistencies in the Bible to continue to believe it all 100% literally true.

Seems like a horrible waste of a lot of really good brainpower to me, but it makes them happy, and for all I know I could be wrong too.

I'll agree on the wasted brainpower; at some point for me I just say that there are more important things to figure out

That's where I think the perception comes from. Literalists are having to allocate a lot of brainpower to uphold one precious assumption that others don't really care about (and most human beings don't even believe is true). Its kind of like how people's scores on IQ tests go up when they get glasses, because less of their brain is being devoted to de-blurring images.

But for all I know the Rapture could really come, and they could be the only thing that saves the human species. That's part of The Method too. Nothing is certain, so I could be wrong.

sure; and a bunch of Christians arguing with other Christians (or even non-Christians) about the name of some town doesn't really advance the Gospel :)

What the bleep. Answer by moderator that is false on its face due to being internally inconsistent, and it's voted to +43.

I haven't voted... so don't blame me :)

I cannot give it the downvote it deserves. :(

As the author, I'm kind of appalled by the score as well. Feel free to vote me down, if you have the rep for that.

I think its perhaps worthy of a +25 tops. I'll freely admit I didn't put the care into making it that something pushing 50 deserves.

Its kind of starting to bother me.

I sought forth into all the knowledge I have amassed over the years, and found no outside evidence for Abraham, but got really close. There is scientific evidence for Philenas the son of Aaron. (It appears that Aaron had only one living son, which limits the evidence to his son rather than him.)

@Joshua ...um...wasn't he the grandson of Aaron?

I'll have to check. Some of the older translations directly translated ben as son when it should have been grandson. Either way, he's the actual bottleneck of the male line.

Yup; grandson.

@BradleyDotNET But there are already two different lineages for Jesus in Matthew 1 and Luke 3. There have been many different proposals for how they could be in some sense true, but there's no way around the fact that both cannot be literally true.

@BradleyDotNET I'm sure it can be, but AIG isn't.

Regarding the lineage problem, my last recollection is that it can be accounted for (and both be 100% true) because you can list out a genealogy differently (follow mothers instead of fathers, and I think Jewish culture has their own way as well).

I'm not saying there aren't things that we don't understand how to reconcile, either with each other or with observed phenomenon/artifacts

but I am, personally, confident that in the end it will all be consistent.

Its where one claims that its flat out wrong that I think one starts to weaken the foundation for the rest of that person's statements/beliefs

and to my above point; its very debatable how many of them are worth reconciling at all (in terms of effort required vs. benefit)

I posted another answer directly calling out the lack of evidence. Unfortunately, citations for no evidence tend to not exist so there's nothing to cite I would trust.

I like your answer Joshua; the only thing I might add is that even if you accept Abraham as a real person; why would we think he interacted with Hammurabi, and even if that happened; that it would have been recorded in such a way that we could find today

Apparently bob agrees with my original comment as well :)

@Davislor That's the thing. You'll see from some of the later comments that if you think humans incapable of explaining away what might appear to be a flat out contradiction, you don't know humans very well.

I remember a passage from Feinman's first autobiography. Where he related that when he (an atheist of Jewish heritage) tried arguing the existence of God with Rabbinical seminary students at his college, they wiped the floor with him. Studying the best way to counter explain away obvious problems in their theology is nearly all they do, so they were great at it.

At some point you'd hope most folks would deploy Occam's Razor, and adjust their view of the universe to a much simpler state that didn't require so much work to justify (which is supposedly a large part of how we advance things like the sciences), but one of the things I love about humans is how ornery we are. :-)

I read that passage. I was disappointed with the Rabbi.

@BradleyDotNET The thing is, you have to start from that refusal to accept that any part of that could be wrong, then work backwards. Here, some of the problems that has to explain away are how Matthew also names several of the mothers and the number of generations between some of the same individuals are different in different Biblical geneologies. But that's just details.

There were better answers they could have given.

@BradleyDotNET In every other historical inquiry, we accept that a source can be invaluable without being absolutely infallible in the most literal sense. We don't insist that it's dangerous to question the authority of anything Herodotus wrote. People who think the Gospels were written down by human beings who sometimes remembered things differently, or that the first three chapters of Genesis are metaphors that the ancient Israelites were ready to understand, don't become bad people.

@T.E.D. But I'm getting too far afield (and probably weakening my credibility with someone inclined to listen to Answers In Genesis). The thing with them is, even to a Biblical literalist, they're a bunch of crackpots who often misrepresent what real scientists have said, spread old wives' tales and urban legends, and eventually end up endorsing a conspiracy theory that every mainstream scientist must be an evil liar.

And I'll reiterate my previous claim; that picking apart the Bible when it claims to be from God can be, and often is, a quick path to an unsustainable platform.

heck; Jesus quoted much of the law, some of which is described during the exodus (the ten commandments at least)... which if it didn't happen is kind of an issue for someone who (a) is supposed to be perfect and (b) know everything.