I was the one who stated that the bible was the most historically accurate document we possess. Notice that I said document. Of course it is full of unverifiable occurences. I mean to say that no one can verify that the Red Sea actually parted, nor can they do any more than claim that it in fact didn't. Its simply unverfiable. That doesn't make it true or false.
The Bible has been demonstrated in several ways to be a document with an enormous amount of historical truth. To look at the Bible in historic terms you must look at it from a number of angles; textual criticism, internal congruity, predictive prophecy, non-biblical texts, archeology, etc.
The Texts themselves make a powerful argument for accuracy. The Dead Sea Scrolls found only 50 years ago contained manuscripts of the Old Testament that were written prior to the coming of Christ (if you believe in that). These manuscripts were almost identical copies of what we have in todays OT. For over two thousand years the text of the OT has remained almost exactly the same. The few differences that do exist are typographically errors such as misplaced letters and punctuation. If you are willing to throw this evidence out on the basis of a misplaced comma then you must also throw out every document composed prior to 1450 and the invention of the printing press. The fact is that the OT has survived over two thousand years with over 99% consistency from copy to copy. There are over 5300 copies of the New Testament dating back to 200 A.D. and earlier....only 168 years after Christ death. To put this in Perspective there are less than 700 copies of Homer's Illiad which is the second largest body of ancient manuscripts and only 8 surviving copies of the works of Herodotus. The copies of the Illiad that exist have only 95% accuracy.....and substantially fewer coppies exist...So there is little...practically no variation in the written word of the Bible in the last 2400 years.
The Bible has tremendous internal congruity and the unique phenomenon of predictive prophecy, that is that the Bible predicts events that are later corraborated. There are people who will list for you the innacuracies of the bible text and point out the places where the bible has contradictions, but when you get down to it these arguments are pedantic at best. For example, Scott Bidstrup claims that the story of Jesus should be thrown out because of this glaring example of inconsistency,”,’He is not here, he is raised, just as he said." (Matt. 28:6) or "He is not here, he has been raised." (Mark 15:6, Luke 24:6)’,” I’ll deal with that much difference in a 2000 year old text where it has zero impact on the texts meaning. Other differences he sites are errors in transcribing numbers such as….”While describing the same incident, 2 Samuel 8:4 states that King David captured 1700 horsemen, and 1 Chron. 18:4 claims he captured 7,000.” I’ll accept that criticism and move on quite happily when dealing with an even that occurred over 2500 years ago.
There are instances of other surviving documents that speak to biblical events such as the works of Josephus, Tacitus, and even the Talmud. Yes, I am aware that there is criticism of some of those texts but the burden of those errors should fall upon those authors, and should not be ascribed to the Bible.
Then there are the accounts of Jesus ministry on earth. These were written within the lifetimes of the apostles themselves. And while you can say that they aren’t primary source material they are about as close as your going to get for any ancient document.
There is a surprisingly accurate discussion of all this here
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/;_ylt ... 6022508775
Another interesting series of articles I stumbled on a while back. I haven't read them all!
http://www.aish.com/literacy/jewishhist ... istory.asp
Then there is archeology which has generally supported the claims of the Bible down to finding the Walls of Jericho, Lot’s Cave, the city’s of Sodom and Gomorrah. These are items thought to be mythological in natures for over a thousand years that were recently discovered.
To say that the bible is only accurate when corroborated by other evidence shows a pretty shallow understanding of the historical process. And if you want to take an incredibly strict secular/materialist point of view on this topic then you also have to throw out all other history as well. Now, I don’t know how you define fact and fiction, but it is quite clear that the bible is no more fiction than are the crusades, the fall of Rome, etc.
There are obviously disagreements on the historicity of the Bible with the minimalist claiming that there is no absolutely indisputable proof of the bibles history, and with maximalist claiming that its a reliable historical document. The problem with using this to discredit the bible is that this spectrum of debate exists for most historical documents...so again you must throw out not only the bible but most other works of ancient history as well.
Chad
