Is the Bible history?¶

The historical narrative¶

As you will see in the Reading Guide, the ‘standard’ modern Protestant Bible portrays a period of fairly continuous narrative from the beginning of the world all the way to its winding up in the Revelation of John of Patmos.

Now, we know the end of the world didn't happen. And the scientific outlook, not to mention the implausibility of the Creation narrative, makes us sceptical of these two ends of the biblical history.

How true to life are the careers of Moses, Solomon, Elijah, Jonah and Jesus? This is the question of historicity.

We are no longer considering the Bible story timeline. That is fairly definite. Most of the prophetic books are placed somewhere alongside the general historical narrative, as you will see from the Reading Guide (int LINK Kings and Prophets).

However, in the real world these books were not necessarily written when they claim to have been. Or even by the people they claim to be written by. This is the problem of pseudepigraphy.

Outside the canon, too, each book is set in or claims to be from some particular period within the known canonical history.

And then the NT books are from (or at least, set in) a very specific time and place, namely Roman-occupied Judaea around the middle of first century CE.

What is history?¶

For a long time it was assumed that everything recorded in the Bible was accurate. Biblical history and real world history were thought to be one and the same. Few people believe this in totality any more, but the tendency clings on.

Link to the World of the Bible

Much of the Bible reads as if it is history, and its writers may have intended it to be taken as history. But the in-universe history is not the same as actual world history.

In this course real world history will mean the best reconstruction we can make of what actually happened in the past, using all available sources including archaeology. The texts of the Bible are undoubtedly useful as sources, but with many reservations.

On the other hand, Biblical history means the timeline presented within the Bible as a series of stories. As we move forward in time the dating of biblical events

Biblical literature often contains connections with the actual historical world. Old and New Testament writers refer to contemporary kings or known events in history. But since the authors were usually writing many years or even many centuries after the events they depict, they often get things terribly wrong. This does not rule out the possibility that sometimes they might get things right.

Pre-exilic Israel¶

Dates approximate, descriptions abbreviated.

-800 some sort of quasi-independent state in Canaan, due to weak external empires -700 Assyrians conquer samaria -600 Babylonians have taken over from Assyrians, threaten Jerusalem -586 or so, Babylonians conquer jerusalem