Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? 1
The Bible, like other areas of Christian theology, has actually failed to stand up to the trust that Christians, rightly or wrongly, had put in it.John Bowden, SCM
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 30 May 2002
Abstract
Life or Death?
Is the bible fact or fiction? Are the accounts of the bible true? Our answer is a matter of life and death, according to somebody called Paul Billington. The “truth of the bible is of vital importance to all of us”, (he means Christians, not anyone with discernment) because, if the bible is not true, then its promise of life must be false, for “belief and obedience will bring us life, whereas unbelief and sin will result in death” (Dt 30:19; Mk 16:15-16; Rom 6:23; Jn 5:28-29). Moreover, says the bible, the nation that turns its back upon the word of God and His teaching cannot expect His protection or blessing (Gen 12:3; Ps 9:17-20; Jer 18:7-10).
We are back to the heathen hordes who will get no blessing from God, while the Christian nations will. This sort of racist monoculturalism ought to have been rejected even by Christians, but it seems it has not.
Billington wants us to consider the integrity of those who wrote the scriptures, as well as of those who later endorsed them. Of course we should consider their integrity, but there are two possibilities at least—they had it or they did not—and Christians will consider only one. He adds that this includes the recorded statement of the Lord Jesus Christ that:
Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?John 5:46-47
So the question arises as to whether even the words of Christ are to be believed. It is true, but who knows that these are the words of Christ. It depends on the integrity of the biblical authors, and their human fallibility. What would it matter if they were indeed false words? It is only because Christians believe that the bible is true and Jesus was God that they think the words the New Testament records are true and Jesus could never lie. If he were a man then he could, and if Christ were himself a Christian we can be sure he would! If he were a plain man, he could have been mistaken. Christians cannot consider that either, because they are not considering evidence but only testing their own dogmatism.
“Did Moses really exist?” is a perfectly sensible question, but Billington, locked into Christian irrationality, says it “echoes the scepticism and the agnosticism that is both fashionable and respectable with so many leading scholars and academics today”. He is saying that no one should ask questions like that! Christians do not like to be questioned about their beliefs, ultimately because they know they are irrational and ill-founded. If no one is allowed to question them, then they have no need to defend the indefensible. This was the state of Europe for over a thousand years before the Enlightenment. Why should the emergence from Christendom be called the Enlightenment? Christianity always claims to be light. Yet, history shows that Christian control brought down a profound darkness and it only lifted with the Enlightenment. It proves that even Christian metaphors are lies.
Billington has no idea of how inquiry works, because Christians have never been encouraged to inquire. Christians were expected never to ask anything about what they believed. Never to seek whether it was true, but simply stick to “belief and obedience”. It suited the rulers of society whether it suited God or not. People had to believe it, and that was it. It is not true now, because people have passed beyond this backwards and superstitious phase we had in our history, but backwoodsmen like Billington want to take us back there. He says questioning “reflects the unbelief which we see in modern society”.
Truth or Lies?
Billington says evidence for the truth of the bible is overwhelming, and offers us over 40 major archaeological discoveries (“and this is by no means exhaustive”) which endorse scripture. Well, we shall look in a moment at the evidence Billington offers, but first let us consider precisely what he is trying to claim. He speaks of the truth of the bible, but what does he mean by this? Is he saying he is refuting some such claim as, “The bible is not true”? What does Billington understand by this, if it is what he is refuting?
Is the film Star Wars true? Is the film Four Weddings and a Funeral true? Is the film Gladiator true? Is the film The Madness of King George true? Is the film The Longest Day true? Of course, none of them are true, although they contain various degrees of truth in them. They vary from purely fantastic science fiction, through everyday fiction set in the modern day to fictional representations of events, that really happened in history, in a more or less realistic setting. Yet all of them are fictional! They are not true, and the realism of the setting does not make them true. It might be that the realism of the setting tells us something about history, but it is only something we can accept because we have independent historical proof.
Thus, in Gladiator, we might note that there was a Roman emperor called Marcus Aurelius, and he had a general called Maximus who finished up as a gladiatior. What, in this, is true? We simply cannot tell from the film alone. In fact, there was an Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but he had no general Maximus who became a gladiator. The film contains historic truths but from the film alone, no one knows what they are.
Now Billington, and Christians generally, are so besotted by the book that they have already been told—in their indoctrination into Christianity—is a holy and therefore infallible book, that they believe everything in it. It is not a matter of discernment on their part. It is true! That is the end of it!
Biblical skeptics say no more than that the bible is essentially a devotional literary work, mainly fiction set in a variety of more or less realist settings in the first millennium BC up until the first century AD. The fact that the settings are fairly realistic does not mean that the storyline is true. What is true can only be determined by external evidence, but when it is found in some cases, it does not verify the rest.
Billington rightly says that archaeology puts us in direct contact with the past—and in a different way from written records.
When a stone monument or clay tablet is unearthed bearing the name of a person in scripture, it provides physical evidence of bible truth.
But to say “because Pontius Pilate in the gospels is a real historic figure, the gospels must be true, and so Jesus really rose from the dead” is obviously absurd, but that is what Christian tricksters like Billington try to make out.
Historical Settings
So let us be clear, because much of Billington’s “evidence” is simply that the settings of the biblical stories actually fit the first millennium BC, that such “evidence” does not prove the bible stories to be true. At best all it shows is that the authors made some effort to be sure that the books they were writing for their own political purposes were as historically accurate as they could make them. Since they were originally written by the Persians who had access to the royal and diplomatic archives of Assyria and Babylon, it is true that there is genuine history in the bible, but only verification from outside proves it. All Billington is doing is finding the parts of the biblical setting for which there is external evidence. Rarely, if ever, is it particular evidence. It is general evidence that any intelligent person—of the type likely to be writing such a book—would know at the time, or could find out.
An example of recent battles over historicity has been one concerning the Ebla tablets discovered in 1976. An Italian archaeologist, professor Giovanni Pettinato, epigrapher of the Italian excavation team, was discredited for saying that the Ebla tablets referred to Sodom and Gomorrah and other biblical cities. His successor, Alfonso Archi disagreed. Pettinato identified as Sodom a city mentioned in the Eblaite tablets as Sidamu, but Archi said another tablet placed Sidamu in northern Syria, nowhere near the Dead Sea. Using the vilest calumny, Billington blames the change on to pressure from the Syrian Government, even though he deigns to accept that “professionals” were involved, and he can hardly deny that even the Syrian government could not alter baked clay tablets 4000 years old. Billington even says without a blush:
Anti-Zionist elements did not want to see any evidence brought to light which might support the book of Genesis—and therefore Israel’s early claim to the land of Canaan.
One could claim with equal ease that Billington is doing the opposite. It shows the scandalous depths that supposed Christians will sink to to defend their so-called faith. It is not isolated. Scholars with the temerity to question the validity of scriptural ideas have been faced with this unpleasant and intimidating baloney. The Inquisition is not yet repealed. Let us be clear again. If scholarship finds that the Passion of Jesus was a mystery play, or that Moses was invented by the Maccabees, then scholars must say so. Christian “truth” says otherwise, but scholars should never mix up truth with Christian “truth”. Christian truth is too often pious lying, and even Christian scholars should not indulge in it. If they believe in God, why do they think He wants them to lie for Him? If He has a purpose in exposing Christianity as a scam, do they want to defy their own God?
Another fierce controversy has raged over the Dead Sea Scrolls, with awkward questions being asked as to why the scrolls were not being published—and why even fully qualified experts were not being permitted to see the unpublished material. Evidence has been presented to show how that the Vatican was at work suppressing scroll material. Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review defended the Vatican (Nov/Dec issue 1991). If Rome was involved in suppressing evidence, then it has been thoroughly suppressed because, although what remains strongly suggests Jesus was an Essene with an eschatological aim—well outlined on these pages—not enough alters the essence of Christianity, for believers, to damage it. If any did, then it has gone for good!
Billington thinks whether Joshua conquered Palestine (as the bible says), or whether Israelites lived there all the time because they were Canaanites as claimed by bible skeptics is a controversial question. The question has been settled apart from dyed-in-the-wool rednecks who will not accept plain evidence because of their faith or politics. Billington deceptively writes:
When experts themselves cannot agree, what are laymen to make of it all?
Billington wants to use the close examination of experts as part of his argument for biblical truth, but typically, it has to uphold the bible, otherwise he does not want to hear it, or calls the experts “skeptics.” Thus he says:
When, as often happens, that evidence is examined, scrutinized and questioned—and yet survives the scholarly critics and sceptics—then we know that it is reliable indeed; far more so than if it had not been subjected to that process. It is not merely a question of certain discoveries supporting the bible’s record, but that those discoveries have been subjected to the most rigorous examination possible by men who are often hostile to the concept of bible truth.
And, on the other hand, will resist anything contrary to the bible, in many cases, whatever the evidence.
House of David?
In 1993, in Dan, the first inscription apparently bearing the phrases “House of David” and “King of Israel” was found. Billington tells us a critic, Philip R Davies, challenged the claim, saying the inscription had been wrongly translated. “Davies was later roundly defeated by two other scholars.” The skeptic wants to know what position these “scholars” held vis-a-vis biblical truth. Were they objective or did they have the biblical truth axe to grind? The fact of the matter does not need scholars, but can easily be explained for people to make up their own minds.
The inscriptions says “bytdwd”. The debate is over what it means. It seems to say, as Billington tells us, “House of David”, but it is far from certain. Let us say it does mean that, though. What does “House of David” mean? The bible truth crackpots immediately say it refers to the Jewish founder David, and that house means dynasty. It is nothing less than the line of people that led to Jesus, Christians like to think. But “house” is more likely to mean a… er, house! Or rather, since people lived in tents or simple houses, a house really meant something grander, a dwelling for a god—a temple. Billington actually admits this in his list of examples, hoping that no one will notice. So, it could imply that David, who has never been mentioned as a king of Judah outside the bible in any documents, might have been a god with a temple.
He might even have been a god with followers, if house means followers as it often does. The Assyrians called Israel the House of Khumri, so everyone in the country were of Khumri’s house. Khumri, apparently the biblical Omri, certainly had a dynasty which ruled Israel for a short while, but House of Khumri in Assyrian records did not mean the dynasty but the country. Skeptics are interested in history, not dogma. If David is shown to be a great tenth century prince, they are glad that the evidence is clear. When it is not, only fools and charlatans pretend it is, for their own reasons.
Billington turns again to context, seeking to amaze ignorant Christians by citing the kings of Israel and Judah whose names have been found in Assyrian and Babylonian records. David and Solomon, supposedly the greatest kings of Israel and Judah, are not among them, but he is pleased to announce that by 1870, Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Azariah, Menahem, Pekah, Hoshea, Hezekiah and Manasseh, and several Assyrian kings, several Syrian kings, an Egyptian king, a Babylonian king and several Persian kings found in the bible had been identified in external records. Billington desperately seeks to prove that the bible is not science fiction like Star Wars, but skeptics already accept that it is not!
What he succeeds in doing is showing that the bible was not written until the last of these kings lived, otherwise he could not have been in it. The last one is probably Darius II of Persia, called Darius only and wrongly assumed by biblicists to be the Great Darius, Darius I. However, a later king is alluded to so clearly that he can be identified without a name. Daniel alludes so plainly to events of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes of Seleucia that the book can be dated within a year or two of 164 BC. Christians will tell us it was prophecy, but after 164 BC, Daniel suddenly lost his prophetic skills, because nothing after then can be identified.
Moses and Exodus
