The title is just a bit fallacious isn’t it?
We repeatedly hear theists claiming that the bible is historically accurate. This is simply not true and I will explain why. First and foremost, the books of the New Testament were written in the first century AD. Allegorical literature was very common at that time. An allegory is a work in which the characters and events are to be understood as representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper, often spiritual, moral, or political meaning. The books that were written at the time were not intended to represent actual facts. The stories simply morphed into a seemingly “historical record” after time. Urban legends are similar in that, stories are made up and after they are told and retold over a period of time, people begin to believe they actually occurred but there is actually no evidence to suggest that they ever really happened.
The first book, “Mark”, that suggested that Jesus was, in fact, a person who had lived on Earth in the Middle East, around the first 30 or so years AD, were actually written at least 40 years after his alleged death. This is a fact that is agreed upon by historians and biblical scholars alike. Any stories that might have been “told” prior to 70 AD, were not written down and herein lies the second problem. Countless studies have shown that “word of mouth” stories change, almost immediately, upon being told. We did a single experiment to substantiate this point in first year Psychology at university. Twenty people were asked to leave the lecture hall. A story was told that lasted for 3 minutes. The first student was asked to come back into the room. The story was told to him/her and they were not allowed to write down any details. The second student came into the room and the first student imparted the story to the second student and so on. By the time the story was conveyed to the 20th student, it, in no way, resembled the original story of which we all had a written copy. And yet, we’re asked to believe that a story written down for the first time, 40 years after it apparently occurred, is supposed to be “believed”. I live in a society where most people are literate but I’m unable to tell any stories that happened to my grandfather (at least not with any amount of accuracy) during his lifetime, especially since he died six months before I was even born.
Paul, evidently, wrote about Jesus 10 to 20 years after his alleged death but Paul did not tell any of the stories that supposedly took place in Jesus’ lifetime. In fact, Paul never placed a physical human being named Jesus on Earth. Paul only spoke of Jesus in a mythical realm. There was no “walking on water”, “healing the sick”, “virgin birth”, “the ministry of Jesus” or any other superstitious tale in Paul’s narrative (letters).
There are also several incidents depicted in the gospels that would not have happened in that geographical area, with Jews, at the time, such as, the Jewish supreme council meeting on Passover eve or Pontius Pilot setting free a known killer of Romans (Barabbas) in favour of letting Jesus be thrown to the mob after he tried to justify letting Jesus off the hook. There were also groups of early Christians and Jews who believed Jesus had been killed a hundred years earlier during the time of King Alexander Jannaeus and others who thought Herod had Jesus killed. Seems like the Jesus character was tossed around through different historical time periods to try to make him fit into the actual historical record. Now why do you suppose that would happen?
In any event, there is NO historical "accuracy" in the Bible, just as there is no historical accuracy for the Harry Potter series of books. In most of Stephen King's books, there are references to real places, real products and real people, but we know for a fact that his books were products of his imagination. The Bible is simply a compilation of somewhat imaginative “stories” that reflected cultural norms at the time; nothing more.
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