Today I spent my second-period spare doing research and gathering ideas for my first World Literature paper for IB. I don’t really find this worth reporting, but I did have a neat conversation with Shivon about doing historic versus scientific research. More directly, we were talking about the Bible’s historical and scientific accuracy. If you’ve gotten to know me over the years (or maybe even just met me), you will know that I am someone very much concerned with being right. I don’t mind being wrong, but just show me how. I also like being right, especially proving and explaining how exactly it is just as I say. Don’t get me wrong, things are not true because I say they are, but if I say something is true, I’ve got good reason(s) to think and know so.
Too many times we say “You can’t prove that.” about something historical, but the thing is, the scientific method for proving things is not the same method used to “prove” history. Since we cannot recreate, replay history, the scientific method (of repeated experimentation and empirical observations) cannot be used to approach things. I cannot scientifically prove to you that the Second World War happened, nor can I perform an experiment where I recreate the life of a famous person for you. I can, however, look at letters, accounts, essays, etc… from the time period about the subject and show that it would be fool’s play to pretend that such things have never transpired.
This is what frustrates me about most people’s very foolish view of historical events. Here are some very straightforward but critical questions worth addressing:
- “How can you expect me to believe that Christ lived if I have never met Him?”
- “How do you know the things in the Bible really happened?”
First off, ask any intelligent and professional historian and they will admit (whether they are Christian or not) that one Jesus of Nazareth lived about two millennia ago. With the overwhelming amounts of historical proof of His existence (i.e. the Four Gospels, numerous a-Biblical–i.e. outside of the Bible–sources/references, etc…) you’d be hard pressed to find a historian who knew anything about anything who would flatly deny this person having ever existed. You may or may not come to believe in Christ as your Lord and Savior, but it’d be hard to believe and argue reasonably that Jesus never existed at all.
Secondly, I reason that we can take the claims in the Bible as having literally happened because there are also far too many correctly placed references to other historical events (like the rule of Pontius Pilate, the Census, etc…) and divinely inspired claims to wave off as purely accidental or coincidental. Have you ever read fairy tales that referenced real dates, real places, and real people? Have you ever read fairy tales written about actual people during their lifetimes? Have you ever heard of bold faced lies told and spread in the presence of primary witnesses who said, “Yeah, sure whatever you say.”? It doesn’t make sense to think that people could have written whatever they liked into the Bible because there were tons of people all around that would have protested profusely against any such lies. There were people who killed Christians, but very very few who would openly deny the truthfulness of the Gospel.
Many times we (i.e. Christians and non-Christians alike) choose to dismiss the stories told in the Bible as merely good moral fairy tales. This is not surprising for most non-Christians, but for Christians to hold such an openly cowardly faith in what we ourselves call “God’s Word” is embarrassing. If we are not convicted (with good reasons, mind you) of the truthfulness of the Bible, how can we 1) claim it to be God’s Word and 2) expect non-Christians, that is to say the world “out there”, to take us seriously? Anyone who holds the Bible as only partly true or as purely moralistic as opposed to historically and scientifically and absolutely true is doing injustice to the words inspired by God, penned by men, and sealed in the blood of both.