Jeffery L. Sheler - Is the Bible True?: How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures

W HAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THE B IBLE IN THESE MODERN TIMES? I S IT, AS so many millions throughout the centuries have believed, the divinely inspired Word of God, accurate and trustworthy in every detail? Or is it, as others contend, merely a collection of ancient fables, fantasies, and folklore that has little credibility or relevance in a scientific age? Or could it be, as some have suggested recently, a divinely encrypted oracle whose significance lies not in its timeless teachings and spiritual insights but in a hidden grid of dramatic predictions that are decipherable only by computer?

Never before has the Bible been subjected to as much scholarly and scientific scrutiny or to as many sensational and conflicting claims as it is today. Archaeologists are making dramatic discoveries that cast surprising new light on the Bibles accounts of history. Anthropologists and sociologists examining the cultural contexts of biblical times are challenging some long-held notions about societal influences on the life of Jesus and the early church. Bible scholars and historians poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts are drawing some startling conclusions about the integrity and authenticity of some biblical texts and the origins of Christianity and modern Judaism. Some New Testament scholars have judged the gospels so devoid of reliable information that they have begun looking to other sources in their quest for the historical Jesus.

For many people, this explosion of modern research and speculation has forever changed how the Bible is regarded and how it is to be read and understood. For some it has made a purely literal approach to the Scriptures untenable, while for others it has made the Bible more credible and concrete in its connectedness to verifiable history. Those who had hoped that modern science and archaeology would discover some incontestable proof of the Bibles veracity have been disappointed. Yet so have those who once arrogantly anticipated the Bibles collapse under the weight of post-Enlightenment rationalism. All too often, the result of all this scrutiny has seemed conflicting and ambiguous, the scholarly conclusions complex and disappointing in their lack of consensus. What sense can average readers, whether believers or nonbelievers, hope to make of it all?

This book attempts to fill the gap. As a journalist who has covered the worlds religious scene for more than a decade, I have endeavored here to put into meaningful perspective a wide array of recent developments in the fields of archaeology, biblical studies, and other disciplines and to evaluate the evidence they present both for and against the historical accuracy and integrity of the Bible.

This is not a book about theology or the Bibles theological claims. Its interest is not so much in ascertaining, for example, whether Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life as it is in learning whether he might have said he is. It is a book mainly about history and about the evidence and arguments that scholars have raised in recent years that pertain to the Bible as history. As we sort through all of the discoveries and debates in the pages that follow, the guiding questions that will be asked are these: In the light of the evidence, what can be known about the Bible? What can be proved? What is reasonable for modern readers to believe about the Bibles authority, its authenticity, and its origins? In that respect, is the Bible true?

Nearly a decade of research has gone into this book. Much of what you will read is the direct result of my reporting in the United States and abroad for the weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, for whom over the years I have written on many of the subjects covered here. The information presented in these pages is based on extensive interviews with leading Bible experts, archaeologists, and other authorities, as well as surveys of some of the latest and most authoritative written works.

As will quickly become apparent, this is not a technical, scholarly workalthough I hope it will demonstrate sufficient precision as to fairly represent the views of the scholars it cites. I am neither a Bible scholar nor a theologian, but a journalist. The questions that this study brings to the Bible and its historical claims are fundamentally journalistic ones: What really happened and why? What was really said? How reliable are the sources? These, roughly summarized, are the very questions that have been at the heart of most of the critical biblical scholarship of the past two centuries.

If this book were merely a survey of recent scholarship it might prove useful, particularly to those who do not have the time or inclination to wade through the proliferating stacks of biblical and archaeological research literature, or to those who have found the occasional newspaper or magazine stories on biblical topics tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying. Certainly survey and summary are important features of this book. But if those features were all it had to offer, it should be judged a failure. The questions being raised, the evidence marshaled, and the issues argued in modern biblical research today are far too important to be given the customary on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand journalistic treatment.

Consequently, wherever possible I have attempted to follow the arguments and the evidence to their most reasonable conclusions. In most cases, those conclusions reflect the studied judgments of renowned and respected scholars, and occasionally they represent what at least approaches a scholarly consensus. But on many of the most pressing issues there is nothing close to a consensus of expert opinion. The evidence in hand often is simply too equivocal: reasonable scholars, examining the same available data, arrive at different conclusions.

In other instances where consensus is reputed to exist, the assumptions and premises that underlie the conventional wisdom are subject to reasonable challenge. In biblical scholarship, as in many fields of academic inquiry, the majority is not always right. Sometimes it is the contrarianthe voice calling in the wildernesswho ultimately is found to have a firmer grasp on reality. For our purposes here, then, it will not do to simply invoke the majority of scholars as the decisive factor on matters of dispute (as if there were scientific polling data that would enable one to say such a thing in the first place!).

What follows in these pages is not a fundamentalist manifesto. Anyone hoping to find a ringing defense of biblical literalism should look elsewhere. Nor should this be viewed as the authors personal statement of faithor lack thereof. I am, like many people, a lifelong reader of the Bible. And many of my own personal impressions of the Bible I have gained from participating in faith communities of the Protestant tradition. There is much in the Bible that I, as a Christian, find worthy of belief even though I cannot make a convincing case for it based on hard historical data. You would not care to read, nor would I care to offer, what I merely believe to be true about the Bible. In any event, that is not what this book is about.

As will become apparent in the discussions that follow, some of the Bibles claims are mainly theological in nature and as such are simply beyond the reach of historical inquiry. Those necessarily will be left alone. Other claimsand there are manythat do lend themselves to historical inquiry but for which scholars currently find no corroboration, or for which there is conflicting evidence, will be fairly and honestly treated even when doing so challenges traditional views. And when the Bibles claims and the weight of historical evidence are found to neatly coincide, as happens more often than one might expect judging from the skeptical viewpoint prevalent in so much of modern scholarship, that too will be duly noted.