The Reliability of the Bible - Part 1 - Introduction

I encourage you to research the individual propositions within this entry yourself. In your research, please be aware of the bias of your source material (e.g. religious sites versus sceptic's sites versus material meant for pure scientific/philosophical knowledge).

An infinity exists, most definitely outside and possibly even within this universe. Of that, I am certain. The universe is finite – it most certainly had a beginning, in the “big bang” and possibly will have an ending. Now I used to think the “big bang” was “just a theory” until I realised just how wrong I was about what a scientific theory is. But that is for a later entry, dedicated probably far less to the Big Bang Theory (the scientific study, not the TV show) and far more to Evolutionary Theory. That aside, while I am of the view life is deterministic, and that every effect was born of a cause that was itself an effect, if we go along this line of thinking, there will be an infinite set of causes. This, to me, is impossible and there must be some sort of ultimate cause. There must be something that, by its very nature, always existed, continues to existed and will always exist. It is even quite possible, that all of the immutable physical and mathematical laws which so perfectly govern this universe, are predicated on This Infinite Something (TIS).

Now I have absolutely no idea about what TIS might be, but if you want to call it God, then I have no problem with that. But if you were to further advance that TIS has anthropomorphic qualities such as likes (humility) and dislikes (jealousy), opinions on our sex lives (homosexuality) and desires (foremost the desire for us to love TIS), I would say you have no idea what you're talking about. How can you have even the faintest idea about the nature of TIS, far less TIS' personality?

Most people would then answer, well the Bible tells me these things. My next question would then be – how reliable is the Bible? And that is the next question I seek to research. How did this book originate? Is it perfect? Those questions alone can fill hundreds of pages of this blog, so I fear this is a multiple-entry topic. But it is an important topic whether you consider the bible to be true or not – after all, an educated reading of the bible requires that you know when it was written, by whom and for what purpose. So let's start from the beginning.

The purely factual questions we need to ask are:

1. What period in history are these mauscripts meant to cover?
2. Who wrote the original manuscripts on which the books are based?
3. When were these manuscripts written?
4. When were the manuscripts assembled into established books?
5. Who assembled the books?

Once those questions are answered, we can then put the information into context. Before we launch into this exercise however, let's just get one thing clear. I am absolutely not basing my opinions solely on what the bible says without weighing these propositions with the scale of other secular disciplines. Otherwise I will simply devolve into saying the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says so. This kind of circular logic has no place in rational discourse. The other secular disciplines that can help corroborate or contradict the bible are other documents written around the same period for a variety of purposes, scholars who lived in the same period, archaeological evidence, historical demography and anthropology, and non-canonical texts (i.e. manuscripts/books floating around at the time that the various committees assembled the various bibles, but, for one reason or another, were not incorporated into the official bible).

Now, I launched into this exercise quickly determining that my research needed to at least be split into two sections – the Old Testament and the New. But soon into researching the Old Testament, I realised that answering the aforementioned questions on the old testament as a whole was exceedingly difficult and that further subdivision was required. I therefore split the Old Testament into the following 4 sections:

1. The Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy)
2. The History of Israel (Joshua to Esther)
3. Wisdom (Job to Songs of Solomon)
4. Prophetic Books (Isaiah to Malachi)

I admit that I got quite a ways into writing with these sub-sections before even this became untenable. I found myself:

• Making generalisations that were only somewhat applicable to all the books to which I referred
• Making statements that were somewhat applicable to some books in the sub-set, but not to others, therefore forcing me to delve into specific books to explain why they were not quite like the rest, and therefore perhaps giving too much attention to them
• Glossing over details of some of the books because they – at first – appeared to be like the others, but were actually not this way at all
• Getting lost in the details in general

I eventually stopped in frustration; the fact is that EACH book of the bible has content of varying levels of cohesiveness and a long and complicated history concerning its origins and development. In the end, I decided to go with the good old tabular approach. This allowed me to give short, specific details about each book on the first 3 of the 5 questions. The other 2 questions, I realised, were better framed in the context of the canonisation process (i.e. the process which brings together various floating books into a single authoritative document – the bible) while acknowledging that the books in question may have been subject to several informal and individual canonisations for centuries prior to the formal process. Each book has this history, mind you. You understand how quickly this research can entangle you.

I will then have a discussion on the 3 questions in hopefully a more fluid/analytical way – the table already giving the details.

And so we begin...