First of all, biblical scholars are not supposed to bring their personal religious beliefs to any evaluation of the Bible. Christopher Gilbert says, in A Complete Introduction to the Bible:
A person who
approaches the Bible academically neither assumes that the Bible neither is
divinely inspired nor assumes that the Bible is not divinely inspired, but
instead remains neutral on this issue.
Gilbert goes on to evaluate the
Old Testament book by book and story by story. For example, he says:
From the
academic perspective, neither the biblical accounts of prehistory nor the
stories about the ancestors can be regarded as historical in the strict, modern
sense of that term. That is, most biblical scholars do not regard the stories
contained in the Book of Genesis as presenting an objective, fact-based
description of historical events.
Elliott Rabin says, in Understanding
the Hebrew Bible:
There is
considerable uncertainty whether the patriarchs in the Bible actually lived or
are instead legends of ancestral founders. No evidence for their existence has
been found independent of the Bible. Of course, we have records of very few
people from ancient history, though we might have expected some independent
record considering the importance the Bible attributes to the patriarchs.
Another perspective comes from
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, in King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical
Distortions of Historical Realities:
The Book of
Chronicles seems to be particularly problematic for modern scholarship. The
problem with Chronicles is not the fact that it offers an account of Israel’s
past alongside that of Kings, nor even that this story of the past can, in
places, differ from and even contradict the version offered by Kings. Rather,
the problem with Chronicles is that these differences and contradictions occur
despite the great probability that the Chronicler has composed his history
using as his weightiest sources versions of the books of Samuel and Kings. This
is problematic for some scholars for it casts into doubt the historicity of the
Chronicler’s story and that of his sources, which often appear to be
manipulated, distorted and even disregarded by the Chronicler. But this should
not be seen as a problem. Rather, the freedom with which the Chronicler appears
to employ his source material emphasizes the tendentious nature of all biblical
texts, reminding the reader that both Kings and Chronicles are not history
writing in the modern sense, but rather are ideological stories of the past
told in order to account for the present and to advise for the future…As such,
Chronicles is best understood as “theocentric historiography”, or as a
“theological essay”.
Francis Watson cites Philo of
Alexandria, in ‘The fourfold gospel’, published in The Cambridge Companion
to the Gospels (edited by Stephen C. Barton):
The Jewish
theologian Philo of Alexandria (died c. 50 CE), who had argued that the
spiritual or theological truth of a scriptural text need not be undermined by
its literal or historical falsehood. There was, for example, no such creature
as the highly intelligent talking snake of Gen 3, and yet its non-historicity
does nothing to diminish the theological value of the story. Indeed, historical
implausibility serves as a positive indication of theological significance.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann discusses
some of the inaccuracies in Acts of the Apostles and says, in Putting Away
Childish Things:
The whole book
is a work of propaganda aimed at Gentile Christians and Gentiles who have not
yet become Christians.
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