Archaeology and History

An Introduction: 

    Archeological evidence as it relates to the historical reliability of the Biblical text (both OT and NT)—presumably especially the NT reliablity regarding its report(s) of Jesus' life and his teaching would be foremost—might be understood as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the trustworthiness of the Bible with respect to the historical claims it explicitly or implicitly makes. 

     So, a good question to ask is what sort of archeological and historical evidence is available to get a sense of the historical reliability of the texts? It should also be pointed out that its historically accuracy is not a necessary or sufficient condition for the truth of the theological claims the Bible makes. That’s because to one degree or another, it can be claimed the Bible or parts of the Bible are not to be understood in literalist terms.

     In contemporary times (the last thirty years or so), there are two main labels that are used to describe the views of archeologists who have done field work and they are “maximalists” and “minimalists.” Rather than thinking there are only two disparate camps, their are other schools of thought that can be undersood in terms of degrees in a continuum between the two. The maximilists conclude that field work (and perhaps their worldview) leads them to think the archeology so far provides a suffcient basis to consider Biblical history in the text as generally reliable and should be given the benefit of the doubt regarding historical claims that cannot be confirmed. Archeology didn’t have to confirm its reliability, but in fact it did. An example of that—or close to that—would be Nelson Glueck who said in the 1950s, 

“Proving or disproving the Bible, Glueck said, was a fool’s errand. “Those people are essentially of little faith who seek through archaeological corroboration of historical source materials in the Bible to validate its religious teachings and spiritual insights,” he wrote in Rivers in the Desert, and he probably should have left it there. Instead, he continued: “As a matter of fact, however, it may be categorically stated that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference.”

     On the other side the debate are the minimalists (or Copenhagen school) who think archeology (and perhaps their worldview) shows that the history and geography contained in the Bible does not provide a sufficient basis for providing reliable information for what happened in ancient Israel; and, that the Bible should not be given the benefit of the doubt regarding historical claims that cannot be confirmed. This view has been fueled in part because there have been numerous forgeries (sometimes pious forgeries) and false claims.

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