In Defense of the Bible's Way of Doing History

Jared Witt   l   June 15, 2018

​There’s no science in the Bible.
 
There’s no science in the Bible.
 
Should I say that again?
 
There’s no science in the Bible.
 
Science is a disciplined method of testing observations and hypotheses about the natural world, which was more or less invented over the last few centuries.
 
There is history in the Bible.

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However, what we mean by “history” is a little bit different today than what it used to mean.
 
In Bible-y times, they took history very seriously—probably more seriously than most of us do in our time. Actually, that's one of the things that distinguishes ancient Jews and Christians from other pagan cultures, who tended to see time as circular rather than linear. Jews and Christians were among the few who looked at time and said, “What has been is not necessarily what will be. This is all going somewhere.”
 
In that way, they were more similar to us modern people than most other ancient cultures. The difference between they and us, when we sit down to retell history, is that we tend to be more preoccupied with the question, What happened? Back then, they were preoccupied with the question, Why does it matter, what happened?
 
Does this mean that they were a little more liberal with facts, especially less important ones, than we are? Yes, it does.
 
Does it mean that there are no facts at all in the Bible, and we should just toss the whole thing out? No, it doesn’t.
 
Take a breath before your modern-biased mind immediately jumps to the defense of our generation’s way of doing history over against theirs.
 
In my favorite Norm MacDonald movie, “Dirty Work,” one of the side stories that you trace throughout the movie is that of the quack doctor, played by Chevy Chase. Chase’s character is a compulsive gambler who needs to pay off his bookie by extorting a lot of money out of one of the main character’s, played by Artie Lange, without which Chase will refuse to do a life saving surgery for Lange’s father. This is ultimately what kicks off the series of grifts in which Lange’s character and his best friend (MacDonald) seek to quickly make a lot of money to pay off the doctor, the main storyline.
 
They finally do, the surgery is completed, Chase pays off his bookies and everything is resolved...we think, until MacDonald, now playing the role of narrator, in the unceremoniously deadpan way that only he can, tells us, “buuut his [Chase’s] bookies decided to throw him out of a moving vehicle and killed him anyways…So he’s dead.” With this 90s absurdist comedic summary of events you never actually see on screen, you, the viewer, realize that the narrative thread which kicked off the entire plot was all a waste of time.
   
My point here is that the authors of the Judeo-Christian Bible were not 90s absurdist comedians. It wasn’t enough for them, historically speaking, to simply say, “A bunch of people lived, did a bunch of stuff, and then they died…So they’re dead,” which is all you’ll get if your ultimate goal in life is simply to establish the facts.
 
They wanted to know, why did a bunch of people live? Who decided it so? And to what end? Where was the whole thing heading? And besides, what then do we make of things like consciousness, shame, love, beauty, regret, ambition, grudge-holding, forgiveness and so many other human experiences which seem to be made of so much more than the mere scientific facts of randomness and entropy?
 
If you’re familiar with the language, we could say that modern historians are interested in the letter of what went on, whereas ancient historians wanted to know the spirit.
 
A lot of new parents learn this early on. They might be hardened and resolved themselves that reality is just a bunch of atoms randomly clanging off of each other, and none of it has any meaning. But the first time they’re kid asks the question Why? they quickly discover that they’ll need more tools than just the historical facts at their disposal.        
 
This need for meaning led the writers of the Bible, as well as Jesus himself, to throw in a lot of poetry, mythology, proverb, dreamlike vision, and parable alongside history as if such things matter, as if there is more to life than simply establishing the facts. For another thing, when they finally did get around to the history, facts were only one of many items on their list of concerns. They were more interested in telling the narrative importance of historical events than simply recounting that stuff happened.
 
Is this a hopelessly loosey-goosey way to do history? Let’s do a quick thought experiment using some well known events.
 
Pretend it’s 1938, and you’re a journalist trying to write about what was going on in Germany in 1923—the year of the Nazi’s failed coup attempt called the “Beer Hall Putsch.” Do you better capture what was really going on by retelling it to the letter? “In that period, a group of retired military officers and uneducated laborers calling themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ party started to hold rallies and meetings around Munich, and they wore brown coats.” Or is it truer to what was really unfolding to write like a biblical author and give the spirit? “In that generation, a group whose ways were evil and corrupt rose up in the south, breathing out murderous threats and violence.”
 
Maybe if we modern thinkers were more well-practiced at discerning the spirit of our times, instead of crowning Hitler as Times Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, we would’ve been sending out a clarion call to resist him. But unless you had eyes to see into the heart of what the Nazis were about, the facts of their overstepping to that point (September of 1938) had been relatively modest to most observers. A skirmish with the police here. Hard to prove rumors of arson and disruption of democracy there.
 
By the November Kristallnacht, their first widespread act of racially discriminant violence, who was left in a position of power to oppose them?
 
All the historians at the time were only trying to establish the facts, while the Nazis were busy making them.
 
Is the Bible a useful historical source? It all depends on what you’re looking to find in your history?
 
Is the Bible likely to screw up whether Quirinius was actually governor yet in 4 BC? Or the geographical boundaries of Ancient Nubia?
 
Yes, it is.
 
Is it likely to tell the deeper truths of history? Of human good and evil, of coups and rebellions, movements of love and of sacrifice and of lust for power? Of what destroys humanity and what saves it? Of what regresses humanity and what draws it forward? Of what sanctifies life and what debases it? And amidst it all, where to find God?
 
Yes, it is.  
 
Cheers and Peace,
 
Jared