The reliability of the Bible

One of the core tenets of Christian apologetics is, of course, that the Bible is a reliable and accurate historical document, and that Jesus was a real person, and pretty much exactly like described in the Bible. Miles and miles of text has been written by such apologists and theologians trying to argue why this is so.

These are some of the most common arguments they make, and why they are invalid.

"Historians almost unanimously agree that Jesus was a real person."

No, they don't. Some strongly argue for it, others against it. Most are open to the possibility of a person named "Yeshua" having existed, who was the basis of the texts, but they don't assert it. Others propose that the "Jesus" of the text is actually an amalgamation of several people (plus a good deal of embellishment.)

The vast majority of historians would agree that it's possible that the story of Jesus is loosely based on a real person, but that the vast majority of the details about him in the New Testament are inaccurate. They also would agree that it's possible that no such person existed at all. Thus, there is no unanimous agreement.

"Most historians agree that the New Testament is historically realiable."

No, they most definitely don't. This is just an outright lie perpetuated by dishonest apologists.

In fact, there are even many Christian historians and theologians who admit to the possibility that many of the events described in the New Testament probably never happened. (Of course the apologists who perpetuate the lie will just resort to the no-true-scotsman fallacy at this point.)

"There are numerous extrabiblical sources for the existence of Jesus."

Actually, there aren't. None at all. This is another lie perpetuated by these dishonest apologists.

They will cite several historians of the first and second centuries, but in every single case these historians are not accounting contemporary historical events, but instead are describing Christians and their beliefs. Invariably, all these mentions were written many decades (sometimes even over a century) after the alleged events of the New Testament. A document mentioning Jesus is not a very reliable source if said document was written a hundred years after Jesus (allegedly) died, and in context is just describing what Christians believed.

For example, apologists just love to mention Josephus, as he mentions Jesus' followers in his text. What they don't mention is that Josephus was born in 37 AD, long after Jesus' alleged death. Hardly a contemporary eyewitness. (All the other historians that apologists love to cite were born later than Josephus, so they aren't any better.)

"The New Testament is reliable because of the thousands of eyewitnesses."

This is a perfect example of a circular argument. It argues that there were thousands and thousands of eyewitnesses to the events described in the gospels, and thus the New Testament is very reliable. But how do we know there were thousands of eyewitnesses? Because the New Testament says so. There is no other source for these alleged eyewitnesses.

I don't think it's necessary to add anything to that. It's a circular argument in its purest form. (And this isn't even going into the fact of how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, no matter how many witnesses there are.)

"The gospels cannot be inaccurate because the people who lived in those places and witnessed those events would have objected to the inaccuracies."

This is one of the favorite arguments of many apologists, and it's one of the stupidest.

Firstly, the gospels were just some books written by some people, which were copied and spread very slowly. They did not mass-print them for the masses because there was no printing technology. And even if a copy did end up in the hands of someone who had lived at one of those places at the correct time, and even if this person had realized that the described events never actually happened, so what? This person probably didn't know who had written the text, nor had the means to do something about it even if he or she wanted.

Also, even if it did happen, the person could have just thought that he didn't witness it because he was just unlucky. It probably happened on the other side of the city, or when he was not around to see it.

Secondly, the gospels were written several decades after the alleged events. Most of the potential eyewitnesses had died or were too young to remember.

Thirdly, we have actual examples of fictional biographies, or biographies with inaccuracies in them, having been written very soon after a person has died, and with nobody objecting to them or correcting them. (The biography of George Washington is a perfect example.) And these are not biographies written decades after the person's death, but almost immediately.

"The gospels cannot be a case of real history having become legendary because they were written too soon after the events."

This is appealing to the notion that historical writing cannot become distorted by legends if it's written too soon after the events. This is a misunderstanding of the original proposition, and is very demonstrably false.

It also has the big problem that it assumes that there were events to be distorted by legends in the first place. There's absolutely nothing that would have stopped the authors of the gospels from just inventing the events.

You could just as well argue that the Harry Potter books were written too soon after the events they describe in order for them to be inaccurate. It makes absolutely no sense.

"The New Testament is reliable because this or that person, or this or that place, really existed."

A very common, and strange, argument that many Christians present, including these apologists, is that since there are some details in the Bible that are demonstrably true, that means that the entire Bible is reliable.

In other word, since it's demonstrably true that this or that king or head of state existed, then that means that the entire story of Jesus' crucifixion and burial is true. This argument makes no sense whatsoever.

You could use the exact same argument to claim that the Harry Potter books are reliable history because they talk about real cities.

"Martyrs wouldn't have died for a lie."

This is an even stranger argument given that people die all the time around the world because of their convictions. Surely these Christians are not going to argue that all belief systems are accurate because of that?

(Of course apologists will respond to this with special pleading, claiming that Christianity is in this regard somehow different from all those other thousands of belief systems.)

"If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then how did the church begin? You have to give a plausible alternative explanation."

(Yes, this really is an argument that some apologists, even very high-profile ones, make.)

I don't even understand this argument. We have countless religion around the world and over all of history. How did they all begin? First a small group of people start believing in something (often the ideas of one single person) and they start gathering more and more people. As time passes, they develop more and more intricate details to their new religion. I don't even see what's the problem here.

Anything goes (as long as it's not science)

I have written about this subject previously, but it just never ceases to amaze me.

There's an almost frightening amount of people in this world who would believe almost anything. The only two criteria that they seem to apply to what they believe are:

1. It's believed by a significant amount of people.
2. The scientific community does not accept it.

(And by "significant" I don't mean millions. I mean hundreds.)

As unbelievable as it sounds (and to me it still does), there really are many people out there who will accept almost anything as long as it's something that science does not accept. It literally doesn't matter how completely crazy and clearly made-up it is, as long as a group of people believe it, and as long as science does not, they will believe it too (or, at the very least, consider it possible and be completely uncritical about it.)

Scientific claims are believed only if they pertain to the person's immediate practical surroundings and experience, or if they have no significance to their other beliefs. Scientific claims that contradict their other beliefs will be freely dismissed without thought or rationale.

Naturally scientific claims that can be used to bolster some of their other beliefs will be used. Or rather, a completely distorted-beyond-recognition version of a simplified "reader's digest" version of the scientific theory (ie, not only will an inaccurate overly-simplified version of the scientific theory be used, but even that will then be distorted to accommodate and support whatever claim the person wants.)

Just to give a taste, here are two actual examples of what some people accept completely uncritically:

They believe that some ten thousand years ago people from Mars arrived to Earth, and many people today are their descendants. And why exactly do they believe this? Because one person a couple of decades ago claimed to have a vision where he got this information (among a ton of other even crazier stuff.)

That's all. There's exactly zero evidence of this other than the claim of this one man that he got this information in a vision. And thousands of people today believe this completely uncritically.

Another example is the claim that in recent years hundreds of "super-psychic" children have been born in China. According to this claim, these children can do almost anything (including telepathy, levitating and moving objects, moving through solid objects, and so on.)

Why hasn't this hit all the news media around the world? For the flimsiest of excuses: According to these people, the Chinese scientists are afraid to publish these results for fear of ridicule. (They don't seem to be fazed by the contradiction that this poses: How do they know about this event if nobody in the news media knows about it? Why hasn't this leaked?)

The people who uncritically believe these things demand no evidence. It's enough if many other people believe it too, and someone who is charismatic enough makes the claim.

Birds and dinosaurs

For some reason creationists are in a crusade to try to discredit the notion that birds have evolved from dinosaurs. It's probably their second-most popular specific claim that they oppose about evolutionary history (the most popular being, of course, that humans and apes have a common ancestor species.) I don't even understand why they hate the notion that much. Even the creationists who accept 99% of the theory of evolution (without using that name, of course) still oppose the notion that birds are dinosaurs.

There are a couple of scientists who, while not being creationists, also loudly oppose the notion that birds evolved from dinosaurs. They are very vocal, and are sometimes quoted in tabloids and blogs.

Naturally creationists often cling to these tabloid articles as well. It really helps bolster their anti-evolutionary movement when they can quote newspaper headers like "birds have not evolved from dinosaurs after all, say scientists".

There's a huge irony in this, however. Those few scientists are not defending creationism. Their claim is that birds and dinosaurs have a more ancient common ancestor, rather than birds having evolved directly from dinosaurs. (This claim has been discredited by paleontologists and evolutionary biologists time and again, but it's still a somewhat rational and scientific hypothesis to make. It simply puts into question where exactly birds branched out in the evolutionary tree, and proposes that it happened earlier.)

In other words, the creationists are promoting an alternative evolutionary tree for birds, without realizing it. Those scientists who create those controversial tabloid news headers are not claiming that evolution didn't happen. They are simply saying that birds evolved from a more ancient ancestral species than dinosaurs.

The Bible needs constant reassurance

Have you noticed how so many Christians, especially apologists, are constantly repeating the same mantras about how "the Bible is the perfect word of God", how it's infallible and unchanging, how there are no contradictions, how it's morally absolute, and so on? Likewise Christians are constantly repeating how God is good, God loves you, etc.

Many people have noticed, and they make a quite good point, that this is quite telling about the Bible.

Normally a work or other source of information does not need constant reassurances because it can stand on its own. You don't see people constantly reassuring that, to take a completely random example, "Euclid's Elements is full of correct and useful mathematical proofs." They don't have to do that because Euclid's Elements can stand on its own merits and does not need people to be constantly reminding you how good it is. You can check the veracity of what it says and come up with your own conclusions about its validity.

Not so with the Bible. It cannot stand on its own merits (given how many morally questionable rules and advise it gives, how many contradictions it has, how heinous the crimes of the god it depicts are, and so on) and thus Christians need to be constantly reassuring and reminding themselves that it is good and valid.

If the Bible were indeed the perfect, infallible word of a perfect omniscient God, then it would need no such reassurances because anybody would be able to check its validity on their own.

Proof of virginity

Deuteronomy 22 is overall one of the most embarrassing chapters in the entire Bible and doesn't get much attention among Christians. It's seldom brought up in church, or even in Bible study sessions, and even when it rarely is brought up, it's usually quickly shoved aside with some light excuses and rationalizations.

Perhaps the most embarrassing passages of this chapter are the following:

¹³ If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her ¹⁴ and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” ¹⁵ then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. ¹⁶ Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. ¹⁷ Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, ¹⁸ and the elders shall take the man and punish him. ¹⁹ They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.
²⁰ If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, ²¹ she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.

What this is saying that when a married woman has sex with her husband for the first time, it's expected for her to bleed (because her hymen breaks), and for the parents of the woman to take the bedsheet as "proof" that she was a virgin.

This passage has quite many problems. All these problems give an interesting light to the claim that the Bible is the perfect and infallible word of God.

Firstly, this really demonstrates the emphasis that this culture of the antiquity put on virginity, but let's not go there now.

One of the major problems with this passage (supposedly from the perfect and infallible word of God) is that the "proof of virginity" is extremely flimsy. There are many problems with it, including:

• Not all women, even if virgin, bleed when having sex for the first time. There are numerous reasons for this. Also, some women may bleed more than others, and some may bleed so little that it wouldn't leave any clearly visible and unambiguous stain. This means that a woman could get stoned to death because she happened to be one of the unlucky ones who didn't bleed.
• The blood stain could be trivially faked. If the parents didn't want their daughter to die, then they could easily fabricate the "proof".
• How are the parents supposed to get the bedsheet? Are they supposed to be waiting on the other room or something? Moreover, even if the sheet would get stained, the man could easily dispose of the bedsheet and claim that there was no blood.

Overall, this "proof of virginity" is so flimsy, so unreliable, and so prone to misuse, that one really has to wonder how this could possibly be the "perfect and infallible word of God." The whole thing is just outright embarrassing.

Of course the even more serious and embarrassing part is the death by stoning if a woman cannot prove having been a virgin. How exactly is this moral and just? Is this really the perfect absolute morality that we are supposed to embrace?

Notice also what happens if the man does not like her new wife and is unable to accuse her of being a slut: He pays money to the wive's parents and is forced to be married to her for life. That's one happy marriage for you. And of course, the woman is not consulted on any of this.

How many Christians, who advocate the Bible as the perfect and infallible word of God, the absolute moral law that we all should follow, would be ready to follow these passages?

The deceptive first premise of Kalam

To recapitulate the Kalam cosmological argument, it goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the Universe has a cause.

One of the major problems with the first premise is that it's deceptively ambiguous. Especially William Lane Craig is infamous for using this ambiguousness to resort to equivocation fallacies in order to defend the first premise.

The first premise is ambiguous because it doesn't specify what kind of "begins to exist" it's talking about. It implies, but doesn't unambiguously state, that it's talking about creation ex nihilo (in other words, out-of-nothing, ie. first there's nothing, then something appears.)

Assuming creation ex nihilo is unfounded because we have exactly zero examples of this. We cannot corroborate that it happens, and even if it happens, if it has a cause, and even if it has a cause, what that cause might be. Simply assuming that it happens and, especially, that it must have a cause, is completely faulty logic. "It makes sense" is not a valid argument for this.

However, when people like Craig try to defend it, they will switch to the other meaning of "begins to exist", which is the more abstract version, ie. energy/matter transforming from one form to another (in other words, for example a table "begins to exist" when the carpenter builds it.)

This is not a distortion or misinterpretation of what, for example, Craig does. This is exactly his argument. In a video, when responding to the objections to the first premise, he directly states things like "didn't dinosaurs begin to exist? Didn't I began to exist?" and then proceeds to belittle the people who present the objection.

Determining the cause for events

When faced with claims of extraordinary events (such as psychic phenomena or miracles), there are, roughly speaking, two steps to be performed to determine their veracity:

1. Corroborating that the event actually happens.
2. Determining the cause for that event.

These are two very important steps. Jumping directly to the second step is rather moot if the first step has not been corroborated. After all, if the event isn't actually happening at all, trying to discover its cause is a wild goose chase.

The second step is also extremely important, and it's the step that most of these people want to skip. They will spend enormous amounts of time and effort to convince themselves and other people that the extraordinary event is indeed happening... and then just jump to their preferred conclusion, without even attempting to corroborate if that's the true cause.

For example, many believers will spend lots of time trying to convince people that miracle healings do indeed happen. They then just jump to God.

This is, of course, flawed reasoning. Even if the event were really happening, that still doesn't tell us what causes it. That would have to be determined before we can draw any conclusions.

(Of course it doesn't help much that all such extraordinary claims fail miserably even step 1.)