Not wanting to digress in this thread here, I’m wondering which credible professional historian who is NOT a professing Christian supports the accuracy of the New Testament’s rendering of historical events. If this has been discussed before, please link me to that discussion.
This needn’t be an atheist historian, a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist will do, just someone who doesn’t have a dog (or a God) in this fight.
You have a strange view of historians. Every “credible professional historian” is expected to be an impartial scientist evaluating sources without regard to his personal beliefs.
Furthermore, the literal belief in the accurateness of the Bible or the NT alone is a loud but small minority of overall Christian beliefs. If you look outside the US fundie circles, most “professing Christians” will not believe in the literal truth of the NT, and furthermore, will tell you that it doesn’t matter to their faith as much as other aspects.
For over one hundred years, at least in Europe/ Germany, Bible science has involved the discoveries of historians and archeology (along with literature scholars and language scholars, ethnologists etc.) applying to the Bible and evaluating how much is “historically true”, (and American fundamentalism with their stress on “literalism” and the strong opposition to science and intellectualism was partly a reaction to feeling threatened in their weak faith and their power politics by those discoveries).
So it’s difficult to point you to one author, or one book, because it’s a whole big field.
You have a strange view of the word “historians” in my title (if not my OP). I’m not asking for the one single definitive historian who fits my description, though that would be nice, but rather for any historians who might be coming from a non-Christian perspective. I’m disqualifying any believing Christians from being able to reject evidence as non-historical because that would invalidate his own beliefs, but surely there must be hundreds of non-Christian historians who concede that certain elements in the NY are undeniably, provably historically accurate. Thousands, even. I’m asking you to name me a few. Should take you a few seconds, right?
One contemporary non-Christian historian was Flavius Josephus who wrote quite a bit about Jesus and his followers.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. There are quite a few elements of the NT that are almost universally considered historically accurate. There was a city at Jerusalem. There was a prefect there named Pilate. Herod Antipas is almost certainly a real historical figure.
Just looking at the Wiki page for those people contain links to historians that have done research on them from non-biblical sources.
What particular NT claim are you interested in finding non-Christian historical evaluations of?
Note that the significance of Josephus regarding the existence of Jesus, as opposed to merely the existence of christians, is disputed. Basically the mentions of Jesus are, for various reasons discussed at the link, thought to be later additions by church fathers rather than the words of Josephus himself.
No serious historian, Christian or otherwise, considers the New Testament to be a reliable account of history. However, many historians believe that, when approached with caution, the New Testament writings are useful source documents that can convey valuable information about Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant healer and preacher who was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate. The Jesus Seminar, a group of dozens of scholars who study the historical Jesus, in 1998 produced a book called The Acts of Jesus with their conclusions at that time. The book is now out of print, but Amazon has used copies. You may also be interested in the Wikipedia article on the Jesus Seminar.
Do not non Christian historians also have a bias?
Another issue that makes this difficult is that many NT historical scholars are Christians and that’s why they’re so interested. Many of them are quite impartial, denying the historical accuracy of much of the Gospels and the authorship of most of the books of the NT. (Only Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon are pretty universally thought by contemporary scholars to actually be written by the person traditionally thought to have written it. Everything else is either written by someone else or its authorship is hotly debated.) There are plenty of historians who do good impartial, secular, and scholarly work on the NT, but I can’t think of any who are explicitly non-Christian. This is partly because they don’t include their religious beliefs in their work, and so I have no idea what they privately believe.
Not true.
Jesus is mentioned twice by Josephus. “ Testimonium Flavianum. The topic of the Testimonium’s authenticity has attracted much scholarly debate. The discussion generally falls into three camps:
• Those who defend the authenticity of the entire passage;
• Those who reject the entire passage;
• Those who believe the passage has an authentic core but also includes later embellishments by Christian scribes.[23]
Recent scholarly discussion has favoured partial authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum”
However-
“Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king, desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrin without his consent”…..The above quotation from the Antiquities is considered reliable by almost all scholars (one reason for accepting its authenticity is that the passage was mentioned in several places by Origen).”
If you want a specific example, how about Bart Ehrman? He’s an acknowledged expert of early Christian history and theology. He’s also a self-professed agnostic.
Historians who are serious Christians don’t necessarily think the NT is historical. This is a lot of information but is rather well done.
Since who is a “credible historian” is subjective, this is probably better suited for GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
if you say so, Colibri. Far as I’m concerned, if someone thinks someone is credible, then I’m interested in what that historian has to say. I certainly don’t plan on challenging anyone’s professional credentials here, just maybe whether they’ve got axes to grind, but that seems pretty objective to me. If Shmuel ben Israel proclaims Revelation to be 100% fact, I’ll probably concede he’s not saying it because of his bias toward Christianity…
That was the first name that came to my mind as well. He’s well known because he’s written many books for a popular audience. He doesn’t agree on the gospels being totally reliable, but does endorse the belief that most of the material in genuine and that scholarship can do a pretty good job sorting out the fake from the true.
Roughly speaking you can split scholars of the Bible and early Christian history into three broad groups of roughly equal size: fundamentalists, left-wingers, and a middle-of-the-road group. The first insist that everything is entirely accurate, the second often come close to insisting that nothing is accurate, the third generally see a broadly accurate picture of the life of Jesus with some errors in transmission. On e good representation of this middle group is the Gospel Perspectives series, which features work by well-known professional historians including F. F. Bruce, Craig Blomberg, Stephen Farris, and David Wenham, among many others. That series and others like it have done a good deal to bring arguments for overall accuracy back into mainstream scholarship in the past generation.
Historians aren’t scientist. I don’t mean to be a pedantic prick, but I think it’s important to note that historians do not come up with testable hypothesis. They are, however, expected to base their interpretations on the available evidence rather than their own personal feelings.
Then you have a limited understanding of Christianity, as I also said. Outside the fundie Christian circles in the US, the majority of Christians does not base their faith on accepting the NT “literally” or “true in the historical sense”. Most educated Christians outside the US, long before they become professors, already know that Jesus is not a historically documented figure, and that the events of the NT can not be confirmed one way or the other because there’s lack of data about another guy in Palestine being crucified for causing trouble (which he was to the Romans of that day who did most of the record-keeping).
So a Christian professor of history finding that parts of the NT clash with recorded history doesn’t invalidate his beliefs, it’s rather kind of “Duh”.
Most moderately involved Christians know for example that the whole story about the census causing Mary and Joseph to move to Bethlehem for birth is a complete fabrication, because Romans would never do a census that way; because there is no record of the results of that census, so it likely never happened; obviously the author wanted to fulfill both the prophecy about Bethlehem and the known fact that Jesus did come from Nazareth.
Does this knowledge cause those Christians to loose their faith? Nope. If their faith is that weak and on feet of clay, then it’s no real loss. Most people go through a crisis of faith by growing up and looking at the world and asking the theodicy questions that have been a problem for ages, or by being exposed to other religions.
No. First, study of NT to compare with historical sources is mostly of interest to Bible scholars, not to “non-Christians”. The NT is not intended as historical sources - compared to Flavius Josephus account of the Judean war, for example - but as an evangelion, as good news about Jesus becoming Christ by rising from death and how that helps people. That’s the message of the NT, and whether it’s true or not is subject of theology, not history.
It’s like asking “Do non-buddhist historians read the ancient scriptures about the life of Buddha for historical accuracy?” The answer would be mostly no, because there’s not a lot of interest for historians in an obviously religious text. That a prince Siddharta Gautama existed has nothing to do with the miracles told about him.
Secondly, I don’t study history, and I don’t know enough english-speaking scholars of Bible history to give you names right know.
If you don’t know anything about Bible study, I would recommend the laymen-oriented book “The Great Myth” by Peter DeRosa. IIRC, he gives a long appendix of books for further reading, but still writes for “people with two hands, not four” (he says that the usual practice of scholar works to put the footnotes at the back means that people need four hands when reading, to look up the footnotes and return to the main text).
The problem there is separating out the later additions (= fabrications/ falsifications) by Church fathers who wanted evidence to convince unbelievers.
Second, he’s not a primary source, he’s reporting hearsay about Christians.
There are scientists outside the natural sciences, too, you know. Even in natural science, a lot of hypotheses can’t be tested like in a chem. lab - meteorology relies on computer models; geology has models, but can’t run tests on a second earth to confirm their theses.
Reducing proper science to “testable hypothesis” is a narrow, non-correct view of science.
Which is why the question shows either a bad understanding or a bad method of making historians in the US. I can’t imagine anybody over here with a basic understanding of either science or history asking that question, because accusing historians of bias is one of the worst things. It’s like accusing a biologist of being a creationist.
But then, we don’t have pseudo-science/ religious institutes handing out degrees nilly-willy, so maybe there are biased and non-scientific-schooled historians and professors abundant in the US, I don’t know.
Why would historians have axes to grind? The only axes historians and bible scholars grind that I know of are against populists and/or idiots misusing science for ideology or to make money - both groups were up in arms against Dan Brown’s travesty of Da Vinci Code. I think about a dozen books refuting his gibberish have been written for the general public.
Am I right in assuming that you are not thinking of a specific scholar, but using a clichee Jewish name as example?
Frankly, if anybody declares “Revelation to be 100% fact”, that person would immediately loose all credibility with me, and I would want to see where he got his credentials from, and with what fundie groups he’s allied with.
No scholar claiming to be serious or expecting to be taken serious would say anything like that. He might explain the parallels and images (metaphors) used in Revelation both with the OT books of prophecy and the state of Rome at time of writing (which is what the piece is about: Rome will fall and the world will be better).
But that would not be a new aspect, it’s the nth book in a series of similar books.