What Does It Mean to Corroborate the Bible?
The internet is full of sites detailing what they claim to be corroboration for the bible. I do not think that word means what they think it means.
A commenter on a recent article of mine took me to task for saying that there is no corroboration for the bible, so I went online to see what was being said on this subject. What I found was thoroughly underwhelming.
Self-corroboration
Several sites claimed that the presence of similar stories in more than one of the four gospels proved that their accounts were accurate and true. Huh? As I recall from my years as a Christian, scholars were pretty much in agreement that the gospels were not written independently but drew from other gospels. The similarities say absolutely nothing about the truth of their accounts. In other words, if I say to you that the snow comes up out of the ground (as Lucy claims in the musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown), and you tell someone else, and they tell someone else, does the fact that three of us are making the same claim say anything about the veracity of the claim? Simply put: No.
Corroboration of Locations
Another popular source of corroboration is the fact that some of the places mentioned in the bible (old and new testaments) are mentioned in other historical documents. OK, that’s fine, but corroborating biblical geography is not the point. If I were to make up something completely out of the blue and try to convince people it was true, using real place names would be a smart way to lend some believability to my story, but it wouldn’t result in my completely made-up claim being true. There’s no association there at all. If I revise my previous claim by saying that snow comes up out of the ground in Pittsburgh, proving that Pittsburgh is a real city has no bearing on whether or not my claim is true.
Archeological Corroboration
A city was excavated in an area that scholars hypothesize was the location of Sodom. That city showed evidence of a cataclysmic event that buried the whole town in 6 feet of ash, in approximately the same period during which some believe the destruction of Sodom occurred.
Thus, the story of God wiping out Sodom because of its sins must be true, right? Wrong.
First, the connection between the excavated city and Sodom is approximate at best. Second, the important part of the story is not that a town was destroyed by a cataclysmic event, but that the event came about by the direct hand of god. Even if archeologists found a “Welcome to Sodom” sign in the course of their excavation, it would say nothing about the key part of the story. Again, if I was trying to convince people that a god (whichever) was real, it would be clever of me to use any natural disaster or unexplained event as “proof,” but it would only work with a very gullible audience.
Mention of Jesus
The writings of Josephus mention Jesus twice and John the Baptist once. It is believed that Josephus wrote the associated documents in AD 93–94, so his writings are not eyewitness accounts. The only available sources were other people’s writings or what other people had heard. Since there is no mention by Josephus that either source provided references or proof of what they claimed, their statements are no more reliable than any other unvetted source.
Another site pointed out that a second early writer also mentioned Jesus, and the number of similarities between the two accounts was statistically unlikely. However, it then went on to say that scholars think both writers relied on a “Jewish-Christian ‘gospel’ that has since been lost.” So, two writers, drawing from the same source, said the same thing. What are the odds of that?!
More of “The Bible Proves the Bible”
At least one site asserted that the fact that 500 people saw Jesus after he was resurrected proved that the event occurred. This is just another case of a silly, circular argument. The bible account is true because the bible says 500 people saw Jesus after he was resurrected, and if that many people witnessed the event, it must have happened. Once again, no.
My Document is Older than Yours
Finally, a widely-used argument is that the oldest extant copies of parts of the bible were made closer to the time the originals are believed to have been written than manuscripts that are generally accepted as valid from Plato, Socrates, etc. The problem here is that neither Plato nor Socrates was making broad claims of supernatural interventions — they were espousing philosophy, and they are evaluated based on what they wrote, even if in some cases what we think they wrote isn’t exactly what they wrote.
Further, the interval between the time something was written and the oldest still existing copy allows experts to estimate how close the existing copy might be to the original, but has nothing to do with the truth of the original. Even if there were manuscripts still in existence that were written during the time Jesus is said to have lived, that wouldn’t provide any proof whatsoever that what they contained was true.
Summary
The bible may use real place names for some (or all) of its stories. I willingly concede that point, and repeat what I said earlier — this is irrelevant and doesn’t prove that the stories themselves are true. In my brief survey of “corroborating evidence,” I have seen nothing that corroborates those stories, and in particular their claims of supernatural interventions, miracles, etc. If I get any comments, I expect some of them will take me to task again for not doing a sufficiently thorough investigation, and I admit that I only spent an hour or so trying to understand the nature of the claimed corroboration. If someone can point me to independent accounts of some of the most amazing stories in the bible (how about Jesus feeds a large crowd with just a few fish and loaves of bread, or Jesus walks on water), please do.
What surprised me (although it probably shouldn’t have) was the number of sites that start with some variant of “Some people say there is no proof that the Bible is true. Boy, are they wrong!” and then present some subset of the claims I described above. The only people I can think of who might be convinced by these claims are Christians who desperately want to be able to say that their beliefs have some factual basis. While I sympathize with their situation, I might gently suggest that if you have to work so hard to come up with even a tiny hint of corroboration, it might be time to think the whole thing through again. Alternatively, just believe what you believe and give up trying to prove any factual basis. But please, just keep it to yourself!
