We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

History and Bible: Do They Align?
To begin, it is significant that when Jesus and the authors of the NT referred to their sacred writings as “God-breathed,” they were referring to the writings that had been handed down to them. So too, the text that the Church has always confessed to be “God-breathed” has been the canon she received. Never has the “God-breathed” nature of the text been affixed to oral or written versions of the biblical material that preceded the written text. For this and other reasons, I find that the “God-breathed” status and divine authority of Scripture attaches to its final canonical form. This alone is the text we are called to wrestle with, with the ultimate goal of discerning how any given passage bears witness to the faithful and merciful covenantal God who was definitively revealed in Christ.
This means, among other things, that our estimation of a passage’s “God-breathed” nature and/or its divine authority should not hinge upon anything like historical-critical considerations. While source and redaction criticism may at times shed light on the pre-history of a text that may be relevant to its exegesis, neither these nor any other branch of biblical criticism should ever be allowed to affect our estimation of the final form of a passage. The fact that a portion of Scripture may have had a different meaning before it assumed the form it has within the canon is largely irrelevant to the contemporary theological task of hearing God speak through the final form of Scripture.
Moreover, to affirm that the canonical form of a text is “God breathed” is to affirm that its authority as well as its interpretation for the Church is not contingent upon how it does or does not conform to so-called “objective history” (historisch) – viz. to any particular scholarly reconstruction of “what actually happened.”
I am persuaded that we are called to embrace the faith conviction that each passage is trustworthy for the divine purposes for which it was “breathed.” If one happens to be led by the available evidence to the conviction that a particular passage does not correspond to “what actually happened,” then, in my view, this simply indicates that corresponding to “objective history” must not have been part of the theological purpose that God intended for that passage.
We are failing to read biblical narratives as they were originally intended to be read when we read them through the grid of how they do or do not cohere with “objective history.” For in this case we are importing into our reading of the narrative modern concerns that are alien to the text, rather than allowing the text to communicate its concerns to us. To read Scripture faithfully, we must read it with the assumption that the meaning of the canonical passage is found in the text, not outside of it in the way it relates to (someone’s reconstructed version of) “objective history.”
To be sure, I grant that attempting to demonstrate a correlation between biblical accounts and “objective history” may sometimes be highly significant for apologetic purposes. Most importantly, I am convinced that the intellectual plausibility of the Christian faith hangs, to a significant degree, on our ability to demonstrate the general historical reliability of the Gospel portraits of Jesus, which I, along with Paul Eddy, argue for in The Jesus Legend. But as it concerns the call for Jesus-followers to hear and obey God’s voice through Scripture, it’s my conviction that all that matters is the narrative in its final canonical form.
I should add that, while I believe it is important for apologetic purposes to anchor the Gospel portraits of Jesus in verifiable history, I have become convinced that it is apologetically unwise, to say the least, to leverage the credibility of the Christian faith as a whole on the historical veracity of the biblical narrative as a whole. There is no reason the credibility of the faith should be leveraged on a conservative evaluation of historical evidence for every aspect of the biblical narrative, and, in any event, the conservative perspective is, in some instances, very hard to defend in light of the archeological evidence. The more important point for our present purposes, however, is that there is absolutely no reason to tether the traditional faith-affirmation that all canonical texts are “God-breathed” to a particular way of relating any or all of these texts to a scholarly reconstruction of actual history.
Image by byronv2 via Flickr.
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Bible Interpretation, Biblical Criticism, Historical Criticism
Topics: Biblical Interpretation
Related Reading

Still Forming
Hi Everyone, The Open Theism conference was a huge blessing for us. We’ll be talking more about that in the coming days and giving you information on how to access video of some of the speakers. But today we wanted to share something about spiritual formation and a very old way of reading the Bible…

Past Sermon Series: Faith & Doubt
Faith is sometimes understood as the lack of doubt. As a result, doubt can be seen as the enemy of faith. But Biblical faith can withstand doubt and even be strengthened by it. God wants His people to wrestle with Him on the things that matter in their lives. We must not be afraid of struggling with deep…

N.T. Wright on the Whole Sweep of Scripture
Here’s a really fine video message from N.T. Wright on how to read Scripture. So many of the misunderstandings we take away from Scripture happen when we pick out a verse here and there and neglect the whole story. We hope this will bless you and encourage you to “press your nose against the window.”

The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…

Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 6
This is the sixth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg addresses the apparent discrepancies in the genealogies of Luke and Matthew and the implausibility of the idea that they were simply fabricated. We’ve been hearing that people are using…

Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update
Well, I’m happy to announce that Crucifixion of the Warrior God is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Like many of you, I found that the clearer I got about the non-violent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed in Christ, the more disturbed I became over those portraits of God in the Old Testament that…