I have seen a few Christians claim that many of what appears to be historical documents in the bible, actually did not occur at all. If the bible is book that is littered with stories that are pure fiction but that are conveyed in such a way to appear as legitimate, why would you trust anything else that it had to say? If you say some of it is true, is it only because it already agrees with you have decided for yourself to be true?
Well, don't we have to apply the same sort of process to anything purporting to be a historical source? If I want to know about the world in classical times, for example, I would be a fool to ignore Herodotus, but I would equally be a fool to believe everything he says --- and
that was written all by one man.
The Bible is a compilation: it's more like if someone bound together everything the ancient Greeks said that had a bearing on history, from the
Anabasis of Xenophon, which recounts events at which he was personally present, to the
Theogony of Hesiod, which gives an account of the origin of the gods and which the poet attributes to divine inspiration. What would you make of such a volume? Would you take an all-or-nothing approach to it, and declare that
either every word of it was true
or that none of it could be given any credence?
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