Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Comment -

Archeology won't prove the truthfulness of our faith, but it certainly helps support it. It demonstrates God's faithfulness to His word (events happened in the way He said they did), shows the sceptic that faith isn't just mindless subjectivism (I believe the moon is made of cheese therefore it must be) and that it is grounded in real history (cf. Luke 1.1ff).

Posted By Mark 10:45am

Friday, 20 July 2007
Proving the Bible

If you look at the writings of the ancient civilizations surrounding ancient Israel, you will see a mirror of many early biblical events; every writing from that time has an account of creation, the flood and the choosing and sending out of Abraham, varied by how many gods were involved and whether Noah was saved from the flood by honesty or deception. I found this really exciting - I mean, this proves the events in the Bible really happened, doesn't it?

A couple of weeks ago there was a big brouhaha that made it into many of the newspapers including the Daily Telegraph. Under headlines such as "Tablet That 'Proves' Bible's Accuracy" articles told how Assyriologist Michael Jursa found a tablet dating back to 595BCE, twelve years before the siege of Jerusalem mentioned in the book of Jeremiah. The name "Nebo-Sarsekim" was found on this cuneiform tablet which recorded a donation of gold to one of the Babylonian temples that Nebo-Sarsekim had made. In Jeremiah chapter 39 Nebo-Sarsekim (also called Sars'khim and Sarsechim) is listed as the chief officer or chief eunuch of Nebuchadnezzar who was present at the siege of Jerusalem. This find is said to "give the whole Biblical text more authority" and "make you think the whole thing [the Old Testament, especially Jeremiah] is true".

Other scholars, of course, have jumped on the bandwagon, pointing out that perhaps the most this find does is to prove that there was a person called Nebo-Sarsekim, and that he existed in the time-frame during which the book of Jeremiah was written; nothing more - and certainly that it has no comment whatsoever to make about any of the other books in the Hebrew Scriptures. And so the argument went on, ranging from other reports and interviews to multiple column-inches of comment and opinion, spilling over - of course - onto the Internet and blog space.

I found myself wondering whether we really need archaeology to prove to us that the Bible is true? Should we, as believers in G-d, need to be able "prove" the authenticity of the Bible? Isn't belief in the Bible as the true word of G-d one of those things we just have to take on trust? After all, the writer of Hebrews tells us that, "trusting is being confident of what we hope for, convinced about things we do not see". Trusting is believing in something you don't necessarily see without verification of its authenticity. So we shouldn't need archaeological proofs to confirm our belief and trust in the truth of the Bible, right?