Is The Bible History Or Legend And Myth?

I have been posting some reflections on the Apostle Paul's discussion of spiritual armor in his Ephesians letter (Ephesians 6:10-20). We looked at the defensive armor (helmet, breastplate, boots, shield). We now need to take a look at the weapon with which the Christian goes on the offense, "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."

In my online book, "The Day of Rest—Biblical Teaching About Time," I pointed out that confidence in the Bible's authority as the word of God has seriously eroded, particularly in the 20th century. See "A World of Uncertainty."  In that chapter I noted that many liberal Biblical scholars now see the Bible primarily as literature and not as history. One such, Thomas L. Thompson, writes in The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeology and the Myth of Israel, 

"One of the things the Bible almost never is, however, is intentionally historical: that is an interest of ours that it rarely shares. . . The Bible's language is not an historical language. It is a language of high literature, of story, of sermon and of song. It is a tool of philosophy and moral instruction." 

In his introductory remarks in the same book he states,

"The history of Iron Age Palestine today knows of Israel only as a small highland patronate lying north of Jerusalem and south of the Jezreel Valley. Nor has Yahweh, the deity dominant in the cult of that Israel's people, much to do with the Bible's understanding of God." 

Thompson is part of a group known as the Copenhagen School of Biblical Studies, popularly known as "biblical minimalism."  This school of thought grew out of historical or higher criticism in biblical studies dating back to the period of  the Enlightenment or Age of Reason (mid-18th century to the present). The Copenhagen group suggests that archeological research has made it clear that ancient Israel was not at all the same as that portrayed in the Bible. Minimalism arose out of a need to account for some of the apparent discrepancies between what the Bible says and what archeologists dug up or failed to dig up in Israel and Palestine. For a detailed summary of this school's ideas as well as a critique of the same read an edited transcript of a lecture given by George Athas to students at the University of Sydney in the first year course “Biblical Studies” on April 29th, 1999.

One example of such a discrepancy: the tumbled down walls of Jericho. Between 1952 and 1956 Kathleen Mary Kenyon and her team excavated the ancient city. In her book Digging up Jericho she talks about why she investigated Jericho twenty years after Professor John Garstang of Liverpool University had concluded that his findings confirmed the biblical account (Joshua 6:1-20) of the walls falling down flat. Using new and better methods Kenyon concluded that the collapsed walls of Jericho uncovered by Garstang were not the collapsed walls of Joshua's time at all. She did not argue, however, that the biblical account of Jericho's destruction was entirely false. A number of earlier walls, she discovered, seemed to have collapsed due to an earthquake. So she writes that "it would have been very natural for the Israelites to have regarded such a visitation as divine intervention . . ." (Kenyon, 262).

The Minimalist scholars put great stock in archeology. They insist that this is the best and only way to write the history of ancient Israel. The example of the biblical account of the conquest of Israel under Joshua in about 1220 B.C. is nothing other than epic myth or legend, they insist. However, in the lecture quoted above, George Athas points out the inexact nature of archeology. It is by no means an exact science and they who attempt to interpret the findings do so according to their personal bias. Athas raises a question I'd like to explore in more detail another time: "If the Bible does contain some real history in it, then how can we judge whether any incident for which we have not found anything never did happen?" In other words, everyone writes history with a bias.