Hex

Okay ...

The ossuary box and other 'relics' notwithstanding, I have heard many Xians bring up the fact that "archaeology continues to prove the Bible". When pressed they bring up names of towns from the Middle East that are mentioned in the Bible, as well as leaders.

But they don't seem to get that thefact that these cities/mountains/rulers don't validate any theology in the book, they merely chronicle a history, or attempt to legitimize ownership ...

Am I missing something in their argument?

Has anybody found a really good way to point the fallacy of this, since the direct method seems to have no effect?

Thanks

- Hex

butswana

Forget about it. You won't change thier minds. Go pick up "The Bible Unearthed". Good stuff there.
Oh.. to answer your question, no. Archeology does far more disproving than proving. Any one that tries to tell you differently is full of shit.

Daniel_AnglumTM

Archaeology shows that the Bible is more unreliable than the Illiad!

Asha'man

Actually, archaeology pretty conclusively proves the Bible is wrong about many things, and provides absolutely no support for a whole lot more.

For example, archaeology proves that Noah’s flood never happened, since we have continuous records of Chinese and Egyptian civilization through the time the flood is supposed to have happened.

Another example: Egyptian records mention nothing about Moses leading 3 million slaves out of Egypt, and there is absolutely no trace of that many people wandering the Sinai for decades.

However, convincing believers of this is mostly impossible. They have shut their mind to logic and reason, so no form of evidence will ever convince them.

winstonjen

If Noah's flood occurred, what happened to all the water that evaporated? Did it just disappear?

Biff the unclean

Actually there is no trace of Mount Sinai either.
The place we call Mt Sinai was named after the one in the bible, it's not the same mountain.
For that matter the town called Nazareth in Israel today is named after the one in the NT. It seems that that piece of real estate that Jesus hails from has more to do with Camelot than history.

lpetrich

First off, some of the Bible is real history -- the Israelite monarchy was certainly real history, and one interesting exercise is to compare the Bible's account of various events with various outside accounts, like the Moabite Stone, a tablet commemorating Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem, and so forth.

But the earlier parts are certainly unsupported by more contemporary documents. There is no Egyptian record of anything like the Exodus, although it would have been made to seem like some great triumph -- expulsion of pesky Asiatic slaves and their traitorous leader.

Also, where are the really old Chinese records? My understanding is that they go back only as far as 1500 BCE.

But Mesopotamian ones go back further, to about 3000 BCE, a bit beyond Egyptian ones. This timing may not be coincidence; what may have happened is stimulus diffusion.

Some Egyptian merchant and traveler found himself in the Persian Gulf, hoping to trade for various exotica, where he noticed the people there doing something really odd -- making marks in clay tablets that indicate words. Is it some sort of sorcery? But it seems interesting, and when he comes home, he starts drawing pictures that come to mind when he thinks of various words.

lpetrich

Noah's Flood can be dated from the Bible to approximately 2200 BCE, but there is absolutely zero evidence of a planetary-scale catastrophe at that date. No unusual sedimentation, nothing unusual in Greenland and Antarctice ice, no mass extinctions or shifts in flora and fauna (or were the flora and fauna precisely restored afterwards?), trees living through that time and showing nothing unusual (dendrochronology goes back to 8000 BCE), etc.

One argument offered for the Bible is that it mentions lots of cities and places and such, but the same can be said of historical novels, and a variety of myths and legends. For example, Greek mythology features a lot of places and items that fit late Mycenaean Greece, but that is not usually held to demonstrate the existence of the deities of Mt. Olympus. And historical-novel writers are considered to do a good job if they have their background details correct.

jess

I don't remember the date, but I know that they had their own 'buring of the library at Alexandris', and one of the emperors destroyed all records he did not like at some point...

damn... do I have to do research now?

lpetrich

That's Shih Huang Ti, who ordered most books burned in 213 BCE, so history can seem to start with his reign.

And he was two millennia after the alleged time of Noah's Flood.

Why not get some practice in doing so? Like using an Internet search engine to research your favorite subjects? I'm sorry if I seem sore, but when an Internet search engine like <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a> is only a few keystrokes away, I see little excuse for not using one.