How Do We Judge the Trustworthiness of Ancient Texts?
6 Criteria for Capturing Historical Truth
Science matters less than history. And Iโll prove it to you.
I once had an atheist argue God doesnโt exist because God is like dragons. Then he suggested thereโs no proof dragons exist, and you (me) donโt believe in dragons, so you shouldnโt believe in God.
Eventually he said:
โNow, letโs say there is a book written 2000 years ago which claims that 7 headed dragons existedโฆ
Would you take that seriously?
How exactly would you investigate that ancient well โdocumentedโ claim?โ
Those questions deserve attention. And are easily debunked with counter-questions:
Why shouldnโt we take stories of 7-headed dragons seriously?
How do you know there is no proof of 7-headed dragons?
How do you know I donโt believe in 7-headed dragons?
How do you know God is like a 7-headed dragon?
What do you mean by โproofโ?
The last counter-question is most important because it signifies the underlying implication of the atheistโs statement above:
How do we verify the authenticity and trustworthiness of ancient or so-called mythical texts?
Historians have wrestled with it for centuries. Entire disciplines formed around it.
Methods were devised, refined, challenged, revised, then refined again. Painstakingly. Because fields such as history, philosophy, theology, sociology, and so on donโt bend to empiricism like modern science. They deal with one-time, unrepeatable events or concepts.
The standards of abstract study, therefore, must be much more rigorous and demanding to determine truth.
Over time, historians hammered down a set of shared criteria for evaluating historical documents of all kinds, especially ancient and myth-laden ones.
Craig A. Evans summarizes the main six of those standards in Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels, from which everything below is derived.
Iโm going to take you through them one by one, summarize them in my own words, and discuss their implications and applications to help you build confidence in both history and God.
The 6 Criteria for Historical Authenticity
Hereโs a list of the key criteria followed by all credible historians:
Historical Coherence
Multiple Attestation
Embarrassment
Dissimilarity
Cultural Background
Coherence or Consistency
These criteria enjoy wide acceptance across disciplines. Each serves a distinct role, but none functions in isolation.
Meeting at least three or more lends tremendous weight to the acceptance of a piece of evidence.
Below is what each standard means, how to use them, and an application of the criteria to the atheistโs 7-headed dragon analogy:
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