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> the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source...

Going to need a source for that.

> Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years

To an extent. 95%+ of the story is false, apart from there (probably) was a big flood. But the majority if the story is false.

As with most of the stories in the bible, they tied them into some real events to ground them to the people, to myths of the age, then wove into them a fantasy story perhaps with enough grounding to reality to state "based on a true story", but probably not even that

I personally wouldn't have used the Bible as an example, but...

I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality.

I mean, the way I see it:

There are stories from a decade ago 'based on a true story' and if you look at our modern 'myths', like a movie based on a true story, generally they are very loosely based on the true story.

And that is with our modern ability to document and review what happened in the past.

These stories were oral tradition for hundreds of years before being written.

The fact that they have any basis left is amazing and a testament to the powerful events that resonated through history. It's a testament to the ability of humans to pass on information in a uni directional time dimension.

* I'm completely non-religious.

> I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality.

Why wouldn't they? You're going to want to pass on interesting stories. And what other means would they have had to transfer knowledge if not through oral tradition? It would have been the only available medium. The stories deemed interesting or important would have been the way people would have entertained each other.

The other thing to keep in mind is that with these stories we can suffer from historical pareidolia - where if the parts of the story fit the truth just enough we assume that must be the basis. I don't know if that's always the case.

Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean. 400 years = 20 generations. How accurate is the retelling of things that happened just 5 or 10 years ago... and for which pictures, books and video exist for evidence? We are in the post modern era where we have to make distinctions like personal truth and objective truth.

Amazement comes when reality exceeds expectations.

If this isn't just the case of pareidolia or cherry picking data:

It seems I see maintaining an oral history that retains any connection to reality over hundreds of years as amazing.

That is because I see human communication as highly flawed, even in today's day where recording and reproduction are easy. Also, think of education; how much more standardized and advanced it is today and still people have a hard time passing things on accurately.

Some people think of human communication as less flawed than I do. So I guess there would be no amazement for them.

> Why wouldn't they is already in my first post: play broken phone in school and see what I mean.

Broken phone is you listening to a message whispered once to you, and there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different. These stories would have been told to you over and over again until you know it by heart. They would naturally get embellished, and that's what we see - floods cover the earth men become gods, mountain peaks become heaven.

It's also important to note that, while we don't know events from 5 to 10 years ago off by heart, we all remember where we were when 9/11 happened - those are the sorts of events that would have been passed down. And really, all we get out of these stories is the equivalent to "9/11 happened" - many of the stories lose all other details.

For instance, there's a general consensus that Noah's Ark is based upon a flood myth shared by many different cultures is drawn from a Mesopotamian precursors, and seems to stem from ~2000 BCE. There are a bunch of retellings with a bunch of different details - there's heroes and gods, but the water varies from "killing everything on Earth" to "a river flooding", and was due to sin, or overpopulation, or just the caprices of the Gods.

That does sound like what would happen if you were playing telephone.

Again, reality - expectations = our reaction to what we see.

You seem to feel your version of expectations are better tuned so that when we subtract them from reality it is what you expected.

I see this as amazing. Again, that has to be because I see human communication more flawed than you do. And that is fine. Personally, I think you do a lot of hand waving when you say something like "there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition maintenance. Especially when you consider wars, famine, mass migrations, etc.

But alas, it's different expectations and and given that you aren't amazed, your expectations are apparently more accurate (as long as those expectations were truly held before the proof was shown)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition

There's plenty of research and precedent for it.

>"there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition //

We actually have some confirmations where oral traditions weren't bawdlerised in Judaeo-Christian history -- if you look at how they adopted a system of rewarding verity (as Muslims do now, with learning their scripture by rote) then you can see how separated populations maintained the same stories, in the same form, without alteration of major factual points.

https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-... read from "When I entered graduate school".

> As with most of the stories in the bible, they tied them into some real events to ground them to the people, to myths of the age, then wove into them a fantasy story perhaps with enough grounding to reality to state "based on a true story", but probably not even that

To the extent that the bible is inaccurate, it's certainly less a conspiracy to mislead and more a gradual loss of accuracy due to being passed down generations orally before eventually being written down.

EDIT: I’m perplexed that this is a controversial opinion. What evidence is there that supports a conspiracy explanation?

cui bono

It's obviously debatable - but we know that there was a huge flood at the end of the Ice age that would have raised the sea level considerably in a relatively short period. This is about 12,500 years ago. There is also evidence in India, and in the Indian ocean, for civilisation there at that time. And finally that particular myth of a huge flood is found in pretty much every culture.

So maybe there was a guy called Noah, maybe there wasn't. But I strongly suspect there was an actual world wide flood within the mythic memory of our species.

I expect some time since we began using speech to tell stories there was something considered to be a great flood somewhere. Either that's true or you've got a Russell's teapot situation anyways.

In both cases it doesn't make the story of Noah's ark true.

> Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends.

Do you have a source for that? My undergrad education is in history, and I am not aware of any attempt to get rid of bible-based histories. Are there attempts to look at the actual historicity of the events and to place them in their appropriate context? Absolutely, but there's no attempt to simply get rid of the histories.

I can’t provide one, but maybe I can deduce what the author was trying to say.

Religion obviously causes biases, and those biases could inhibit scientific process.

In popular culture, most people think of scientists as atheists and that they try to disprove one side vs. comparing them in an unbiased fashion.

That's making a lot of assumptions about the nature of historical research. I believe people are mistaking "trying to find other evidence for claims" as being synonymous with "trying to get rid of".

When you put the authors of the bible in their historical context many are removed via proximity or time from the actual events described (for instance, Paul didn't know Jesus before his crucifixion, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written 60-110 years later), and so there's is going to be a search for primary sources that corroborate what was said.

Correct. I mistakenly said author, and was referring dalbasal’s comment.

My point was that people (on both sides of this issue) do mistake fact checking with agenda when it comes to religion because of the polarizing nature of the topic.

I don't know about generalizations across all "modern historians" but Biblical Minimalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_minimalism) was a big trend in near Eastern archaeology. They had/have legit criticism of how modern definitions/attitudes taint our interpretation of the archaeological record.

But...ultimately, that view ignores that many of the places (and even some of the people) of the Biblical narrative from the 9th century BCE seem to roughly match the archeological record.

And even before that the record is simply incomplete or mixed, rather than directly contradicting the Biblical era of prophets and early kings.

For example, at the Elah Fortress site (10th century BC), there were no pig bones (unlike Philistine sites) and a fragmentary inscription that at least resembles the Israelite culture depicted by the Bible:

1 you shall not do [it], but worship (the god) [El] 2 Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an] 3 [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and] 4 the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king 5 Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

This isn't evidence for the Bible (which makes lots of other unprovable magical claims) but rather evidence that parts of the Bible do accurately convey information about an ancient society.

I'm not well versed in archaeology by any means, but based upon that Wikipedia article it seems to be a school of thought arguing that the old testament can't necessarily be treated as a primary source of truth - we already know that when we compare and contrast the stories in Kings Vs Chronicles, they were clearly written by different people at different times with different agendas, and the facts in each don't agree. They may be both representing some similar baseline truth, but they are looking through different lenses. This comes back to having to try and interpret the stories of the bible in their historical (or in this case archaeological) contexts.

All that being said, I'm pretty sure we agree with eachother.

Searching for Atlantis is as non-crazy as it has been for even longer.

I'm pretty sure that Atlantis was found a long time ago.

As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlanti... summarizes, the historical evidence of Atlantis is in Plato. And if we assume an easy to make factor of 10 misreading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Plato's description fits the known destruction of Minoan civilization by the Theran volcano.

Yeah, not as glamorous as space aliens. But it fits all known evidence, including archeological.

The franks also held to be descendants of the trojans, who lived in modern-day turkey:

https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of...

Was reading recently about viking trips to North America (c 1100 AD?), which they surprising called Vinland. Grapes are not viable in north eastern Canada, which indicates that they traveled quite far south.

Unless of course, like Greenland and Iceland, the naming was a marketing ploy.

It's my impression that the vikings were operating some logging camps in North America, so a marketing ploy to get more laborers seems plausible.

vine grape apple melon where/are all just words for 'fruit' at some stage / in some dialect.

C'mon, the Bible is the book of grossly exaggerated stories for moralistic purposes to be charitable. Yeah the authors referred to things that might have happened but they are as reliable as my 4yo retelling his day.

Sounds like a well-read (in both the Bible and History) point /s

What part of that sentence makes you think I don't know either? Would you say the Bible is particularly accurate or reliable as an historical source or are you accusing my son of being a reliable narrator?