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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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