A Track Record That Speaks for Itself

The most important thing to understand is that the Bible has been vindicated, over and over again, in precisely the areas where critics were most confident it was wrong. And the courtesy we would extend to any historical document applies here: when a source has proved reliable time after time, the honest reader gives it the benefit of the doubt where questions remain.

Consider the remarkable career of Robert Dick Wilson, professor of Middle Eastern languages at Princeton and then Westminster Seminary from 1900 to 1930. As a young man, Wilson mapped out a forty-five year plan for his life’s work: fifteen years mastering twenty-six ancient languages, fifteen years comparing around a hundred thousand quotations from those languages with the text of the Old Testament, and a final fifteen years publishing his findings. His conclusion, after a lifetime of painstaking research, was striking: the biblical text had victoriously met every test that documentary evidence could throw at it.

Abraham, Ur, and an “Uninhabitable Desert”

Abraham was a favourite target of nineteenth-century sceptics. The Bible says he came from Ur of the Chaldees and spent time in Haran — but scholars insisted there was no evidence of any civilisation in those regions around 2000 BC. The whole area, they said, was a vast, uninhabitable desert, and Abraham, if he existed at all, was nothing more than a primitive nomadic tribesman.

Then in 1854, the ruins of Ur were discovered. Between 1922 and 1934, Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the site — about 120 miles north of Basra in modern Iraq — and uncovered a highly advanced civilisation that predated Abraham by centuries. Woolley found a seventy-foot ziggurat, a massive temple, shops, law courts, schools, and houses with colour-washed plaster ceilings. Thousands of official records revealed a bustling city of merchants trading as far as Syria and the Persian Gulf. The inhabitants even understood Pythagoras’ theorem — fifteen hundred years before Pythagoras.

Moses and the Question of Literacy

Critics also insisted that Moses could not have written the first five books of the Bible because writing was virtually unknown in the fifteenth century BC. Then in 1904, the Assyriologist A. H. Sayce demonstrated that writing was far more ancient than Moses. Egypt and Babylonia in Moses’ day were nations of scribes and readers, with schools, libraries, and a rich literary culture. In fact, the Babylonia of Abraham’s time — six hundred years before Moses — was a more educated society than the England of George III.

William Ramsay and the Book of Acts

Perhaps the most dramatic story of all belongs to Sir William Ramsay, professor of classical art and architecture at Oxford, Regius Professor of Latin at Aberdeen, a founder member of the British Academy, and knighted in 1906 for his services to scholarship. As a student, Ramsay fully accepted the critical view: the Bible was historically unreliable, and the Book of Acts was fan fiction, cobbled together by an anonymous author long after the events it described.

Then Ramsay went to Turkey to do fieldwork — and everything he believed was overturned. Again and again, the historical accuracy of Luke’s writing was confirmed. Luke uses a bewildering range of titles for civic officials across the Roman Empire — proconsuls in Corinth and Cyprus, Asiarchs in Ephesus, politarchs in Thessalonica, the “first man” in Malta — and he gets every one of them right. For years, critics insisted that Thessalonica did not have politarchs; then first-century inscriptions were unearthed proving that it did.

Ramsay’s fieldwork led to his conversion. He became a Christian because the evidence forced him to conclude that the Bible was true and the scholars were wrong. His considered verdict on Luke was that he should be placed among the very greatest of historians.

The Bigger Picture

The testimony of experts reinforces the pattern. Nelson Glueck, one of the world’s leading authorities on Palestinian archaeology, stated that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference. Alan Millard, professor of Hebrew at Liverpool, concurred: nothing has ever been found which can be proved to contradict any statement of the Old Testament.

The contrast with other texts claiming historical authority is stark. Despite decades of aggressive archaeological exploration supported by enormous resources, not a single piece of evidence has ever been found to support the historical claims of the Book of Mormon — not a city, not a coin, not a river, not a mountain. The Bible stands in a category of its own.

What About the Contradictions?

So what do we make of those awkward numbers — the 2,000 versus 3,000 baths, the 1,700 versus 7,000 horsemen? Two observations are worth making.

Both Numbers May Be True

The biblical authors were not careless. The Chronicler had the books of Kings and Samuel open in front of him; if he wrote a different number, we should at least consider that he had a reason. It’s a little like asking “What was the score?” and receiving two different answers — one giving the result on the night, the other the aggregate over two legs. Or asking “When was the nation of Ireland born?” and hearing 1922, 1937, or 1949, depending on which milestone the speaker has in mind. Not every apparent contradiction is an actual one. The 3,000 baths may have been the basin’s maximum capacity, while the 2,000 was its normal operating level.

Copying Errors in an Age of Handwriting

Hebrew numbers were written with simple stroke-marks followed by the word for “thousand.” Two strokes for 2,000; three for 3,000. In centuries of copying by hand, it would be remarkably easy for a scribe to add or omit a single stroke, or for a smudge on the parchment to obscure the difference. The original was correct; the copy introduced a minor variation. This is exactly what happened with the so-called “Wicked Bible” of the seventeenth century, which omitted the word “not” from the seventh commandment. Nobody concluded that the Bible endorsed adultery — they recognised a printer’s error and moved on.

A Shrinking List, a Growing Confidence

One scholar has noted that the list of alleged contradictions in the Bible once numbered around a hundred. Today it has been reduced to just a handful, as new archaeological and textual discoveries continue to vindicate the biblical record. If the direction of evidence were the opposite — if every new dig and every new inscription threw up fresh problems — we might have cause for concern. But the trajectory points only one way: the more we learn, the more trustworthy the Bible proves to be.

Perhaps the remaining handful of difficulties will never be fully resolved this side of eternity. But there is more than enough evidence to strengthen the faith of believers and to make even the most committed sceptic pause and, as it were, doubt their doubts. The Bible is not a “very inaccurate history book.” It is a remarkably, demonstrably, consistently accurate one — and that matters, because a God whose Word can be trusted on matters of fact can also be trusted on matters of life and death.