Is the Bible Full of Myths?

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A listener's friend told her the Bible is full of myths, and all she could say back was "no, it isn't." In this episode, John, Mary Jo, and Blaine walk through a better response, starting with a question that puts the claim back on the skeptic. Then they get specific: a tunnel carved through solid rock under Jerusalem that John has personally walked through, a six-sided clay prism where an Assyrian king brags about trapping Hezekiah "like a bird in a cage," and a list of facts about Jesus recorded by ancient writers who were openly hostile to Christianity. The evidence for the Bible's historical reliability is more concrete than most believers realize, and this conversation gives you the pieces to use it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is a book that is tied to the world we actually live in. I made Hezekiah like a bird in a cage.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

This passage, when I was not a believer, just blew me away.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Okay, we've got another great question. So this one comes from Alice in Miami, and she said, a friend of mine told me they thought the Bible was full of myths, and I didn't know how to respond other than to say, no, it isn't. So, John, how can she respond to that question? It's a very common question.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

It is a common question, right? I think there's a lot of people that feel like the Bible's just a collection of sort of legends or fables, those kinds of things. They don't really match up with reality. So I I probably the place that I would begin if someone said the Bible's just full of myths, I I'd probably put it back on them. In other words, I'd say, oh, really? Like it it sounds like you're a little bit familiar with the Bible. Like, where are those places where you feel like you know there are myths in the Bible? Because it's I'd I'd want to do that for two reasons. First, I think, hey, they made the claim, right? They they were the ones that said the Bible's full of myths. So they should have to defend their position, right? I don't need to go into defense of my position right away. But probably more importantly is by their answer, I'm able to understand where their difficulties are. So what what are the stories exactly that they struggle with? Or in many cases, what I found is they don't actually know any specific stories that they're struggling with. They just have heard that the Bible's full of myths and they have uh you know taken that in for themselves. And so by asking them, you know, what myths do you find in the Bible, I get to understand where they're at. So uh that's probably where I would begin if I uh received a claim or a comment like this.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Aaron Powell What do people normally mean by myth when they pose a question like this?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Aaron Powell Well I think when they're talking about myth, they're there's they're saying it's something that didn't actually happen. It's a story, maybe with a meaning, and there might even be some value in the meaning of that story, but it's not about real people, real places, and real events.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Aaron Powell Yeah. Uh let's suppose that uh they don't have a specific reason why they believe the Bible's full of myths, but it's just something they've heard or suspected. Oh, and I think we want to spend most of our time here. What kind of information would you want to give to them to maybe show that the Bible is historically accurate and reliable?

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Well, the first thing I would say is it's really great that the Bible is testable. Like we're able to take what we read in the Bible and see if it matches up with uh records of history outside of the Bible. So many religious works are they're really just sort of moral statements or moral claims or stories or mythological figures. But the Bible is suggesting that, hey, such and such happened in such and such a place with these people, right? So we can go fact check it, right? Which is a really great thing that we're able to do that. And so if we're going to see that the Bible really isn't full of myths, what we want to do is can we corroborate, again, these people, places, and events with outside history? And I think that can give people a whole lot of confidence that the Bible is not full of myths. For sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Yeah, and I I think sometimes um going back to what you originally said, we kind of need to push people a little bit, like where is this coming from? Um, because I think people are more, when they hear myth, they're more influenced by the work of like Joseph Campbell, the the uh power of myth, or they're you know, the hero of with a thousand faces, his works. Um I think they're and then and then the movie Zeitgeist, oh, the movie Zeitgeist on YouTube has influenced so many people. So if they don't really know where it's coming from, I think that's part of the reason is it's just become kind of our um, I'm gonna use a nerdy term, it's become part of our cultural milieu to say that the Bible is full of myths and they don't actually know where it's coming from. But when you look at the Bible, like you're saying, um, you've got stuff I I just have to, I have to do this. You guys. Um, first of all, uh Peter says to us in 2 Peter 1.16, he says, we did not follow cleverly devised stories. Um and the word there is mythos, the Greek word for myth. We're not, but we were eyewitnesses to the majesty and power of Jesus. Like we were eyewitnesses to this. So he is drawing a contrast in the scripture between what you guys know as these myths and what we saw. And then this passage, when I was not a believer, just blew me away. So here's Luke, and Luke's just like reporting stuff, right? He says, now in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was the Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was a Tetrarch of the region of Iritrea, and Trachonidas, and Lysanius was the Tetrarch in Ably. I mean, and it keeps going. Look at all these things. That's just a tiny little thing, and you could check all that. Was there Pontius Pilate? Was there um Tiberius Caesar? Did he reign for 15 years? Like, so there's places and times you can locate this in history. That blew me away. I was not expecting the Bible to be full of times and places that are testable. Testable.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

That's right. Yeah. I mean, that's a great, that's a great passage for that because it does. It just it's one right after the other. So let's go, let's take a look at it. Yeah and see whether it's myth or not myth. That's right. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

And the the difficult thing about this question in the limited amount of time we have on a podcast like this is that there are so many places we could go in the Bible to explore and corroborate. But what where do you want to go for the purpose of this conversation, John? What do you want to look at?

SPEAKER_01 5:51

I I find myself going to uh two particular peoples and events, um, just because they're they're easy for me to explain. So one of them has to do with an Old Testament figure, and one of them has to do with a New Testament figure. So the Old Testament figure is is Hezekiah. So let's paint the picture a little bit. Israel was this grand nation under Solomon, but after Solomon, it divided into these two different nations, really because people weren't following God. And uh, when the nations divided, at that point in time there, there were all these forces from the outside that were beginning to press onto them. Well, a little bit down the road, one of the forces from the outside that's really pressing down on these two nations uh that had come from the unified nation of Israel was Assyria. And Assyria was a marauding, violent, vicious um uh empire. And they came into the northern kingdom, uh Israel, and destroyed it completely. And then they started coming into the southern kingdom, which is the kingdom that Hezekiah reigned over. He was the king in Jerusalem. And we're told an awful lot in the Bible, actually in three different places in Kings and Chronicles and in Isaiah, about Hezekiah and his interactions with the Assyrian forces and the Assyrian kings and commanders. And we're even told about the cities that the Assyrians came into and that they laid siege around Jerusalem. And so the question is like, do we have any evidence for that, right? Anything out there that's corroborating these events? And we have all kinds of evidence. First of all, we have a ebola. Ebola is a little clay seal that was used to authenticate and uh uh protect uh scrolls. Perhaps a leader was giving out a message or a command and it would be rolled up, and then their clay seal would be put on the scroll to keep it closed. And impressed on that, on that little bit of clay was the leader's signet ring. So Hezekiah would press his signet ring into this little clay and uh then send off the message. Well, we have discovered bolas, okay, or bolae, I should say, okay, but a bola of Hezekiah with his seal on it, right? His name and his seal on it. So Hezekiah was a real person. We've also seen things like, okay, if if there's this kingdom coming in that's going to take you out, like you're going to protect yourself. So are there any is there any evidence? What does the Bible say about what Hezekiah did to prepare himself? And is there any evidence of that? Well, one of the things that Hezekiah did is he he broadened the wall. Okay, if you've got a wall around your city and then there's these forces coming in, like, let's make our wall even thicker, right? And so you can go to Jerusalem today, and it's actually called the broad wall. It's it's this addition to the wall that was already there that's like 23 feet wide. And it was made hastily, they know that because it's not this beautifully hewn rock. It's just like throw any rocks that we can in there to make this wall thicker, right? It's there. And then, right, the the water for the city was from the spring outside of the walls. Well, if there's a siege around the city, like they would die in a hurry if they didn't have water. So they need a tunnel to bring that water from the outside the city to inside the city. And the Bible tells us about that tunnel. But a tunnel under the city through pure rock, like could that really be there? Well, it is there. They have discovered the tunnel of of Hezekiah, and I've walked in that tunnel, it still has water going through it. So I walked uh through that tunnel with water up to my shins. So so this tunnel that isn't a myth, it it actually happened. And then we see uh other evidence from the records of the Assyrians. So King Sennacherib of Assyria uh kept some pretty nice records for us, which is great, in a couple of different forms. So one of the forms was uh this relief panel, which is like the stone wall with carved figurines on it. And it's it's considered to be like the most detailed uh uh depiction of a siege in all of ancient history. I mean, it's showing the Assyrians come in and it's taking off you know slaves and it's killing other people and um of the city up in flames, you know, not of Jerusalem, but of another city called Lakeish, which was a big city that they captured right before they came to Jerusalem. And uh we see that in the Bible as well. We see them attacking Lakeish. We see a siege ramp against Lakeish. We found the siege ramp. I mean, there's just all kinds of evidence about these events. And then one in particular that I love, we call it the Sennacherib Prism. It's a clay uh six-sided object. It's probably it's less than two feet tall. And uh he made several of these little prisms, and around it, around this prism is the history of that uh time and period. And he talks about taking Lakeish and and coming against uh you know the Jewish people, and then it says, I made Hezekiah like a bird in a cage. Like the Bible talks about uh Sennacherib you know creating the siege, and so does Sennacherib's account, like I made Hezekiah like a bird in a cage. And so again, what we see in the Bible is these accounts of of Hezekiah being attacked by uh Sennacherib and the Assyrians, and what we see in the history and archaeological finds is whoa, there there it is too. Like this isn't myth, this actually happened.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah, and I love those are great examples because you can see the depth and the detail on somebody like Hezekiah, who maybe most people haven't even heard of. Exactly. And there's so much more. I mean, there's so much more we could go into, but I've often found it helpful to think in terms of the Bible as a story and and being a story in a real world, like you're describing, and there's evidence it's a real world. But you think of this question, and sometimes it comes from, I think, a perspective where people view the Bible as like Narnia or like Star Wars, or you know, it's a story about a land far, far away, and all the characters and it's all not real. This is a book that is tied to the world we actually live in, and we have some really good reasons to believe that. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

I think one of the things that's important to consider when you hear archaeological evidence and you're kind of like, okay, yeah, um, is that one of the things that we're saying philosophically is that these things are located in time and history and space. So this is a big difference from when you read the Egyptian myths like the book of the dead. Um, there's a lot of things that are happening and going on in places we could never know because it's in the afterlife or it's in some, you know, the pre-before the earth exists. And if they mention any places, it's rarely anything so specific as what Luke is doing here. Um rather, it's like uh the Nile, you know, or something like that, where it's just a general area. So what we have from the scripture is this very detailed account. And that's what really struck me about Luke again, is that he's so detailed and just unapologetically so on places, times, people in history, because they are real. Paul says that in First Corinthians, like you could about the resurrection of Jesus. You could still talk to the witnesses today because they are around, right? There's the 500 witnesses he mentions. So these writers of the Bible were assuming these things were uh verifiable. And that, I mean, it's not every single thing in there, but there's so much in there that distances it from pagan mythology or from Greek mythology. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Yeah. In fact, I would say that there are times where details are put in the Bible, it's pretty clear by the writers so that people could check them out.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Right. So that so that people would know that this really took place.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

What we're really getting after here is not just times and places in history, but we are getting to theological truths that you can't touch and feel and prove in a certain sense. But if we can have uh a confidence that what the Bible teaches us regarding history and archaeology and people and all the things we're talking about, if that's all true, then we can take seriously its claims about theological truths and things that we can't touch and feel and and prove in in that same kind of way. So I I want to you said you got a New Testament example.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

And I think that person is Jesus, right? So um, Jesus, we gotta we gotta talk on Jesus. So what do we have on Jesus, right? So is Jesus a mythological figure? Um was he just a minor rabbi that you know has somehow gotten uh pushed to the forefront and all these legends around him? So I I think it's really valuable for people to understand what we have about Jesus. So fortunately, um in addition to what we have in the scriptures, which I think Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospels are historical accounts. I think we can rely on them as much as we can any other ancient historical work. But beyond that, we have a lot of people writing about Jesus, mentioning things about Jesus who weren't in the Christian camp. So we have several sources in the first 150 years after Jesus that mention things about Jesus, and these people, again, were hostile towards Christians. In some cases, they were killing Christians, or they were uh creating an apologetic against Christianity, or whatever the case might be. So some of those people are Josephus or Mar Bar Serapian or Pliny the Younger or Setunius or Thallus, Lucian, uh Celsus. So just a number of people that were um uh writing things about Jesus. And and I'm just gonna list some of the things that they tell us about Jesus. So again, this isn't from the Bible, this is from people who are hostile towards Christianity. They have no reason to sort of prop up who Jesus is or any legend about Jesus. They tell us that he lived in Judea, that he had a brother named James, that he actually did some things that are kind of hard to explain, like miraculous, um, that he was a teacher of wisdom, that he was called the Messiah by his followers. Not he wasn't called the Messiah a couple hundred years later by church councils, he was called the Messiah by his followers. He was crucified under the direction of Pilate uh during the reign of Tiberias. So they write about that. Uh he was reported as risen from the dead by his followers. Uh he was worshipped as God soon after his resurrection by his followers. So those are all things that are written by people that are hostile towards Christianity. And they're saying these things that align with what the scriptures have to say. So even when we look to a character like Jesus, who you could uh really fault Christians for sort of turning into this legendary figure, he's not legendary, right? Like I mean, in some ways he is legendary. Well, in terms of what you mean, legendary, right? But um he's not a legend, he's a real person who lived in a real place and experienced real things and had a real impact on people in his time and space and even to today.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

And is it correct to say that it's a pretty widely held belief today that he was a real person and all this stuff? I mean, uh the person that would say Jesus never existed.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

No, I mean, even the great textual critic Bart Ehrman would say that Jesus was a real person.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

So if you're saying he was a legend, you're not you're out of alignment with like even non-Christian scholarship there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah, I think that's important in this conversation too for people to know because Jesus is the central figure of the Bible. The whole Bible's about him, and we know that he was a real person in all the things you just listed, plus a whole bunch of others, too, right? So if we can start there, we're starting with the central figure who is not a legend.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

That's right. Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Yeah, and I think some people, I'm gonna take this at just a slightly different turn from the archaeological into the uh literary. Some people think he's a um myth or a legend because they think Christianity is a copycat of all the other myths and legends. He's uh the savior figure that has existed throughout time and history, and the Christians just, you know, like rebranded him for their vibe. So what people will say is, you know, the Greeks had their myths and the Egyptians had their myths, and these are way before the Christians. Okay, this is before. And so they say, when you get Jesus that comes along, he's a copy of like the Egyptian god Horus or the Roman god Mithras. So um, in fact, comedian Bill Mars said that on the program, The View. Like to millions of viewers, he says, Jesus is just exactly like the story of Horace. Okay, well, there's a lot of problems with the theory. And uh, one is that um a lot of the things that they're saying are similar, like Jesus was a savior or messiah that we hear about him. Um they say, you know what, uh, these other guys were Messiah before that, but the language is uh the chronology is out of order. So after Christianity started influencing the pagan world, they start adopting some of the savior, messiah, these kind of terms. Um, so you get wrong chronology. So these similarities are backwards. They're borrowing from Christianity, not the other way around. And then what I don't want to go into, because this is so good and it's so much, is the supposed parallels, like virgin birth, uh, they're so bad about what they think could qualify for virgin birth that they just blow up the meaning of virgin birth altogether. So, like if you got a God that's jumping out of the underworld into this world via a cave and a rock, that's not a virgin birth, you guys. Stop saying that. And if the Christians were borrowing this Christ myth, they did a horrible job. Like they got nothing right, not even the basics. And in fact, when Paul talks to the Greek learned men, the men of Athens at the Areopagus in Acts 17, and he talks about the resurrection, they don't say, Oh, yeah, that's Horace. No, we've already heard this. This is Dionysus, this is the other. They say, What is this new teaching that you're bringing? They don't even recognize this uh philosophy, this story. So I think it's really important, like you can start building a really big case around archaeology, the New Testament reliability, things like that. And the uh it's not even the same belief going on there.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

That's right. That's right. Certainly not a copycat of these other myths that we have from history. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

So to wrap this up, why don't we talk about some resources? Because we've just touched the surface of what this is such a great subject, right? Uh the reliability of the Bible. So, what are some resources that you two might recommend? I'll start with you, John.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yeah, just a couple of resources that can help you get some of these facts you know to have in your backpack to be able to share with other people if they say, you know, the Bible's just full of myths. So one of them is a brand new book. Like I think it came out in the last week or so. So I have it though, I have it already. It's uh called Faith Affirming Findings, and it's ball by Paul Weaver, and it just outlines 50 different archaeological finds and tells you their significance, how it ties into the Bible, um, where you can actually go see them today, that kind of thing. So Faith Affirming Findings by uh by Paul Weaver. And then uh the other one in regards to Jesus in particular would be Cold Case Christianity by Jay Warner Wallace. So that will help you really see that, hey, this figure of Jesus is not a mythological figure.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

Yeah. Um I I think this is the right name on this book. It's putting Jesus in his place. Uh, and it's uh, I think that's Ed Komashewski. It might be Rob Bowman as well. And then um the Center for the Study of the New Testament manuscripts. That's Dan Wallace's uh organization, and it's really important work that he's doing because he's going around and uh photographing all the extant copies of the Bible, and then he's cross-referencing them for reliability. So the Center for the Study of the New Testament manuscripts. And I forgot the big ones, Mike Lacona and Bart Ehrman. If you watch, if you want to really get into this stuff, go watch some of their debates because those are the two heavyweights.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah. And I might throw in at the end here too that all of this is really, really helpful. But in the context of evangelism, too, I think we do have to keep in mind that at some point we we really can't argue people into believing the Bible is the word of God, is is his word. You know, there's a there is really a difference, right, between okay, it's historically reliable and and is it actually God's word? And it it shares something that's important for me. And so in the context of all this, I just would encourage everybody to be reliant upon the Lord and the conversations that you're having with people who are asking you questions and be prayerful and be praying that God would open their eyes to not just the historical reliability of the Bible, but that the Jesus that it's speaking of, that's that's the real Jesus in helping them to come to know him. Thanks for listening to the Reach Podcast. If you've got a question that you'd like to submit, go do that on reachothers.org slash podcast. And that whole website, reachothers.org, was developed by Search Ministries, which is our parent organization. And Search has been doing relational evangelism in the United States for almost 50 years, and we want to give the best of what we've learned away to you, and that's what we've done on reachothers.org. Hope you enjoy it. Come back and listen to the next episode.