Are there historical errors in the Bible?
-The Gospels tell the story of a herd of possessed pigs in the town of Gedara, who run off a cliff and into the sea. Gedara is thirty miles from any sea.
-The Gospel of Mark gets the geography of Israel totally wrong. It mentions travelling from from Tyre by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilea, which would be like travelling from New York to Washington by way of Los Angeles. He mentions a town called Dalmanutha which does not exist.
-When was Jesus born? According to Luke, it was during the reign of the Roman governor Quirinius, during a census ordered by Augustus throughout the whole world.According to both Luke and Matthew it was also during the reign of king Herod "the Great."The problem is that Herod died in 4 B.C.E., and this was fully ten years before Quirinius’ census. Furthermore, during Herod’s reign, no Roman census could have been held in his territory, which included both Judaea and Galilee, the locations of both Bethlehem and Nazareth. Herod would have collected his own taxes, and given tribute to the Romans. Lastly, the existence of a census throughout the whole empire is contrary to the practice of the Romans, who collected taxes province by province, often subcontracting the process to "publicans."
-Though Luke 1:5 dates the birth of Jesus in the "days of Herod, King of Judea," who died in 4 B.C., he wants the journey from Galilee to Bethlehem to have occurred in response to a census called when "Quirinius was governor of Syria." As historians know, "the one and only census conducted while Quirinius was legate in Syria affected only Judaea, not Galilee, and took place in A.D. 6-7, a good ten years after the death of Herod the Great." In his anxiety to relate the Galilean upbringing with the supposed Bethlehem birth, Luke confused his facts. Indeed, Luke’s anxiety has involved him in some real absurdities, like the needless ninety mile journey of a woman in her last days of pregnancy – for it was the Davidic Joseph who supposedly had to be registered in the ancestral village, not the Levitical Mary. Worse yet, Luke has been forced to contrive a universal dislocation for a simple tax registration: who could imagine the efficient Romans requiring millions in the empire to journey scores of hundreds of miles to the villages of millennium-old ancestors merely to sign a tax from! Needless to say, no such event ever happened in the history of the Roman empire, but Micah 5:2 must be fulfilled.
-In the nineteenth century an eminent scholar, Rabbi Wise, searched the records of Pilate’s court, still extant, for evidence of this trial. He found nothing.
-There are many similarities between stories about Jesus and contemporary myths of Pagan godmen such as Mithras, Apollo, Attis, Horus and Osiris-Dionysus, leading to conjectures that the Pagan myths were adopted by some authors of early accounts of Jesus to form a syncretism with Christianity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus cache version)
-Crucifixion was a slow death. It usually lasted several days. Death followed from exhaustion, inability to respire property as a result of being in an upright position or attacks by wild animals. Why did Jesus, who was a fit and healthy man used to walking the countryside for long distances, die so quickly in only a matter of a few hours?
-Vinegar is often considered to have a stimulating effect, rather similar to smelling salts. Why, in Jesus’s case, did it suddenly lead to his death? (John 19:29)
-The three Synoptic Gospels have Jesus being arrested and condemned by the Sanhedrin on the night of the Passover. This could not be real history because the Sanhedrin, by Judaic law, were forbidden to meet over Passover. The Gospels state that the arrest and trial occurred at night, but the Sanhedrin “were forbidden to meet at night, in private houses, or anywhere outside of the precincts of the temple
-Another historical impossibility in the crucifixion story is the removal of the body of Jesus from the cross. According to Roman law at the time, a crucified man/woman was denied burial. The person was left to the elements, birds, and animals, which completed the humiliation of this form of execution.
Yes, a few. But more often there are completely fabricated pseudohistorical accounts, like most of the history of the Jewish people.
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