History & the Bible
By Gregory Kouki

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus caused a stir when He forgave the sins of a paralytic.  As the scribes noted, forgiving sins was God’s privilege, not man’s.  Further, how could anyone know if Jesus was telling the truth?  It’s easy to make claims about an invisible realm that can’t be tested.

      Jesus understood this, so He gave the people some tangible evidence.  He said, “‘In order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic—‘I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.’” (Mk. 2:10-11) 

      This supernatural healing was an historical event, what Jesus’ biographers called an “attesting miracle.”  Jesus gave them something they could see in the physical realm to substantiate a claim He was making about something they couldn’t see in the spiritual realm.  History proved religion.  Facts substantiated faith.

      The historical record in the Hebrew Bible serves the same purpose.  The great redemptive act in the history of the Jews was their escape from slavery in Egypt.  In the writings of Moses we find an historical record of the events leading up to this exodus. 

      If we could show that these events took place largely as described in this account—that ten plagues culminating in the death of the firstborn of Ramses II shook the foundation of the greatest nation on earth at the time, and that the Hebrews then escaped across the Red Sea with the Egyptian army destroyed in its wake—wouldn’t it be fair to say this history has “religious” significance.

      The record itself claims as much.  In Exodus 9:14 we find this statement:  “For this time I will send all My plagues on you and your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is no one like Me in all the earth.” Once again, a series of observable, historical events (plagues) were meant to verify unobservable, spiritual truths.

      There’s a reason the Bible is a record of history and not merely a list of religious beliefs.  God has tied religious claims—which can’t easily be tested—to historical events—which can be verified to a significant degree. 

      By their very nature the events of the Bible have ramifications for transcendent truth.  If Jesus rose from the dead as a point of historical fact, intellectual honesty requires we not dismiss it as an interesting but meaningless fact of history.  Instead, we are forced to concede with the apostle Paul that Jesus of Nazareth was “declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.”