One of our most fondly remembered homeschool outings was a visit to the traveling exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences back in 2008 when the kids were in their early teens. It was particularly exciting for me because it had been a hobby, an avocation really, to read Ancient Near East history for the previous twenty five years to try to get an understanding of what we really know about the events that transpired in the Old and New Testaments. Of course the New Testament and the events surrounding Jesus’ time here on Earth or the most well attested events in antiquity as represented by the documents available to us today and the proximity in time of those documents to the actual events. As part of our world view studies in homeschool, we studied all these things carefully and it was nice to see the artifacts themselves. That this exhibit arrived in Raleigh was coincident with our studies was truly serendipitous.
The Old Testament is so far removed from us that, historically speaking, it is a lot more difficult to find the level of verification for those events from either the available documentary evidence or from archeology. Still, there not nothing and what there is continues to confirm the biblical record. I was very happy to find a couple of articles that talked to all these issues in the last couple of days. The first is a blog post about the way the canon of the New Testament was selected. It put into one article what it took me a long time to figure out reading about it piecemeal. The upshot is hat 22 of the books of the New Testament, the gospels, the Acts, Paul’s epistles (including Hebrews), I Peter, I John and Revelations have always been universally recognized as canonical. In addition, things like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of John, etc. have been considered to be heretical from antiquity. There are a couple of other categories that describe how the canon got to 27 books and no more. I highly recommend this concise article titled An Essential Key to Understanding the Development of the NT Canon.
In addition to that, I found a blog post titled Historical Reliability of the Old Testament: Resources for Study. It is a series of links to articles about what we do know and what we don’t know, historically speaking, about the Old Testament. The articles talk about the controversies, the archeology, etc. of the Exodus, the Babylonian exile and other events and persons in the Old Testament. I good survey of what we know today and a good place to start (from the list) is this article by Peter J. Williams.
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