Historical Proof That the Bible Must Be From God

Let us compare the historical accuracy of man’s best historians, with the Bible.  Has man ever shown the capability to be as accurate as the Bible?  Let us put historians to the test.

Imagine you are back in school and you are given a spelling test.  You have to name all the presidents of the United States, in order, and spell their names correctly.  How well would you do?  If you were considered one of the greatest historians who ever lived and you could go to the library to look up all the answers, you would expect to do very well.  But what if you misspelled over 90% of the names and left out 20% of the presidents.  And what if this was the best that anyone has ever done?

We have the names of kings and pharaohs, and the order in which they lived.  They are recorded by some of the most respected ancient historians (such as Herodotus, the Librarian at Alexandria, Ptolemy, et al.).  How well did they spell the names of the kings in their lists?  Did they get all the kings right?  Did they leave some of them out?  These famous historians misspelled the ancient kings’ names so badly that we cannot use their writings to correct anyone else’s mistakes.  We cannot even assume that the spelling used by the majority of these historians is the correct spelling.  So how do we know which one is right?

Think for a moment.  What is the chance of someone misspelling a king or pharaoh’s name while he’s alive, in the city in which he reigns, and on the monument made to him?  If a writing or monument was created while this king lived and in the city where he reigned, we would expect the spelling to be really close.  We would not expect the accuracy of ancient historians living a few hundred years later to be as good.  All the ancient historians, therefore, need to be compared with the monuments.  The fact is, in every single list of kings by the world’s best ancient historians, the kings’ names are so badly misspelled that we can barely recognize a few of them (Wilson 73).

How well did the secular historian Ptolemy do?  Out of the 22 kings that reigned over Babylon from Nabunasir (#1 above) to Nabu-na’id (#18 above) inclusive, Ptolemy only mentions 18 (and he only mentions 10 out of the 18 that reigned from Cyrus to Darius Codomannus).  The 18 names above are from the interlinear transliteration of the kings’ proper names. The first spelling is from the well respected historian Ptolemy, and the one underneath it is the correct spelling—the one from monuments erected during the time the king lived, many of which were under the king’s supervision.

The secular historians rarely spelled even one name correctly.  Ptolemy did not get one spelling correct in this list and also left out four kings.  How accurate is the Bible?  There are 29 kings mentioned in the Bible that have been found by archaeologists on monuments and documents made when those kings reigned.  We can also compare the lists of the order in which the kings reigned.  Wayne Jackson comments on this point:

If anyone talks against the Bible, ask him about the kings mentioned in it. There are 29 kings of Egypt, Israel, Moab, Damascus, Tyre, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia referred to, and ten different countries among these twenty-nine; all of which are included in the Bible accounts and those of the monuments. Every one of these is given his right name in the Bible, his right country, and placed in the correct chronological order (63).

Out of the 29 proper names, there are a total of 195 consonants (remember Hebrew did not have any vowels).  Only two or three consonants out of these 195 have any possibility of being in error.  Compare this to all the secular historians.  This research was done by Dr. Robert Dick Wilson and published his great volume, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament. 

But you might ask, “How is this comparison done between languages that do not even use the same alphabet?”  Transliteration is used.  Let me give you the definition of transliteration according to the Wikipedia, “transliteration is the practice of converting a text from one writing system into another in a systematic way. From an information-theoretical point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this objective, transliteration may define complex conventions for dealing with letters in a source script which do not correspond with letters in a goal script.

Here is an example of Transliteration (letter by letter) from Greek to English;

Example:  Greek                                  English Transliteration
                       Ελληνική Δημοκρατία          Ellēnikē Dēmokratia

Notice in the above example that you could transliterate the two words back from English to Greek and not have an error in spelling. Each letter in Greek has a unique letter (or letter combination) in English and vice versa.

Transliteration and kings names on monuments prove once again that man has never written a book of history as accurate as the Bible.  When we can check the facts, the Bible turns out to be beyond the capabilities of man.

Wilson, Robert Dick. A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament. http://solid-ground-books.com

Jackson, Wayne. Biblical Studies in the Light of Archaeology. http://ChristianCourier.com

Our media and education system constantly ignore these proofs that the Bible must be from God.  And then they come up with good-sounding stories like a Hollywood script (evolution) and expect us to believe their theories.  The Bible has always been attacked by man and man’s attacks against the Bible have been proven wrong, generation after generation, for over 2000 years. Do we really think man cannot come up with new stories that seem to make the Bible seem wrong?  See the proofs that the Bible is miraculous at www.MiraculousBible.org (video tutorial and downloads with the technical documentation).  Examine the evidence!

“The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbor comes and examines him.” (Proverbs 18:17).

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The Bible has proven itself to be from God (Scientifically, Archaeologically, Historically, etc.). Have you seen the evidences? If we can be of any help, call 407-657-0657, or visit www.WhyBaptism.org and press the link “Noah’s Ark Model” (small print near the top of the page), to see pictures of our 16 foot model of Noah’s Ark, or press the “Creation Videos” link for information on Creation versus Evolution and America’s Silencing of God.