Is the Holy Bible fictional

Answer 1

OpinionLarge parts of The Bible are clearly fictional, the truth of some parts is debatable, and a small amount is demonstrably true. Of course, many parts of the Bible are neither true nor untrue: for example, the Psalms are typically hymns of praise and so on. It is only possible to look at a few brief examples from each Testament.

To quote the early Church Father, Origen (On First Principles, 3.1.1) on the creation stories in Genesis: "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, "planted a paradise eastward in Eden", and set in it a visible and palpable "tree of life", of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life: and again that one could partake of "good and evil" by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events."

The Book of Daniel is regarded within Christianity as one of the most important books of the Old Testament, because of the alleged prophecies of Jesus made far back during the Babylonian Exile. Yet scholars point out that Daniel contains some fundamental errors about the history of the Babylonian Exile. While it does contain some apparent prophecies, these point to a second-century BCE date of authorship, not only because they become more accurate as the time of the Maccabees approaches, but because these prophecies suddenly cease just prior to momentous events that would have been prophesied if the Book were not fictional.

There is nothing known to support the historicity of the gospels. Belief in Jesus of Nazareth remains purely a matter of faith. In fact, the conservative Jesus Seminar has voted on each of the events and sayings attributed to Jesus, with many of them being rejected as clearly untrue. And the genealogies in Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel are not only mutually contradictory, but even contradict the Old Testament genealogy. Raymond E Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that the gospel genealogies of Jesus are unlikely to be literally true.

Scholars also point out that Acts of the Apostles contradicts the epistles of Paul to such an extent that the author of Acts could scarcely be someone who had known Paul.