Historicity: Was He Real?
Did George Washington chop down his father’s cherry tree?
No. That story was made up by one of his first biographers, a traveling preacher and book salesman named Mason Locke Weems, and it first appeared in the 1806 edition of his book, years after Washington died (Mount Vernon).
So was George Washington real?
Of course he was. Nobody hears that the cherry tree is fiction and concludes that Washington never existed, or never led an army, or never became president. We easily hold two thoughts at once: the man was real, and some of the stories about him are not.
Yet when the same thing is suggested about Moses or Jonah, it can feel like an attack on God. This page is about why that happens, and about a better set of words and questions for talking about scripture and history without anyone feeling ambushed.
The two-question test
When someone asks, “Do you believe in Abraham?” they are usually asking two different questions mashed into one.
- Was this a credible historical figure? Did a real person by this name likely exist?
- Is the description of them accurate? Did the things the story tells us actually happen as told?
Those are separate questions, and they can have different answers. Achilles may well have been modeled on a great warrior, but his mother was not a sea goddess. King Solomon was probably a real king, but the biblical descriptions of his wealth and wisdom look exaggerated. Just because I don’t believe everything written about someone doesn’t mean I think they didn’t exist, or didn’t change the world.
I call this the two-question test, and it clears up an amazing amount of confusion.
Choose your words carefully
The second thing that helps is vocabulary. Some words in these conversations generate more heat than light.
Unhelpful words: real, true, literal. “Is the Bible true?” can mean a dozen different things. Is it true that it was written? That its moral teachings are wise? That every event in it happened? Two people can argue for an hour and never notice they’re answering different questions.
Gray-area words: bona fide, genuine, actual, factual, accurate. Usable, but slippery.
Helpful words:
- Historical actuality: the event really happened in time and space.
- Ahistorical: the story is not a record of events that happened, whatever its other value.
- Historically accurate: the account matches what we can otherwise establish about what happened.
- Credible historical figure: a person we have reasonable grounds to think existed.
- Authentic: the document’s origin is undisputed; it is what it claims to be.
Notice that none of these words is a verdict on whether a story is good, or inspired, or worth reading. That’s deliberate. Calling Jonah ahistorical says nothing about whether the book of Jonah is wise. I happen to think it is.
How history turns into legend
How does a real person become a legend? A few ways, and none of them requires anyone to lie.
Distance. For most of human history, few people could read or write. Stories were passed along by word of mouth, and oral tradition drifts. There were no objective historians in the modern sense. What matters most for a written account isn’t how old it is today, but how much time passed between the event and the writing.
That matters a great deal for the Old Testament. Scholars argue about the details, but mainstream scholarship holds that the first books of the Bible were written and edited over centuries, and many place their final form around the time of the Babylonian exile and the Persian period that followed, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE (overview). If Adam, Noah and Abraham lived when the traditional chronology puts them, that’s a gap of well over a thousand years between the event and the page.
Exaggeration. Each retelling sands off the ordinary parts and polishes the remarkable ones. Mythologizing can even begin while the subject is still alive.
Reverence. Once a community accepts that God worked a miracle, any doubt about whether it happened is heard as doubt about God’s power. The story becomes untouchable, so it can no longer be checked.
Running the test on the Bible
Here’s roughly how I sort some familiar figures. This is my own reading, not a scholarly consensus, and reasonable people place the lines differently.
- Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph of Egypt: ahistorical. I read them as legend and myth, as I explain in In the Beginning.
- Moses and Jonah: mixed, mostly ahistorical.
- David: probably a credible historical figure. An Aramaic inscription from the 9th century BCE, the Tel Dan stele, refers to the “House of David,” which most scholars read as a reference to his dynasty.
- Solomon: probably historical, but the descriptions are exaggerated.
- The later prophets and kings: more likely to be real people, because their books were written closer to their own time.
- Jesus: partial. I think it’s quite plausible that he was a real Jewish teacher who expected God to bring the world to an end soon, and whose followers formed a community to wait for his return. That is a common view among historians of early Christianity. The miracles, the virgin birth and the resurrection are a different matter, and history can’t confirm them.
The believer’s objection
The faithful response deserves a fair hearing. A believer might say: you’ve ruled out the miraculous before you started. If God exists and can part the sea, then “it couldn’t have happened” is an assumption, not a finding.
That’s fair. The historical method can’t prove a miracle didn’t happen. What it can do is ask what the evidence suggests, using the same standard we’d apply to any other ancient text. We don’t accept the miracles of Greek heroes or Egyptian pharaohs on their storytellers’ word. Applying a softer standard only to our own scriptures is the problem I call the exemption.
And the two-question test cuts both ways. It doesn’t only take things away. It lets a believer say, “I’m not sure Jonah was swallowed by a fish, but I believe the book has something to teach me,” without feeling like a traitor.
Back to the cherry tree
Here’s the thing about the cherry tree story: it was told for a reason. Weems wanted to teach children that honesty matters, and he chose the most admired man in the country to carry the lesson. The story is ahistorical. The lesson is not.
That’s how I’ve come to read much of scripture. I don’t think the Bible is historically accurate in most of its early stories. But it still means a great deal to me as a collection of metaphorical and conceptual artifacts, the way I describe in my letter to family and friends. Knowing which question I’m answering lets me keep the lesson without pretending about the tree.
If you’d like to see the same test applied to the Book of Mormon, read Plates of Gold.