As I do research for my Bible Studies and other writing, I frequently find notices such as the one below attached to the Wikipedia article about Rephidim – mentioned in Exodus 17:1-7 as the location of the Israelites’ rebellion against God and Moses because they had not found any water to drink there.
This article uses texts from within a religion or faith system without referring to secondary sources that critically analyze them. Please help improve this article. (October 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephidim (July 20, 2024)
This warning is attached to an article addressing potential locations for a place mentioned (so far as I am aware) only in the Bible. Therefore the article simply recounts what the Bible has to say about the place and some of the potential locations for Rephidim proposed by modern archaeologists. The article makes no attempt to either defend or refute the veracity of the Biblical account itself. It merely recounts what the Bible has to say about the place. To be fair, I must admit that the article doesn’t specifically state that Rephidim might never have existed at all either.
But the presence of this warning attached to the article frankly rankles because of the underlying skepticism about the Bible’s provenance that pervades almost all scholarship and writing on ancient history in our world today. We who refer to Biblical accounts in our writing find ourselves continually having to defend the Bible’s reliability in terms of corroboration, authorship, dating, and historicity of Biblical accounts. By contrast, other ancient sources are not held up to nearly the same level of scrutiny or pressure to be defended by those citing them.
Part of Biblical skepticism arises from the now debunked idea that Christian scholars gathered at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD conspired together to “harmonize” (and in some cases simply make up) the Biblical canon they eventually agreed upon. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century laid that contention to rest since the scrolls have been reliably dated as being at least several hundred years older. Furthermore, a complete Greek harmony of the Gospels found in the ruins of Dura-Europus, Syria can’t possibly be younger than 256 AD when that city was destroyed and abandoned some seventy-five years before the Nicaean Council. So we can at least be certain that those gathered at Nicaea didn’t fabricate the Gospel out of a desire to control the masses and make them conform to the teachings of the Roman Church as has been proposed by some.
By contrast, the earliest extant manuscripts of Roman and Greek writers including Julius Caesar, Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle are Medieval transcriptions. Yet no one questions the authorship of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, Cicero’s letters, or Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings. Nor are authors who refer to these works called upon to defend the veracity, authorship, and dates of their contents. In all cases except the Bible, it is assumed that the readers of writings making reference to such ancient works should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to accept or reject what is written about those references. Certainly, no warning like the one attached to the Wikipedia article about Rephidim can be found in any of the Wikipedia articles about the writings of Caesar, Cicero, Plato, or Aristotle, although the main Wikipedia article about Aristotle contains this ironic comment without benefit of a large warning banner…
Most of Aristotle’s work is probably not in its original form, because it was most likely edited by students and later lecturers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle (July 20th, 2024)
In fact, I don’t think the main reason the Bible is held up to such an elevated level of scrutiny and skepticism by comparison to other ancient writings is due to its provenance, but rather its content. The Bible does after all contain the claim that all mankind has only one hope to be rescued out of death in our sins into eternal life in the presence of God – namely, belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that the Bible proclaims. Furthermore, many people including myself make the claim that the Bible is the very Word of God Himself and the only valid source of God’s direction for how people must conduct our lives.
Therefore, I suppose we certainly should hold the Bible up to strict scrutiny. But if the Bible’s author truly is the eternally unchanging and utterly infallible God, how much more strictly should we scrutinize the writings of fallen men like myself?