02. Countering With Proof, Defensive and Offensive

Countering With Proof, Defensive and Offensive But there are many whose faith in the veracity of the Scriptures has been shaken; and the best, and in some cases the only, way to re-establish their faith is to show them that the charges which are brought against the Bible are untrue and unwarranted. The attempt to show this may be made along two lines. We may take the purely defensive line and endeavor to show that the general and particular attacks upon the truthfulness of the Old Testament narratives are unsupported by facts. Or, we may take the offensive and show that the Old Testament narratives are in harmony with all that is really known of the history of the world in the times described in the Old Testament records, and that these records themselves contain the ineffaceable evidence that the time and place of their origin agree with the facts recorded. The best method, perhaps, will be to make an offensive-defensive, showing not merely that the attacks are futile, but that the events recorded and the persons and things described are true to history,—that is, that they harmonize in general with what we learn from the contemporaneous documents of other nations. This is true of the very earliest narratives of the Old Testament. Even when we look at the two great events occurring before the time of Abraham—the Creation and the Flood—we find that these events are the same that are emphasized among the Babylonians, from the midst of whom Abraham went out. For it is certain, that, however we may account for the difference between the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts of the Creation and of the Deluge, there is sufficient resemblance between them to point to a common origin antedating the time of Abraham’s departure from Ur of the Chaldees.