Is The Bible Historical Fiction?

I don't read fiction.

The last work of fiction that I read was Crime and Punishment. The second half of the title is true.

C&P is fiction, but I'm not sure if it's historical fiction. Dostoyevsky refers to every character by at least three different names, which is clearly a red flag for identity theft, a subgenre of fan fiction. Regardless, it's fiction, and no one claims that the events in the novel actually occurred.

If God doesn't exist, then the scriptures - specifically the gospels - are historical fiction. My half-assed research indicates that Christian and non-Christian scholars generally accept that Matthew, Mark and John were not written by Matthew, Mark or John, and that they were written at least 30 years after Jesus' death. Luke may have been written by Luke, but he never met Jesus. So if Christianity is not true, then all four accounts of Jesus' life are historical fiction. 

The Guardian explains the art of creating historical fiction as follows:

In creating good historical fiction, it is essential to tell lies. A clear distinction needs to be made here between telling lies and making mistakes. A lie is intentional and purposeful; a mistake is accidental and sometimes unforgivable. 

If the Bible isn't true, then by definition it's fiction. Regardless, I do not believe its authors were malicious liars, just like I don't think Mohammed was a malicious liar. I believe they would have sincerely certified under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of American that, to the best of their knowledge, their accounts were true and correct.

They really believed what they wrote, so even if the Bible (or Qur'an) isn't true, it isn't fraud because of the absence of scienter.

Now, back to The Guardian:

One highly acclaimed and commercially successful recent novel had on page three the statement that there were "no priests within a three-day ride". Taking into consideration the time of year and the location of this statement, I calculated there were between five and eight thousand priests within "a three-day ride" in that year. I could not carry on reading when I realised that author's vision of 14th-century England was so far from my own.

Wow. In Die Hard with a Vengence, I knew there was no way John McClane could keep his balance standing on the roof of a pickup that was being forced through a giant underground pipe by a massive wall of water, but I was able keep watching the movie. This guy writing for The Guardian is kind of a pretentious jackass; however, we should probably be at least as anal retentive at fact-checking the Bible as this nut job is with a "commercially successful novel" set in the dark ages.

Here's the point: details are incredibly important for the Bible and for historical fiction and for fraud examiners who are trying to determine whether or not testimony is true.

Fraud examiners are the sexiest of all accountants, meaning they're still not sexy. These hardass accountants interrogate suspected embezzlers and fraudsters with all the machismo of the Canadian border patrol. 

Fraud Magazine explains how details, or the lack of details, can indicate if someone's jerking you around:

Truthful statements usually contain specific details, some of which may not even be relevant to the question asked. 

Those who fabricate a story, however, tend to keep their statements simple and brief. Few liars have sufficient imagination to make up detailed descriptions of fictitious events. Plus, a deceptive person wants to minimize the risk that an investigator will discover evidence contradicting any aspect of his or her statement; the fewer facts that might be proved false, the better. [Experts] refer to seemingly inconsequential details as "tangential verbal data" and consider their presence to be prime indicators that subjects are telling the truth.

The Bible pretty much kicks butt when it comes to tangential verbal data. In Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell says that somebody else said, "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable [Biblical] details." I heard somewhere that archaeologists have used the Bible like a treasure map to find archaeological archeology. The Bible's tangential data seem to check out.

Detailed descriptions are everywhere in the Bible. Matthew Chapter One includes Jesus' lineage from Joseph all the way back to Abraham, proving that the only thing more boring than reading Biblical genealogies is reading  Crime and Punishment. Verses 12 and 13 say, "Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abiud." It's minutiae, but it's important because it shows that the messiah was a descendant of King David.

However, details can bite you in Balam's ass. There's another genealogy, in Luke Chapter Three that mentions, "... Rhesa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri ..." This contradicts the data in Matthew because paternity test episodes of Maury Povich have taught us that Neri and Jeconiah can't both be Shealtiel's dad.

Some people say the genealogy in Luke 3 is Mary's genealogy, not Joseph's. That'd be better. Since Joseph isn't Jesus' real dad, Jesus' lineage to David would need to be established through Mary. That could also explain why the names aren't the same. But since Luke 3:23 starts the genealogy off with Joseph, not with Mary, I've reached the conclusion that it's Joseph's genealogy, not Mary's.

The Christmas story is also filled with tangential verbal data. 

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

The author of Luke could've just said, "There was a census, and everybody had to go to their own town to register." Caesar Augustus and Quirinius are perfect examples of tangential data which makes a stronger case for the truthfulness of the Bible.

But Reza Aslan, in his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, says that forcing people to return to their ancestral homes for a census was both unheard of and impracticable. So while the historical background of Augustus and Quirinius are accurate, the movement of the story doesn't appear to line up with historical fact.

A lot of people maintain that the Bible has no contradictions or historical errors. However, the genealogies in Matthew and Luke contradict each other, and the manner in which the census in Luke 2 is carried out appears to be an error.

It's easy to blow past something as dull as a genealogy and write off its discrepancies as immaterial, but as a CPA, comparing records like that is exactly what we do to determine if the the overall message is accurate.

But even if the Bible was free of contradictions and errors, historical reliability can't prove the Bible true. Laura Ingalls Wilder's books are incredibly accurate depictions of little houses on prairies, but that's not enough to prove that Nellie Olsen really was a bitch.