ABSTRACT
The Old Testament contains much narrative material, some of which approaches what we might regard as historiography, while other parts look more like legend or even myth. This chapter examines what can be known about the origins of Israel in the ancient Near Eastern context. It also considers the historicity of the stories about Jesus in the Gospels, and discussed the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, which has been an important theme in New Testament scholarship since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the case of both Testaments there is a small amount of external evidence that sets the context, but much work on the history of Israel, and of Jesus and the early Church, has depended on deductions from the biblical narratives themselves. The chapter discusses how confident we can be in our historical assertions about the reality underlying the Bible’s account.
