Emanuel Pfoh writes, "Unless we have external evidence of a biblical event, it is very difficult to know what is truly “historical” and what is not."
The argument Pfoh is an age-old one that raises the logical fallacy of argument from absence. One cannot argue from the absence of evidence of "external evidence" for drawing sound conclusions.
What if we turn that statement around about other histories, "Unless we have external evidence in biblical record for [fill in the blank: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the Hittites, etc.], it is truly difficult to know what these authors really wrote. For a long period, scholars continued to claim there was no record for any Hittite civilization and impugned the Bible as inaccurate. But their discovery suddenly surprised liberal biblical scholars.
Emanuel Pfoh writes, "Unless we have external evidence of a biblical event, it is very difficult to know what is truly “historical” and what is not."
The argument Pfoh is an age-old one that raises the logical fallacy of argument from absence. One cannot argue from the absence of evidence of "external evidence" for drawing sound conclusions.
What if we turn that statement around about other histories, "Unless we have external evidence in biblical record for [fill in the blank: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the Hittites, etc.], it is truly difficult to know what these authors really wrote. For a long period, scholars continued to claim there was no record for any Hittite civilization and impugned the Bible as inaccurate. But their discovery suddenly surprised liberal biblical scholars.