Faith deserves evidence that can withstand scrutiny

Nothing will ever prove God or prove the Bible, or faith would not be faith. What we can do is examine the evidence honestly, and give it the strongest fair hearing.

Our principles

• We start each event by asking: if this happened as Scripture describes, what evidence would we expect, and what has been found?
• The absence of a record is not proof that something never happened. Ancient kings rarely recorded their defeats.
• We investigate unconventional discoveries seriously, and label them honestly until they are confirmed.
• Human writers, editors, and copyists do not cancel divine inspiration.
• Where faithful readers disagree, we show each view at its strongest.
• We never exaggerate evidence to make a claim look stronger.

Every lesson has three layers

• Story: what happened, told simply. You can understand the whole Bible from this layer alone.
• Explore: the ancient world behind the story, its artifacts, places, and parallels.
• Research: the Case for the Biblical Account, the discoveries, the debates, and how the text came to us.

What the evidence labels mean

• Independently documentedConfirmed by relevant sources outside the Bible.
• Strongly supportedSeveral independent lines of evidence point the same way.
• Plausible, not confirmedFits what we know of the ancient world, but no direct confirmation yet.
• DisputedSerious researchers disagree, with real arguments on each side.
• Not independently verifiedNo outside evidence yet. That is not the same as evidence against it.
• Conflicts with current evidenceThis particular reading clashes with present evidence. Other readings may not.
• Matter of faithA claim about God that historical methods cannot test either way.

How we know a reading

On passage pages each witness says how the site itself knows its reading. A manuscript's age says nothing about how carefully we checked it, so the two are kept apart. No reading on the site has yet been checked against manuscript images.

• Read in the site's library text: Read by the site in a digital edition in the Scripture Library. Library editions are audited for completeness and numbering, not proofread against the printed edition.
• Checked in a published edition: Checked in a published edition or translation outside the library.
• Known here only through a translation: The site has read this only in a translation (for the Greek Old Testament, Giguet's 1872 French). The wording of the original-language text itself has not been checked.
• Described from a published transcription of the manuscript: The site's script read this manuscript in a published scholarly transcription (for the Dead Sea Scrolls, Martin Abegg's transcription in the ETCBC/CACCHT dataset, version 2.0.5), and the site describes the reading in its own words without reproducing the transcription. It has not yet been checked against the manuscript photographs or the critical edition.
• Reported in scholarship; not checked by the site: Taken from published scholarship or critical editions. The site has not checked this reading in a manuscript or an edition itself.

The library page lists, for each edition used as evidence, its editor, date, underlying manuscripts where known, digital source, licence and what the site has checked. Every book is published separately from research certification: a book can be live and still marked "built, not research-certified" in our records.

Images

Every image carries one of these labels. Paintings and reconstructions help us picture the story, but they are not historical evidence, and we say so.

• Authentic ancient artifact
• Historical manuscript
• Historical printed work
• Site or place photograph
• Modern copy or drawing of an ancient original
• Modern reconstruction, not an ancient object
• Later artwork, not historical evidence
• Map
• Scientific image