The Tel Dan Stele

I have made it clear from the beginning that I am a rationalist before all else; scientific and historical evidences are always incomplete and potentially misleading because they only offer seeming evidences rooted in mere subjective perception, emotions reveal nothing but emotional states as they are experienced, and assumptions of any kind, including assumptions that something is true because it merely seems to be, are outright asinine.  As such, I am a Christian in the sense that I am committed to living as if Christianity is true on the grounds that there is significant evidence that this is the case, not in the sense that I believe everything in the Bible actually is true.  Only logical axioms, truths that can be established about my own existence as a conscious being, and truths that in some way follow from these things are knowable and inherently true no matter what anyone feels, wants, or is aware of.  Historical evidence does nothing more than provide possible hints that some events might have happened.  Whether or not they even happened is unprovable.

Much of the Bible is still devoted to detailing what, according to Christianity, happened at various points throughout human history.  The historicity of Jesus himself is by far the most significant and evidentially supported part of the history the Bible proposes, with Jewish and non-Jewish historians like Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews) and Tacitus (The Annals)--and even competing religious texts like the Quran--mentioning a Jew named Jesus as if he really lived.  These and other historical or theological sources might say or imply conflicting things about his identity beyond this, but his historical presence is something that many sources still point to.  There are also plenty of other Biblical figures that various historical evidences suggest the existence of (including the New Testament prophet John the Baptist).  One crucial example because of his importance within Old Testament history is King David.

The Tel Dan Stele, which was reportedly found in the 90s in Israel, is a remnant of ancient Near East culture describing the defeat of a son of Ahab that references the "House of David."  The stele actually refers more directly to Jehoram/Joram, the son of King Ahab (2 Kings 8:16), and calls him a descendant of the Israelite King David, so even though David is a more Biblically central figure than Jehoram/Joram or Ahab, the Tel Dan Stele is actually evidence for all three of them.  This kind of casual message referencing three Biblical figures that were all connected in the text to the political history of the Jewish monarchy is not trivial.  While it is far from the whole of the historical evidence for certain rulers and events of the Old Testament, it is noteworthy for the number of people it affirms all at the same time, especially since Jesus is said to have come from the line of David and since David himself is a major Biblical figure in his own right.  People just need to remember what does and does not follow from this and other historical data; nothing follows from this except that this stele is an addition to the probabilistic evidence that the Bible is likely true.

A lack of historical evidence does not prove that a certain person never lived or that a supposed event did not happen because something can be true, as long as it is logically possible, without being either logically necessary or having any accessible evidence for it.  Historical evidence could be misleading or illusory, so archaeological, textual, and oral evidence for specific events or figures of the past does not prove that history unfolded as the evidence suggests it does.  All the same, evidence for a historical person or event does mean that it appears more probable that these things really were a part of history.  It would be irrational to deny any of these things to oneself or others.  Thus, while it is objectively impossible to logically prove that the Biblical David or Ahab really lived or carried out the deeds the Bible ascribes to them, the fact that there is evidence for their genuine presence in history is philosophically important.