Evidence for the Old Testament Miracles: The Long Day of Joshua

Evidence for Old Testament Miracles  ·  Post 4

Sun, Stand Still:
The Long Day of Joshua

Hebrew linguistics, ancient astronomy, archaeology, and a miracle witnessed by the world

Old Testament Series · Apologetics · Astronomy & Archaeology

By Rajkumar Richard W.J.F

Few passages in all of Scripture have invited more scorn from the scientifically minded than the tenth chapter of Joshua. An Israelite commander stands on a hillside at Gibeon and speaks to the sun. The sun obeys. It holds its position in the sky for nearly a full day while a great battle is fought and won. To the modern ear shaped by Newtonian physics and a post-Enlightenment suspicion of miracles, the account sounds cartoonish -- the invention of a primitive people who did not know that the earth, not the sun, does the moving.

Yet the evidence surrounding this event -- linguistic, astronomical, archaeological, and cross-cultural -- is anything but primitive. This post examines each category of evidence in turn, acknowledges honestly what remains uncertain, and makes the case that this passage, far from being an embarrassment to the Christian mind, is one of the most remarkably corroborated miracle accounts in the Old Testament.

"Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies... The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since."

Joshua 10:12-14 (ESV)

Notice what the narrative does not say. It does not say the sun moved faster, or that Israel simply fought bravely, or that the day felt long. It says the sun stopped. It says the moon stayed. It says there had never been a day like it before or since. And then -- most remarkably -- it says: "Is this not written in the Book of Jasher?" The author appeals to a second, independent source as corroboration. That is not the habit of myth-makers. It is the habit of historians.

Evidence 1

The Hebrew Text: What Joshua 10 Actually Says

The meaning of this passage has been debated by Hebrew scholars for centuries -- and the debate itself reveals how seriously the ancient world took this account.

The Key Hebrew Words: Dom and Amad

The two Hebrew verbs at the heart of this passage are dom and amad. The word dom, translated "stand still," literally carries the sense of being silent or ceasing -- it describes a cessation of normal activity rather than necessarily a static halt. The word amad, used of the moon, means to stand or stop, with a connotation of ceasing from a previous activity (cf. 2 Kings 4:6; Jonah 1:15).¹

These linguistic details have opened four major interpretive positions, all held by responsible, believing scholars. None of them requires dismissing the text as myth or legend. They are genuine hermeneutical options arising from the richness of the Hebrew itself.

1. Literal Prolonged Day

The sun literally ceased its apparent motion across the sky, extending the daylight by approximately twelve hours. God miraculously slowed the earth's rotation -- or suspended the normal laws of planetary motion -- to grant Joshua a longer window of battle. Joshua 10:14's declaration that "there has been no day like it before or since" points powerfully to a unique, unrepeated cosmic event.

2. Solar Eclipse (Cambridge Proposal)

Professor Colin Humphreys (Cambridge) and Dr. Graeme Waddington proposed in a peer-reviewed 2017 paper that the Hebrew word dom has the same root as a Babylonian term used for eclipses.² On this reading, Joshua prayed for the sun to stop shining -- to be eclipsed -- providing cover from the heat during an all-night, all-day battle. Humphreys calculated the only qualifying eclipse visible from Canaan between 1500 and 1050 BC occurred on October 30, 1207 BC.

3. Extended Darkness (Night View)

A minority of interpreters, including Old Testament scholar Dale Ralph Davis, propose Joshua prayed for prolonged darkness rather than prolonged daylight -- a longer night to enable a surprise attack. Israel had marched all night to reach Gibeon (Joshua 10:9), and Davis suggests Joshua prayed for the darkness to hold so the element of surprise would not be lost at dawn.

4. Poetic-Phenomenological Language

Some scholars understand the passage as phenomenological language -- describing the battle from the observer's perspective, using the idiom of the sun "standing still" to express that God gave Israel a complete, decisive, unhurried victory. On this reading, the miracle is real; the language is the standard figurative vocabulary of ancient battlefield poetry, not a claim about planetary motion.

Why the Literal View Remains Most Compelling

While each interpretation has scholarly defenders, Joshua 10:13 makes the literal view the most natural reading. The prose narrative commentary in verse 13b -- "the sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day" -- is not embedded in a poem. It is the narrator's plain prose explanation of what happened. As Old Testament scholar Mitch Chase has observed, if the event were purely figurative, the narrator's explicit explanatory comment in 10:13 would be redundant and misleading.³ The verse is written to tell readers that something real and extraordinary happened to the sun and moon on that specific day.

The Book of Jasher: An External Appeal to Corroboration

Joshua 10:13 explicitly cites the Book of Jasher (Hebrew: Sepher Ha-Yashar -- "the Book of the Upright") as a secondary source for this account. The same book is cited in 2 Samuel 1:18 and possibly 1 Kings 8:12 (in the Septuagint). Scholars such as Cyrus Gordon have concluded that the Book of Jasher consisted of poetic accounts of Israel's battles and achievements -- a national anthology of heroic verse now lost.⁴ The author of Joshua appeals to it not to prove the account but to point readers to an independent record of the same event.

This citation has significant implications. Authors who fabricate miracles do not cite alternative sources. The appeal to the Book of Jasher is the behavior of a historian confident that the event was independently documented and that readers could verify the reference. No authentic ancient manuscript of the original Jasher survives, but the citation itself is a mark of historical integrity within the Joshua narrative.

Verdict: The Hebrew text, carefully read, presents a real historical event. The author's citation of an independent source is a mark of historical confidence, not mythological invention.

Evidence 2

Astronomical Evidence

A peer-reviewed study from Cambridge University identified the oldest recorded solar eclipse in history -- directly from the text of Joshua 10.

The Humphreys-Waddington Study (2017)

In October 2017, Professor Sir Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University's Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy and Dr. W. Graeme Waddington published a peer-reviewed paper in the Royal Astronomical Society's journal Astronomy and Geophysics with a remarkable finding. Revisiting the original Hebrew text and combining it with a new eclipse calculation model accounting for variations in the earth's rotation over time, they identified the only annular solar eclipse visible from the land of Canaan between 1500 and 1050 BC -- on October 30, 1207 BC, in the afternoon.⁵

Their argument rested on the observation that the Hebrew word dom, translated "stand still" in most English Bibles, shares the same root as a Babylonian astronomical term specifically used to describe eclipses. On their reading, Joshua prayed for the sun and moon to "stop shining" -- which is precisely what an annular eclipse produces, surrounding the moon's shadow with a ring of fire and reducing earthly illumination to approximately dusk level.

The Eclipse of October 30, 1207 BC

Humphreys and Waddington's calculations showed this annular eclipse passed directly over the land of Canaan in the afternoon. It is the only such eclipse matching the parameters of Joshua's battle during the proposed period of the Israelite conquest -- a precise match to the biblical text.

Fixing Pharaoh's Dates

Combining this eclipse date with the Merneptah Stele (which mentions Israel, dated to c. 1208 BC), the Cambridge researchers were able to refine the reign of Ramesses the Great to 1276-1210 BC, plus or minus one year -- one of the most precise chronological fixes in Egyptian history derived from a biblical source.

The Limitations of the Eclipse Theory

The Humphreys-Waddington interpretation, while published in a peer-reviewed journal and widely cited, does not go unchallenged among Christian scholars. Astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle has pointed out that Joshua 10:14 states explicitly that "there has been no day like that before or since" -- but solar eclipses are not rare events. They occur regularly throughout history. If the long day were merely an eclipse, the claim of absolute uniqueness would be difficult to sustain.⁶

Additionally, the eclipse proposed by Humphreys occurred in the afternoon -- between 3:30 pm and sunset -- whereas Joshua 10:12 locates the sun "over Gibeon" (to the east) and the moon "in the valley of Aijalon" (to the west), suggesting an early morning battle position more consistent with sunrise than mid-afternoon. These are legitimate objections, and they are why many conservative scholars continue to favor the literal prolonged day interpretation.

What is significant for apologetics, however, is not which astronomical interpretation is correct -- it is that Cambridge University researchers working from the original Hebrew text found the account sufficiently credible and historically specific to publish a peer-reviewed astronomical study on it. The text is being taken seriously as a real historical record by mainstream scientists.

Verdict: A peer-reviewed Cambridge study identified a real 1207 BC astronomical event consistent with the Joshua account, fixing a precise biblical date and refining Egyptian royal chronology.

Evidence 3

Ancient Cross-Cultural Traditions of a Long Day

Cultures with no knowledge of Joshua record the same extraordinary celestial event from the same approximate historical period.

One of the most striking bodies of evidence for the long day of Joshua comes not from Israel but from cultures that had no connection to Israel at all. Ancient historians and ethnologists have documented a pattern of traditions from multiple civilizations, spread across different continents, that describe an extraordinarily long day -- or, in the case of cultures on the opposite side of the earth, an extraordinarily long night -- at approximately the time Joshua lived. Herodotus, the great Greek historian (c. 484-420 BC), recorded that during his visit to Egypt, the priests showed him their temple archives, in which there appeared a record of a day that was twice the natural length of any other day ever documented.⁷

Ancient Traditions of an Extended Day -- Worldwide

Egypt

Herodotus reported that Egyptian temple records described a day twice the natural length. French scholar Fernand Crombette also translated Egyptian hieroglyphics describing a royal decree issued to exempt taxation victims of a great flood caused by a concentrated lunar gravity -- during which "two days had been rolled into one."

China

Ancient Chinese writings record a long day during the reign of Emperor Yao (also transliterated Yeo or Yahou), described as a contemporary of Joshua. The text states the sun did not set for an extraordinary period, causing great concern among the emperor's court and scholars. A second Chinese source in the Huai Nan Tse describes a day with two dawns, with the sun rising in the west rather than the east.

Mexico (Aztec)

The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan -- the history of the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian script in the sixteenth century -- record that during a cosmic catastrophe in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time. The Aztecs also recorded that the sun stood still for one entire day in the year corresponding to Joshua's campaigns in Palestine.

Incas of Peru

Incan traditions preserved in the records of Spanish colonial historians describe a day of extended light at a time corresponding roughly to the Mosaic period, in which the sun stood abnormally long above the horizon.

Babylon and Persia

Ancient Babylonian and Persian records speak of a day that was miraculously extended, preserved in the legendary literature of both civilizations alongside other accounts of cosmic disturbances.

Polynesia

Ethnologist and theologian Harry Rimmer documented a detailed Polynesian oral tradition of this event. In cultures on the opposite side of the earth from Canaan, the corresponding experience would not be a long day but a long night -- and that is precisely what Polynesian tradition records.

What the Pattern of Traditions Means

These cultures had no contact with ancient Israel. They had no access to the Book of Joshua. Their traditions were preserved in completely different languages, on different continents, through different oral and written media. The common thread -- a day or night of extraordinary, frightening length at approximately the time of Joshua -- points with remarkable force to a single real astronomical event experienced simultaneously by the entire globe, each culture interpreting it through its own cultural framework.

Scholarly Caution Required Here

The dating of ancient traditions -- Chinese, Aztec, Polynesian -- is notoriously difficult, and establishing precise correspondence with the period of Joshua (~1400-1200 BC) requires careful handling. One researcher has noted that the Chinese Emperor Yao tradition may be dated approximately 800 years before Joshua, which would break the correlation if so. These traditions should be presented as corroborating patterns, not as independently verified historical documents. They are significant and worthy of consideration, but they are not primary evidence in the same category as peer-reviewed astronomy or archaeological excavation.

Verdict: Multiple ancient cultures, with no knowledge of Joshua, preserve traditions of an extraordinary extended day. The pattern is globally significant even where individual traditions resist precise dating.

Evidence 4

Archaeological Evidence for Joshua's Battle

The Amarna Letters -- clay tablets found in Egypt in 1887 -- provide a remarkable independent Egyptian witness to the events of Joshua 10.

The Amarna Letters and the Habiru

In 1887, an Egyptian peasant woman near modern Tell el-Amarna, approximately 270 kilometers south of Cairo, accidentally uncovered 382 clay tablets -- diplomatic correspondence from the royal archives of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), dating to the fourteenth century BC. Written mostly in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the ancient Near East, these letters are now distributed between the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (200 tablets) and the British Museum (80 tablets). They paint a vivid picture of Canaan during precisely the period of Joshua's campaigns -- and they correspond to the biblical account with striking detail.⁸

The tablets describe repeated and desperate appeals from Canaanite city-state rulers to Pharaoh for military assistance against an invading force of people called the Habiru. The connection between the term Habiru and the word Hebrew is linguistically plausible -- the consonantal spelling is identical in some transliterations -- though scholars are divided on whether the Habiru were an ethnic group or a broader social category of displaced persons. What is beyond dispute is the correspondence between the biblical account and the Amarna picture of Canaan under military pressure from a powerful external force.

Amarna Letters Matched to Joshua 10

Jerusalem (EA 286-288)

Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem, sends multiple desperate letters to Pharaoh: "The Habiru have plundered all the lands of the king... Lost are the lands!" He identifies Aijalon -- the very valley over which the moon stood still in Joshua 10:12 -- as having fallen to the enemy (EA 287): "The town of the district of Aijalon is now in the hands of the enemy."

Lachish (EA 287, 329-333)

An Amarna letter states that the Habiru killed the king of Lachish and gained control of the city. The Bible records that the king of Lachish was one of the five kings killed on the day the sun stood still (Joshua 10:23-26, 31-32). The correspondence is precise.

Gezer (EA 271, 299)

Milkilu, the ruler of Gezer, writes to Pharaoh: "May the king deliver his land from the hand of the Habiru." A further Gezer letter (EA 299) admits bluntly: "The Habiru are stronger than we." The Bible records that the king of Gezer engaged Joshua in battle at Lachish and was defeated (Joshua 10:33).

Hebron & Jarmuth (EA 271, 284, 366)

Amarna letters confirm Hebron, in league with Jerusalem and Lachish, is at war with the Habiru. The Bible lists the kings of Hebron, Jerusalem, Lachish, Jarmuth, and Eglon as the five-king coalition that Joshua faced at Gibeon on the day of the long day (Joshua 10:5).

Hazor (EA 148, 228)

The king of Tyre writes that Hazor has been turned over to the Habiru. The Bible records that Joshua conquered Hazor and pursued the enemy all the way to Sidon (Joshua 11:1-13).

The Valley of Aijalon -- Independent Corroboration

The specificity of the geographical correlation deserves emphasis. The Valley of Aijalon is the very location over which the moon stood still in Joshua's prayer (Joshua 10:12). It is not a famous location, not a major city, not a place one would expect to appear independently in Egyptian diplomatic correspondence. Yet Amarna letter EA 287 -- Abdi-Heba's letter from Jerusalem to Pharaoh -- specifically mentions that the district of Aijalon has fallen to the enemy. This is the kind of precise, incidental geographical convergence that strongly supports the historical authenticity of the Joshua 10 narrative.

"The Amarna letters establish that Jerusalem was already a significant urban center in the fourteenth century BC, that it was under pressure from an invading force called the Habiru, and that the geographical locations named in Joshua 10 -- Aijalon, Lachish, Hebron, Gezer -- were exactly the sites experiencing conflict during this period. As is so often true with the fog of history, we have no absolute proof that the Amarna letters describe the conquest of the Hebrews under Joshua -- but the parallels between the letters and the biblical account are many and striking."

-- Mind Renewers, summarizing the Amarna correspondence (2013), citing the tablets directly

Verdict: The Amarna Letters independently corroborate the geographical setting, the political alliances, and the specific city-names of Joshua 10's battle narrative, including the Valley of Aijalon itself.

Evidence 5

Biblical & Theological Evidence

The miracle of the long day is not a one-off story. It is anchored in the wider biblical narrative by multiple authors and reaffirmed in the New Testament.

Habakkuk 3:11 -- A Second Biblical Witness

The long day of Joshua is not only recorded in Joshua 10. The prophet Habakkuk, writing several centuries later, alludes to the same event in Habakkuk 3:11: "Sun and moon stood still in their place, at the light of your arrows as they sped, at the flash of your glittering spear." Habakkuk uses the same imagery -- sun and moon standing still -- in a poetic recollection of God's great acts of deliverance. This is a second biblical witness, from a different author, centuries removed from the original event, treating it as settled historical fact.⁹

The Theological Meaning of the Miracle

The miracle of the long day carries a specific theological message that distinguishes it from all the surrounding Ancient Near Eastern cultures' mythology. In the ancient Near East, the sun and moon were worshipped as deities -- the Egyptians had Ra and Thoth, the Babylonians had Shamash and Sin. In Joshua 10, the sun and moon do not act. They are acted upon. They are commanded by a human voice -- Joshua's -- and they obey. Not because Joshua has magical power over them, but because the LORD, the God of Israel, is sovereign over the created order, including the celestial bodies that surrounding nations worshipped as gods.

This is the same theological polemic visible in Genesis 1, where the sun and moon are deliberately called "the greater and lesser lights" rather than by their names -- lest any reader worship them. Joshua 10 completes the argument: Israel's God does not serve the sun. The sun serves Israel's God.

Joshua's Prayer -- An Act of Faith in God's Sovereign Power

Joshua 10:14 concludes with a statement that reaches beyond the military victory to the theological heart of the passage: "There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man, for the LORD fought for Israel." The miracle is presented not primarily as an astronomical wonder but as a demonstration of the prayer of a righteous man moving the sovereign God of the universe to act directly in history. This is the framework within which the miracle must be understood: not as a primitive attempt to explain a natural phenomenon, but as a deliberate, theologically loaded act of divine power in response to human faith.

Science has shown the earth cannot simply stop rotating. The tidal and gravitational forces would be catastrophic.

This objection assumes the miracle required the sudden cessation of the earth's full rotational momentum -- which would indeed be catastrophic. But the text does not specify the mechanism, only the result. A God who created the laws of physics is not constrained by them. He can produce the effect of prolonged daylight through any means he chooses -- including slowing rotation gradually over hours, adjusting the refractive properties of the atmosphere, or through a means entirely outside the categories of current physics. The objection proves too little: the same argument would rule out any miracle, including the resurrection, which also violates known physical laws. The question is not whether the mechanism is scientifically describable, but whether God exists and can act in his creation. If the former is true, the latter follows.

No other ancient culture recorded this event in its historical documents, only its legends.

This is imprecise. The Egyptian temple records seen by Herodotus were not legends but priestly historical archives. The Amarna Letters are royal diplomatic correspondence, not mythology. And the cultures whose traditions have survived -- Chinese, Aztec, Incan, Polynesian -- did not share a common literary tradition with Israel. Their separate memories of the same event are precisely the kind of independent multiple attestation that historians regard as strong evidence. The absence of records in a given culture is also not surprising: ancient catastrophic events were frequently remembered in oral tradition long before being committed to writing, and the majority of ancient records did not survive.

Verdict: The miracle is corroborated by a second biblical author (Habakkuk), carries a precise theological message consistent with the rest of Scripture's anti-idolatry polemic, and is presented as the answer to a specific prayer of faith.

An Honest Assessment

What Remains Genuinely Uncertain

Defending the faith well requires acknowledging the boundaries of present evidence.

Any responsible treatment of the long day of Joshua must acknowledge what the evidence does not yet settle.

The NASA "Missing Day" Story

A widely circulated claim holds that NASA computers calculating past and future planetary motion discovered a "missing day" in the astronomical record, confirming Joshua's long day. This story has been repeated in countless Christian apologetics publications and sermons. There is, however, no documented basis for this claim. The National Center for Science Education has noted that no one has ever produced documentation that this NASA calculation actually occurred. Christians damage their credibility when they repeat it. The archaeological and astronomical evidence surveyed above is far stronger and does not require this unverifiable claim.

The Timing of Ancient Cultural Traditions

The dating of Chinese, Aztec, and Polynesian traditions of a long day is not precise enough to confirm exact correspondence with the period of Joshua (c. 1400-1200 BC). Some traditions may pre-date or post-date this period by centuries. They are suggestive and worth noting, but they should not be presented as definitively dated corroboration.

The Habiru-Hebrew Identification

While the correspondence between the Amarna Letters and the Joshua narrative is striking, mainstream scholarship remains divided on whether the term "Habiru" is an ethnic designation for Hebrews or a broader social category. The geographical correspondences in the Amarna Letters are strong independent evidence regardless of how the Habiru question is resolved, but the identification should be presented as plausible rather than proven.

Verdict: The case for the long day of Joshua is strong across multiple disciplines. Intellectual integrity requires setting aside the unverified NASA story and acknowledging ongoing scholarly debates where they exist.

The Evidence Considered as a Whole

The long day of Joshua is one of the most multi-layered miracle accounts in the Old Testament. The Hebrew text, carefully examined, records a real historical event in plain prose narrative, appealing to an independent external source as corroboration. A peer-reviewed Cambridge University astronomical study identified a specific 1207 BC solar event consistent with the account and used it to fix one of the most precise dates in ancient Egyptian royal chronology. The Amarna Letters -- Egyptian diplomatic correspondence discovered by accident in 1887 -- independently corroborate the geographical setting, the political coalitions, and the specific city-names of Joshua 10's battle, including the Valley of Aijalon itself. And more than two hundred ancient cultural traditions, from Egypt to China to Mexico to Polynesia, record an extraordinary extended day or night at approximately the same historical period.

None of this constitutes mathematical proof. Ancient historical events rarely come with that kind of certainty. But the convergence of Hebrew linguistics, peer-reviewed astronomy, Egyptian archaeology, and cross-cultural ethnology all pointing to the same event is not what one expects from a myth. It is what one expects from history.

And at the theological center of it all stands Joshua -- not a magician commanding the cosmos, but a man of faith calling on the God who made the sun and moon and who, on one remarkable day in the hill country of Canaan, commanded them to wait.

Core Apologetic Takeaway

"A Cambridge professor and a royal Egyptian archive and an Aztec chronicle and a Chinese imperial record all point to the same day. The man who commanded the sun to stand still was standing on solid historical ground."

Discussion Questions

1. Of the four interpretations of Joshua 10:12-14 -- literal prolonged day, solar eclipse, prolonged darkness, or phenomenological language -- which do you find most convincing, and why?
2. How does the theological message of the long day -- that the sun and moon obeyed a human prayer to Israel's God -- challenge the surrounding culture's worship of celestial bodies? How does it challenge modern secular culture's tendency to treat the cosmos as impersonal?
3. What should Christians do when a popular apologetics argument (like the NASA story) turns out to be unverifiable? How does intellectual honesty strengthen rather than weaken the overall case for faith?
4. The Amarna Letters were discovered by accident by an Egyptian peasant woman. How does this kind of unexpected archaeological discovery affect your confidence in the historical reliability of the Old Testament?
5. Joshua 10:14 says the LORD "heeded the voice of a man." What does this say about the nature of prayer and its relationship to God's sovereign power over creation?

* * *

Endnotes

1. Hugh J. Blair, "Joshua," in The New Bible Commentary Revised, eds. D. Guthrie, J.A. Motyer, A.M. Stibbs, D.J. Wiseman (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 3rd ed., 1970), p. 244. Blair notes that dom and amad both carry a sense of cessation from prior activity rather than absolute motionlessness.
2. Colin J. Humphreys and W. Graeme Waddington, "Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs," Astronomy and Geophysics 58, no. 5 (October 2017): 5.39-5.42. DOI: 10.1093/astrogeo/atx178. Published by the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford Academic.
3. Mitch Chase, "When the Sun Stood Still," Substack essay (2024), drawing on the consensus of evangelical Old Testament commentators that the prose commentary of Joshua 10:13b precludes a purely figurative reading of the poem in 10:12.
4. Cyrus Gordon, cited in David Wilber, "The Truth About the Lost Book of Jasher," davidwilber.com (February 23, 2026). Gordon concluded on the basis of parallels with Mediterranean epic literature that the Book of Jasher was a collection of poetic accounts of Israel's battles.
5. Humphreys and Waddington, "Solar eclipse of 1207 BC," 5.39. The eclipse track passed directly over the land of Canaan. The researchers also confirmed the result against the Merneptah Stele, which mentions Israel and dates to c. 1208 BC. University of Cambridge press release, October 30, 2017: cam.ac.uk/research/news/oldest-recorded-solar-eclipse-helps-date-the-egyptian-pharaohs.
6. Dr. Jason Lisle, quoted in "Physicists Claim to Have Pinpointed Date of Sun Standing Still for Joshua," Christian News Network (November 8, 2017). Lisle argues that Joshua 10:14's claim of absolute uniqueness ("no day like it before or since") is inconsistent with identification as a solar eclipse, which is a regularly recurring phenomenon.
7. Herodotus, Histories, Book II, as cited in Harry Rimmer, The Harmony of Science and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1936); also documented in Robert Boyd, Boyd's Bible Handbook; and in the Long Day of Joshua survey at coursebible.com.
8. For the Amarna Letters corpus, see William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). The specific letter numbers cited -- EA 286, 287, 288, 271, 284, 287, 299, 329-333 -- are drawn from the standard EA (El Amarna) numbering system.
9. For Habakkuk 3:11 as a reference to the long day, see the standard Hebrew lexica and the commentary tradition. The verse uses the Hebrew word amad -- the same root as Joshua 10:13 -- for the sun and moon "standing" in their place.

Key Sources & Further Reading

• Humphreys, C.J. & Waddington, W.G. (2017). "Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs." Astronomy and Geophysics 58(5): 5.39-5.42. Royal Astronomical Society. DOI: 10.1093/astrogeo/atx178.
• Moran, W.L. (1992). The Amarna Letters. Johns Hopkins University Press. (Definitive English translation of all 382 Amarna tablets.)
• Rimmer, H. (1936). The Harmony of Science and Scripture. Eerdmans. (Includes survey of ancient cultural traditions of a long day.)
• Blair, H.J. (1970). "Joshua." In The New Bible Commentary Revised, eds. Guthrie, Motyer, Stibbs, Wiseman. Inter-Varsity Press. p. 244.
• Humphreys, C.J. (2003). The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist's Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories. HarperOne. (Context for Humphreys' broader methodology of scientific engagement with OT miracles.)
• Kitchen, K.A. (2003). On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Eerdmans. (Chapter on Joshua and the conquest in its archaeological and historical context.)
• Hoffmeier, J.K. (1996). Israel in Egypt. Oxford University Press. (For the broader context of the Exodus and Conquest chronology.)
• Wilber, D. (2026). "The Truth About the Lost Book of Jasher." davidwilber.com. (Summary of scholarly positions on the Book of Jasher.)
• Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology. "And the Sun Stood Still." armstronginstitute.org (December 16, 2017). (Survey of Amarna Letter correspondences with Joshua 10.)
• Bible Archaeology Report. "Letters from the Biblical World: The Amarna Letters." biblearchaeologyreport.com (August 1, 2025). (Peer-reviewed summary of Amarna tablets and the Joshua conquest narrative.)
• University of Cambridge Press Release. "Oldest recorded solar eclipse helps date the Egyptian pharaohs." cam.ac.uk (October 30, 2017).
• Lisle, J. (2017). Response to Humphreys-Waddington eclipse theory. Cited in Christian News Network (November 8, 2017).

Evidence for Old Testament Miracles  ·  Post 4 of the Series  ·  The Long Day of Joshua

By Rajkumar Richard W.J.F  ·  Next in the series: The Ten Plagues of Egypt

Answering Skeptics: Modern Miracles

The Christian Case Apologetics & Evidence Notes

Ten Modern Miracle Cases Worth Investigating

Documented healings, resuscitations, and unexplained deliverances — graded by evidence quality, not by enthusiasm.

The skeptical claim that "nobody documents miracles today" is empirically false. The Southern Medical Journal has published field data on it. The Lourdes International Medical Committee has been producing case files on it since 1883. A Yale-trained psychiatrist has staked his professional credibility on it. The evidence exists. The problem is most people haven't read it.

This post showcases ten specific cases — cases drawn from medical literature, peer-reviewed publications, and academically credentialed researchers — and examine what each one actually establishes. Each have been graded honestly by the quality of its documentation, because sloppy apologetics that overstates the evidence does more damage to the Christian witness than any skeptical objection.

A note on sourcing: a substantial number of these cases appear in the work of Craig Keener, whose two-volume Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic, 2011) remains the most comprehensively documented academic treatment of this question in print. Where cases have independent institutional documentation, this is noted accordingly. Where the evidence is thinner than some would like, this article acknowledges that fact.

Confidence key → Institutionally Verified Documented, Ongoing Review Single / Limited Source

---

Case 01

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre — Parkinson's Disease

Diagnosis: Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease · France, 2001–2006

In 2001, French nun Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. After Pope John Paul II died in April 2005, her religious community began praying specifically for his intercession in her healing. By June 2005 she reported a sudden recovery of normal motor function and, critically, was able to discontinue her Parkinson's medication without relapse. Neurological examinations confirmed the absence of previously documented disease markers.[1]

What makes this case unusually strong is the procedural trail behind it. The Vatican's medical commission — distinct from the theological body — examined the case before John Paul II's beatification in 2011. The Positio documenting the case runs into hundreds of pages. Several physicians were involved at the diagnostic and recovery stages. There was long-term follow-up. This is not a story: it is a dossier, assembled under institutional scrutiny by people with a professional interest in finding a natural explanation.

Institutionally Verified · Vatican Medical Commission

Case 02

Delizia Cirolli — Ewing's Sarcoma

Diagnosis: Ewing's Sarcoma (Bone Cancer) · Italy, 1970s

Italian teenager Delizia Cirolli was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, an aggressive and often fatal bone cancer. Surgical intervention was considered, but physicians indicated limited prospects for long-term survival. After a pilgrimage to Lourdes, physicians documented an unexpected and complete disappearance of the tumour — confirmed by subsequent imaging and clinical examination.[2]

Her case passed through the Lourdes Medical Bureau's review process, which included cross-examination by specialists who were not party to her care and who had no stake in affirming a miraculous explanation. The Bureau's criteria — confirmed pre-existing diagnosis, complete recovery, lasting recovery, absence of adequate medical explanation — were each satisfied before the case was advanced for further investigation. It is worth repeating that the Bureau formally recognises fewer than 1% of the cases it reviews, which means Delizia's case was not rubber-stamped: it was examined, debated, and then recognised.

Institutionally Verified · Lourdes Medical Bureau

Case 03

Barbara Snyder — Multiple Sclerosis

Diagnosis: Progressive Multiple Sclerosis · United States

Barbara Snyder had been diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis and, by the time of her reported healing, was largely bedridden and dependent on others for basic care. During a Christian prayer meeting she reported an immediate, complete restoration of function. Her neurologists subsequently confirmed that active disease was no longer detectable, and they acknowledged the recovery as medically extraordinary — though they stopped short of attributing it publicly to supernatural cause.[3]

The strength of this case lies in physician acknowledgement of the extraordinary character of the recovery, and in the fact that it is documented by Keener with supporting medical testimony rather than based solely on the patient's account. The limitation is that it did not pass through an independent institutional review body the way the Lourdes or Vatican cases did. Readers should weigh it accordingly.

Documented · Physician Testimony

Case 04

The Lourdes Healings — Cumulative Record

Since 1858 · Approximately 7,000 claims reviewed

Lourdes is treated as a single entry here, not because the individual cases aren't distinctive, but because the cumulative institutional record is itself the argument. Since 1858, roughly 7,000 healing claims have been submitted to the Lourdes Medical Bureau for evaluation. Of those, only 72 have ever been formally recognised as miraculous — a recognition rate well below 1%.[4]

That rejection rate is actually one of the most important data points in this debate. If the Bureau were a credulous body in the business of confirming miracles, the recognised count would be in the thousands. The fact that it is 72 tells you the review is genuinely adversarial. To be recognised, a cure must meet four criteria without exception: the original diagnosis must be confirmed by medical records; the recovery must be complete; it must be lasting; and it must be inexplicable by any known medical process. The 2025 recognition of an Italian woman's recovery from primary lateral sclerosis — a condition with no established course of spontaneous remission — came after sixteen years of investigation. That is not folklore. That is institutional rigour applied to an inconvenient claim.

Institutionally Verified · Lourdes CMIL

Case 05

Ophthalmological Restorations — Vision Healings

Multiple Cases · Various Locations

Keener's two volumes document a recurring category of cases involving sudden restoration of vision in individuals with documented prior blindness or severe visual impairment. The more compelling instances in this category are not self-reported: they are supported by ophthalmologist reports, pre-treatment diagnoses, and in some cases independent witnesses who were present at the moment of recovery.[5]

Not every case in this category is equally compelling. Some are better documented than others. But several remain medically unexplained even after specialist review. The honest summary is that this is a category with a range of evidentiary strength — some cases strong, some thin — and the strongest deserve more attention than they typically receive in popular debates about miracles.

Documented · Varies by Case

Case 06

Mozambique Hearing Restorations — STEPP Field Study

Diagnosis: Profound Deafness · Mozambique, 2010

This case deserves its own entry separate from the broader Keener category because it has something the others in this list rarely have: independent clinical measurement. In 2010, religious studies scholar Candy Gunther Brown published the STEPP study in the Southern Medical Journal, a peer-reviewed medical publication. Using a calibrated audiometer and standardised vision charts, her team tested 24 consecutive Mozambican subjects with documented hearing or vision impairment — before and after they received prayer. Statistically significant improvements were recorded in both auditory function (p<0.003) and visual function (p<0.02).[6]

Brown herself is not an apologist and was careful to acknowledge the study's limitations — small sample size, no randomised control group, field conditions rather than laboratory conditions. She did not claim to have proven the supernatural. What she did demonstrate is that the skeptic's empirical claim — "nobody measures anything like this" — is simply not true.

Peer-Reviewed · Southern Medical Journal

Case 07

Medically Verified Healings at Pentecostal Conferences

Multiple Cases · Tumours, Paralysis, Mobility Restoration

Keener documents cases from Pentecostal and charismatic healing contexts — tumours disappearing between diagnosis and surgery, restoration of mobility following paralysis, and similar recoveries — where medical records from before and after the event are available for scrutiny. Critically, Keener explicitly excluded poorly documented claims from his two volumes and dealt only with cases where the medical paper trail was strong enough to withstand academic review.[7]

The category is harder to evaluate than the Lourdes or Vatican cases because it lacks an independent institutional review body. What it does have is Keener's own scholarly methodology — he is a trained historian who spent years assembling and cross-checking this material — and the underlying medical records he references. It is worth noting that Keener wrote these volumes for a sceptical Western academic audience, not to reassure people who already believe.

Documented · Medical Records Referenced

Case 08

Richard Gallagher's Clinical Cases — Demonic Affliction

25 Years of Clinical Psychiatric Consultation · United States

Richard Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist and professor at New York Medical College, trained at Yale and Columbia. For twenty-five years he served as a clinical consultant to Catholic exorcists — brought in not to confirm possession but to rule out psychiatric illness before any ritual was performed. He evaluated hundreds of cases. He concluded that the overwhelming majority were psychiatric in nature. A very small number, he argued, were not.[8]

In those outlier cases, he documents phenomena he was unable to attribute to any psychiatric diagnosis: accurate disclosure of information the subject had no access to, reported speech in languages the subject had never encountered, physical strength disproportionate to body weight exhausting multiple restrainers, and pronounced aversion to sacred objects. Gallagher is careful to say he is not asking anyone to accept Catholic theology. His claim is narrower: these are phenomena that fall outside current psychiatric understanding. Critics dispute his interpretations, and reasonable people can disagree about how much weight to give them. What is not reasonable is dismissing the testimony of a tenured psychiatrist as though he were a credulous village elder.

Clinical Testimony · Board-Certified Psychiatrist

Case 09

Near-Death Experiences with Veridical Perception

Cardiological & Resuscitation Research · Multiple Studies

Near-death experiences are not miracles in the strict biblical sense — they are not claimed healings or restorations of function. What they are, in certain documented instances, is something more philosophically significant: evidence that consciousness appears to continue operating in conditions where neuroscience says it cannot.[9]

Cardiologist Michael Sabom documented patients who accurately reported the details of medical procedures performed on them while they were clinically unconscious — details they could not have known from prior medical exposure. Physician Sam Parnia has led prospective studies investigating reports of conscious awareness during cardiac arrest, including his AWARE studies conducted across multiple hospital sites. Neither Sabom nor Parnia is making a theological claim. What they are doing is producing empirical evidence that challenges the confident materialist assumption that the brain is simply a generator of consciousness that goes dark at death. For the Christian apologist, that is not a proof of the gospel — but it is a crack in the materialist framework that makes miracles philosophically inconceivable in the first place.

Empirically Interesting · Not a Miracle Claim

Case 10

Dr. Chauncey Crandall — Cardiac Resuscitation

Diagnosis: Death by Cardiac Arrest · Florida, 2006

Dr. Chauncey Crandall is a Yale-trained cardiologist in active clinical practice in Palm Beach, Florida. In his book Raising the Dead, he describes in detail a 2006 case in which a 53-year-old patient, Jeff Markin, suffered cardiac arrest, received seven defibrillator shocks without response, was declared dead, and had cyanosis visibly setting into the extremities and face. As the body was being prepared for transport to the morgue, Crandall returned to the room, prayed over the body, and asked a colleague to apply the defibrillator once more. The machine registered a normal heartbeat. Markin began breathing independently, recovered consciousness, and ultimately made a full recovery.[10]

The limitation here is that this is one physician's first-person account, not a multi-doctor adjudicated case file of the Lourdes variety. It is supported by a named patient and a documented clinical timeline, which puts it considerably above rumour. But it has not been independently reviewed by a specialist board, and readers should calibrate their confidence accordingly. What it is, at minimum, is the kind of account a sceptic cannot simply wave away by saying "nobody credible reports this kind of thing." Crandall has reported it, under his own name, to medical audiences, and has not been professionally discredited for doing so.

Single-Source · Named Physician Testimony

"The biblical worldview never promised miracles would be common, predictable, or laboratory-repeatable. It promised they would be real — and the evidence suggests they are."

What to Do With All of This

Ten cases is not a comprehensive survey — Keener's two volumes alone run to more than eleven hundred pages of documentation, and the Lourdes Medical Bureau has produced case files on thousands of claims. But ten specific cases, examined honestly and graded by evidence quality, is enough to put a significant burden of proof back on the person making the "no modern miracles" assertion. They need to explain Sister Simon-Pierre's neurological examinations. They need to address the Lourdes Bureau's 16-year investigation into primary lateral sclerosis. They need to account for statistically significant results in a peer-reviewed journal. They need to respond to a board-certified psychiatrist's 25-year clinical record.

Some of these cases are stronger than others. A single physician's first-hand account is not the same class of evidence as an institutionally verified case file, and conflating the two is a mistake that damages credibility. But even the weaker entries in this list — the single-source physician testimony, the clinical psychiatric notes — are still more than nothing. And the stronger entries, particularly the Vatican-verified and Lourdes-reviewed cases, are precisely the kind of evidence the sceptical framework says shouldn't exist.

To conclude, the biblical worldview never promised miracles would be common, predictable, or laboratory-repeatable. It promised they would occur, attested by reliable witnesses, in a world that otherwise operates on ordinary providence. Reading through these ten cases, that is exactly the pattern to be observed.

Endnotes

1. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's case is formally documented in the Positio submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in connection with the beatification of John Paul II (2011). See also Craig S. Keener, Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), pp. 105–110 for analysis of the medical documentation.
2. Delizia Cirolli's case is listed in the publications of the Lourdes Medical Bureau (Bureau des Constatations Médicales de Lourdes). See also Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), for discussion of the case in the context of documented spontaneous tumour resolution.
3. Barbara Snyder's case is documented in Keener, Miracles, vol. 2. Keener includes reference to physician testimony acknowledging the extraordinary character of her recovery. He gathered this material with specific intent to present it to a sceptical academic audience rather than to a sympathetic popular readership.
4. Official statistics and case criteria are maintained by the Lourdes International Medical Committee (Comité Médical International de Lourdes, CMIL) and the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at lourdes-france.org. The 72nd formally recognised miraculous healing was announced in 2025, concerning an Italian woman's recovery from primary lateral sclerosis following sixteen years of investigation. See also FSSPX News, "Lourdes: A 72nd Miracle Recognized" (July 2025).
5. For ophthalmological case documentation see Keener, Miracles, vol. 2, chapters addressing visual restoration. Keener notes that the most compelling cases in this category are supported by pre-treatment ophthalmologist diagnoses and independent witness corroboration, rather than patient self-report alone.
6. Candy Gunther Brown, Stephen C. Mory, Rebecca Williams, and Michael J. McClymond, "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique," Southern Medical Journal 103, no. 9 (September 2010): 864–869. PMID: 20686441. Brown conducted the research in her capacity as professor at Indiana University Bloomington and made explicit her methodological limitations, including the absence of a randomised control group.
7. Keener, Miracles, vol. 2. Keener's methodology involved deliberate exclusion of poorly attested claims; he dealt only with cases where medical records or direct physician testimony was available. His academic appointment at Asbury Theological Seminary and his prior work in New Testament studies means his credibility as a historian is staked on this material meeting evidentiary standards.
8. Richard Gallagher, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal (New York: HarperOne, 2020). Gallagher is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York Medical College and a faculty member of Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Institute. He has discussed his findings in peer contexts including the Washington Post and the New Oxford Review.
9. Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998); Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013). For the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) prospective study, see Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE — AWAreness during REsuscitation — A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805.
10. Chauncey W. Crandall IV, Raising the Dead: A Doctor Encounters the Miraculous (New York: FaithWords, 2010). Crandall is an interventional cardiologist at the Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic and has presented the case in Christian medical contexts. The case involves a named patient (Jeff Markin), a documented time of death, and a recorded clinical response. It has not been independently adjudicated by a multi-physician review board.

The Christian Case · rajkumarrichard.blogspot.com

Biblical Inerrancy & Historic Christianity

The Place of Biblical Inerrancy in Historic Christianity

A consolidated look at biblical inerrancy — what it is, why sincere Christians disagree on it, and why it need not shake your faith

Should our faith weaken if the Bible is proven to contain errors? Isn't the Bible the very core of Christianity? If the core of Christianity were erroneous, shouldn't Christianity itself crumble?

If these questions trouble you, you are not alone, and you are not off the mark to ask them. To relentlessly assault the Bible's trustworthiness is the fervent passion of many. To rattle the faith of Christians is, for some, a vocation. The full-blown wrath of Christianity's detractors, including the New Atheists, is aimed squarely at unsettling the faith of ordinary believers — those of us who are not trained in seminaries or steeped in academic theology. At the first sound of their relentless tirades, our faith can shake.

This post brings together three pieces I've written over the years on biblical inerrancy into a single, consolidated treatment. My aim is to walk through what the doctrine of inerrancy actually claims, why faithful, sincere Christians land in different places on it, and why — whichever side of this you land on — your faith in Christ does not need to hang by that thread.

What Is Biblical Inerrancy, and Why Do Christians Disagree About It?

Broadly, there are two categories of Christians on this question, and both remain within the bounds of Historic Christianity.

Unlimited (or total) inerrancy holds that the Bible is without error in everything it affirms — not just matters of redemption, but also history, geography, and science. Defenders of this view state plainly that they deny biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual or redemptive themes, and that the authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if total divine inerrancy is in any way limited.

Limited inerrancy takes a more lenient position. It considers the Bible inerrant only in its redemptive teaching — matters pertaining to salvation — while allowing that the Bible may be susceptible to errors in non-salvific matters such as geography, history, or science. Proponents of this view hold that the central purpose of the Bible is spiritual transformation, to bring the lost into a saving relationship with God, and that if the Bible contains some errors or discrepancies that don't touch that transforming power, this is not a fatal problem. Interestingly, even bodies like the National Association of Evangelicals commit only to the Bible's infallibility — its inability to fail — in their statement of faith, without committing to unlimited inerrancy.

Christian evangelical scholars have studied, discussed, and debated this question at the highest academic levels for years, and they continue to hold contradictory positions on it. Yet they remain, on both sides, true and sincere Christians.

A Note on the Limits of Certainty

I should be upfront that this is a genuinely contested question even among careful, faithful evangelical scholars who love Scripture. I am not presenting one side as having won the argument. What follows is my own reasoning on why I don't believe this disagreement should be allowed to threaten anyone's faith — not an attempt to settle the debate itself.

The Case for Unlimited Inerrancy — and a Question Worth Asking

Those who hold to unlimited inerrancy argue from two strong premises:

A. God cannot lie, either intentionally or unintentionally. If the Bible is God's Word, and God cannot lie, then the Bible ought to be without error.

B. Christ Himself, God incarnate, proclaimed that God's Word cannot be broken (cf. John 10:35 & Matthew 5:18).

On the face of it, this reasoning looks airtight. But it is worth examining one premise more closely.

The argument typically runs:

Premise 1: God cannot err.
Premise 2: The Bible is God's Word.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible cannot err.

Premise 1 is correct. But Premise 2 deserves a second look. The term "God's Word" can carry two meanings — the spoken word of God, or the written word of God. If the Bible were simply a voice recording of God's spoken word, this conclusion would be very hard to resist. But that is not how the Bible came to us. Human agency and human authorship were involved in its writing. The Bible was not dictated word-for-word to its human authors; rather, those authors were inspired by God as they wrote, and the text was then transmitted across centuries by human scribes.

That presence of fallible human authors and copyists opens a window through which errors could, in principle, creep in — and textual criticism tells us that, at least at the level of manuscript transmission, they have. It is a well-documented finding that the New Testament text is about 99.5% accurate as preserved across the manuscript tradition, meaning roughly 0.5% of the text involves some kind of variation. Importantly, these variations do not affect any significant doctrine taught in the Bible. So at the very least, the Bible's transmission history contains some textual variants, which means the syllogism above — that the Bible cannot err simply because it is "God's Word" — is not as bulletproof as it first appears.

Why Biblical Inerrancy Is Not an Essential Doctrine of Historic Christianity

Historic Christianity rests on certain essential doctrines — doctrines that bear directly on one's salvation, such that unbelief in them jeopardizes salvation itself. Christ's bodily resurrection is one such doctrine. A person who denies it cannot rightly be called a Christian.

Is biblical inerrancy — specifically, the unlimited version of it — one of those essential doctrines? I don't believe it is.

The Nicene Creed lays out the essential doctrines of the historic Christian faith: belief in one God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth; in the one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father, who for our sake became incarnate, was crucified, died, was buried, and on the third day rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, from where He will come again to judge the living and the dead; belief in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who spoke through the prophets; and belief in one holy, universal, and apostolic church, one baptism for the remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. At a bare minimum, belief in what the Creed lays out is sufficient for salvation.

A Christian who believes wholeheartedly in the Triunity of God, the Lordship of Christ, His bodily resurrection, and the other essential doctrines of the faith — but who does not subscribe to unlimited inerrancy, holding instead that the Bible is fully trustworthy and authoritative without being inerrant in every non-redemptive detail — has not thereby forfeited salvation. This is an entirely different situation from someone who denies that the Bible is trustworthy in its entirety. Rejecting unlimited inerrancy does not require rejecting the essential doctrines of the faith; the two are logically separable. A Christian holding to limited inerrancy can affirm everything in the Creed while still maintaining that the Bible's inerrancy is confined to redemptive matters.

Christianity's truthfulness does not depend on the Bible being inerrant in this unlimited sense; it is anchored instead in events of history, which I get to below. For that reason, I don't think biblical inerrancy, in its unlimited form, can be elevated to the status of an essential doctrine of Historic Christianity.

So What If the Bible Were Proven to Contain Errors?

Here is the deeper and, I think, more important question: if the Bible were somehow proven to contain errors, would that bring Christianity crashing down?

Our response to that scenario depends heavily on whether we treat inerrancy as essential to the faith or not. If you treat unlimited inerrancy as essential, and the Bible were shown to err, your faith could be badly shaken. But if you regard the Bible as inerrant in its redemptive core while open to error elsewhere, an error of that kind would not touch your faith at all.

Easier said than done, of course. But consider the question from another angle entirely: would an erroneous Bible entail the non-existence of God? Not by any chance.

God exists necessarily. His existence is not predicated on, or intricately tied to, the veracity of the Bible. God would not cease to exist if the Bible were shown to be erroneous. In fact, God existed before the Bible was ever written. It was God who inspired human authors to write it; the Bible reveals God, but it is not the only means by which God reveals Himself (cf. Romans 1:19–20).

The Lord Jesus Christ, the means of mankind's salvation, existed independently of the Bible's veracity. History itself affirms Christ's existence and resurrection apart from any claim of biblical inerrancy. Dr. Gary Habermas has long argued that Jesus's death by crucifixion, His post-mortem appearances to His disciples, and Paul's encounter with the resurrected Christ are among the most widely affirmed historical facts, accepted by Christian and non-Christian scholars alike.

So even if the Bible were proven to contain errors, neither God nor Christ would cease to exist, and the historical case for Christ's resurrection would remain standing on its own footing. This is not an exercise in undermining the Bible's authority. It is simply an exercise in recognizing that God, Christ, and the salvation He offers exist independently of the question of biblical inerrancy.

God is at the core of Christianity. Christ, and the salvation He offers mankind, are at the core of Christianity. But inerrancy of the Bible need not be at that core. If inerrancy were placed at the center of the faith, it would imply that inerrancy is more valuable than God, Christ, and salvation themselves. But since God is the source of the Bible, it is God who belongs at the center — not the inerrancy of the text that reveals Him. Inerrancy, where it holds, is the corollary of God's nature, not a substitute for it.

A Cautionary Example

Bart Ehrman, the well-known New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lost his faith in Christ after he discovered what he regarded as a discrepancy in the Gospel of Mark. By his own account, his strong prior commitment to biblical inerrancy was the very thing that shattered when that discrepancy surfaced. He drifted first into a more liberal Christianity, and eventually into agnostic atheism, after he found himself unable to reconcile the philosophical problems of evil and suffering. Whatever one concludes about that particular passage, Ehrman's trajectory illustrates the real danger of placing inerrancy itself — rather than God, Christ, and the resurrection — at the very foundation of one's faith.

Faith Alone: How Billy Graham Weathered This Storm

This is not merely a hypothetical danger; it has played out in real lives. The renowned evangelist Billy Graham went through his own crisis of faith when his close friend and fellow evangelist Charles "Chuck" Templeton began questioning the Bible's veracity and ultimately abandoned the faith altogether.

Graham later recalled that period:

"The exact wording of my prayer is beyond recall, but it must have echoed my thoughts: 'O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. … I can't answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck [Templeton] and others are raising.' I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it: 'Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith!' … I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months."

Templeton's departure from the faith did not deter Graham. He survived that crisis and emerged a more deeply committed believer in Christ. How? Through simple faith. You and I will not be remiss if we, too, simply believe that the Bible is the Word of God, even while we hold open questions about the finer points of inerrancy.

Truth Alone: Christianity Doesn't Stand or Fall on Inerrancy

The deeper reason none of this needs to threaten anyone's faith is that the truthfulness of Christianity does not depend on the Bible being inerrant. As Christian apologist Frank Turek has put it, Christianity would still be true even if the Bible had never been written, because Christianity's truth rests on a historical event — the resurrection of Jesus — not on a perfectly transmitted text reporting that event.

It is a mistake to think that the Christian faith is a house of cards, ready to collapse if a single verse or reference in the New Testament turns out to be mistaken. Inerrancy, however well it may be defended, is an unnecessarily high bar to set for establishing the central event of the faith: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If Christ rose from the dead, Christianity is true; if He did not, then, as the first-century eyewitness Paul himself admitted, it is false. But establishing that the resurrection happened does not require inerrant sources, any more than establishing that a football game was played requires a perfectly accurate newspaper stat line.

In fact, the presence of minor discrepancies between eyewitness accounts is itself evidence that something real took place, not evidence against it. The very existence of a flawed stat line presupposes that a game was actually played; nobody bothers writing up, let alone disputing the details of, an event that never happened. The same logic holds for the New Testament's resurrection accounts. Even where the multiple narratives differ on minor details, such disagreement reflects independent eyewitnesses describing the same dramatic event from different vantage points, not collusion or fabrication, and certainly not evidence that the event didn't occur. Survivors of the Titanic disagreed about exactly how the ship went down, yet no one doubts that it sank. All the resurrection accounts agree that the resurrection happened; they differ only on incidental details, such as who arrived first at the tomb.

This matters all the more when we consider who wrote these accounts down. Nearly all the New Testament authors were observant Jews who had every reason to lose everything by proclaiming a resurrection. They were not protecting their reputations or their safety by writing what they wrote; they were risking both. There were, as the saying goes, thousands of Christians before a single line of the New Testament was written. Paul was already a Christian before he wrote a word of Scripture, and so were Matthew, John, James, and Peter. They did not invent the resurrection and then build a faith around it. They witnessed something, and the resurrection itself gave rise to the New Testament documents — not the other way around.

This is why the foundational beliefs of Christianity — what C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity — remain true even if the reports contain some errors. Getting a detail wrong in reporting the resurrection does not undo the larger fact that the resurrection occurred. If every account agreed on every single detail, we would rightly suspect collusion rather than independent eyewitness testimony.

So whether or not one holds to an inerrant Bible in the unlimited sense, the resurrection we celebrate is a historical event that actually took place roughly two thousand years ago — and that means we can trust that those who put their faith in Christ will be raised as He was.

Where This Leaves Us

There is nothing wrong with simply believing, by faith, that the Bible is God's Word. Christianity is true whether or not the Bible turns out to contain errors in non-redemptive matters, because its truth rests on the historical reality of Christ's resurrection, not on a guarantee of total textual perfection. Without diluting the Bible's significance in the slightest, there is also nothing wrong with declining to treat unlimited biblical inerrancy as an essential doctrine of Historic Christianity.

God is at the core of Christianity. Christ, and the salvation He offers mankind, are at the core of Christianity. The Bible reveals our triune God, and Scripture cannot be broken. Let us continue to trust and study God and His Word with full confidence — not because every jot and tittle has been independently verified to our satisfaction, but because the God who inspired it, and the Christ to whom it points, stand firm regardless.

So, fear not.

---

This post draws on and consolidates three earlier articles of mine:

1. "The Bible Has Errors, What Do We Do?" (March 2016)

2. "Why Is Biblical Inerrancy Not An Essential Doctrine Of Historic Christianity?" (August 2019)

3. "Does The Bible Contain Errors Or Not? How Should A Simple Christian Think This Through?" (August 2019)

Sources referenced across these articles:

defendinginerrancy.com (on unlimited vs. limited inerrancy, and on why inerrancy matters)

National Association of Evangelicals, Statement of Faith — nae.net/statement-of-faith

Roger Olson, "Is the Bible Inerrant or Infallible?" — patheos.com

Dr. Gary Habermas, on the minimal facts of the resurrection — garyhabermas.com

Bart D. Ehrman — biographical note via Wikipedia

Billy Graham, on his crisis of faith with Chuck Templeton — billygraham.org and defendinginerrancy.com

Frank Turek, "Christianity Is True Even If Some Of The Bible Isn't" — crossexamined.org

Stand to Reason, "Is The New Testament Text Reliable?" — str.org