Did the Bible really happen or lie?

Answer

Your question assumes that something is either “really happened” or “lie”. However, if we want to understand what the Bible is all about, it is important to keep in mind what kind of texts we are dealing with. The stories in the Bible do mention (historical) events, but often do so tens if not hundreds of years after the date. These stories are therefore not eyewitness accounts. Reading the Bible is not the same as reading the newspaper or watching the news on television. Before the stories were written down in the form as we know them today, they were first passed down orally, often over many generations, and then they were also written down in many versions. The current Bible stories are the end result of a long development. The Bible is therefore not the word of God, at least not in the sense that it fell directly from heaven to earth, so to speak. The Bible is a thoroughly human book, written by and for people, in which they tell stories about those events from their past in which they see God’s hand. But it is precisely in this way, Christians believe, that God himself speaks. God speaks through the stories we tell each other. The dichotomy between “really happened” and “lied” is therefore too black and white. It is highly unlikely that anything in the Bible “really happened.” You may know from experience how people like to exaggerate the stories they pass on to each other. Something like that would have happened in the Bible. But this is not to say that nothing has happened at all and that it is all “just lies”. Just to comment on the comment that not much is said about Jesus in the oldest parts of the Bible. That shouldn’t come as a surprise when you know that the Bible was written by people. How could the writers of the earliest writings know anything about Jesus? The expectation that someone like Jesus would come has only grown very gradually in the course of history.