Doctrinal and Mission Statements

Doctrinal Statement

Mission Statement

"The Bible was written in an envoirnment that is now unfamiliar to most of its readers. The individual realization of the modern world with its new facilities, products, and problems is quite different from the social and economic conditions described in the Bible. Some of its language is puzzling, and can easily be miscronstrued if one does not have some explanation of the ancient background."
                                                           - Merrill C. Tenney

Bible History Online's mission statement will be on more of a practical level. Our goal is to aid students and teachers of the Scriptures with Biblical and historical information for the purpose of furthering the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is our desire that He would be glorified and that He would equip the readers with an insight into discerning truth from error seeing that Biblical and historical studies delve into an area that has been researched by the scholarly community, whom many are unbelievers and seem to be antagonistic toward the evidence brought forth from the historical accuracy of the Biblical account, and attempt to persuade the unlearned that the Bible cannot be substantiated by history. On the contrary, historical evidence has brought many in scholarly circles to an awareness that the wealth of documentation found in both the Old and New Testaments, unparalled in history, along with the insights of the recent scenes discovered from the past, give a stirring hope to the soul that the Bible is indeed a God-Breathed Book.

Thanks to Archaeology, our certainty of the accuracy of the Bible in the light of historical evidence has been immeasurably enhanced. Ever since the American scholar, Edward Robinson, laid the foundations of Biblical archaeology with his work in Israel in the nineteenth century, the study of Biblical history and ancient studies has been crowned with extraordinary success. After thousands of years the forgotten world of the near east has come alive to us again, the rulers and peoples of the lands that stretched from Mesopotamia to Asia Minor and to the Nile and even the whole historical, cultural and religious background of those ancient times, with which the Bible is concerned, have recently opened our our eyes and shined a brilliant light bringing the world of the bible closer to us.

Recent excavations of Mesopotamia have brought evidence of the dynasties of Ur, which was mentioned in the Bible as the original home of Abraham, the first Hebrew, who left Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, to go to a place that the Lord would bring him, the land of Palestine. The Lord promised him a great number of descendants who would dwell in that land and be a beacon to the whole world surrounding them of the will and purposes of the One and Almighty God, and we know them today as the Israelites. Their history, which the Bible records, is one that touched the greatest empires in the history of the world, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and even Rome.

Cities referred to in the Scriptures, like Nineveh, Ashur and Babylon, along with their palaces and royal homes, city gates and walls, their sanctuaries and temple towers, their statues of gods and monarchs, have been discovered and excavated. The annals of the warrior kings of Assyria and Babylon, written on cuneiform tablets, have been found in their thousands confirming and never contradicting what has been handed down to us in the Hebrew Scriptures in the books of the Kings and the Chronicles. Archaeology has brought us closer to the Elamites, the Horites, and the Hittites (sons of Heth according to the Bible), and the Philistines can be seen in real living shape on Egyptian temple walls. In fact, Egypt is becoming very important to Biblical archaeologists in the light of recent discoveries, as mentioned by professor William F. Albright:

"Biblical scholars are coming more and more to value Egyptology as a means to a better understanding of the Bible. No where else have we anything remotely corresponding to the mass of material on the walls of temples and in tombs with which we can illustrate every aspect of life in Bible times."

What an opportunity for us today being alive in a time where modern archaeology has, for the first time in three and four thousand years, illuminated us as with a powerful searchlight, with scenes of the ancient Bible world and helping us to understand what the Bible has to say in its historical and cultural setting. The mission and hope of Bible History Online is to help in bringing the work of writers, great scholars, research workers and excavators, who have devoted their lives to gathering information, and bring their work to the readers fingertips through the amazing technology of the Internet, and with this precious information they would enrich themselves and others with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the God-Breathed Word and the historical setting in which it was written.

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