What's the evidence for the Bible based on sources outside of the Bible?

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Archaeological discoveries

The Tel Dan Stele (“House of David”)

In 1993, archaeologists found a broken stone slab (stele) in northern Israel that dates to the 9th century BCE, it contained an inscription celebrating a Syrian victory over the “King of Israel” and the “House of David”, which is the first non-biblical historical mention of David’s royal lineage as mentioned in the Bible.

The Pool of Siloam and Hezekiah’s Tunnel

The Old Testament mentions King Hezekiah carving a tunnel through solid rock to bring water into Jerusalem during an Assyrian siege . In modern day, tourists visit this part of Jerusalem to walk through the exact 1.7k foot underground channel.

Dead Sea scrolls In 1947, a shepherd boy discovered a cache of ancient jars in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea. Inside were Hebrew manuscripts dating from roughly 250 BCE to 68 CE. Before the discovery, the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible we had was around 900 CE.

When scholars compared the Dead Sea Scrolls to the copies made a thousand years later, they found them to be word-for-word identical in over 95% of the text. There were some minor variations which were mainly spelling errors or the pen slipping. This shows that ancient scribes copied the texts with extreme (borderline obsessively) precision for over a long period of time.

Historians

They were either secular / hostile to the early Christian movement wrote about biblical figures (people who had nothing to gain to support writing about these people)

Flavius Josephus (c 37 - 100 CE) He was a prominent Jewish-Roman historian, he wrote extensively about first century Judea. He references multiple figures in the New Testament such as John the Baptist (mentioning his execution by Herod), James (who he called “the brother of Jesus”, who was called Christ), as well as Pontius Pilate.

Pliny the Younger (c 61 - 113 CE) He was a Roman governor who wrote letters to Emperor Trajan asking for advice on how to deal with trials for Christians. He confirmed that early Christians routinely met on a fixed day before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god.

References

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