The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. Questions on biblical historicity are typically separated into evaluations of whether the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible accurately record the history of ancient Israel and Judah and the second Temple period, and whether the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.
When studying the books of the Bible, scholars examine the historical context of passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence. Being a collaborative work composed and redacted over the course of several centuries, the historicity of the Bible is not consistent throughout the entirety of its contents.
