9 Scientific Explanations For Famous Bible Stories

Whether you're religious or not, the Bible is an incredible book. Well worth the read if you have the time.

It contains a great many stories of seemingly impossible, dare we say miraculous, occurrences. As you might expect, what with it being the Bible and all, these are generally put down to the will of God.

However, with the power of hindsight, a more advanced body of scientific knowledge and a healthy dose of skepticism, we can begin to unpick many of the biblical tales and discover what exactly was going on.

How did Moses part the Red Sea? Did Jesus really heal those lepers? And how exactly did the J-man rise from the dead?

Like with everything, stories from the bible get changed in the retelling and modern interpretations of are unlikely to be accurate (like, for instance, the constant depictions of Jesus as a white dude). 

With a bit of scientific know-how, and some historical sleuthing, we'll lift the veil on some of the more fantastical elements of the most famous bible stories and do our best to bring them back to cold, hard facts. Before you get picky, we're working here on the assumption that they weren't all just made up.

You could argue that applying logic to a book of parables is somewhat missing the point, but never mind.

In the bible, Jesus performs a great many healing miracles that appear to demonstrate his heavenly abilities (as well as bumping up is Thoroughly Top Bloke status). From curing the blind to healing lepers to allowing a paralysed man to walk again, it all seems pretty miraculous, but there might be a more earthly explanation.

In ancient times, understanding of the human body and disease was very limited. As in "Got a disease? It's probably demons, off to the leper colony with you" kind of limited.

The incredible account of Jesus telling a paralysed man to "take up his bed and walk" appears to depict a feat of miraculous healing. However, whilst it is possible that the man may have had a psychosomatic illness, it is much more likely that he wasn't actually paralysed in the first place. It's not exactly unheard of for beggars to feign a terrible illness in order to attract sympathy and therefore money.

When it comes to healing leprosy, we again run into the issue of a misdiagnosis. People were so fearful of lepers that it was common to overreact to even mild skin lesions, just in case they were leprosy. Eczema, rashes and even acne could be misdiagnosed as leprosy, and so it would seem like a total miracle when they went away on their own.

The "instant" aspect of the many healing stories are likely to be embellishments to make them more exciting.

The healing of the blind man is interesting. On a much smaller scale, many faith healers emulate this miracle by curing people of their poor eyesight. The way they do this is by lying them on the floor, this causes the liquid inside the eyeball to shift, temporarily changing the shape (which is usually the cause of poor eyesight) and often leading to short-term improved vision. The effect wears off very quickly.

However, many people regard the healing of the blind man to be metaphorical (a strong argument for many bible stories), representing his blindness to God.