62 Sermon Illustrations on Archaeology

A modern model of ancient Jerusalem portrays it in the period of the first temple. Major elements are Hezekiah's tunnel, portions of walls and tower, the "ashlar house" and other archeological finds. Five Babylonian arrowheads were found at the base of the tower.

*

The ancient city of Nimrud (=Calah in Bible) has yielded fantastic gold jewelry from graves recently. The Assyrians were brutal but good craftsmen. A short history of their rise and fall is given.

Time Magazine (March, 1990) in its “Science” section, had an item, “Score One for the Bible,” refuting the research of the late British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who claimed Jericho was destroyed 150 years before Joshua could have done it. Time also noted many facts consistent with the biblical story. While Bible believers certainly don't need it as a prop for their faith, it is always nice when “science” and secular periodicals like Time catch up with the Word of God.

=============

Version used July 28, 1991:

The traditional fall of Jericho has been confirmed. The British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon dug up Jericho and found that the city fell during a short attack. Vast amounts of grain were found, which shows there was not a long siege. And the walls had fallen outward, as if in a sudden collapse. But Kenyon also concluded Jericho fell 150 years before Joshua and the Jews arrived.

Time Magazine (March,1990) in its “Science” section, now says Kenyon may have been wrong and the Bible correct. It quotes archaeologist Bryant Wood, who says the city's walls came tumbling down at just the right time, based on pottery evidence.

It is very stylish among the main-stream media to think of the Bible as a collection of religious fables. Ironically, however, the press itself has provided abundant evidence that the Bible can indeed be trusted to speak the truth. One example can be found in the Book of Exodus. In an article subtitled, “A figurine backs the tale of Moses and the idolatrous Israelites,” TIME magazine reported on the discovery in Israel of the prototype of the infamous golden calf: “...While scientists have unearthed a few examples of bovine idols, they have never found a calf that predates the Exodus, which scholars think took place between 1500 and 1200 BC. Last week, though, a team of Harvard archaeologists announced they had done just that.”[1] Archaeologist Lawrence Stager dated the Canaanite calf-idol to about 1550 BC. This date, derived from the Canaanite pottery found along with the idol, “supports the belief that the Israelites took some of their religious practices from other Canaanites.” The Old Testament writers were constantly condemning the Israelites for their tendency to worship Canaanite gods, and this discovery confirms it.

US NEWS & WORLD REPORT also examined the discovery of the calf, pointing out that pottery found at a later level - the level dating from the time of the Philistines - provided evidence of another biblical assertion: that the Philistines were of Greek origin. Genesis 10:14 tells us they were from a branch of tribes originating around Caphtor, the Hebrew name for the Aegean Islands. The October 7, 1991, issue of US NEWS reported that “the [Philistine] pottery found in the dig is identical to that produced by the Mycenaean Greeks, leading a number of scholars to conclude that that’s exactly who they were. The date of the artifacts corresponds perfectly with Homer’s accounts’ of the aftermath of the fall of Troy in 1183 BC, when Odysseus and other Greek war heroes wandered the eastern Mediterranean on circuitous journeys home.”[2]

That same issue of US NEWS provided us with still more evidence of the reliability of the Bible. The issue reported on a discovery that proves the accuracy of the account of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho. It stated: “The city’s walls do appear to have collapsed suddenly (cf. Joshua 6:20), and the blackened timbers and stones, as well as a layer of soot dating to 1400 BC, all suggest that the city burned, as the Bible says it did (Joshua 6:24). [Archeologist Kathleen] Kenyon also found bushels of grain on the site, consistent with the Bible’s account of a springtime conquest so rapid (seven days, Josh. 6:4,15,16) that Jericho’s besieged populace had not exhausted their food. With such a superb confirmation of the biblical account, no wonder TIME magazine titled its March 5, 1990, article on the same discovery “Score One for the Bible.”[3]

The proof of Joshua goes on. Joshua 17:15-18 tells us that, because all of Canaan had not yet been conquered, there wasn’t enough room for all the Israelite settlers, so Joshua suggested they cut down the forests that covered the hills of Canaan. The Israelites did so, and today we have confirmation of it. NEWSWEEK magazine reported: “The Jews’ arrival (under Joshua) does leave its mark in other places. Strata in the highlands of central Palestine, dated to the 12th century BC, were seriously deforested, suggesting a huge influx of settlers and lending credence to Joshua’s statement that ‘the mountain ... is a wood, and thou shalt cut it down.’”[4]

It is truly ironic that the mainstream media in this country, while trying its utmost to ridicule and even destroy Christianity, is at the same time reporting on so many discoveries that prove that the Bible (and therefore, Bible-based Christianity) is a source of truth. When will they ever learn?

Stephen Caesar

Bible Proof Ministries

Merrimack, New Hampshire

Sources:

1. Michael Lemonik, “The Return of the Golden Calf,” Time, Aug. 6, 1990, p. 57.

2. Miriam Horn, “Unearthing the Promised Land,” US News & World Report, October 7, 1991, p. 68.

3. Ibid., p. 69.

4. Sharon Begley, “the Hunt for a Lost Holy Past,” Newsweek, June 22, 1987, p. 60.

Nelson Glueck, former president of Jewish Theological Seminary in the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and one of the greatest archaeologists ever:

"I have been accused of teaching the verbal inspiration of the

Scripture. I want it to be understood that I have never taught this.

All I have ever said is that in all of my archeological investigation

I have never found one artifact of antiquity that contradicts any

statement of the Word of God."

*

[Used in sermon found at Holw-serm-ID #4682]

Is the Bible true? Extraordinary insights from archaeology and history.

– In the beginning

– Age of the patriarchs

– Flight from Egypt

– The rule of David

– The days of Jesus

– The road ahead

The workday was nearly over for the team of archaeologists excavating the ruins of the ancient Israelite city of Dan in upper Galilee. Led by Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, the group had been toiling since early morning, sifting debris in a stone-paved plaza outside what had been the city's main gate.

Now the fierce afternoon sun was turning the stoneworks into a reflective oven. Gila Cook, the team's surveyor, was about to take a break when something caught her eye – an unusual shadow in a portion of recently exposed wall along the east side of the plaza. Moving closer, she discovered a flattened basalt stone protruding from the ground with what appeared to be Aramaic letters etched into its smooth surface. She called Biran over for a look. As the veteran archaeologist knelt to examine the stone, his eyes widened. "Oh, my God!" he exclaimed. "We have an inscription!"

In an instant, Biran knew that they had stumbled upon a rare treasure. The basalt stone was quickly identified as part of a shattered monument, or stele, from the ninth century B.C., apparently commemorating a military victory of the king of Damascus over two ancient enemies. One foe the fragment identified as the "king of Israel." The other was "the House of David."

The reference to David was a historical bombshell. Never before had the familiar name of Judah's ancient warrior king, a central figure of the Hebrew Bible and, according to Christian Scripture, an ancestor of Jesus, been found in the records of antiquity outside the pages of the Bible. Skeptics had long seized upon that fact to argue that David was a mere legend, invented by Hebrew scribes during or shortly after Israel's Babylonian exile, roughly 500 years before the birth of Christ. Now, at last, there was material evidence: an inscription written not by Hebrew scribes but by an enemy of the Israelites a little more than a century after David's presumptive lifetime. It seemed to be a clear corroboration of the existence of King David's dynasty and, by implication, of David himself.

Beyond its impact on the question of David's existence, however, the discovery provided a dramatic illustration of the promise and peril that come into play whenever the Bible is weighed on the scales of modern archaeology. In one moment, the unearthing of an inscription or artifact can shed new light or cast a shadow on a passage of Scripture and in the process shatter the presuppositions of biblical scholarship. One kind of truth is confirmed – or replaced – by another.

In extraordinary ways, modern archaeology has affirmed the historical core of the Old and New Testaments – corroborating key portions of the stories of Israel's patriarchs, the Exodus, the Davidic monarchy, and the life and times of Jesus. Where it has faced its toughest task has been in primordial history, where many scholars find the traces of human origins obscured in theological myth.

IN THE BEGINNING

Ever since Copernicus overturned the church-sanctioned view of Earth as the center of the universe and Charles Darwin posited random mutation and natural selection as the real creators of human life, the biblical view that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth" has found itself on the defensive in modern Western thought. Despite the dominance of Darwin's theory–that human beings evolved from lower life forms over millions of years–theologians have yielded relatively little ground on what for them is a fundamental doctrine of faith: that the universe is the handiwork of a divine creator who has given humanity a special place in his creation.

These apparently conflicting explanations have played a divisive role for centuries. In modern times, the supposed incompatibility of the scientific and religious views of creation have sparked bitter clashes in the nation's courtrooms and classrooms. Often the modern debate has amounted to little more than a shouting match between extremists on both sides–fundamentalists, who dismiss evolution as a satanic deception, and atheistic naturalists, who assert that science offers the only window on reality and who seek to discredit religious belief as ignorant superstition.

Listening to some of the rhetoric today, one might easily assume that the views espoused by creationists–that God created the universe in six 24-hour days, as a literal reading of Genesis 1 would suggest–represent the historic position of Christianity and of the Bible, and that it is only in modern times, with the rise of evolutionary theory, that creationism has come under siege. Yet this is hardly the case.

As early as the fifth century, the great Christian theologian Augustine warned against taking the six days of Genesis literally. Writing on The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine argued that the days of creation were not successive, ordinary days – the sun, after all, according to Genesis, was not created until the fourth "day" – and had nothing to do with time. Rather, Augustine argued, God "made all things together, disposing them in an order based not on intervals of time but on causal connections." Sounding like an evolutionist, Augustine reasoned that some things were made in fully developed form and others were made in "potential form" that developed over time to the condition in which they are seen today.

Now, a growing number of conservative scholars embrace theistic evolution–a view that considers evolution, like all other physical processes known to science, to be divinely designed and governed. They understand Genesis as speaking more of the relationship between God and creation than as presenting a scientific or historical explanation of how and when creation occurred. "Creation and evolution are not contradictory," explains Howard Van Till, a professor of physics and astronomy at evangelical Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. "They provide different answers to a different set of questions."

Much the same may be said of disputes over the meaning and intent of the biblical story of the Flood. Those who take it as literal history believe that God unleashed a worldwide deluge that destroyed all air-breathing life on Earth except for those creatures taken aboard the ark in divine judgment against a creation gone bad. When God finally allowed the waters to recede, the ark was emptied and the world was repopulated by the creatures that disembarked. Based on biblical genealogies, all of this would have happened less than 10,000 years ago.

While most biblical scholars consider the story of the Flood a myth, many conservatives have little difficulty imagining that God could pull off precisely what the Genesis story describes. As with the Creation narrative, however, the evidence and arguments from science stack up overwhelmingly against a literal interpretation of the Flood story. Where, for example, would such a volume of water have come from, and where would it have gone afterward? How would mammalian life have re-emerged on isolated islands and landmasses that emerged from the receding flood waters? While some scholars allow the possibility that a catastrophic regional deluge may underlie the flood legends of the ancient Near East, conservatives argue that there is, indeed, geological evidence consistent with a universal deluge. But such arguments have found little support within the scientific mainstream.

AGE OF THE PATRIARCHS

The book of Genesis traces Israel's ancestry to Abraham, a monotheistic nomad who God promises will be "ancestor of a multitude of nations" and whose children will inherit the land of Canaan as "a perpetual holding." God's promise and Israel's ethnic identity are passed from generation to generation – from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. Then Jacob and his sons – the progenitors of Israel's 12 ancient tribes – are forced by famine to leave Canaan and migrate to Egypt, where the Israelite people emerge over a period of some 400 years.

Modern archaeology has found no direct evidence from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 B.C.) – roughly the period many scholars believe to be the patriarchal era – to corroborate the biblical account. No inscriptions or artifacts relating to Israel's first biblical ancestors have been recovered. Nor are there references in other ancient records to the early battles and conflicts reported in Genesis.

Moreover, some scholars contend that the patriarch stories contain anachronisms that suggest they were written many centuries after the events they portray. Abraham, for example, is described in the 11th and 15th chapters of Genesis as coming from "Ur of the Chaldeans" – a city in southern Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq. But the Chaldeans settled in that area "not earlier than the ninth or eighth centuries" B.C., according to Niels Peter Lemche, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and a leading biblical skeptic. That, he says, is more than 1,000 years after Abraham's time and at least 400 years after the time of Moses, who tradition says wrote the book of Genesis.

Yet other scholars, like Barry Beitzel, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill., are neither surprised nor troubled by the apparent lack of direct archaeological evidence for Abraham's existence. Why, they argue, should one expect to find the names of an obscure nomad and his descendants in the official archives of the rulers of Mesopotamia? These are "family stories," says Beitzel, not geopolitical history of the type one might expect to find preserved in the annals of kings.

While there may, indeed, be no direct material evidence relating to the biblical patriarchs, archaeology has not been altogether silent on the subject. Kenneth A. Kitchen, an Egyptologist now retired from the University of Liverpool in England, argues that archaeology and the Bible "match remarkably well" in depicting the historical context of the patriarch narratives. In Genesis 37:28, for example, Joseph, a son of Jacob, is sold by his brothers into slavery for 20 silver shekels. That, notes Kitchen, matches precisely the going price of slaves in the region during the 19th and 18th centuries B.C., as affirmed by documents recovered from the region that is now modern Syria. By the eighth century B.C., the price of slaves, as attested in ancient Assyrian records, had risen steadily to 50 or 60 shekels, and to 90 to 120 shekels during the Persian Empire in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. If the story of Joseph had been dreamed up by a Jewish scribe in the sixth century, as some skeptics have suggested, argues Kitchen, "why isn't the price in Exodus also 90 to 100 shekels? It's more reasonable to assume that the biblical data reflect reality."

FLIGHT FROM EGYPT

The dramatic story of the Exodus–of God delivering Moses and the Israelite people from Egyptian bondage and leading them to the Promised Land of Canaan–has been called the "central proclamation of the Hebrew Bible." Yet archaeologists have found no direct evidence to corroborate the biblical story. Inscriptions from ancient Egypt contain no mention of Hebrew slaves, of the plagues that the Bible says preceded their release, or of the destruction of the pharaoh's army during the Israelites' miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. No physical trace has been found of the Israelites' 40-year nomadic sojourn in the Sinai wilderness. There is not even any indication, outside of the Bible, that Moses existed.

Still, as with the patriarch narratives, many scholars argue that a lack of direct evidence is insufficient reason to deny that the Exodus actually happened. Nahum Sarna, professor emeritus of biblical studies at Brandeis University, argues that the Exodus story – tracing, as it does, a nation's origins to slavery and oppression – "cannot possibly be fictional. No nation would be likely to invent for itself . . . an inglorious and inconvenient tradition of this nature," unless it had an authentic core. "If you're making up history," adds Richard Elliott Friedman, professor at the University of California-San Diego, "it's that you were descended from gods or kings, not from slaves."

Indeed, the absence of direct material evidence of an Israelite sojourn in Egypt is not as surprising, or as damaging to the Bible's credibility, as it first might seem. What type of material evidence, after all, would one expect to find that could corroborate the biblical story? "Slaves, serfs, and nomads leave few traces in the archaeological record," notes University of Arizona archaeologist William Dever.

The dating of the Exodus also has long been a source of controversy. The book of 1 Kings 6:1 gives what appears to be a clear historical marker for the end of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt: "In the 480th year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord." Biblical historians generally agree that Solomon, the son and successor of David (and the builder of Israel's first great temple) came to the throne in about 962 B.C. If so, then the Exodus would have occurred in about 1438 B.C., based on the chronology of the 1 Kings passage.

That date does not fit with other biblical texts or with what is known of ancient Egyptian history. But the flaw is far from fatal. Sarna and others argue that the time span cited in 1 Kings – 480 years – should not be taken literally. "It is 12 generations of 40 years each," notes Sarna; 40 being "a rather conventional figure in the Bible," frequently used to connote a long period of time. Viewing the 1 Kings chronology in that light – as primarily a theological statement rather than as "pure" history in the modern sense – the Exodus can be placed in the 13th century, in the days of Ramses II, where it finds strong circumstantial support in the archaeological record.

THE RULE OF DAVID

The reigns of King David and his son Solomon over a united monarchy mark the glory years of ancient Israel. That period (roughly 1000 B.C. to 920 B.C.)–described in detail in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles–marks the beginning of an era of stronger links between biblical history and modern archaeological evidence.

Before the discovery of the "House of David" inscription at Dan in 1993, it had become fashionable in some academic circles to dismiss the David stories as an invention of priestly propagandists who were trying to dignify Israel's past after the Babylonian exile. But as Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein observes, "Biblical nihilism collapsed overnight with the discovery of the David inscription."

In the aftermath, another famous ancient inscription found more than a century ago has attracted renewed scholarly interest. The so-called Mesha Stele, like the stele on which the Dan inscription is etched, is a basalt monument from the ninth century B.C. that commemorates a military victory over Israel – this one by the Moabite king Mesha. The lengthy Tyrian text describes how the kingdom of Moab, a land east of the Jordan River, had been oppressed by "Omri, king of Israel" (whose reign is summarized in 1 Kings 16:21-27) and by Omri's successors, and how Mesha threw off the Israelites in a glorious military campaign.

But the name of another of Mesha's conquered foes may lie hidden in a partially obliterated line of text that, transliterated, reads b[–]wd; the remainder of the inscription is missing. The French scholar André LeMaire, after carefully re-examining the inscription, has suggested that the line should be filled in to read bt dwd – "beit David," or "house of David" – a reference to the kingdom of Judah. "No doubt," says LeMaire, "the missing part of the inscription described how Mesha also threw off the yoke of Judah and conquered the territory southeast of the Dead Sea controlled by the House of David."

As significant as they are, these two inscriptions–both still contested – remain for now the only extrabiblical references to David's dynasty. And both were written more than a century after the reigns of David and Solomon. Given the grandeur of the Israelite monarchy under the two kings as described in the Bible, how could such an influential and popular regime have attracted so little notice in ancient Near Eastern documents from the time?

The answer, suggests Carol Meyers, professor of biblical studies and archaeology at Duke University, may lie in the political climate in the region at the time, when, she says, "a power vacuum existed in the eastern Mediterranean." The collapse of Egypt's 20th dynasty around 1069 B.C. led to a lengthy period of economic and political decline for a nation that had exerted powerful influence over the city-states of Palestine during the Late Bronze Age. This period of Egyptian weakness, which lasted for over a century (until around 945 B.C.), saw a "relative paucity of monumental inscriptions," says Meyers. "The kings had nothing to boast about."

Similarly, the Assyrian empire to the east was unusually silent from the late 11th to the early ninth century B.C. regarding the western lands it once had dominated. Assyria was preoccupied, says Meyers, with internal turmoil following the death of one of the greatest of its early kings. Another major power in the region, Babylonia, also was uncharacteristically quiet. For centuries following a raid on Assyria in 1081 B.C., it seldom ventured beyond its own borders, says Meyers, "and thus its records would hardly have mentioned a new dynastic state to the west."

The reign of David was a time of territorial expansion for the united Israelite kingdom and was marked, according to the Bible, by a series of military victories. Twice the Israelite armies repulsed invasions by the Philistines, a belligerent horde of pagan marauders who occupied Canaan's Mediterranean coastal plains. While the Bible depicts the Philistines as a frequent nemesis of the Israelites, their name does not appear in ancient nonbiblical sources before 1200 B.C. Some minimalist scholars have suggested that the biblical stories of run-ins with the dreaded Philistines were invented by priestly scribes in the middle of the first millennium B.C. to dramatize the military prowess of the mythical Davidic dynasty.

But modern archaeology has uncovered a wealth of information regarding the Philistine "sea people" thoroughly consistent with their portrayal in the Bible. For example, sources including numerous Egyptian inscriptions indicate that the Philistines most likely originated in the Aegean area, probably on the island of Crete. That fits with biblical passages (Jeremiah 47:4 and Deuteronomy 2:23, for example) linking them with Caphtor, a location most scholars identify with Crete.

Additionally, the Bible depicts the Philistines as expert metallurgists, and archaeologists have found material evidence that the Philistines were, indeed, expert metalworkers. Trude Dothan, a Hebrew University archaeologist who has excavated many of the Philistine sites, says this superior knowledge no doubt gave them a military advantage in their early battles with the Israelites. She notes that in the famous story of the duel between David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, the giant Philistine warrior is described as wearing a bronze helmet and bronze body armor and carrying a spear with a shaft "like a weaver's beam" and with a head of iron. "The Bible compares Goliath's spear to a weaver's beam," Dothan says, "because this type of weapon was new to Canaan and had no Hebrew name." Once again, the Bible and archaeology are in agreement.

THE DAYS OF JESUS

Compared with the earlier eras of Old Testament history, the days of Jesus are a fleeting moment. A life span of just three decades and a public career of only a few years leave a dauntingly narrow target for archaeological exploration. Yet during the past four decades, spectacular discoveries have produced a wealth of data illuminating the story of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. The picture that has emerged overall closely matches the historical backdrop of the Gospels.

In 1968, for example, explorers found the skeletal remains of a crucified man in a burial cave at Giva'at ha-Mitvar, near the Nablus road outside of Jerusalem. It was a momentous discovery: While the Romans were known to have crucified thousands of alleged traitors, rebels, robbers, and deserters in the two centuries straddling the turn of the era, never before had the remains of a crucifixion victim been recovered. An initial analysis of the remains found that their condition dramatically corroborated the Bible's description of the Roman method of execution.

The bones were preserved in a stone burial box called an ossuary and appeared to be those of a man about 5 feet, 5 inches tall and 24 to 28 years old. His open arms had been nailed to the crossbar, in the manner similar to that shown in crucifixion paintings. The knees had been doubled up and turned sideways, and a single large iron nail had been driven through both heels. The nail – still lodged in the heel bone of one foot, though the executioners had removed the body from the cross after death – was found bent, apparently having hit a knot in the wood. The shin bones seem to have been broken, corroborating what the Gospel of John suggests was normal practice in Roman crucifixions: "Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs" (19:32-33). While one later analysis drew some different conclusions about how the man died, similarities to the biblical account were affirmed.

The discovery also posed a powerful counterargument to objections some scholars have raised against the Gospels' description of Jesus's burial. It has been argued that the common practice of Roman executioners was to toss corpses of crucified criminals into a common grave or to leave them on the cross to be devoured by scavenging animals. So it hardly seems feasible, the argument goes, that Roman authorities would have allowed Jesus to undergo the burial described in the Gospels. But with the remains of a crucified contemporary of Jesus found in a family grave, it is clear that at least on some occasions the Romans permitted proper interment consistent with the biblical account.

A find at another Jerusalem site added to the list of Gospel figures whose existence has been verified by archaeology. Workers building a water park 2 miles south of the Temple Mount in 1990 inadvertently broke through the ceiling of a hidden burial chamber dating to the first century A.D. Inside, archaeologists found 12 limestone ossuaries. One contained the bones of a 60-year-old man and bore the inscription Yehosef bar Qayafa – "Joseph, son of Caiaphas." Experts believe these remains are probably those of Caiaphas the high priest of Jerusalem, who according to the Gospels ordered the arrest of Jesus, interrogated him, and handed him over to Pontius Pilate for execution.

A few decades earlier, the name of another key figure in the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus turned up in the archaeological record: During excavations in 1961 at the seaside ruins of Caesarea Maritima, the ancient seat of Roman government in Judea, a first-century inscription was uncovered confirming that Pilate had been the Roman ruler of the region at the time of Jesus's crucifixion. Italian archaeologists working at the city's magnificent Herodian theater found the inscribed stone slab in use in the theater's steps. Experts say it originally was a first-century plaque at a nearby temple honoring the emperor Tiberius. The badly damaged Latin inscription reads in part, Tiberieum . . . [Pon]tius Pilatus . . . [Praef]ectus Juda[ea]e. According to experts, the complete inscription would have read, "Pontius Pilate, the Prefect of Judea, has dedicated to the people of Caesarea a temple in honor of Tiberius." The discovery of the so-called Pilate Stone has been widely acclaimed as a significant affirmation of biblical history because, in short, it confirms that the man depicted in the Gospels as Judea's Roman governor had precisely the responsibilities and authority that the Gospel writers ascribed to him.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Modern archaeology may not have removed all doubt about the historical accuracy of the Bible. But thanks to archaeology, the Bible "no longer appears as an absolutely isolated monument of the past, as a phenomenon without relation to its environment," as the great American archaeologist William Albright wrote at midcentury. Instead, it has been firmly fixed in a context of knowable history, linked to the present by footprints across the archaeological record.

Just as archaeology has shed new light on the Bible, the Bible in turn has often proved a useful tool for archaeologists. Yigael Yadin, the Israeli archaeologist who excavated at Hazor in the 1950s, relied heavily on its guidance in finding the great gate of Solomon at the famous upper Galilee site: "We went about discovering [the gate] with Bible in one hand and spade in the other." And Trude Dothan notes that "without the Bible, we wouldn't even have known there were Philistines."

Much work remains for the archaeological explorers of the next century, and many more mysteries of the Bible wait to be solved. Where, for example, are the lost "Annals of the Kings" of Israel and Judah cited as literary sources in the Old Testament book of 1 Kings, and the five books of Papias mentioned in early church writings as a collection of the sayings of Jesus? Will further discoveries of hidden scrolls from the Dead Sea reveal new insights into the birth of Christianity? Scholars are convinced there is much more out there waiting to be found. It's just a matter of time.

____________________

From Is the Bible True? by Jeffery L. Sheler © 1999 by Jeffery L. Sheler. HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

[see #4919 for Chuck Colson's adaptation]

*

Most of us think of Goliath, the Philistine giant slain by David, as someone huge and fierce-looking. According to a new theory, however, there's one more detail we can add to our mental picture: glasses. Well, not glasses perhaps, but certainly the need for an eye doctor.

While this theory may be one scientist's fanciful speculation, it is, nevertheless, an example of the new-found respect that science is showing for the words of Scripture.

According to Vladimir Berginer, a professor of neurology at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Goliath may have been suffering from a condition known as acromegaly, a disease that affects the pituitary gland.

With this condition, a benign tumor on the pituitary gland would cause too much growth hormone to be released, causing the gigantism described in the Bible. In addition, people suffering from acromegaly often suffer from tunnel vision which restricts their field of vision to a narrow area directly in front of them.

According to Berginer, this condition not only explains Goliath's great height, it also explains why David was able to defeat him so easily -- Goliath never saw him coming.

Berginer has submitted a paper about his theory to a London journal. I don't know whether his theory holds water, but it's worth noting that scientists are increasingly using biblical texts in their research.

This is an about-face from the way academics regarded the Bible just a few years ago. As Jeffery Sheler points out in his new book, Is The Bible True?, for more than a century fields such as archeology and biblical scholarship were dominated by what could be called "minimalists" -- people who believed that the Bible contains little or no history.

When scientific methods were applied to the Bible, it was usually an effort to disprove the truth of biblical narratives.

But the past few decades have seen what Sheler calls "refreshing winds of change" blowing across the biblical landscape. Sheler says " biblical archeology ... [has] produced breathtaking discoveries that ... [shed light] on the historicity of the scriptures." These discoveries have corroborated biblical narratives that earlier scholars had written off as myth.

Now, scholars like Berginer are beginning to look to the Bible as history. Not so long ago, no scholar would have dreamed of submitting a paper on Goliath to a scientific journal -- not when his peers believed that Goliath was a fictional character. But the growing body of scientific evidence now means that Berginer's hypothesis are beginning to be taken seriously.

Parts of what the Bible says are, frankly, beyond the scientific method -- the resurrection of Jesus and life after death are just two examples. But the kind of discoveries that Sheler describes in his book sends a clear message: Believing what the Bible says is a very reasonable thing to do. In fact, simply dismissing the Bible out-of-hand is ignorance.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be telling you more about exciting developments in biblical archeology that you will want to share with your neighbors.

Because there's a worse kind of tunnel-vision that the one that may have cost Goliath his head: It's the kind that blinds us to the truth of Scripture.

___________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

A few years ago, people exploring the caves around Jerusalem made the discovery of a lifetime: an ancient burial site containing the remains of a crucified man.

The find was only one in a series that have overturned a century-old consensus which held that the gospels are almost entirely proclamation, with little, if any, real history.

It turns out the remains belonged to a man who had been crucified in the first century A.D. As Jeffrey Sheler writes in his book "Is The Bible True?", the skeleton confirms what the evangelists wrote about Jesus' death and burial in several important ways.

First, there was the location. Scholars had long doubted the biblical account of Jesus' burial. They believed that crucified criminals were tossed in a mass grave and devoured by wild animals. But this man, a near contemporary of Jesus, was buried in the same way the Bible says that Jesus was.

Then there's the physical evidence from the skeleton. The man's shin bones had been broken, which confirms what John wrote was the practice of the Roman executioners. The Bible tells us that, because He was already dead when the executioners reached him, Jesus was spared this act.

The evidence is especially important since scholars have long dismissed the details of John's Passion narrative -- treating them as theologically-motivated embellishments.

Another account that has been corroborated by archeology is the story of Jesus healing the lame man in John chapter 5. In this story, John describes a five-sided pool just inside Jerusalem's Sheep Gate, where the sick came to be healed. Since no other document from antiquity -- including the rest of the Bible -- mentions such a place, it had long been assumed that John invented the locale.

But, as Sheler points out, when archeologists decided to dig where John said that the pool was located, they found a five-sided pool. What's more, the pool contained shrines to the Greek gods of healing. John hadn't made up the locale, after all.

This dismissing of the biblical text, without bothering to dig, points out the weakness of liberal scholarly opinion: much of the suspicion about biblical texts can only be attributed to prejudice. That is, it's a conclusion arrived at before the facts are all in.

Scholars long assumed that the Bible, like other documents of antiquity, is essentially propaganda. But this prejudice manifests profound ignorance of what Christians believe. Central to faith are history and memory. Christians believe that God has acted, and continues to act, in history. For us, remembering what God has done is an act of worship -- something that brings us closer to God.

Thus, while all these discoveries in the desert may come as a surprise to the skeptics, they're no surprise to believing Christians.

Archeology alone, of course, cannot bring a person to faith, but finds like these offer an eloquent argument for not dismissing the truth of Scripture before the evidence has been examined.

Because, as we are learning, more and more every day, Jesus wasn't kidding when he told us, "the stones will cry out."

___________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

==========================

[slightly modified version from March 25, 2002]

"The Stones Cry Out: Archeology Bears Witness To The Gospels"

A few years ago, people exploring caves outside Jerusalem came across the find of a lifetime: an ancient burial cave containing the remains of a crucified man.

This find is only one in a series of finds that overturn a century-old scholarly consensus. That consensus held that the Gospels are almost entirely proclamation, and contain little, if any, real history.

The remains belonged to a man who had been executed in the first century A.D., that is, from the time of Jesus. As Jeffrey Sheler writes in his book IS THE BIBLE TRUE? the skeleton confirms what the evangelists wrote about Jesus' death and burial in several important ways.

First, location -- scholars had long doubted the biblical account of Jesus' burial. They believed that crucified criminals were tossed in a mass grave and then devoured by wild animals. But this man, a near contemporary of Jesus, was buried in the same way the Bible says Jesus was buried.

Then there's the physical evidence from the skeleton. The man's shinbones appeared to have been broken. This confirms what John wrote about the practice of Roman executioners. They would break the legs of the crucified to hasten death, something from which Jesus, already dead, was spared.

This point is particularly noteworthy, since scholars have long dismissed the details of John's Passion narrative as theologically motivated embellishments.

Another part of John's Gospel that archeology has recently corroborated is the story of Jesus healing the lame man in John 5. John describes a five-sided pool just inside the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem where the sick came to be healed. Since no other document of antiquity -- including the rest of the Bible -- mentions such a place, skeptics have long argued that John simply invented the place.

But as Sheler points out, when archeologists decided to dig where John said that the pool had been located, they found a five-sided pool. What's more, the pool contained shrines to the Greek gods of healing. Apparently John didn't make up the pool, after all.

The dismissal of biblical texts without bothering to dig points to a dirty little secret about a lot of scholarly opinion: Much of the traditional suspicion of the biblical text can only be called a prejudice. That is, it's a conclusion arrived at before one has the facts.

Scholars long assumed that the Bible, like other documents of antiquity, was essentially propaganda, what theologian Rudolf Bultmann called "kerygma" or proclamation.

But this prejudice does an injustice to biblical faith. Central to that faith are history and memory. Christians believe that God has acted, and continues to act, in history. For us, remembering what God has done is an act of worship -- something that brings us closer to God.

Thus, while these discoveries in the desert may come as a surprise to some skeptics, they're no surprise to Christians.

While archeology alone cannot bring a person to faith, these finds are an eloquent argument for not dismissing the truth of Scripture before at least examining the evidence -- because, as we are learning every day, Jesus meant it when he said that "the very stones will cry out."

For further reading:

Jeffrey Sheler, IS THE BIBLE TRUE? (HarperCollins, 1999).

Visit the Biblical Archaeology Society website.

Randall Price, THE STONES CRY OUT: HOW ARCHEOLOGY CONFIRMS THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE (Harvest House, 1997).

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

*

For many years, Bible scholars in Israel and America claimed that the story of King David was just a myth. Then archaeologists digging in the rubble around Syria made a remarkable discovery.

What they found was a rock fragment inscribed with an ancient text referring to "the House of David," a phrase used for the ruling dynasty founded by King David. The carving appears to be a victory monument erected by a Syrian king just 100 years after a battle described in the Book of First Kings

What makes the finding so unusual is that it's the first reference to King David or the Jewish royal family ever found outside the pages of the Bible. And it provides important new evidence for the historicity of Scripture.

This is by no means the first time archaeology has supported the Bible. Time after time, critics have stated that portions of the Bible are false. But time after time, archaeologists chipping away with their hammers have uncovered evidence that supports the biblical account.

For example, critics once said that the Pentateuch -- the first five books of the Bible -- could not have been written by Moses, since the text mentions rituals not developed until much later. But clay tablets from a period prior to Moses have now been discovered, describing many of the same rituals. There's no longer any reason to doubt that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, just as the Bible claims.

Critics also used to dismiss the stories about the patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then cuneiform tablets were discovered with references to biblical names, like Abraham and his brothers, Nahor and Haran. And suddenly those passages in Genesis moved from the realm of myth to the realm of history -- where the Bible had put them all along.

Archaeology also explains some unusual customs from biblical times. Abraham's wife, Sarah, and Jacob's wife, Rachel, both offered servant girls to their husbands to bear children. Modern readers find these passages baffling: How did they come up with something that strikes us as so immoral?

Archaeology gives us the answer. It was a common practice in those times for a barren wife to provide her husband a surrogate. In many ways, the patriarchs were children of their age.

A few centuries later, these practices were largely forgotten. And that makes it highly unlikely for the Genesis account to have been invented later, as critics once claimed.

With a record like this, Christians never need to be intimidated by the skeptics. Some of us are too ready to give in. Some Christians even believe that the Bible is only true in its religious content, and not its history. But there's no need for such a defensive position.

From the late nineteenth century, when archaeology first became a science, to the day when archaeologists found the ancient text mentioning the "House of David," the Bible has always proved reliable, on all levels -- religious and historical. You can assure your friends that the God of faith is also the God of history.

___________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

In the spring of 2011 a startling archaeological discovery was revealed. A cache of 70 small books, made of lead sheets about the size of credit cards, was found by a Bedouin in a cave 3 years ago. He smuggled them into Israel but scholars found out about them and the Jordanian government wants them back.

Experts say they may be among the earliest Christian writings found so far, dating from the first decades of the church. The director of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities says they may be more important than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Even though the books are written in Hebrew code that hasn’t been deciphered yet, scholars believe they are Christian. The cover of one of the books shows a “T”-shaped cross, and behind the cross is what must be the tomb of Jesus. From the very beginning, these symbols have been the center of the faith.

Some scholars believe the books are modern forgeries and contain a mishmash of writing styles and images copied from ancient sources. Further tests are being conducted.

________

Adapted from a BBC News article

*

[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #4353]

[inscription was later found to be fraudulent - Holwick]

Archaeology made headlines around the world last fall when an ossuary, or burial box, surfaced in Israel that bore the inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Now, a book is picking up where the headlines left off. It is called THE BROTHER OF JESUS: THE DRAMATIC STORY AND MEANING OF THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGICAL LINK TO JESUS AND HIS FAMILY.

The book is co-authored by Hershel Shanks, publisher of the BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL REVIEW, and Ben Witherington III, a noted New Testament scholar.

Shanks is the man who first broke the news of the ossuary. In the book he details the scientific tests and scholarly examinations that preceded the announcement and the academic furor that followed it. Witherington describes the life and beliefs of James who was a leader of the early Church. James brokered the famous compromise in Acts 15 that allowed Gentile believers to join the early Church.

Now that the dust is settling and the critics have had their say, it appears that the early consensus is left intact. Although the burial box will always be controversial -- because it surfaced through an antiquities market, rather than a controlled dig -- leading experts agree that it is authentic. And it represents hard evidence to corroborate ancient Christian manuscripts.

It's refreshing to see objectivity at work through the story of the ossuary's discovery. André Lemaire, a specialist in ancient inscriptions and a former priest, was the first to authenticate the ossuary's inscription even though the word brother challenges the Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Israeli experts confirmed the artifact's authenticity even though it backs up Christian, rather than Jewish, tradition. And Hershel Shanks broke the story, not because he believes in Christianity, but because he believes in good scholarship.

While I'm thrilled by the new evidence that demonstrates the Bible's historical accuracy, there is reason for some caution. Some Christians want to base their beliefs entirely on extra-biblical evidence, but the fact is that we must never downplay the Bible's inherent credibility.

We need to remember which witnesses are primary and which are secondary. Moses, the prophets, and others were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” to write holy Scripture. Some were eyewitnesses of the events they reported; through them the Scriptures were “God-breathed” to record every thought faultlessly.

If an ossuary or an ark corroborates a point the Bible has declared for thousands of years, we are thrilled. But that does not make the biblical facts more factual. It simply confirms, and as historian Paul Johnson says, the confirming evidence is mounting -- so much so that the skeptics, not the Christians, must fear the further course of scientific discovery.

But always remember the Bible stands on its own credible witness, regardless of whether secondary sources confirm or contradict it. It is the veracity of the Bible that forms the basis on which a Christian worldview is built.

That said, the James ossuary does give us a wonderful opening to share with our neighbors and to remind them that our faith holds up under scientific scrutiny -- thanks, in this case, to scientists and scholars who champion the free marketplace of ideas rather than their own private agendas.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION

Hershel Shanks and Ben Witherington III, THE BROTHER OF JESUS: THE DRAMATIC STORY AND MEANING OF THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGICAL LINK TO JESUS AND HIS FAMILY (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

On Easter Sunday, April 20, at 9:00 p.m. EST and Monday, April 21, at 12:00 a.m., the Discovery Channel will air “James: Brother of Jesus,” the story behind the archaeological find. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030324/dcm026_1.html http://dsc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=24198&gid=0

Rossella Lorenzi, “First Proof of Jesus Found?”, Discovery News, 21 October 2002. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20021021/jesus.html

“Cracks in James Bone Box Repaired: Crowds Flock to Toronto Exhibit,” BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY, 10 January 2003. http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb_BAR/bswbba2901f1.html

Order the November/December 2002 issue of BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW, featuring “Burial Box of James, The Brother of Jesus.” http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb_BAR/bswbbar2806f1.html

Ben Witherington III, “'The Most Important Extrabiblical Evidence of Its Kind,'“ BELIEFNET, 18 October 2002. http://www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/115/story_11561_1.html&boardID=47202

Jeordan Legon, “Scholars: Oldest Evidence of Jesus?”, CNN, 22 October 2002. http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/10/21/jesus.box

Charles Page, “Biblical Archaeology and the James Ossuary, Part 1,” Crosswalk.com. http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1180609.html#http___www_crosswalk_com_news_1180609_html Also read Part 2 and Part 3. http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1189304.html#http___www_crosswalk_com_news_1189304_html http://www.crosswalk.com/news/religiontoday/1193746.html

Susan Weiner, “The Best Evidence We Have: The History of the Christian Scriptures,” BREAKPOINT ONLINE, 16 January 2003. http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/OnlineFeatures/The+Best+Evidence+We+Have.htm

Also see “The Evidence for the Bible,” the April 10 edition of “Worldview for Parents.” http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/WorldviewForParents/The+Evidence+for+the+Bible.htm

Jeffrey Sheler, IS THE BIBLE TRUE? (HarperCollins, 1999).

Randall Price, THE STONES CRY OUT: HOW ARCHEOLOGY CONFIRMS THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE (Harvest House, 1997). http://www.parable.com/breakpoint/item_1565076400.htm

NOTE: Referral to websites not produced by Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Wilberforce Forum, and BreakPoint is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS “Being the Body: A Challenge to the Church” -- On May 18, Chuck Colson will lead a seminar that will be broadcast live by satellite. Host this once-in-a-lifetime event at your church! http://www.christianitytoday.com/conferences/events/2003/30518.html

____________

Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #12576]

[inscription was later found to be fraudulent - Holwick]

Early examinations of the ossuary reputed to have once contained the mortal remains of James, half-brother to Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, have sent ripples of excitement and expectation across the archaeological community. Could the box, dated to A.D. 63, actually have belonged to the biblical James?

By all indications the ossuary itself is authentic and a valuable find for scholars. It was cut from the limestone around Jerusalem, carved in typical Herodian fashion, and shows no sign of tampering by modern implements. It bears the Aramaic inscription "Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua," which renowned paleographer Andre Lemaire confirmed was written in the first century.

The bone box belonged, as the inscription indicates, to a James, a son of Joseph and a brother to Jesus. What will forever remain unknown, regardless of the conclusions of scientists and theologians, is whether the James, Joseph and Jesus mentioned are our Lord's earthly "father," brother and our Lord himself. Although such a connection may be probable, we need not know for certain.

Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Time magazine that while the discovery of the bone box, housed for years in the apartment of its owner, was "fascinating" and may be a useful evangelistic tool, Christians should avoid "building faith on archaeological discovery."

Why? Because "faith" then becomes faith in an object, and true faith, by its very nature, doesn't require evidence or proof.

The veneration of relics is a practice nearly as old as the church itself, but began in earnest after Bishop Ambrose of Milan displayed the relics of two martyrs in his church between A.D. 385-388. Veneration of the relics was thought then to aid in worship.

But by the Middle Ages, countless articles were visited upon the masses of Europe in ceremonial procession because the Roman Catholic Church believed that "holy relics" held miraculous power and could increase the faith of the flock. Hoards of peasants thronged to see splinters from the true cross of Christ and fragments from the table where Jesus presided over the Last Supper.

Others longed to see thorns from the Savior's crown and even the head of John the Baptist. Wherever the relics went, miracles followed, or so the church claimed. Christian historians refer to the belief that such objects -- or body parts -- held magical power as "fetishism."

Such belief is amusing considering that as many as five heads of John the Baptist floated around Europe. Fourteen churches claimed to possess the foreskin of the baby Jesus, and Martin Luther, who sparked the Protestant Reformation because of his belief that the "just shall live by faith," lampooned the church when he wrote that enough splinters of the cross existed in Europe to build a mighty ship.

In the "Schmalkald Articles," Luther wrote that relics were tomfoolery and that "even the devil has laughed at such rascalities." The veneration of relics, he said, ought to be condemned because such practices were not contained within Scripture. They were "an entirely unnecessary and useless thing." Luther wrote in his "Large Catechism" that relics were "lifeless, dead things that can make no man holy."

But the Church of Rome continued to teach that beholding the relics conveyed salvific benefits. Lutheran historian Bernhard Lohse wrote that in 1517 that even Luther's protector, Frederick the Elector, displayed relics, claiming that those who viewed all of them would escape the suffering of purgatory 127,800 years early.

I do not believe that Baptists, nor any Protestants for that matter, are in danger of becoming entangled in such beliefs.

What I find intriguing, however, is the enthusiasm of archaeologists and the public for the notion that this new relic might be a link to Christ, as if they would believe should the ossuary be authenticated. Some scientists have even suggested extracting DNA from the bone fragments in order to learn about the mother of James -- Mary, also the mother of Jesus.

I am reminded of the words of Margaret Deanesly, who wrote in her book on medieval church history of Christians building churches over the graves of apostles. "The dust of the apostle who had seen with his own eyes and touched with his hands the very body of the Savior was itself a link with Christ, inexpressibly precious."

Ironically, the owner of the bone box reportedly claimed that he withheld his name from public media because he feared his home would become a church where those seeking a tangible connection to Christ would venerate the ossuary.

Those who are looking for a link to Christ need not hope to build their faith by caressing a stone box or laying eyes on a bone fragment. They need to look no further than to the Christian. A relic, while it is a link to the past, is a memorial or testimony to the power of the individual to whom it belonged or belongs. That is precisely what Christians are -- living relics.

John wrote in his first epistle that "the one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself ... and this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son."

I wonder sometimes if the church forgets how simple that is. We are his workmanship, saved by grace, and we preach the written word and live the testimony of the living word. We live by grace, we love, we share, we build, we pray for peace and if need be we die for others. If the world doesn't find Christ in us, it surely will not find him because his name is etched into a 2,000-year-old piece of limestone that may or may not have belonged to his relative.

_________________

Tomlin is news director at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

*

For years, skeptics have assailed the Bible as a book of pious pronouncements, and scientists like Carl Sagan claimed science would prove the Bible to be unreliable.

This question of the historical reliability of the Bible was a major stumbling block for journalist Lee Strobel before his conversion. So, like any good journalist, he decided to investigate. He turned to theologian Norman Geisler, an expert on the historicity of the Bible. Their conversation is recorded in Strobel's excellent new book, The Case for Faith.

First, Geisler said, the accuracy of the Bible is backed up by thousands of archeological finds. For instance, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were once considered legends -- but archeological evidence has done much to corroborate them.

The same goes for the Genesis account of Sodom and Gomorrah. The tale of how God destroyed these two cities for their sexual sin was once dismissed as a myth. But "evidence has been uncovered proving that all five of the cities mentioned in Genesis were, in fact, situated just as the Old Testament said," Geisler said. And archaeologist Clifford Wilson says there is "permanent evidence of the great conflagration that took place in the long distant past."

Archeology has corroborated many other Biblical details, as well. There's evidence confirming the Jewish captivity. Every Old Testament reference to an Assyrian king has been proven correct. During the 1960s, an excavation confirmed that the Israelites could indeed have entered Jerusalem by way of a tunnel during the reign of King David.

And then there's the evidence that the world had a single language at one time, just as Genesis teaches. Biblical accounts of the burial of Saul -- once thought to be in error -- have also held up under secular scrutiny.

Critics used to say there was no evidence that the Hittites existed. But now, Geisler says, "archaeologists digging in modern Turkey have discovered the records of the Hittites."

New Testament details are documented just as solidly. As Geisler put it, "archaeology has confirmed not dozens, but hundreds and hundreds of details from the biblical account of the early church. Even small details have been corroborated, like which way the wind blows, how deep the water is a certain distance from shore, what kind of disease a particular island had, [and] the names of local officials."

The evidence is now so overwhelming that Sir William Albright, one of the world's most prominent historians, concludes that critics of New Testament accuracy hold "antiquated views" that are "pre-archaeological."

Another authority puts it even stronger. Oxford University historian A.N. Sherwin-White says the evidence confirming details in the Book of Acts alone is so staggering that "any attempt to reject its basic historicity must now appear absurd."

This leaves Christians with an exciting apologetic argument: If archeology proves the Bible's accuracy in thousands of historical details, why would it be any less accurate in its other claims?

The Bible's historical accuracy is a reminder that while "the heavens declare the glory of God," there's also plenty of evidence among the rubble and ruins.

For further reference:

Strobel, Lee. The Case for Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000.

_________________________

Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

There are few biblical stories as well-known as the one of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Ask any believer or non-believer, and they're likely to know at least something about the ancient cities' wickedness and sinfulness.

However, some wonder if they really existed. Were there actually two cities destroyed by God for their wicked acts?

Archaeologist Bryant Wood believes so. Wood, an archaeologist with the Associates for Biblical Research and the editor of Bible and Spade magazine, gave a series of lectures Sept. 25-27 at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he showed archaeological proof for several Old Testament events. One of the lectures dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.

"Even people who don't know anything about the Bible know something about Sodom and Gomorrah and the wickedness of those places," he said. "Did they exist? Were they real? Did this really happen? I think archaeology can provide some answers to those questions."

Wood, who holds to the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, said evidence for the ancient cities can be found in land that is located southeast of the Dead Sea. In the 20th century, archaeologists excavating in the region found five ancient cities that are now identified as Bab edh-Dhra, Numeira, Safi, Feifa and Khanazir.

While some archaeologists contend that the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah now lie underneath the Dead Sea, Wood argues that the aforementioned five cities are indeed found in the Bible, only with different names. He pointed to Genesis 14:8, where five cities are mentioned: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zoboiim and Bela (also called Zoar).

Bab edh-Dhra, Wood said, was once Sodom; Numeira was Gomorrah. He said that archaeological evidence at both sites shows that the cities were destroyed by fire around 2,100 B.C., which would cohere with the biblical time of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction. Just as telling, geological evidence shows that there was an earthquake during the time, as well.

"Everywhere the archaeologists dig within the site, they find the evidence for a massive destruction by fire," Wood said.

The fire evidence is very detailed, he said. While excavating one ancient building, archaeologists discovered "that the fire did not start on the floor of the building, but rather on the roof of the building. They found evidence for the collapse of the roof. The roof beams had burned first and then collapsed inside the building."

A cemetery located near the city was burned as well, suggesting that the fire was not started by raiders. Cemeteries were considered sacred.

Why would both the city and a local cemetery be burned?

"Basically, (archaeologists) have no explanation for this," Wood said. "But the Bible does give us an explanation, doesn't it? It says that God rained down this burning material on the cities from the sky. Not only the cities, but the area surrounding the cities. Here we have graphic evidence, that, yes, something from above came down onto these houses, setting the roof on fire and eventually burning the entire structure."

Wood suggested that the fire may have come from the effects of an earthquake. He said that a volcanic eruption is not likely because no evidence has been found.

"The geologists who studied these sites -- both Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira - - say the earth's surface shifted at the very time the cities were destroyed and burned by fire," he said.

It is possible, he said, that God caused petroleum deposits under the earth to escape though the earthquake's fault lines, after which they were ignited and then fell back down onto the cities.

Another interesting find pertains to Sodom's city gate. Archaeologists discovered not just one, but two gates along the city's wall. However, one of them had been sealed. Wood said the Bible provides a possible solution to the mystery. In Genesis 14 -- years before the final destruction -- Sodom was destroyed for the first time in a battle.

"The destruction of this gate, I believe, is connected with Genesis 14," he said. "Rather than rebuild the gate, the citizens of Bad edh-Dhra decided they would block it up and build a new gate. They built their new gate at the northeast end of the site."

That new gate, Wood said, is referred to in the story of Sodom's second destruction.

"When the angels came to Sodom to warn Lot of the coming destruction, they found Lot sitting in the gate," he said. "This must be the gate. It was the only gate in use at the end of the life of the city."

___________________

The Bryant Wood lectures can be heard on the seminary's web page at http://www.sbts.edu/bryantwood.html

*

The first evidence that humans lived in an area now covered by the Black Sea - perhaps inundated by the biblical flood - has been found by a team of explorers.

"Artifacts at the site are clearly well preserved, with carved wooden beams, wooden branches and stone tools," lead researcher Robert Ballard said.

"We realize the broad significance the discovery has and we're going to do our best to learn more," Ballard said in a telephone interview Tuesday from his ship off the northern coast of Turkey, west of the community of Sinop.

Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, the team's chief archaeologist, said the discovery "represents the first concrete evidence for occupation of the Black Sea coast prior to its flooding."

"This is a major discovery that will begin to rewrite the history of the cultures in this key area between Europe, Asia and the ancient Middle East," Hiebert said.

The remnants of human habitation were found in more than 300 feet of water about 12 miles off the coast of Turkey.

Many ancient Middle Eastern cultures have legends of a great flood, including the Bible story of Noah.

Columbia University researchers William Ryan and Walter Pittman speculated in their 1997 book "Noah's Flood" that when the European glaciers melted, about 7,000 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed into what was then a smaller freshwater lake to create the Black Sea.

Last year Ballard found indications of an ancient coastline miles out from the current Black Sea coast. The new discovery provides evidence that people once lived in that now inundated region.

Ballard, a National Geographic Society explorer in residence, said he studied shells found along the ancient coastline and found two types. One group is an extinct type of freshwater shell, while the second is from saltwater shellfish.

The saltwater shells date from the present back 6,500 years, while the freshwater shells all date to 7,000 years ago and older.

"So we know that there was a sudden and dramatic change from a freshwater lake to a saltwater sea 7,000 years ago," he said Tuesday.

"And we know that as a result of that flood a vast amount of land went under water.

"And we now know that that land was inhabited. What we don't know is who these people are, we don't know how broad their settlements were ... but we're expanding our studies to try to determine that."

Ballard said his team, using remote-controlled underwater vessels with cameras, located a former river valley beneath the sea, and in the valley was the collapsed structure. Remains include preserved wooden beams that were worked by hand.

The structure was "clearly built by humans," and was characteristic of stone-age structures built 7,000 years ago in the interior of Turkey, Ballard said. It contained a stone chisel and two other stone tools with holes drilled through them, he said.

Nothing has been removed from the site. "When you first find a site you don't just run in there and start picking up things," he said.

The group is now mapping the site and looking for other structures in the area.

"This is a work in progress," Ballard said. "It is critical to know the exact era of the people who lived there, and to that end we hope to recover artifacts and wood for carbon dating so we can figure out what sort of people lived there and the nature of their tools."

The discovery occurred within coastal waters of Turkey, whose Directorate of Monuments and Museums has a representative on the research vessel.

Ballard, best known for finding the remains of the ships Titanic, Bismarck and Yorktown, among other discoveries, operates the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn.

His expedition is sponsored by the National Geographic Society, which is planning a book and television programs on Ballard's Black Sea research.

[inscription was later found to be fraudulent - Holwick]

A burial box that was recently discovered in Israel and dates to the first century could be the oldest archaeological link to Jesus Christ, according to a French scholar whose findings were published Monday.

An inscription in the Aramaic language - "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" - appears on an empty ossuary, a limestone burial box for bones.

Andre Lemaire said it's "very probable" the writing refers to Jesus of Nazareth. He dates the ossuary to A.D. 63, just three decades after the crucifixion.

Lemaire, a specialist in ancient inscriptions at France's Practical School of Higher Studies, published his findings in the November/December issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

The Rev. Joseph Fitzmyer, a Bible professor at Catholic University who studied photos of the box, agrees with Lemaire that the writing style "fits perfectly" with other first century examples. The joint appearance of these three famous names is "striking," he said.

"But the big problem is, you have to show me the Jesus in this text is Jesus of Nazareth, and nobody can show that," Fitzmyer said.

Lemaire writes that the distinct writing style, and the fact that Jews practiced ossuary burials only between 20 B.C. and A.D. 70, puts the inscription squarely in the time of Jesus and James, who led the early church in Jerusalem.

All three names were commonplace, but Lemaire estimates only 20 Jameses in Jerusalem during that era would have had a father named Joseph and a brother named Jesus.

Moreover, naming the brother as well as the father on an ossuary was "very unusual," Lemaire wrote. There's only one other known example in Aramaic. Thus, this particular Jesus must have had some unusual role or fame - and Jesus of Nazareth certainly qualified, Lemaire concluded.

However, Kyle McCarter, a Johns Hopkins University archaeologist, said it's possible the brother was named because he conducted the burial or owned the tomb.

The archaeology magazine said two Israeli government scientists conducted a detailed microscopic examination of the surface and the inscription, reporting last month that nothing undercuts first century authenticity.

Lemaire's claim was attacked by Robert Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, who unlike most scholars thinks that "Jesus' existence is a very shaky thing." Since Eisenman is highly skeptical about New Testament history, he considers the new discovery "just too pat. It's just too perfect."

Virtually all that is known about Jesus comes from the New Testament. No physical artifact from the first century related to him has been discovered and verified.

James is depicted as Jesus' brother in the Gospels and head of the Jerusalem church in the Book of Acts and Paul's epistles.

The first century Jewish historian Josephus recorded that "the brother of Jesus the so-called Christ, James by name," was stoned to death as a Jewish heretic in A.D. 62. If his bones were placed in an ossuary the inscription would have occurred the following year, around A.D. 63.

Until now, the oldest surviving artifact that mentions Jesus is a fragment of chapter 18 in John's Gospel from a manuscript dated around A.D. 125. It was discovered in Egypt in 1920.

There are numerous surviving manuscripts of New Testament portions from later in that century. Jesus was mentioned by three pagan authors in Rome in the early second century and by Josephus in the late first century.

The ossuary's owner required Lemaire to shield his identity, so the box's location was not revealed. Nor is anything known about its history over the past 19 centuries, one reason for McCarter's caution.

Biblical Archaeology Review editor Hershel Shanks said skepticism is to be expected. "Something so startling, so earth-shattering, raises questions about its authenticity," he said.

Shanks said the owner bought the box about 15 years ago from an Arab antiquities dealer in Jerusalem who said it was unearthed south of the Mount of Olives. The owner never realized its potential importance until Lemaire examined it last spring.

Lemaire, who was raised Roman Catholic, said his faith did not affect his judgment, since he studies inscriptions only "as a historian - that is, comparing them critically with other sources."

The archaeology magazine is negotiating to display the box in Toronto during a major convention of religion scholars in late November, and possibly in the United States.

==================================

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1021_021021_christianrelicbox.html

BURIAL BOX MAY BE THAT OF JESUS'S BROTHER, EXPERT SAYS

Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News, October 21, 2002

Researchers may have uncovered the first archaeological evidence that refers to Jesus as an actual person and identifies James, the first leader of the Christian church, as his brother.

The 2,000-year-old ossuary - a box that held bones - bears the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Until now, all references to the three men have been found only in manuscripts.

Andre Lemaire, a paleographer at the Sorbonne University in Paris (École Pratique des Hautes Études), first saw the artifact and its inscription while examining the relics of a private collector in Jerusalem. He dates the box, which was empty, to A.D. 63.

The ossuary is not quite rectangular, like most burial boxes found so far, but trapezoid in shape. It is about 20 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 12 inches high. The image on top shows the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

"This is probably going to be the biggest New Testament find in my lifetime, as big as the Dead Sea scrolls," said Ben Witherington, a New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

"Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all historical religions, and they have to be open to historical inquiry," he said. "To some extent they stand or fall on the authenticity of the historical record. This gives us one more piece of evidence outside of the Bible that these are real people, and that they're important people, and provides a small confirmation for the claims made about James as the brother of Jesus."

The find is described in the November/December issue of BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL REVIEW.

HISTORICAL RECORD

From the first century B.C. to about 70 A.D., it was the burial custom of Jews to place their dead in a cave for a year, then retrieve the bones and put them in an ossuary. Several hundred such boxes from that era have been found - some ornately carved and others plain, some with feet and others without.

The burial custom changed in A.D.70, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and torched the Temple there.

The James burial box, which is about 20 inches (50 centimeters) long, was originally acquired in the antiquities market 15 years ago and has been in the hands of a private collector.

Lemaire stumbled upon the ossuary by chance. While he was in Jerusalem on a six-month project to study paleo-inscriptions, a friend introduced him to a private collector. The collector, who remains anonymous, told Lemaire he had a few inscriptions and showed him some photographs of an ossuary.

"When I read it [the inscription], I immediately wondered if it was the same James who was said to be the brother of Jesus of Nazareth," said Lemaire. "To the collector, Jesus was known as the son of God, so he had no brother. It never occurred to him that this might be anything other than just another ossuary."

Lemaire said, "I knew right away that it could be something really important."

TELLING DETAILS

Translating the inscription was the easy part. Tying the ossuary to Jesus of Nazareth was much more difficult.

Scientists at the Geological Institute of Israel examined the box, which is made of Jerusalem limestone, and judged it to be about 2,000 years old. The inscription is written in Aramaic, in a form that further narrows the possible time frame.

"The script is very important for the date because the Aramaic script changed over time in ways we could measure," said p. Kyle McCarter, a paleographer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "It's the most important criterion for dating this object, and the script is consistent with a date in the middle of the first century A.D."

The fact that the box is very plain, apart from the beautiful script, is not surprising, according to experts. "Highly decorated boxes are the ones that are unusual," said McCarter. Lemaire said extensive study of several hundred ossuaries found in Jerusalem has shown no connection between the ornateness of the design and the importance of the person whose bones they contained.

What is highly unusual is the mention of a brother.

"So far, with all the inscriptions we have, only one other has mentioned a brother," said Lemaire. "This is a very important point for the problem of identification. There would need to be a special reason to mention the brother. It suggests the brother was also prominent, an important person."

Jesus and Joseph were fairly common names of that era; James, slightly less so. Statistical analysis suggests that the possibility of these three names occurring in the given relationships (son of Joseph, brother of Jesus) is very small.

The lack of knowledge about where the ossuary came from is worrisome but not unusual, the experts say.

"It means there will always be doubts about the thing," said McCarter. "They've applied every possible test to it to determine its character and authenticity, but there will always be a cloud over it and there will always be those who doubt because it wasn't recovered in a legitimate archaeological dig.

"But this is not an unusual situation," McCarter added. "We get this a lot."

JESUS AND JAMES

Whether Jesus was the son of God is a theological problem, said Lemaire. But historians don't doubt the existence of either James or Jesus; both are mentioned frequently in early historical accounts.

Following the death of Jesus in A.D. 29, James assumed leadership of the Christian church in Jerusalem until he himself was martyred in 62 A.D. According to biblical accounts, he was one of the first apostles to see Jesus after his resurrection.

He is referred to as the brother of Jesus in both the Bible and in contemporary historical accounts. In Matthew 13:55-56, for instance, Jesus is said to have four brothers and two sisters. But the exact nature of these relationships - whether they were full siblings by blood, half siblings, or cousins - has been open to interpretation.

"If you're Catholic, you think they're cousins because the perpetual virginity of Mary is official church doctrine," said Witheringon. "But there are a lot of problems in the historical record with that."

"When James is referred to as the 'brother of our lord' in the New Testament, the word used means 'blood brother,'" he continued. "It would have to be qualified in context to mean something different."

A second interpretation is that James and the other siblings are half-brothers and -sisters, Joseph's children from a prior marriage.

"The ossuary gives us another piece of evidence outside the Bible that these are blood brothers and sisters of Jesus," said Witherington.

======================

Israeli authorities conclude burial box inscription forged

By Robert Marus, Associated Baptist Press, 6/20/2003

An inscription on an ancient stone box that has been touted as the only physical evidence of Jesus' existence is almost certainly a forgery, a panel of Israeli archaeologists has concluded.

Officials with Israel's Antiquities Authority announced June 18 that the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” on the stone ossuary was almost certainly forged in recent decades.

Ossuaries -- small coffins for holding the skeletal remains of deceased persons -- were commonly used as burial containers by families in first-century Palestine. The discovery became worldwide news in October, when an article in the Biblical Archaeological Review cited it as the first direct physical link to Jesus' existence and claimed that it was “very probable” that the box actually had held the bones of Jesus' brother, James.

But months of investigation by archaeologists and antiquities authorities have raised doubts about the authenticity of the inscription. A statement released by the Israeli officials said, “The inscription appears new, written in modernity by someone attempting to reproduce ancient written characters.”

The archaeologists cited close investigations of the inscription -- written in Aramaic, an ancient Palestinian language -- that seemed to show that the letters had been carved through layers of patina, or discoloration caused by aging, on the stone. If the letters had been carved in the stone around the time it was produced, the patina would cover the inscription as well.

But Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeological Review, said June 19 he is “not convinced at all” that the inscription is a forgery, according to the Washington Post. Shanks' magazine subjected the ossuary to extensive testing before publishing its article. He also said that archaeological politics may have caused the Israeli board to be biased against the inscription's authenticity.

The box's Israeli owner also stood by his discovery's authenticity. “I am certain the ossuary is real, I am certain that the committee is wrong regarding its conclusions,” said Oded Golan, according to the Associated Press. Golan said he got the artifact from a Jerusalem antiquities dealer in the mid-1970s.

But the Israeli experts said there was another piece of evidence that the ossuary probably didn't actually belong to James. They said the stone used to make it likely came from Cyprus or northern Syria rather than ancient Palestine.

*

Researchers using sophisticated radio-dating techniques have concluded that a tunnel running under ancient Jerusalem was indeed constructed around 700 B.C., during the reign of King Hezekiah, just as it is described in the Bible.

The tunnel, which is about 500 meters (550 yards) long, brings water from the Gihon Springs, located some 300 meters (330 yards) outside the walls of old Jerusalem, to the Siloan Pool inside the ancient city. It was built to protect the city's water supply during an Assyrian siege.

Structures described in the Bible are notoriously difficult to date. While some are poorly preserved or hard to identify, others are off limits to scientists because of political reasons. The age of the Jerusalem tunnel had been in dispute, with dissident scientists arguing it is not as old as the Bible suggests.

Scientists have confirmed that a tunnel found beneath the site of ancient Jerusalem was commissioned by King Hezekiah around 700 B.C. and is the same tunnel described in the Bible.

The new research should put those doubts to rest. The biblical text appears to present an accurate historical record of the tunnel's construction. It is one of the longest ancient water tunnels without intermediate shafts.

“The tunnel was a major technological achievement,” said Amos Frumkin of the geography department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who led the research. “It's one of the most ancient structures that's still in use.”

RADIO-DATING

Scientifically linking the tunnel to the time of King Hezekiah, who ruled the Jewish kingdom from 727 B.C. to 697 B.C., was difficult because researchers had little archaeological evidence to work with.

An inscription written in ancient Hebrew, which was found at the lower entrance to the tunnel, describes how two groups of men dug the tunnel from different directions. Unlike other ancient inscriptions, however, this epitaph did not mention the king who commissioned the tunnel's construction.

Frumkin and his colleagues ignored the archaeological evidence altogether. Instead, they analyzed pieces of plants embedded in the floor of the tunnel. Since radiocarbon, which is found in all plants, disintegrates at a known rate, Frumkin was able to measure exactly when the plants died.

Using a similar radio-dating method to obtain a minimum age for the tunnel, the researchers also dated stalactites, which had formed inside it.

“We can constrain the age of the tunnel by analyzing things that grew before it was constructed and things that grew after it was built,” said Frumkin. “We found that the tunnel is 2,700 years old, which corresponds with the Bible.”

SAVED BY A MIRACLE

Scholars believe King Hezekiah commissioned the tunnel for security reasons to supply his subjects with water during an imminent siege by the Assyrians.

“The spring water comes out in the valley and not in the city,” said Frumkin. “The ultimate solution was to bring the water into the city. The tunnel takes the water by gravitation down to a pool which is built inside the city.”

The construction of the tunnel is described in detail in Kings and Chronicles in the Bible. Scholars have long debated its historical importance.

“In the Bible, the city [of Jerusalem] was saved by a miracle,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. “However, the Bible does tell us that Hezekiah built this tunnel and apparently that is what enabled the Israelites to withstand the siege.”

At one point, after the tunnel was built, the spring is believed to have been sealed to conceal it from the enemy. Most people only knew the Siloan Pool and lower end of the tunnel. It wasn't until the late Middle Ages when people walked into the tunnel that they found it was connected to the spring.

“We have known about the tunnel for a long time,” said Frumkin, who began researching the tunnel while he was in high school in the late 1960s. “It just hasn't been dated.”

HARD TO DATE

Modern equivalents of structures described in the Bible are hard to locate and date. Most sites are not associated with enough geographical information to be identified, and many structures have been destroyed during warfare. Others, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, are easily identified but impossible to study because of political reasons.

“The main problem is that we don't have a lot of material that can be dated,” said Frumkin. “Unlike in archaeological dating, which relies on comparison of artifacts, it's very rare to have material available for radiometric dating.”

There are still many structures described in the Bible, like some of the gates leading into ancient Jerusalem, that have not been dated.

“It's quite rare to be able to go into structures that were constructed thousands of years ago to try to understand the people who lived during this time,” said Frumkin. “But if we can date the structure, we will be able to know if what is written in the Bible is real.”

*

[Original illustration here was a duplicate in HolwickID 25837-26027]

“But wanting their ears tickled, they will not endure sound doctrine.”

The Apostle Paul wrote this warning to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:3) to guard against false teaching, but the exhortation/warning is applicable to the recent sensationalism surrounding archaeological discoveries that support the Bible.

This past year has witnessed the publication of two dramatic inscriptions supporting the New Testament and Old Testament. The first was the James ossuary, the purported bone box that held the remains of James, the brother of Jesus and bishop of the church of Jerusalem. The second is the Joash inscription purporting to recount renovations and repairs to the temple as recorded in Kings. The public and press were quick to tout these as proof of the historicity of the Bible. Recent developments in the saga have placed these objects in a dark light.

The James ossuary initially was subject to scholarly investigation and the results were presented to a conference of biblical scholars and archaeologists in November. The Aramaic inscription was analyzed by one of the top Aramaic scholars. After the publication of this inscription, the Joash inscription also was publicized. The Geological Survey of Israel authenticated both inscriptions.

The authenticity of the Joash inscription was immediately questioned in publications in the Israel Exploration Journal. An upcoming article in Archaeology magazine will state that the James ossuary also is a fake.

There have been some recent developments. The owner of the Joash inscription and the James ossuary was arrested by the Israeli police, charged with illegally selling fake artifacts. Police found an elaborate lab used to produce fake artifacts according to reports in the Israel press.

If the James ossuary inscription is proven to be a fake like the Joash inscription, does this cast doubt on the historicity of the Bible?

Ironically it seems that some Christians feel that they need to support the authenticity of these inscriptions because they are defending the Bible. The proliferation of fake artifacts on the market does not say anything about the truthfulness or accuracy of the historical accounts in the Bible. It only proves that there is a willing public to jump on the bandwagon of biblical archaeology.

The Apostle Paul constantly confronted a church that wanted to view signs and wonders instead of a reasoned faith, which was the hallmark of Paul's Gospel message.

There will continue to be archaeological data that supports the historicity of the Bible and there will be artifacts that appear on the antiquities market that will be frauds. The popularity of the “Indiana Jones” movies has conditioned people to see archaeology as glamorous with the discovery of exciting finds.

Biblical archaeologists are uncovering and documenting finds that support the biblical account but it is not done by swinging with ropes while saving heroines or dodging giant rolling balls; it is done by the systematic excavation and research of the archaeological enterprise. Unfortunately, this is too labor-intensive and financially difficult for those who want immediate gratification without the cost.

The good news is that a consortium of Southern Baptist seminaries is joining forces to establish a biblical archaeological research program in the Middle East. The work will be done by solid and reasoned scholarship, not the sensationalism of frauds and fakes.

_____________

Dr. Steven M. Ortiz, with more than 20 years experience serving as a senior staff member of excavations in Israel, is assistant professor of archeology and Bible at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminar and director of the Archaeological Research Program. To contact Ortiz concerning research and study opportunities, or to obtain more information about the Archaeological Research Program, 1-800-662-8701, ext. 3249, or send e-mail to sortiz@nobts.edu

*

A biblical wall that has eluded archaeologists for years has finally been found, according to an Israeli scholar. A team of archaeologists in Jerusalem has uncovered what they believe to be part of a wall mentioned in the Bible’s Book of Nehemiah.

Artifacts including pottery shards and arrowheads found during an excavation in Jerusalem’s City of David indicate that a nearby wall may be one that is mentioned in the Bible’s Book of Nehemiah, from the 5th century B.C.

The discovery, made in Jerusalem’s ancient City of David, came as a result of a rescue attempt on a tower which was in danger of collapse, said Eilat Mazar, head of the Institute of Archaeology at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research and educational institute, and leader of the dig.

Artifacts including pottery shards and arrowheads found under the tower suggested that both the tower and the nearby wall are from the 5th century B.C., the time of Nehemiah, according to Mazar. Scholars previously thought the wall dated to the Hasmonean period (142-37 B.C.).

The findings suggest that the wall is actually part of the same city wall the Bible says Nehemiah rebuilt, Mazar said. The Book of Nehemiah (chapters 3-6) gives a detailed description of construction of the walls, destroyed earlier by the Babylonians.

“We were amazed,” she said, noting that the discovery was made at a time when many scholars argued that the wall did not exist.

“This was a great surprise. It was something we didn’t plan,” Mazar said.

The first phase of the dig, completed in 2005, uncovered what Mazar believes to be the remains of King David’s palace, built by King Hiram of Tyre and also mentioned in the Bible.

Ephraim Stern, professor emeritus of archaeology at Hebrew University and chairman of the state of Israel archaeological council, corroborated Mazar’s claim. “The material she showed me is from the Persian period,” the period of Nehemiah, he said. “I can sign on the date of the material she found.”

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21406]

While archeological proof of Jesus’ birth may be scarce, there’s no shortage of evidence supporting the reality of His life on earth, a seminary professor told Baptist Press.

L. Scott Kellum, assistant professor of New Testament and Greek at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., gave examples including the identification of Peter’s house at Capernaum and the limestone coffin -- called an ossuary -- of Caiaphas, the high-priest who interrogated Jesus.

Kellum also noted that archeologists have found a Christian burial site dated to A.D. 50 at Bethany; Jacob’s well mentioned in John 4 in the story of the woman at the well; the synagogue at Capernaum where Jesus taught; the pool of Siloam; a fishing boat big enough to carry 13 men; the possible tomb of Lazarus; and other sites and finds that, to varying degrees, validate the Gospels and Jesus.

“Even though rare, some sites regarding the nativity bear the stamp of probability,” Kellum said. “Under the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, there is a cave which probably was a first-century storeroom. Given the family of Mary is known to have lived in Nazareth well into the third century, the veneration of this site may mark the actual place where Gabriel spoke to the mother of Jesus.”

Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, in the third century identified a cave in Bethlehem as the site of Jesus’ birth. Such caves often were employed as stables during the first century, Kellum said. Also, surviving second-century literary records describe a cave being honored as the site of Jesus’ birth.

“It is not unlikely that the place venerated today as the birthplace of Jesus is the site,” he said.

Scholars have long accused Luke of inaccuracy by dating the birth of Jesus during a census by a Syrian governor named Quirinius, as recorded in chapter 2, verse 2 of Luke’s Gospel.

“The Quirinius we know from other sources ruled Syria and did a census in A.D. 6,” Kellum said, noting that Luke demonstrates knowledge of the census in Acts 5:37.

A census in A.D. 6 would have been about 12 years too late for the birth of Jesus, Kellum said, but archeologists “have found a coin with an inscription naming a Quirinius proconsul of Syria from 11–4 B.C., at precisely the right time.”

________

Edited by Art Toalston and Erin Roach.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #33278]

In the last part in this series, we saw that the Bible is reliable, being textually pure and verifiably accurate in many places. Therefore, the Mormon can have confidence that the Bible is the Word of God and that it can be accurately translated. In this chapter we will examine the Book of Mormon to see how it holds up to the historical test. The Mormons at your door will tell you that many findings within archaeology have confirmed the Book of Mormon time and time again. Is this true? What does the historical data we have tell us about the events recorded in the Book of Mormon?

1. There is no specific confirmation of the Book of Mormon from archaeology.

A. What Mormon archeologists say.

Brigham Young University (BYU) is owned by the Mormon Church and has a department of professional archeologists who are dedicated to archaeology as it pertains to the Book of Mormon. These professionals, who are practicing Mormons, are to be applauded for their honesty. What many of them have to say will be a shock to the lay Mormon who is unaware that archaeology and the Book of Mormon are at odds with one another. The lay Mormon is told by the Mormon Church that archaeology continues to confirm the Book of Mormon, while Mormon scholars, who actually study archaeology for a living, have something quite different to say.

“[It appears that the Book of Mormon] had no place in the New World whatsoever.... [It] just doesn’t seem to fit anything ... in anthropology [or] history.... It seems misplaced” (endnote 20, continuing from endnote 19 in Part 2).

“The first myth that we need to eliminate is that Book of Mormon archaeology exists. Titles on books full of archaeological half-truths, dilettante on the peripheries of American archaeology calling themselves Book of Mormon archaeologists regardless of their education, and a Department of Archaeology at BYU devoted to the production of Book of Mormon archaeologists do not insure that Book of Mormon archaeology really exists” (endnote 21).

“What I would say to you is there is no archeological proof of the Book of Mormon. You can look all you want. And there’s been a lot of speculation about it. There’ve been books written by Mormon scholars saying that ‘this event took place here’ or ‘this event took place here.’ But that’s entirely speculative. There is absolutely no archeological evidence that you can tie directly to events that took place” (endnote 22).

“Now, I’m an archeologist, and I work in Mexico where some people think that the events occurred. So a lot of Mormons ask me every week if I find any evidence. And I tell them, ‘No.’ ... [T]he question of how to translate what the Book says in terms of real evidence that we can grab in our hands, archeologically, is still a huge problem” (endnote 23).

Keep in mind that all of these are practicing Mormons who are professional Book of Mormon archeologists!

B. What non-Mormon archeologists say.

Earlier we read from the Smithsonian Institution’s statement “The Bible as History.” We saw that archaeology confirms much of the Bible and that professional archeologists use the Bible in their work. The Smithsonian also has a “STATEMENT REGARDING THE BOOK OF MORMON.” This statement can be requested at the same address. Every one of the statements are damaging to the reliability of the Book of Mormon. Here is the first of eight statements: “The Smithsonian Institution has never used the Book of Mormon in any way as a scientific guide. Smithsonian archeologists see no direct connection between the archeology of the New World and the subject matter of the book.”

In 1989, Michael Ammons wrote to the National Geographic Society requesting information on the Book of Mormon and archaeology. The Society replied in a letter dated April 26, 1989:

“Neither the Society nor any other institution of equal prestige

has ever used the Book of Mormon in locating archaeological

sites. Although many Mormon sources claim that the Book of

Mormon has been substantiated by archaeological findings, this

claim has not been verified scientifically.”

Also in 1989, Linda Hansen wrote to the Department of Archaeology at Boston University with a similar request. In a reply letter dated April 5, 1989, Julie Hansen of the department responded:

“The Archaeological Institute of America has never used the Book

of Mormon as a scientific guide in locating historic ruins on the

Western Hemisphere.... Over the past 30 years The New World

Archaeological Foundation, located at Brigham Young University in

Provo, Utah, has conducted numerous scientific excavations in

Mesoamerica, originally with a view to confirming the claims in

the Book of Mormon. They have discovered no evidence that

supports the Book of Mormon in any way. Nonetheless, they have

published in full detail the results of their excavations in

Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation, Volumes 1-55,

1959 and following.... They are accepted by the Archaeological

Institute of America and the Society of American Archaeologists

as legitimate scientific investigations and the New World

Archaeological Foundation is to be commended for publishing the

results of their work that essentially refutes the basic beliefs

of the Mormon Church on which the Foundation is based” (endnote

24).

Therefore, there is a consensus from professional archaeologists, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, that there is no specific confirmation of the Book of Mormon from archaeology.

2. The lack of archaeological evidence is sometimes damaging.

A) The Book of Mormon claims that the ancient inhabitants spoke and wrote in “Reformed Egyptian” and Hebrew (endnote 25). If this were the case, we would expect to find artifacts with writings in these languages. However, the Smithsonian’s eighth statement regarding the Book of Mormon says:

“Reports of findings of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and other Old

World writings in the New World in pre-Columbian contexts have

frequently appeared in newspapers, magazines, and sensational

books. None of these claims has stood up to examination by

reputable scholars. No inscriptions using Old World forms of

writing have been shown to have occurred in any part of the

Americas before 1492 except for a few Norse rune stones which

have been found in Greenland.”

B) The Book of Mormon states that the two peoples mentioned (Nephites and Lamanites) had Jewish beliefs that became Christian when the resurrected Christ appeared to them. However, there is no evidence that the ancient inhabitants in the Americas had either Jewish or Christian beliefs.

C) Hill Cumorah is located in New York, southeast of Rochester. Joseph Smith claimed that when Moroni appeared to him, he was told that Moroni’s father, Mormon, buried the gold plates upon which the Book of Mormon was based on the hill Cumorah just before the great final battle there (Mormon 6:6). In the Pearl of Great Price, Smith writes that the day after his second vision, he went to a large hill outside of the village where his family lived (the hill Cumorah) and found the gold plates (endnote 26). This identifies the hill where Smith dug up the plates as the same hill where Mormon buried them and where the great battle took place. In Mormon 6:10-15, it is claimed that hundreds of thousands of people were killed on or near the hill Cumorah during that final battle. It says that “their flesh, and bones, and blood lay upon the face of the earth, being left by the hands of those who slew them to molder upon the land, and to crumble and to return to their mother earth” (Mormon 6:15). In other words, their bodies were left there, unburied.

To help you understand the magnitude of casualties at hill Cumorah, let us consider another major battle. During the Battle of Gettysburg of the American Civil War, 55,000 soldiers were wounded, including 6,000 of them killed on the battlefield and 4,000 more whose wounds were mortal. Eyewitnesses said that there was so much blood from the dead and injured that there were parts of the battlefield that seemed like streams of blood. So many men and horses died that all could not be buried at once and many corpses were left on the battlefield until a few days later when others were hired to do the task.

If 6,000 men died on the battlefield at Gettysburg, what would a battlefield look like with hundreds of thousands dead? Since they were left unburied at hill Cumorah, wouldn’t there be some artifacts made of metal and stone? Bullets by the thousands are found at Gettysburg. Nothing, however, has been found at hill Cumorah.

University of Rochester paleontologist and stratigrapher Carl Brett has worked in the Palmyra, N.Y, area where hill Cumorah is located and is familiar with the hill and its geologic conditions. He says that if hundreds of thousands were slaughtered at the hill and not buried, there would still be skeletal remains on the surface today, even after 1,600 years. Scavengers and weather conditions would account for why much is gone, but there would still be quite enough left to look at. Metallic artifacts from weapons and armor would also be easily found (endnote 27). But nothing has ever been found at hill Cumorah.

3. Attempts by Mormons to answer the archeological problem fail.

During a series of conversations I once had with a Mormon friend and some Mormon missionaries, I turned to them in the first meeting and said that one objection I had to Mormonism was that there is no archaeological evidence to support the stories in the Book of Mormon. One of the missionaries smiled confidently and claimed there was a lot of evidence from archaeology to support the historical truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. I asked him to show me some. He said he did not have any information with him but would bring some to our next meeting. He did. Needless to say he was shocked when I quoted the Mormon scholars below who refuted the very materials he had in hand!

“Few of the writings they have produced are of genuine

consequence in archaeological terms. Some are clearly on the

oddball fringe; others have credible qualifications. Two of the

most prolific are Professor Hugh Nibley and Milton R. Hunter;

however, they are not qualified to handle the archaeological

materials their works often involve” (endnote 28).

“Those volumes which most flagrantly ignore time and space and

most radically distort, misinterpret, or ignore portions of the

archaeological evidence are the popular Farnsworth volumes. Also

inadequate, from a professional archaeologist’s point of view,

are the well intentioned volumes by Milton R. Hunter and a number

of smaller pamphlets and works by various authors.... New World

Old World comparisons have been less popular but fraught with

problems. The best known examples are the two volumes by Nibley

which suffer from an overdose of Old Worlditis.... He does not

know New World culture history well, and his writing ignores the

considerable indigenous elements in favor of exclusively Old

World patterns” (endnote 29).

“In situations where sources of religious and secular authority

conflict with each other, a Latter-day Saint sometimes finds

himself in a quandary. He has been assured by a folklore

transmitted in lessons, talks and church literature that

archaeologists (usually Gentiles) are steadily proving the Book

of Mormon authentic, while through his formal education and

secular literature he has become aware that in actuality the

experts seem to contradict the scripture” (endnote 30).

“Science does not arrive at its conclusions by syllogism, and no

people on earth deplore proof demonstration by syllogism more

loudly than real archaeologists do. Yet, Mr. Jakeman’s study is

nothing but an elaborate syllogistic stew. The only clear and

positive thing about the whole study is the objective the author

is determined to reach” (endnote 31).

Again, every one of the above are practicing Mormons. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, BYU is owned by the Mormon Church and has a department dedicated to Book of Mormon archaeology. According to BYU anthropologist John Clark, virtually all of the professional archaeologists there admit that archaeological finds which specifically tie the past to events in the Book of Mormon are missing. These practicing Mormons call books and their authors that list sensational findings not qualified, inadequate, and speculative.

Some Mormons will respond that these archeologists do not represent the official church position, so their opinions are not credible. But why trivialize and dismiss the findings of the overwhelming consensus of practicing Mormons who are professional archaeologists, yet accept, without question, the official Mormon Church position? Could it be that the ground’s silence is indicative of a Mormon Church position that is false? After all, if it is false, silence from archaeology is precisely what we might expect to find.

It is fair to mention that professional Mormon archaeologists claim there is general confirmation of the Book of Mormon from archaeology, citing peoples existing where it is thought Book of Mormon peoples may have existed. This general confirmation, however, does not show that the Mormon picture of history is true. These same archaeologists (Johnson, Clark) admit that conclusions regarding the findings are pure speculation. The issue is not, “Did people exist in the Americas between 600 B.C. through A.D. 400?” We know that they did. The issue is, “Can we identify these civilizations as the ones mentioned in the Book of Mormon?” And the answer from virtually all professional Mormon and non-Mormon archaeologists alike is no.

In the last part of this series we saw that the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts in our possession today allow us to have an accurate translation of the Bible. Therefore, even by Mormon standards, we can be confident that we have the Word of God. We also saw that secular history has attested to the accuracy of the Bible so that we can know with certainty that many of the events recorded in it took place. Unfortunately, the Mormon cannot have this same confidence when it comes to the Book of Mormon. Archaeology and secular history are silent when asked if the events took place. Not only is this silence disturbing to professional Mormon archaeologists, but it is evidence against Mormonism when no artifacts turn up in areas which should be abundant with relics such as the hill Cumorah. However, as damaging as these may be, Mormonism’s greatest challenge concerns another one of their scriptures, the Book of Abraham, which will be the subject of the next part in this series.

________

Mike Licona is the director of apologetics & interfaith evangelism at the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board.

ENDNOTES

20. Dr. Ray Metheny, Professor of Anthropology, BYU. Address at the Sixth Annual Sunstone Theological Symposium, Salt Lake City, 8/25/84.

21. Dr. Dee Green, Former Editor of the University Archaeological Society Newsletter “Book of Mormon Archaeology: The Myths and the Alternatives,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 4, No. 2 (Summer 1969), pp. 77-78.

22. Dr. David Johnson, Professor of Anthropology, BYU. In a personal telephone conversation, 7/23/97.

23. Dr. John Clark, Professor of Anthropology, BYU. In a personal telephone conversation, 7/25/97.

24. Copies of the reply letters from the National Geographic Society and Boston University were provided by Jim and Judy Robertson of Concerned Christians.

25. Mosiah 1:4; Mormon 9:32-33. Also see Joseph Smith. History 1:64.

26. Joseph Smith. History, verses 51-52. Hill Cumorah is located in Manchester, N.Y., about 25 miles east of Rochester. Smith lived in Palmyra, about five miles away from the hill.

27. A personal telephone conversation on September 8, 1997.

28. John L. Sorenson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Sociology, BYU. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 1, No. 1 (Spring 1966), pp. 145-246.

29. Dee Green, General Officer, Univ. Archaeological Society. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 4, No. 2 (Summer 1969), p. 74.

30. John L. Sorenson, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 4, No. 2 (Summer 1969), p. 81.

31. Dr. Hugh Nibley, quoted by Dee Green. Book of Mormon Archaeology, p. 75.

PART 4: Mormonism and its Book of Abraham

By Mike Licona

EDITORS’ NOTE: The following information, adapted from the North American Mission Board’s www.4truth.net apologetics website, is the third of six parts to be carried by Baptist Press this week. The initial article appeared in Baptist Press Mon., Dec. 10.

ALPHARETTA, Ga. (BP) -- In the last part of this series, we saw some of the problems Mormonism faces with the Book of Mormon and archaeology. Now we will examine another book of the Mormon scriptures called the Book of Abraham. The problems encountered here are devastating to the credibility of Mormonism.

Mormonism has four sources that they consider to be Scripture: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants. The Pearl of Great Price contains the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and the Writings of Joseph Smith which include his translation of Matthew 23:39 through all of Chapter 24, and excerpts from History of the Church.

The Book of Abraham is of particular interest. In 1835, Smith purchased some mummies that were accompanied by ancient Egyptian papyri. Smith claimed to be able to translate the papyri because they were written in the same language as the Book of Mormon, “Reformed Egyptian.” As he translated the manuscripts, he claimed that part contained the Book of Abraham, a book written by Abraham himself.

1. There are problems with the Book of Abraham.

The papyri for the Book of Abraham contained some drawings with Egyptian writing that were subsequently published in Times and Seasons, a Mormon newspaper. The papyri were lost after Smith’s death in 1844. In 1967 the papyri were rediscovered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who returned them to the Mormon Church which confirmed them to be the originals and published them for others to see. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought asked three prominent Egyptologists to translate the papyri. The Mormon Church had no need to fear. Since Joseph Smith was a true prophet, the contemporary translation would be very close to Smith’s. However, the stakes were high. The translations of the Egyptologists could either confirm Joseph Smith as a true prophet or convict him as a charlatan. Furthermore, if Joseph Smith was terribly wrong in his translation of the Book of Abraham, it follows that he cannot be trusted to have produced an accurate translation of the Book of Mormon, which he himself claimed was in the same language.

John Wilson and Klaus Baer, both Professors of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, and Richard Parker, a Professor of Egyptology at Brown University, were asked to do the task. Here are the results:

John Wilson said that the text Smith used to translate the Book

of Abraham was actually “a related mortuary text of late times,

the so-called Book of the Breathings.” The Book of Breathings

was an ancient Egyptian document, which was buried with the dead

in order to provide guidance in the afterlife (which explains why

Joseph Smith’s papyri were found among the mummies he had

purchased). Wilson also claimed that one of the drawings Smith

included in the Book of Abraham was actually a hypocephalus, “a

cartonnage disk which was placed under the head of a mummy toward

the end of ancient Egyptian history” (endnote 32, continuing from

endnote 31 in Part 3).

Klaus Baer said that the papyri that Smith thought was the Book of Abraham were actually “The Breathing Permit belonging to the priest Hor” (endnote 33). This is another name given for the Book of Breathings. Baer provided a comparison of his translation with Joseph Smith’s. It is quite easy to see that there is not the slightest resemblance between the two. For example:

Baer’s translation: “the”

Smith’s translation: “now this priest had offered upon this altar

three virgins at one time who were the daughters of Onitah, one

of the royal descent directly from the loins of Ham, these

virgins were offered up because of their virtue they would not

bow down to worship gods of wood or stone, therefore they were

killed upon this altar” (endnote 34).

Richard Parker, likewise identifies Smith’s Book of Abraham papyri as the Book of Breathings (endnote 35).

These results are absolutely devastating to Mormonism. Joseph Smith did not have the faintest idea of what he was doing while he was translating the papyri into the Book of Abraham. This certainly brings into question his ability to translate the gold plates into the Book of Mormon, since both the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham were in “Reformed Egyptian.”

2. Attempts by Mormons to answer the Book of Abraham problem fail.

Mormon missionaries who come to your door will be stunned when you bring up the problem with the Book of Abraham. Some are completely unaware that such a problem exists. Others have heard of a “tension” but are unaware of its magnitude. Mormon scholars also have not had much success in their attempts to provide an explanation for the problem. Here are a few of the most common responses:

A. “We do not have the original papyri which Joseph Smith used for the Book of Abraham. They remain lost.” Klaus Baer, however, has proven that we do have them in our possession today (see endnote 23 from Part 3). Furthermore, they are identical to reproductions that appeared in the Mormon newspaper, Times and Seasons (see as examples, March 1, 1842 and May 16, 1842).

B. “If you compare the Book of Abraham with other ancient writings about Abraham such as Jewish Midrash, the Genesis Apocryphon (found among the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Testament of Abraham, and the Book of Enoch, you will find their stories agree on a number of points. This is remarkable because Joseph Smith would have had no way of knowing about these other Abrahamic writings in 1842. They either had not yet arrived in the United States or were still undiscovered. So Joseph Smith could not have made it up.” Jewish Midrash includes stories that took parts of the Old Testament and attempted to make them relevant to a different time as well as provide solutions to questions unanswered in the Old Testament. Midrash began to be developed before the completion of the Old Testament and continued up until no later than the fifth century A.D. (endnote 36). While it is true that large volumes of Midrashim did not appear in print until the late 19th century to early 20th century (endnote 37), for nearly 2,000 years much Midrashim were orally transferred from one generation to another. Many were printed in little informal collections (endnote 38).

The first Jews arrived in the colonies of the New World in 1654 (endnote 39). By 1655 the first Jewish congregation in the United States (Shearith Israel) had formed in Joseph Smith’s home state of New York (endnote 40). Nearly 200 years later, Smith was engaged in learning Hebrew. The Mormon Church hired a prominent Jewish professor, Joshua Seixas, to teach Smith and the Mormon high Elders (endnote 41). Since Midrash existed in the United States during Smith’s day (unquestionably in oral form) and Smith lived relatively close to the nation’s first Jewish congregation, it is easy to see where Smith may have obtained his source. Miraculous knowledge on Smith’s part was not necessary.

What about these other writings? I have had Mormons tell me that there are ancient writings including one from the Dead Sea Scrolls that confirm the authenticity of the Book of Abraham because the stories are very similar. One prominent Mormon scholar claimed that the books mentioned above have many parallels to the Book of Abraham and, thus, confirm that Joseph Smith received the translation of the Book of Abraham through divine inspiration, because he could not have possibly known these accounts in his day. I must admit that his argument sounded pretty convincing until I went to the library, obtained, and read copies of these writings (endnote 42). Here are the “many,” “very similar” parallels:

1) The Book of Abraham and Genesis Apocryphon both speak of Abraham going to Egypt. However, the Bible does as well. So there is no uniqueness since Joseph Smith was well versed in the Bible.

2) The Book of Abraham, Apocalypse of Abraham, and the Testament of Abraham all speak of an attempt on Abraham’s life. However, the context in each rules out any parallel. In the Book of Abraham, a pagan priest attempts to sacrifice Abraham to the Egyptian gods in Abraham’s homeland. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, he fights with an evil spirit. In the Testament of Abraham, it is time for Abraham’s natural death. He refuses the requests of the archangel, Michael, to accompany him to Paradise.

3) The Book of Abraham and the Apocalypse of Abraham both speak of God’s promise to make a nation out of Abraham’s descendants. However, the Bible gives an account of this as well. So there is no uniqueness since Joseph Smith knew the Bible.

4) The Book of Abraham says that God instructed Abraham to lie to Pharaoh concerning his wife in order to save his own life in Egypt. The Genesis Apocryphon does provide perhaps our only true parallel. It says that Abraham had a parabolic dream (from God?) while in Egypt which encouraged him to lie concerning his wife in order to save his own life. The Bible speaks of Abraham’s lie but says it was Abraham’s idea, not God’s. The Bible never records that God encourages lies. In fact, quite the opposite is true (see 1 Samuel 15:29, Psalm 5:6, 34:13; Proverbs 12:22, 30:8; Hebrews 6:18). Even other Mormon scriptures are emphatic against lying (Ether 3:12; D&C 10:28).

5) The Book of Abraham and the Book of Enoch both contain a divinely revealed account of creation. However, the stories are obviously not parallel accounts. In the Book of Abraham, God reveals the story of creation to Abraham. The Book of Enoch has an angel revealing the story to Enoch. The Book of Abraham refers to “the Gods” involved in creation. The Book of Enoch speaks of only one God. The creation account in the Book of Abraham has many parallels in the Bible and, therefore, is not unique. The creation account in the Book of Enoch is not at all like the biblical account.

Where are the parallels? One weak parallel is all we have. Therefore, the assertion that there are close parallels to the Book of Abraham in other ancient writings is a fabrication.

C. “Joseph Smith never attempted to translate the Book of Abraham by his own intellect. He did so by the power of God. The Egyptian papyri had nothing to do with it.” Joseph Smith said, “I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham” (endnote 43). When he identified the papyri as the Book of Abraham, he labored to translate it accurately (endnote 44). He also put together an Egyptian grammar. Smith’s statements and actions make no sense if the Egyptian had nothing to do with his translation, since they implicitly claim the Egyptian had everything to do with his translation.

D. “We just do not know how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham. It was apparently done by a process unknown to anyone but Joseph.” While this may be a possibility, the Mormon should be honest with himself or herself and ask, “Does every problem in Mormonism need to be explained away by an unexplainable and unverifiable cause?” Certainly the Bible does not work that way. Is it possible that Mormonism is wrong?

I once asked two Mormon missionaries, “Is there anything which could show you that Mormonism is wrong?” They said they didn’t know. So I asked them, “I know this has never happened, but what if archaeologists began digging around Joseph Smith’s home and found some rusted plates with foreign engravings buried under the back porch? Let’s say they examined them and were able to date them to the 1830s. Let’s also say traces of gold paint were found on and around the plates that had since worn off. Would that cause you to question your faith?” They both agreed that it would. We then discussed the Book of Abraham problem. They were shocked. They were hardly aware such a problem existed! I assured them it was real and that Dr. Hugh Nibley, a chief defender of Mormonism, admitted of all the problems facing the credibility of Mormonism, “that’s the big one” (endnote 45).

The two missionaries remained steadfast saying, “We will believe the church over all findings to the contrary.” I asked them if they honestly believed that was a rational stance. “Would you want the folks you talk to on a daily basis, attempting to convince them of Mormonism’s truth, to adopt the same type of position that they will not change to Mormonism no matter what you show them? If everyone did that, you would quickly become unemployed.” I further pointed out that earlier they said such a problem would justify their questioning Mormonism and that if what I am sharing is true it would be healthy for them if they did.

The Book of Abraham problem is the death knell for Mormonism. In order to understand its significance, let’s say the bones of Jesus were found. One day archaeologists find a big box in Jerusalem during a dig. As they bring the box up and clean it off, there is writing on the box that says, “Jesus, son of Joseph the Carpenter, the one who was called the Christ.” As the archaeologists lift the lid off the box, there is silence as everyone zooms in on the skeleton of one who had been crucified. On top of the skeleton is a papyrus which says, “We fooled the world, until today,” and it’s signed, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, etc. Well, you might say, “That doesn’t prove anything. It could be a first-century Jewish fraud.” And you would be right. It could be. But suppose we did a DNA test on the bones and compared the results with a similar DNA test from a blood stain on the Shroud of Turin and they matched! Christian leaders were responding, “We have no answer. There’s definitely a match. It’s a mystery!” What would you do? The Apostle Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised ... your faith is worthless” (endnote 46). The Bible says Jesus rose bodily and ascended into heaven. But we have his bones. “Gosh, I thought it was true. I thought I had a relationship with Christ.” What would you do? What the bones of Jesus would do to Christianity, the Book of Abraham does to Mormonism.

You can expect your Mormon visitors to be confused. But do not expect them to leave Mormonism that day. If it was claimed that the real bones of Jesus were discovered, would you give up Christianity on the spot? Probably not. You would investigate the story to make sure all of the facts were true. After all, many such stories have been proven to be sensational, embellished truths, or simply false. Your Mormon visitors will probably want to do the same. Encourage them to do so. Unfortunately, Mormon missionaries are not allowed to read any literature that has not been approved by the Mormon Church. However, they are allowed to listen to something that you read to them. So read parts of this book to them. Offer to show them anything they would like to see for themselves. Mormons who are not missionaries are permitted to read literature that has not been approved by the Mormon Church. Offer to give or loan this book to them. I have attempted to document every important point, so that anyone can check these things for himself or herself.

So far we have seen that, contrary to Mormon claims, the text of the Bible is trustworthy. We have also seen that the discipline of archaeology has been anything but friendly to the Book of Mormon. Finally, we have just observed that, at best, Joseph Smith was mistaken to believe that he had the ability to translate Reformed Egyptian, thus rendering the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as unreliable. At worst, he was a fraud. In other words, if Joseph Smith really believed he was given the gift to translate (from God) and that the Book of Mormon contains an historical account of real peoples, he was deceived. He was either self-deluded or the recipient of the tricks of the devil. The other option is that Joseph Smith knew his claims to be able to translate the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham accurately were false. If this was the case, he was a deceiver. Deceived or deceiver? Either way, it seems pretty clear that Joseph Smith was not a prophet of God.

________

Mike Licona is the director of apologetics & interfaith evangelism at the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board.

ENDNOTES

32. DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT. Vol. III, No. 2 (Stanford: Dialogue Foundation, 1968), p. 68. To order back issues or request a subscription you may write to: Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, P.O. Box 658, Salt Lake City, UT 84110 or call 801-363-9988.

33. DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT. Vol. III, No. 3, p. 111. In a footnote on the same page Baer said, “The identification is now certain. It was immediately evident the ‘Facsimile From the Book of Abraham No. 1’ of the PGP [Pearl of Great Price] was copied from P. JS I. The interpretation proposed by Joseph Smith for the first two lines of text in P. JS XI corresponds to Abraham 1:4-2:6.... The fact that the name of the owner is identical in both papyri, and that the left edge of the P. JS I appears to fit the right edge of P. JS XI (see N. 15) -- that is, that they are parts of the same scroll -- confirm this.”

34. Ibid., pp. 130-132. The Book of Abraham reference is 1:11.

35. DIALOGUE, Vol. III, No. 2, p. 86.

36. Addison G. Wright. THE LITERARY GENRE MIDRASH (Staten Island: Alba House, 1967), p. 51.

37. See Louis Ginzberg’s monumental anthology, LEGEND OF THE JEWS (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society).

38. Dr. Mark Lee Raphael, Professor of Religion at the College of Willam and Mary in a personal telephone conversation, September 2, 1998.

39. Margolis and Marx. A HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society Of America, 1927), p. 603.

40. Ibid., p. 605.

41. HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, vol. II, p. 388. You may order History of the Church from any Mormon bookstore or call Mormon book dealer Deseret Bookstore, ZCMI Center, 36 S. State St., Salt Lake City, UT 84111, 1-800-453-4532. In an article for Dialogue, Vol. III, No. 2, Louis C. Zucker, Professor of English and Lecturer in Hebrew at the University of Utah said “... there is little doubt that Joshua Seixas was the ablest Hebraist . . . in the 1830’s” (p. 45). Interestingly, Seixas was a relative of Gershom Mendez Seixas, the leader of Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation mentioned above.

42. You can do this as well. See Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., & Edward Cook. THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1996). This is an English translation of all of the Dead Sea Scrolls available to date. The English translation of the Genesis Apocryphon is found on pp. 74-84. For an Aramaic original with English translation including an informative introduction and commentary, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. THE GENESIS APOCRYPHON OF QUMRAN CAVE 1 (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1971). R.H. Charles. THE BOOK OF ENOCH (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1942), Michael E. Stone, translator. THE TESTAMENT OF ABRAHAM. THE GREEK RECENSIONS (Missoula: University of Montana, 1972). A short summary of the Apocalypse of Abraham with bibliography may be found in James H. Charlesworth. THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA AND MODERN RESEARCH WITH A SUPPLEMENT (Chico: Scholars Press, 1981).

43. HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, vol. 2, p. 236. The introductory statement to the Book of Abraham is an excerpt from HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, vol. 2, pp. 235, 236, 348-351 and says, “A Translation of some ancient Records, that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. - The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.”

44. HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, vol. 2, pp. 238, 286, 320.

45. Dr. Nibley in a personal telephone conversation with this author on August 19, 1997.

46. 1 Corinthians 15:14,17.

Internet blurb on how Public Broadcasting approaches the Bible:

Bill Maher, on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” frequently refers to the Old Testament of the Bible as the Book of Jewish Fairy Tales. The description might anger the pious and the fundamentalists, but guess what? Maher’s close to the truth, according to the Public Broadcasting Service.

A visually stunning two-hour special edition of “Nova” examines decades of archaeological studies that contradict much of what is in the Bible. The entire Exodus story is debunked, as is the idea that the Israelites were monotheistic following the contract made between God and Abraham. It turns out idol worship was common through the reign of King David and right up to the Babylonian exile.

Is the Bible the word of God? Only if God dictated it to dozens, maybe hundreds, of different writers, each of whom wrote and modified stories using different patterns of language over a period of centuries.

To be sure, writer-producer-director Gary Glassman does not dismiss the Old Testament as a collection of fairy tales. He asserts that the stories, though provably false in many cases, were intended to give identity to the Israelites, a group likely made up of former Canaanites, nomads and runaway slaves. Also, the Bible provided the Israelites with a moral framework.

The special, narrated by Liev Schreiber, is not likely to sit well with those who believe that the Bible, despite its internal inconsistencies, should be interpreted literally. Then again, science and religion have had a long history of conflict until, ultimately, the former prevails.

________

Reuters / Hollywood Reporter

Between 1997 and 2016, researchers at an excavation near Ashkelon in Israel examined the remains of more than one hundred humans, remains that dated from the 12th to 6th centuries before Christ. The researchers hoped to find human DNA in order to answer an old question: Who were the Philistines? Where did they come from?

As it turns out, the Philistines were exactly who the Bible says they were, and they came from where the Bible says they did.

Amos 9 speaks of God bringing up the Philistines from Caphtor, just as he brought Israel out of Egypt. Deuteronomy 2 tells us that “the Caphtorim, who came from Caphtor, destroyed [the original Canaanite inhabitants] and settled in their place.”

This brings us to the obvious question: “Where was Caphtor?” We just don’t know for sure, but the Bible does provide an interesting clue. Jeremiah called the Philistines “the remnant of the coastland of Caphtor.” The Hebrew word translated “coastland” can also mean “island.”

For this and other reasons, many archaeologists have concluded that biblical Caphtor was Crete. In fact, some modern Bible translations even render “Caphtor” as “Crete.” We can’t be completely certain that it is, but the Bible does tell us three additional things about the Philistines. First, they weren’t native to Iron Age Canaan. Second, they displaced the original inhabitants of the region. And, third, they came via the sea, that is, the Mediterranean.

Which brings me back to the excavation in Ashkelon. After analyzing DNA from the site, Michal Feldman, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute, and Daniel Master, the head of the expedition, revealed the results. Master announced, “Our study has shown for the first time that the Philistines immigrated to this region in the 12th century (BC).”

And from where did they immigrate? According to Feldman, “This [DNA] ancestral component is derived from Europe, or to be more specific, from southern Europe, so the ancestors of the Philistines must have traveled across the Mediterranean and arrived in Ashkelon sometime between the end of the Bronze age and the beginning of the Iron age.”

Over time, the “ancestral component” became diluted as the Philistines mixed with the local Canaanite population.

All of this is pretty much in accordance with the Biblical narrative. The Philistines were ancient Israel’s principal antagonist during the period of the Judges, which coincides with the time frame Feldman and Master mention, as well as the early Monarchy. As the biblical narrative continues, they become less distinct from their Canaanite neighbors and basically drop out of the picture, except as an historical reference, as in Jeremiah.

Whenever the latest archaeological evidence confirms parts of the Biblical narrative, we are told that this does not prove the Bible is “true.” I suspect what critics are trying to say, for example in this case, is that confirming the biblical narrative’s account of the origin of the Philistines doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of the Bible is true.

Of course, it doesn’t. But the Bible is on quite a streak here, isn’t it? And, each finding further distinguishes the Biblical narrative from other religious or even ancient historical texts. The Biblical writers weren’t creating myths or recounting legends. They were relating history.

Like all history, the events it describes are interpreted within Israel’s larger story, but the events are clearly not created out of thin air to suit their agenda. These were events either witnessed or received from reliable sources.

Which is why we must say that Biblical faith is a historical faith. Many other faiths are “ways of life” or “paths to enlightenment” or something like that. The Bible is different. It tells the story of God’s dealing with His people as it unfolded in human history. Its details are grounded in real events, not in some mythological “once upon a time.”

And, along the way, we learn of other actors. You know, like the Philistines.

________

Copyright (c) 2019 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a dwelling in Nazareth that can be dated back to the time Jesus lived in the area, making it the only known structure to portray what His home may have looked like.

Yardena Alexandre, excavations director at the Israel Antiquities Authority, unveiled the finding to reporters Dec. 21, 2009, revealing that workers had uncovered the first signs of the dwelling during the summer as they were digging up the courtyard of a former convent, according to the Associated Press.

The workers were making room for the construction of the International Center of Mary of Nazareth on the site, which is just yards away from the Church of the Annunciation, the location where Mary is believed to have received word of Jesus’ impending birth.

“The discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nazareth and thereby sheds light on the way of life at the time of Jesus,” Alexandre said. “The building that we found is small and modest and it is most likely typical of the dwellings in Nazareth in that period.”

Archeologists believe Nazareth was an out-of-the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres, AP said, and it was populated by Jews of modest means whose dwellings included camouflaged grottos to hide from Roman invaders.

Alexandre said the stone house, which consists of at least four rooms, a courtyard, a water cistern and a small grotto, may have been a place where Jesus and His cousins and friends played as children.

“It’s a logical suggestion,” she said.

The excavation team has chipped away at mud to uncover about 900 square feet of the dwelling, so authorities aren’t yet sure how large it was at the time, when it could have been used as a home for an extended family.

Archeologists believe the home was occupied by a Jewish family because of the discovery of clay and chalk vessels inside. Galilean Jews of the time used chalk to ensure the purity of the food and water kept inside the vessels, AP reported. The absence of remains of glass vessels or imported products suggests it was a “simple Jewish family,” Alexandre said.

Today Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel, with about 65,000 people, mostly Palestinians. It’s located about 16 miles from the Sea of Galilee in the northern region of Israel.

Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar has reported an exciting discovery — evidence that newly unearthed fortifications in Jerusalem were built 3,000 years ago. Based on the age of pottery shards that she found at the site, Mazar believes that the fortifications were built by Solomon, just as described in the Old Testament.

Of course that’s interesting news for Jews and Christians, but there’s a lot more to this than you might expect. As the Associated Press reported, “If the age of the wall is correct, the finding would be an indication that Jerusalem was home to a strong central government that had the resources and manpower needed to build massive fortifications in the 10th century B.C.”

That’s a direct contradiction to the views of some scholars who believe, as the AP puts it, “that David’s [and Solomon’s] monarchy was largely mythical and that there was no strong government to speak of in that era.”

No wonder that Mazar calls the wall “the most significant construction we have from First Temple days in Israel.” And if she’s right, we will have another link in the long chain of evidence that demonstrates the historical veracity of the Bible.

As I’ve said before on BreakPoint, discoveries like these are worth getting excited over — even though we need to be careful not to get TOO carried away by them. Every archeological, historical, or even scientific find that we make that supports the Scriptures is welcome news. They remind us that the Bible is a record of real people, places, and events — that as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, Jesus Christ was “born into history,” not into mythology.

At a time when the veracity of the Bible is under attack from all sides, such reminders are always refreshing and encouraging.

Yet at the same time, the primary source of our beliefs must remain the Bible itself. I made this point several years ago when archaeologists discovered an ossuary — that is, a box for bones — marked “James...brother of Jesus.” Even today there is controversy over the ossuary’s authenticity.

But even if the discovery of an ossuary or a city wall corroborates what the Bible says, that does not make the biblical facts more factual — it simply confirms them. And as historian Paul Johnson says, the confirming evidence for scriptural accuracy is mounting — so much so that the skeptics, not the Christians, must fear the further course of scientific discovery.

But always remember — the Bible stands on its own credible witness, regardless of whether secondary sources confirm or seemingly contradict it.

If we get too caught up in each discovery that seems to support the Bible, we run the risk of building our faith on a less-than-solid foundation. And we run the risk of being disappointed and disillusioned should a certain artifact be somehow discredited.

Better to build our faith on the solid rock of God’s Word — even as the evidence continues to mount, this time from a pile of ancient rubble pointing to the Word’s veracity.

Several years ago, Paul Johnson gave a remarkable speech at Dallas Seminary called “A Historian Looks at Jesus.” It’s one of the best pieces on the accuracy of Scripture I’ve encountered. I encourage you to read it as well — and you can do that now because we have it for you at our website, BreakPoint.org.

________

Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.