Transcription
We just heard about artifacts that confirm the Old Testament, and now we're going to talk about the New Testament. Last night, Andy mentioned that the New Testament is the culmination of the Old Testament. The Old Testament was a story in search of a conclusion, and that conclusion found its final fruition in the New Testament documents.
I am always encouraged in my academic study that, although I believe the Bible, we do things like stick shovels in the ground and confirm and corroborate so many different things. There was a thinker and theologian in the Middle Ages named Anselm of Canterbury, and he said that as Christians, we have to strive to pursue "faith seeking understanding."
You know, it's one thing to believe the Bible, and we should, if we claim to be Christians, believe the Bible. But that understanding aspect brings the reality that this isn't just a story. It's no less than a story in that it finds its foundation and place within actual times, events, and places.
What I want to do is go through a number of archaeological artifacts, as Dr. Kennedy did, that corroborate and come alongside the text of Scripture. These artifacts give us confidence as Christians to see the actual times, places, and people come into existence when we open our Bibles. The Bible did not exist in a vacuum, and the New Testament did not exist in a vacuum.
The New Testament has a historical context from which it stems. It is thoroughly a Second Temple, first-century Jewish document. We find its origination and context historically and sociologically. The New Testament, that last section of your Bible, isn't just one book; it's a collection of 27 books written over the course of 60 years by at least nine different authors, writing to multiple audiences in multiple places, in the language of the ancient world—Greek at that time.
By acknowledging the historical realities of the New Testament and evaluating them on those terms, we see that these are historical documents. They are theological documents, but ultimately, they are historical documents. Evaluating them based on the evidence presented helps us understand and seek that "faith seeking understanding."
These ancient texts, even as we find ourselves 2,000 years after the most recent one was written, have a framework and context. When we look back at how we actually go from ancient papyrus to modern-day print, the history of the Bible is not some layered web of translations. In reality, what we find is a single step going from the original Hebrew and Greek directly into our Bibles today.
The translation of the Bible takes into consideration an amazing collection of archaeological evidence, from discoveries in Israel like the Dead Sea Scrolls to papyri dug up in places like Oxyrhynchus. Over time, as we've uncovered more of these fragments and manuscripts, they haven't complicated our understanding of the Bible but clarified it.
The documents that sit behind the history of the Bible and the way we translate them today give us confidence in their reliability. We can go from the original languages into our own, even though we're almost 2,000 years removed from the last book of the Bible that was written. As discoveries are made, we are not getting farther away from the text but getting closer.
This evidence confirms and gives us good reason to trust that our Bibles have been faithfully and accurately copied, and that what we have now is what the original authors wrote. The manuscript evidence of the Old Testament shows that we have what the original authors wrote, but with the New Testament, we almost have even more, primarily because we're closer to the time.
The first piece of archaeological artifacts I want to look at are the manuscripts themselves. The thousands of copies that the ancient world produced were very prolific. The Christians translated these documents very early and very quickly. Dr. Kennedy highlighted a number of ancient writings. Tablets were the first form of writing; we would inscribe things on tablets.
Tablets were eventually replaced by scrolls, which were a more manageable form of technology. Scrolls were then replaced by the codex, what we think of as a book today. Now, we scroll through books on tablets, going forwards and backwards.
When we look at the documents, there are multiple manuscripts we could highlight. P66 is a late second to early third-century copy of the Gospel of John that preserves for us a near-complete copy of what John's gospel looked like 1,800 years ago. A codex, known as the Codex Sinaiticus, is arguably our first Bible in that it contains Genesis to Revelation all in one unit. It comes from the fourth century and took 260 sheep to make. That's a lot of sheep!
P1, the first page of the Gospel of Matthew, dug up from Oxyrhynchus, was the first manuscript of those nearly half a million papyri that were discovered. This one was dug up on January 12, 1897, and it kicked off a slew of manuscript discoveries that built up the basis of the copies we have of the Old Testament.
We could also talk about GA 777, a more than a thousand-year-old gospel collection and one of our earliest illuminated manuscripts, which, alongside the Greek text, has detailed and intricate paintings of the life of Jesus.
The manuscripts are incredible pieces of evidence that allow us to contrast, read, and compare. We can look back and trace the original text. But as cool as all of those are—and believe me, they are cool—I want to focus on a very particular manuscript, much smaller than any of the others I just mentioned. It's called P52, also known as John Rylands 457.
This manuscript is a fragment of the Gospel of John, only about the size of a credit card. This fragmentary piece of papyrus is housed today at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England. It was discovered in 1934 by an individual named C.H. Roberts, who had recently received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He was rummaging through drawers of manuscripts that had been brought over from places like Israel and Egypt and were just housed in the basement of the library.
While doing some research, he pulled out this tiny, credit card-sized manuscript from one of these drawers. He noticed something very particular about it. Because the script was ancient Greek and because it was written on both sides, it was identified as coming from a book.
In the ancient world, scrolls were the preferred medium of writing. They didn't actually like the book; they would write things on scrolls and roll them up. It was by far the medium chosen in ancient antiquity. Christians, however, for various reasons, which we're still not entirely sure of, very early adopted and preferred the use of the codex or book form.
Christians did not invent the book, but they were the ones who popularized it as we moved from the ancient world into the Middle Ages. For this small scrap to be written on both sides, because of its text and the way it was written, and the fact that it was probably from a codex, identified it as a Christian writing.
Roberts took note of this and thought, "This could be important. I think this is very, very old." Sure enough, it was a biblical document. It contains a section of John 18 on both the front and the back.
Now, just about a century prior to Roberts making this discovery of P52, there was a man named Ferdinand Baur in Germany who had come up with a theory. Baur was a biblical scholar and a student of an individual named Hegel. Hegel had come up with a philosophical theory sometimes referred to as the Hegelian dialectic, where you have an idea, which is a thesis, and then on the opposite side is an antithesis, and then there's a measure in the middle called a synthesis.
Baur, being a student of Hegel, applied this to the datings of the gospels in the New Testament. He surmised that Mark is arguably the oldest Gospel and portrays a very Jewish Jesus. Mark's Jesus is a first-century Jewish rabbi.
Then he thought Luke is the latest of the three synoptics—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and it portrays much more, in his mind, of a Gentile Jesus. So you have Mark with the Jewish Jesus, Luke with the Gentile Jesus, and then he argued that John comes along as the antithesis. He is the synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis.
In John, you get a Jewish and a Gentile Jesus coming together. Based on this and a number of other internal arguments, he said that the Gospel of John could not be dated any earlier than 160 AD, thus making it far too late to be from the time of the eyewitnesses and therefore completely unhistorical in its content.
This reasoning, which was a little convoluted and complicated, stood as the reasoning for basically the next 100 years within critical biblical scholarship. John was seen as this picture of measuring between Mark and Luke and was considered unhistorical in its content.
The interesting thing about P52 is that when Roberts identified it as a Christian manuscript and text and sent it off to a group of individuals who were paleographers and papyrologists—individuals who date manuscripts—all of them unanimously dated it to the beginning of the second century.
What this means is that copies come after originals. You don't need doctoral-level education to figure that one out. If P52 is from the beginning of the second century, then John has to be from at least the end of the first century.
There have been many individuals in the last few years who have questioned the dating of P52, but nonetheless, the consensus remains that it is a second-century document. John most likely wrote in Ephesus, which is about 1,700 miles, or 2,700 kilometers, away from Egypt, where P52 originated.
You have to wait for time for John to write, for it to be spread around, for it to be read, and then eventually copied and find its way to Egypt. Even if you want to date P52 to the latter half of the second century, by all accounts, the way manuscripts spread around the ancient world and were copied still pushes John back into the first century.
This was a monumental discovery because it completely refocused the perspectives of how the Gospel of John was read back to being early eyewitness testimony within the lifetime of the witnesses of those actual events.
Every time we stick shovels in the ground, we're corroborating theories, even if certain consensuses are the opposite. P52 was a rock in the manuscript New Testament textual criticism world.
The second pieces of archaeological artifacts I want to highlight are three, one of which has already been mentioned: the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus's writings, and Jewish ossuaries. An ossuary is a bone box.
If you think about the Easter pictures you've often seen where Jesus's body was put, have you ever thought about the fact that when Jesus was put in the tomb, they laid him on a slab? This was a family tomb, right? So what are the rest of his family going to do if Jesus is lying on the slab?
The burial practice of the day was to wrap the body, put it on that slab, let the body disintegrate, and then collect the bones. They would put the bones in a box, inscribe the person's name on the side of the box, and stick the box in a hole in the wall, much like a modern-day mausoleum.
A number of scholars have taken the fact that you have these different sources that give us a lot of information regarding what names looked like in the ancient world. Names are important for historians because names change in popularity over time, not just from decade to decade but year to year.
These sources, although the Dead Sea Scrolls come before Jesus, Josephus's writings are after Jesus, and the ossuaries are in this time frame around Jesus. What these various sources do is give us a frame of reference for the data of names. We can analyze this and do what is called "onomastic congruence."
That's a fancy word, isn't it? You can drop that one at the next party you're at. Onomastic congruence simply means names that can be matched and corroborated. A series of scholarly studies has shown that, though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located.
By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified by narrowing down the most popular names in the places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered. By comparing these to the list from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen.
Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname, and others do not: Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with the names we see listed in the biblical gospels, we find that all of the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claimed to be narrating.
In contrast, the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit—Jesus and Judas—but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first-century Galilee and Judea, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries.
Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical gospels with four different named authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time—a standard that the apocryphal and Gnostic gospels simply do not pass.
Isn't that cool? Isn't it cool that we can look at things we would normally skip over, like names? Believe me, there are a lot of names. I mean, I'm not an Old Testament guy, but even I glaze over when I'm reading some of those names in those genealogies.
But we look at these names and see how important they are. Even when this doesn't apply, it shows the accuracy of the text. What do I mean by that? In the last half of the book of Acts, Luke mentions two names that are completely outside of the data points of onomastic congruence.
Luke mentions 19 Greek names. Two of those names are completely unique: Darius and Lydia. These are completely unique Greek names, and we have no uses of them in any inscriptions or literary documents anywhere within this time period.
However, because there have been extensive studies on name frequency and popularity throughout the ancient world in the last few decades, we now know that in the region where the last half of the book of Acts was written and took place—this Northern Mediterranean, Southern portion of Asia Minor—10% of people had completely unique names.
So the fact that Luke has 19 names, two of which are completely unique, fits the data perfectly if we assume that Luke is actually describing real people in real places. He says that he's doing this while accompanying Paul during his missionary journeys in the Acts of the Apostles.
So, onomastic congruence with name frequency shows the trustworthiness of the New Testament. Ironically, in a couple of instances where there are outliers, given the data we're working with, this also happens to fit in regard to the reliability of when that doesn't happen.
Because the New Testament books, whether it's the gospel authors or whoever, are writing their biographies of Jesus, or when Peter, Paul, Jude, and James are writing their epistles, they're making sure that they're communicating a level of authenticity through their writings. They want to ensure that you know they're talking about real people in real places at real times.
Luke goes to great lengths to demonstrate that his narrative is placed within an actual time and location. In the first three verses of Luke chapter 3, we are given seven historical characters that mark the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist. Within these three verses alone, there are 22 historical references to locations and people that have been verified by archaeology and ancient literary sources outside of the Bible.
This places Luke's account within a historical framework, making sure his readers know he's not merely making up a story but pinpointing when and where these events actually took place in history. The gospel authors do this in multiple ways—with names, locations, as well as with accurate plant and animal life related to the areas within the narratives they are describing.
The gospel authors get these types of facts right, even when other ancient writers of the time don't. That narrator sounds like a smart guy!
You know, I mentioned at the end of that clip that the gospel authors often get this right when other ancient historians don't. Let me give you an example of that. There was a very important, arguably one of the four most ancient biographers and writers in the Greco-Roman period. His name was Tacitus.
He makes two minor errors in a particularly important writing. First, he mentions that Christians believe in Christ. The problem is that he wrongly assumes that "Christus" is a name, not a title. So he gets that fact wrong. He assumes that "Christus" sounds like a Greek name to him. He doesn't have the framework for that being a Jewish translation into Greek of the Hebrew word "Messiah."
He says these Christians derive their name from a man called Christus. The more important historical aspect is that where he describes what happened to Jesus, particularly being crucified under Pontius Pilate, he gives Pontius Pilate the wrong title. Pilate was commissioned not as a procurator but as a governor.
This is backed up by numerous written sources, such as Josephus's Antiquities, which I mentioned before, as well as the records of what appear to be his handling of this period in Judean history that we read about in the gospels. He was eventually removed from that position, not under Tiberius, who was the emperor, but the next guy, Caligula.
Along with that, we can look at archaeological discoveries, particularly a stone that was found in Caesarea Maritima in Israel in 1961. In 1961, we discovered this stone that, once again, along with Josephus and some other ancient writings, describes the political situation in the ancient world.
It says that here in Caesarea, Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, dictated this particular project. We have written sources that corroborate who Pontius Pilate was, and we have archaeological sources and discoveries that corroborate who Pontius Pilate was. And guess who also gets it right? Luke!
Luke and the other gospel authors, where prominent ancient writers get it wrong, the gospels get it right. They want to make sure that you know you are reading history. Luke doesn't need to preface John the Baptist's ministry by naming everybody he can possibly think of—everybody who was ruling, where they were ruling, and why they were ruling.
He didn't need to do that, but he did because he wanted you to know that what he was writing about was actual history—events that took place in real times and real places.
My final artifact is the very first depiction we think of Jesus on the cross. It's a piece of 1,900-year-old Roman graffiti. If you go to Palatine Hill in Rome, the Palatine Hill Museum, you can actually see this. It's on a wall, and etched into the wall is a man on a cross with the head of a donkey. Off to one side, there's a figure standing, arms raised in worship, and the caption scrawled on the side says, "Alexamenos worships his God."
This is meant to be biting. This is meant to be mocking. What this graffiti artist is saying is that anyone who worships the God of the cross is worshiping a donkey. It's ridiculous, it's stupid, absurd—dare I say asinine?
And yet, that is the Christian claim, isn't it? That we worship a crucified God. The Alexamenos graffito tells us a number of very important things: that the early followers of Jesus worshiped Jesus as God. This isn't something that was invented; it isn't something that was written into the Bible hundreds of years later.
Aside from all the manuscripts that clearly identify Jesus as God, even those who are criticizing and mocking Christianity reveal that, as early as we can push it, Christians are worshiping the crucified Savior. Not only that, but that Jesus was crucified, and particularly on a cross.
Now, why is this important? I highlight this just as a side note because there are groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses who want to deny that and say Jesus was crucified on a stake. Now, this debunks that because this is coming from a source who would have understood crucifixion, who would have seen crucifixion.
Although it is true that we have examples of individuals being crucified with their arms upright on a stake, Jesus almost certainly, based on what's described in the gospels, was crucified in the normative position of Roman crucifixion—with his arms outstretched.
As I said before, this was meant to be mockery. The Roman philosopher just prior to Jesus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, said the very mention of the word "cross" should be far removed not only from a Roman citizen's body but from his mind, his eyes, his ears. It is a most cruel and disgusting penalty.
He viewed it as a curse word, as vulgar. You didn't just go around saying the word "cross" because of what happened during a crucifixion. This was the penalty for the lowest of the low. So for Alexamenos, whoever that is, to be worshiping a crucified God—that is nonsense to the ancient Roman.
This was a point of both misunderstanding and mockery for non-Christians. I think we should take this to some degree as encouragement in 2024, on the cusp of 2025, because our culture likewise often misunderstands and mocks what we believe.
It's not something new, and we can take cues from the ancient Church, from the Jesus Revolution that Glenn was talking about last night, in how they fundamentally overturned society and culture with the love of Jesus.
We read in Paul that he says in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that we preach Christ crucified—a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. The two Greek words that are translated there are "scandalon" and "moros." It's a scandal to the Jews, and it's moronic to the Gentiles.
I think we can relate to that to a certain degree. Our faith, this proclamation of a crucified Savior, is a scandal to some and moronic to others. Yet, nonetheless, Paul says we preach Christ crucified.
So, in all of this, archaeological artifacts have their limits. These aren't proofs that the Old Testament, in what Dr. Kennedy was highlighting, and the New Testament, that I've highlighted here, is true. However, combined with the internal evidence from the New Testament texts themselves, the corroborative data of artifacts I've highlighted, and many, many more, they all correlate with the accuracy of the 27 books we call the New Testament.
When things are in doubt, like certain theories that date the gospels late, every once in a while, we find a P52 that upturns the consensus. That doesn't mean we need to be disparaging of the consensus; the consensus is the consensus for a reason.
But I am always encouraged that the more we explore these things, the more we find corroborative data. This creates a cumulative case that gives us confidence that when you pick up your Bible and read through its pages—this is actually Pastor Tim Woodcock's Bible, and I'm going to be auctioning it off later today—I can feel the holiness just radiating!
When you pick up your Bible and read through its pages, you can at minimum see its trustworthiness as historically accurate documents. However, whether or not you then choose to embrace the Christian faith depends on far more than historical evidence.
The very quick examples Dr. Kennedy and I have shared with you this morning are not going to convince you that Jesus is the Son of God, that he did miracles, died for sins, and rose again to guarantee eternal life.
At the same time, the best lines of historical reasoning today can and do—and probably should—lead a fair-minded inquirer to the conclusion that the New Testament contains good, accurate, and trustworthy testimony from the time that Jesus was living, by people who were actually there, who claim to have seen what they saw.
That testimony corroborates with other evidence in the form of tangible artifacts that we can look at in stone, in papyrus, and inscribed on walls. The information found in its pages can be weighed, scrutinized, and verified with a host of internal and external lines of data that show its reliability and accuracy.
Because Jesus is no less than a historical character, but he's also so much more than that. It's via historical analysis of artifacts such as the ones we've just seen that lead us to the confident judgment that you can, in fact, trust the New Testament—not just as a reliable collection of ancient documents, but as something that contains the words of a man who really did predict his own death and resurrection, who really did die on a cross 2,000 years ago, walked out of the grave, and invites you into a perfect and right relationship with him as your Lord, your Savior, and your friend.
That is historically reliable eyewitness testimony. Let me finish with this: C.S. Lewis said, "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."
Thank you very much for listening.