Are the Gospels Real History?

Thank you very much, Barry. Nice to see all of you here today. We've been a little bit thin in our numbers over the summer, with people gone serving at camps, gone on vacation, things like that. I had a burning question. Do retired people go on vacation? Arthur?

They do? Okay, alright. Got to rest up from that.

We burned it. You burned it. Okay, I'll go along with that. Good to see all of you here.

I might mention, too, we will have a short discussion, question and answer period after services here. This is something I've been talking with Charles Malire about. They've been doing it for several months up in Loveland, and it seems to work out quite well up there.

People have any questions that come up during the sermon, thoughts, comments, observations, whether the material is helpful, things like that. We'll try that today. Traffic wasn't as bad, so we weren't as late getting down here for services, so we'll have a little bit of time for that.

I'd like to start off with a question today, and that is, do we know if the Gospels are true and accurate records? We're investing many, many hours in studying them, digging into them diligently, and we're basing our lives on what they say, what they have to tell us. So a good question to ask is, are the Gospels real history? Are they accurate?

Do they reflect real events? Do they talk about a real man, a real person, Jesus of Nazareth, whom the authors believe to be the Son of God and the promised Messiah? Or are the Gospels simply made-up stories?

I'll pick up with a theme that I started on two weeks ago in the sermon here, and I started off that sermon with quotes from two quite prominent scholars. Many of you have probably heard of these two individuals, Bart Ehrman and Richard Dawkins. And I picked these two because they are two of the more better-known ones. There are many others I could have chosen, but these two have published books attacking the concept of God, the Bible, the Gospels, and have been very successful at arguing against those. Their books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, so I thought I would pick those two. Let's take a look at some of the quotes that they offer regarding the Gospels. The first is Bart Ehrman. I talked a little bit about his background last time. Both of these are very intelligent men. I have PhDs. Bart Ehrman is chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at one of the University of North Carolina campuses, an individual who, years ago, studied for the ministry. It's been a great deal of time studying the Scriptures. Finally, he came to the conclusion that they are not inspired, that the Gospels are essentially fables made up later, as reflected by his quote here. He says, some books, such as the Gospels, had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them, namely apostles and friends of the apostles. That's from his book, Jesus Interrupted, published in 2011. Quite a read.

Richard Dawkins talked about his background last time. He's one of the more famous advocates of evolution and atheism in the world. Quite well known. He was a professor at Oxford University for many years before he discovered he could make more money writing and selling books than teaching. He's made quite a career out of attacking the concept of God and the Bible.

Regarding the Gospels, here's what he says. The Gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life. That is from his book, The God Delusion, which tells you where he's coming from, published in 2006. Another quote from Richard Dawkins, nobody knows who the four evangelists were, four evangelists being Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. So are they correct? Again, these are two scholars out of many that I could have chosen to get similar quotes from here. Is there a way to know for sure? Or to approach it in one way, we might look at it from a legal standpoint.

In a trial, you don't have to prove someone guilty or innocent, but you have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. So if we were to apply such a standard to the Gospels, what conclusion would we reach regarding this question? I'd like to start off here with a fundamental question we might ask on this. Who were the Gospel writers? I don't mean who they were, in the sense of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, whomever. But to examine this question logically, let's look at three possibilities. Broken down logically, we have three possibilities as to who the Gospel writers are. I mean, and who in this context. What were their motivations?

Why were they writing? What were they hoping to accomplish? So we have three possibilities for these men writing the Gospels. One, they were deceivers. They were forgers, in other words. They were writing something they knew, not to be true, to fool people. Second possibility is that they were dupes, which means that they believed what they were writing was true, but it really wasn't. And they were duped themselves, and consequently didn't know that they were unwittingly deceiving others. Or the third option, they were direct witnesses.

Or people who wrote, learned what they learned, and wrote what they wrote based on the accounts of people who were direct witnesses. As I mentioned the last time, we have Matthew and John who were apostles, who were accompanying Jesus Christ. And then we have Mark and Luke.

Mark is apparently writing, as best we can tell, from Peter's perspective. He's a friend and co-worker, compadre of Peter, and writes Peter's perspective on things. And then Luke, who you can read the first few verses of Luke, where he describes how he interviewed and studied out sources and so on to write a biography of Jesus Christ, and then continued that with the book of Acts later on. So we have these three choices here. And let's break that down a little bit further here. Again, applying a test of logic here, is if we were to examine the evidence of the Gospels objectively to see whether these accounts are reliable, if they are historically accurate, how would we do that? Well, the logical way to do it would be to look at these works as scholars would look at any ancient work that they discovered.

For instance, if scholars were to find a new document that purported to be a biography of Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or some other historical figure of that era, what would they do? Well, what this means... Yes, I've got a little bit out of order on my slides here. So again, we have these three choices here. Either what the authors of the Gospels said was true, or it was false. It's got to be one or the other. It's true or it's not true. If it was true, then we have the word of some direct witnesses. And if it was false, either they knew that it was false, meaning they were deceivers, or they did not know that it was false, in which case they were dupes. They didn't know that what they were disseminating was not correct. So again, to examine this, to answer some of these questions, we would apply some tests that would be applied to any historical document that you might want to look at. And these would be divided down, scholars divided into what are called internal tests and external tests. The internal tests would be things like the overall consistency among the books. We have four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Are they internally consistent? Do they disagree with one another? Do they talk about similar events? Mention the same type of people? Are they set in the same time frame, same geographical setting?

Are they consistent in the message, the picture that they portray? One way to look at it, one way would be undesigned coincidences. This is the material I gave in the sermon two Sabbaths ago. Water undesigned coincidences. That's where, for those of you who weren't here, that's where one Gospel writer will leave out something key to the story. I gave a couple of examples, I gave a dozen examples last time. One, for instance, where they go up to the Mount of the Transfiguration. Peter, James, and John accompany Jesus Christ. There, they see Jesus Christ transform before them. They see Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus.

They hear a voice come out of heaven saying, this is my beloved Son, hear Him. And then they leave and are silent about what they said, what they saw. Now, in what universe does that make sense? They saw these three miracles there. Jesus transfigured, He talks to Moses and Elijah. A divine voice comes out of heaven saying, this is my Son. And they don't tell anybody why. Well, that's one Gospel writer's account. Another Gospel writer adds the detail that Jesus told them to keep quiet about this vision until after he was crucified and resurrected. So that key bit of information fits in with the other Gospel there to help us understand why they didn't say anything. And the other one records Jesus' instructions but then doesn't say whether they obeyed those instructions or not. So I covered a dozen different examples like this. I'll mention one or two, possibly two others today as we go through this. So that's what I mean by undesigned coincidence, is where the Gospels are like a jigsaw puzzle and some of the puzzles in one Gospel writer have holes in it and you find the missing pieces that fit into those holes in the writings of one of the other Gospel writers. So that's what that is talking about. If you miss that, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it because it does tie in. It's kind of the lead-in to what we're talking about today. And another, an external test that we would apply in examining a document to see if it's historically accurate or credible is whether it agrees with other verifiable history. Again, to use the example, if we came across a document that purported to be a biography of Alexander the Great, and yet it told a very different story of Alexander, described battles that did not take place, described Alexander going to places that we know he never went to from other accounts, well, you would dismiss that document as not credible, as a fake, a fabrication, an invented story.

The reason I mention these things is, the reason I'm giving this short two-part series of sermons here on the Gospels is because we see so many attacks on the Bible, at least several times a year. I'll talk about some of these again as we get further into the message here. But we see so many attacks against God, against the credibility of the Bible and so on, and yet with the media bias that we see in so many new sources these days, we don't see the other side presented in those things. And particularly for our young people, those who are in high school, junior high, those in college and so on, they see so many things, they're exposed to an evolutionary model of biology, of science, and so on.

Historically, the Bible is dismissed as real history, that sort of thing. So this falls loosely under a category of scholarship called apologetics. And apologetics doesn't mean we're apologizing. It comes from the Greek word apologia, which essentially means a defense of something. So when I talk about apologetics, it's not that I'm apologizing for the Bible, apologizing for the Gospels, apologizing for their trustworthiness, it's that I'm defending it. And what I'm trying to do in this short two-part series here is to help you become better equipped, to understand the reasons for our faith, why we believe the things we do. And again, this would be helpful in conversations with other people that you come in contact with, and just again, to counter some of the bad information that we're exposed to in terms of the media, college, things like that all the time. So this is to help you counter some of these things here, to better equip you to be a defender of the faith of what we believe in. So when it comes to assessing the historical credibility here, how do the Gospels stack up against these tests here? Well, when it comes to consistency, you can see that quite readily, just from thumbing through your harmony of the Gospels there. You do see a very consistent message, very consistent presentation among the different Gospel writers. They describe the same events, the same personalities, same location, same time frame. You see a great deal of consistency in there. There are some variations because of the author's individual memories, recollections, personalities, what they felt was important for them to emphasize, and so on. But on the whole, they are remarkably consistent in the picture that they present.

We've seen some of that already in our Gospel studies, and we'll cover a lot more of that as we go along as well. As for the second test of Undesigned Coincidences, again, I gave a whole sermon on that last time, which I won't recount, but we went through a dozen examples of that. As I mentioned last time, when it comes to Undesigned Coincidences, if you have one or two, it might just be coincidental where one Gospel writer leaves a big hole in his account, and that hole happens to be filled by information on another. But when you have that happen five times, six times, eight, nine, ten, twelve, like we covered last time, and there are a number of others as well that I didn't have time to cover, eventually just to try to attribute all of that to sheer coincidence just doesn't hold water. The odds just don't work. It's too much to be just coincidence there. So that is a very powerful argument that shows that these are real people writing about real events and real history. Another point that I should have mentioned and neglected to in my sermon last time, and it's pertinent to what we'll be talking about today as well, is that at no time in that sermon today am I going to appeal to faith alone, or to theology alone, or to, for that matter, to the Scriptures saying that they are the Word of God. No, I'm just looking at history, at sheer, raw history, while we can learn what evidences we have about the Gospels. Because, again, we're just simply looking at the evidence, the evidence alone, to see if it is accurate, to see if it is credible, to see if it is believable. Now that is not to say, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that faith is not important. It certainly is important. But my purpose in giving the last sermon and today's sermon is to demonstrate that our belief in God's Word isn't a matter of blind faith. Our should be a faith that is based on sound reasons, sound logic, sound conclusions, and sound historical evidence for believing what we do. And consequently, our faith should be strengthened by the things that I talked about last time and we'll be talking about today. And they should be rock solid again in the face of these different attacks and misinformation that continually comes out about the Bible and the existence of God the Father, Jesus Christ, God's Word, and so on. So now, with that background, we'll pick it up and actually get into the heart and core of the sermon. What about external tests?

Again, we covered the first two internal tests on the consistency of the Bible and on design coincidences. But what about external tests? How do the Gospels agree or disagree with verifiable history from other accounts? And from what we know about archaeology, for instance.

I've been bringing out some of these things as we go through the Gospels as we encounter intersections between what we see in the Gospels and archaeology. And describing that, how archaeology verifies some of the things we read about in the Gospels. But I'd like to take some time now to give just a brief overview of this. And it will be an overview. There are entire books on the subject. And there's more being learned, uncovered, uncovered all the time. You may be surprised at how recent some of these discoveries are that I'll be talking about today. So first, in assessing the historical credibility of the Gospels, what about the individuals? The people who are mentioned in the Gospels? Are they real?

Can we verify them historically, that these are real people who existed in that location at that time? And indeed, we can, for a number of them. Here are some of the individuals who have been confirmed as living at that time in that geographic area and carrying out the functions that are attributed to them in the Gospels. I'll just go through these quickly. Annas, the High Priest, this is in alphabetical order, incidentally. Augustus Caesar, the Emperor of Rome. Archalaeus, the ruler of Judea after Herod, the Great. Caiaphas, the High Priest. Herod the Great. Herod Antipas, one of the successors of Herod the Great.

We've talked about him a bit. James, the half-brother of Jesus. Jesus Christ himself. John the Baptizer.

Philip, the Tetrarch of Galilee. Pontius Pilate, the procurator or governor. Abjudea. Corinius, the governor of Syria, mentioned in Luke's setting a chronology for his Gospel. Tiberius, Caesar, the Emperor of Rome. These are the individuals that we know from other historical sources or from archaeology were real people living in that area at that time.

What kind of evidence do we have for these individuals? Some of it's fairly easy for people like the Roman Emperors. We have statues of them. We have coins with their likeness and their names on it. Things like that that are pretty evident. What about some of the lesser-known individuals? What kind of evidence do we have for them? We'll cover it for all of these individuals, but a few representative ones. Here's an object you can see in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This is called an ossuary. It's made out of stone. It's a box about yea big. It's called an ossuary after bones, Latin word for bones, as in osteoporosis, things like that. The burial practices of the Jews in the first century, when a person died, they would be spread out, laid out on a bench inside a tomb until the flesh decayed.

Then, about a year later, they would go in and gather up the bones of the individual and put them inside an ossuary, the stone box like this. They found several hundred of these in Israel, mostly around Jerusalem because it was kind of the population center.

This particular one has an interesting inscription. It's hard to make out, but you can see it inscribed rather crudely right here on one end of the box. Incidentally, this is a very elaborate box. You can see these rosettes here, geometric patterns. Very elaborate.

This is the most elaborate ossuary that I'm aware of, indicating that the individual whose box this is had quite a high status. Indeed, that is the case because the inscription here reads, in Hebrew, Joseph, son of Caiaphas. Does the name Caiaphas ring a bell? Well, the high priest, who is ruling when Jesus Christ is crucified. This is the bone box of his son, who also was a priest and possibly a high priest as well, if I remember correctly.

This came from the tomb of the family of Caiaphas. They are discovered not far from Jerusalem near the Henam Valley. Here we have evidence that Caiaphas was a real person, living in Judea in the first century. Incidentally, any time you find a bone box like this, these were only used from about 10 BC to when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. Less than a century is when these bone boxes were used. They weren't used before that. They weren't used after that. So any time you find one of these, you know it is set in the first century or the decade or so leading up to that. Here is evidence of Caiaphas.

Let's take a look at another individual. Again, if some of you have been to Israel, you may have seen this. It is on display in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This is called the Pontius Pilate Inscription. It was discovered at Caesarea Maritima, the port of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast. This was discovered just 50 years ago, in 1961, a little over 50 years ago. Incidentally, the Caesarea box I mentioned was discovered only in 1990. This is quite a recent discovery.

Go back to books earlier than this, you won't find these items mentioned.

Here is the Pontius Pilate Inscription again. If you look at it carefully, you can make out some Latin names. You can see a T here, an I, a U, which is shaped like a V, a V, and an S. It's the last part of Pontius Pilatus. P-I-L-A-T and a U shaped like a V and then a S. Pontius Pilatus. They have reconstructed the rest of the inscription here and determined that it came from a plaque, roughly square, that was probably affixed to a temple. I'm not sure how good your Latin is. If your Latin is good, you may be able to read this. It says Caesareanus Tiberium. What that's referring to is a temple. They worshiped emperors. Then, starting with Julius Caesar after his death, the emperors were worshiped as God. So this is a temple inscription, an inscription on a temple dedicated to emperor worship. Pontius Pilatus. Prefect of Judea. They didn't have the J letter or sound there, so it's spelled I-U-D-A-E-A-E. Judea. They called the Jews, what is it? I don't recall how to pronounce it, but yeah, Eudyn, Eudaea, that sort of thing. This is basically saying this is a dedicated to them. So loosely translated, this is a temple to the emperors. Pontius Pilate, the prefect or governor of Judea, dedicates this temple. This again was found at Caesarean Maratima, where Pontius Pilate had his headquarters. He's the Roman governor over Judea, but he doesn't live in Jerusalem. We get that impression because that's where he is during Christ Passover.

But the governors only came to Jerusalem when they had to. They liked to live in large up on the beach in Caesarean Maratima, and only came to Jerusalem generally during the Holy Days because the Jews tended to have riots then, expecting a Messiah to show up on the Holy Days. So it was a custom of the governors to go down and earn with a lot of Roman guards, or accompanied by a lot of Roman guards, to keep a lid on things during the feasts. That's why we find Pilate there in Jerusalem at the Passover when Christ is crucified.

So here's strong evidence that, yes, there was a Pontius Pilate at this time, and he was the prefect or governor of Judea in that period. He's also mentioned in other historical accounts we don't have time to go into. Incidentally, he got recalled to Rome and retired to a little place in Italy called Pompeii. Don't know exactly what happened to him from that point, but that seems to be where the story ends. Here's another ossuary here. This one is much more crude plain than the previous one. What's interesting about this one is it also has an inscription on it. It's hard to make out here, but it's located right in this area.

This ossuary has been the subject of a lot of information and misinformation over recent years. Here's an illustration showing the inscription on it, and it says, to translate from the Hebrew here, Yaakov, or James, Ben Yousaf, son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua.

What it says is, James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. Some of you may have heard of this, called the James ossuary. This is a subject of a fair amount of media coverage when the owner, discoverer of this ossuary, announced it to the world back in 2002. You probably read some of the news accounts, how it was determined to be a fake forgery. There was a large, very lengthy trial in Jerusalem where the owner of this ossuary was put on trial accused of forgery. That's probably about all you heard in the news media, because that's what was reported. What you didn't hear is that over the course of this trial, many scientific experts in various fields of epigraphers, people who study ancient inscriptions, geologists who know about stone, and the aging of stone, and the location of where stone came from, and this type of thing, a number of scientists examined this, and the vast majority of them testified in the trial that this is authentic. It is indeed from the first century, the inscription is from the first century, and the people who are bringing charges against the owner of this don't know what they're talking about. This is not a forgery, it is authentic. You probably didn't hear that in the media. I learned it because I was following the trial through different experts, archaeologists, and so on in Israel during this time. Eventually, the owner was acquitted in the trial. The judge confronted the prosecution and said, basically, you haven't approved your case, you've got all these experts lining up saying you're flat out wrong, drop the case, save us all a lot of money, and go home. But they refused to do so and continued to insist it go to trial, and the judge eventually declared that the defendant, the owner of this, not guilty, and ordered them to return his property to him. There were several other interesting artifacts as well that are being analyzed right now. Bottom line, the defendant was acquitted on this charge of forgery. He was convicted on a lesser charge of trafficking and antiquities, artifacts, in other words, which is a much more minor charge. Actually, if you ask just about any archaeologist in Israel, you can probably convict him of that, including yours truly, but we won't get into that. I'll erase that off the tape over there. Anyway, this is one of the things where I mentioned the media bias. How many of you have ever heard of this thing to begin with, the debate over it? How many of you have heard that it was declared a forgery and fake and all of that? How many of you have ever heard the rest of this story, which I have just given? None of you. Proves my point. I only knew it because it wasn't reported in our mainstream media, but because of people actually watching and monitoring the trial over there. Again, this is the type of evidence that we have of some of the individuals who are mentioned in the Gospels, and we can prove by this type of evidence we're living in that place at that time in the context in which the Gospels depict those people.

I'd like to move now to another very interesting category of external evidence that confirms the Gospels, and that is structures or buildings that are mentioned in the Gospels. Now, before I get into that, I want you to think about something for a minute. How many history books or news accounts do you read these days that talk about specific buildings? Probably not many, because history is made of people and of events like battles and the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires and things like that. Rarely do you see history books focus on specific structures, buildings, houses, this type of thing. There is just not something that you often find in history books yet in the Gospels. We find a number of them, and a number of them that have been verified from archaeology. Let's go through those briefly. Here's just a list of them. The Bethesda Pool in Jerusalem, the Capernaum Synagogue, the Gerizim Temple in Samaria, Herod's Temple in Jerusalem, the High Priest's Palace in Jerusalem, Jacob's Well in Samaria, Peter's House in Capernaum, the Praetorium where Jesus was brought before Pilate in Jerusalem, and the Siloam Pool in Jerusalem. These are specific structures, buildings there that are mentioned in the Gospels that have been found and identified as such by archaeologists here. Because this is a fairly short category, I would like to take a look at some photos of these. First of all, I'll start with those two are in alphabetical order, incidentally here. Let's start with the Bethesda Pool. This is one of my favorite stories from archaeology because it's so classic here in how people view the Bible and the lessons we can draw from that. It's mentioned in the Gospels in John 5 and verse 2. It says, Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate. The sheep gate was on the northern side of the temple slash temple mount. It was called the sheep gate because that's where the sheep that were offered for sacrifice were brought in through the northern side of the temple, the northern gate there. So in Jerusalem, on the north side of the temple is a pool which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porches. Now for years people read over this and they wondered about it because never in all the pools and things that have been excavated over the years have they ever found a five-sided pool. Is this describing something shaped like the Pentagon? Five sides. Well, for years a lot of people just dismissed this.

They said, that's absurd. Nobody makes a five-sided pool. They make it round, they make it rectangular, they make it square, but they don't make it with five sides. It's just so awkward architecturally. However, in 1964, 50 years ago in Jerusalem, archaeologists were excavating north of the sheep gate on the northern side of the temple mount and this is what they found. Now it looks like a big mess of rocks and dirt and you're right, it is a big mess of rocks and dirt because for one thing there was a Byzantine era church built over at 400s, 500s AD that was built on top of a pagan Roman temple dating from 100-200 AD, which is built on top of a pool. Now when they dug down and isolated and identified which structures belonged with the church and which with the temple and which with a pool, they came up with an architectural plan of the pool and it looked like this. This is a model of the Bethesda pool.

How many porches, what is a porch? A porch is an enclosed area with columns supporting the roof, like we have inside this building here. And you see those on the sides. How many porches?

Well, let's count. One, two, three, four, and one in the middle makes five. You've got your five sides of a porch exactly as John described. Five porches, five colonnaded porches on this pool.

This one, incidentally, would have been open in the middle with columns on either side supporting the roof, so it would have been kind of a walkway in between. Incidentally, the pool is in two levels because part of it was used for city water supply, part of it used for ritual bathing by people before they went up to the temple there. So that's why it's divided in half like that. But indeed, it had five sides to it. Now, what's really interesting from this, from an archaeological standpoint, and from how it relates to John's Gospel that we read earlier, let's go back and review that again. Now, there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool which is called in Hebrew Bethesda having five porches. But consider this. If John's Gospel is a fake, and there are a lot of scholars who will tell you that. It's a forgery. It was written much later. It wasn't written by John. It wasn't written by anybody who ever lived around Jerusalem. This kind of nonsense.

Keep in mind what happened to Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. It's totally flattened, totally raised by the Roman Empire, by the Romans, the Roman army there. The whole city, Josephus says, it was destroyed to the point that you could walk by and not even tell a city had ever been there.

And I think Josephus is exaggerating a little bit, but his point is this place is total rubble.

Total rubble. And as we saw from the earlier photo here, the lowest levels of this are something like 20 feet below current ground level.

About the height of our ceiling up here is about how far down. That's how much rubble had accumulated.

That's how long this pool had been buried there. Now, if you were a forger, riding from Rome or Asia Minor decades later, how in the world would you ever know that a five-sided pool was laying under 20 feet of rubble north of the sheep gate, north of the Temple Mount, exactly where John says it was? How would you know that? If you're a forger, you don't know that. There's no way you can make up a detail like that by chance and happen to get it right. No, this is just evidence that, yes, John is an eyewitness of this. John knew had walked by this pool, had seen Christ's miracle there, which is related, which we don't have time to get into. So these are some of the details that we find in the Gospels that verify the story, and there's just no other way to explain it other than this person who wrote about this knew that this pool existed and was there in the first century when he says it was.

Let's take a look at another one of these structures. We've talked about this one before.

That's the synagogue in Capernaum. This is a magnificent synagogue. This is what it looks like today. It's made out of limestone, bright white limestone. This is an artist's illustration of what they think it looked like during that period. Multiple stories, very large. The school, I've talked about this quite a bit before in earlier ones, the school over here on the side for the kids. Here's another view of what you see there today. But notice something, it's very obvious even on here, you see this dark line here between this white limestone up here and this dark volcanic basalt rock here. Well, years ago, this was in the 60s, 50s, 60s, if I remember correctly. Archaeologists were excavating. They removed some of the stones, dug down below this level to find out how old this one is. This one, again, is from about 400s, late 300s, early 400s AD. But what about the one that is built exactly on the foundations? It was the same size. This is the largest synagogue found in Galilee by far, incidentally. It's easily half again the size of any others. But they dug down, let me give you a close-up of what we're looking at here. You see the white limestone and then the dark volcanic basalt. There's a sign here that says the late 4th century AD white synagogue built upon the remains of the synagogue of Jesus.

So as they excavated down and dug below this to find out how old it was, they found this lower synagogue existed in the 1st century. Right during the time Jesus Christ is making Capernaum the headquarters of his ministry there. So the logical conclusion is, yes, right here is the synagogue that we find Christ performing miracles in, teaching in, in the Gospels. This is the very one there with the later one. After this synagogue is destroyed, possibly by the Roman invasion, possibly earthquake, we don't know, but they came along and built a more elaborate limestone synagogue later. But you can see the foundation of the earlier synagogue built right there.

Moving on to the next one, the Gerizim Temple. We find this referred to indirectly in the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in Sikhar, as it's called, where the woman tells Jesus, you Jews worship at Jerusalem, but we worship here at Mount Gerizim, which is right behind where she's talking to Jesus there at the well, which we'll talk about the well in just a minute. But this is what the ruins atop Mount Gerizim looked like.

You can see this octagonal structure, which is a dead giveaway that this is a Byzantine-era church built on top of what they thought was a holy site or a biblically significant site.

Around it are the ruins of a combination fortress-slash-monastery there, and then other ruins down below that of earlier structures. Well, now they've excavated down even further, and here's what they found. And that is the foundation of the temple that the Samaritan woman was referring to in her conversation with Jesus right there on Mount Gerizim, there within just a mile or two of where Jacob's well is, where she had the conversation with Jesus Christ. So here's yet another structure just mentioned in passing in the Gospels that we have archaeological evidence for.

The next item, a very notable one, Herod's Temple, there in Jerusalem, built by Herod the Great.

The temple itself has been destroyed, but the massive 30-acre temple mount is still there.

You can visit it very prominently today. These are the ruins. What we're looking at here are some of the shops, some of the rubble in the background where the Romans destroyed the temple and all of its porches and so on, and pushed it over the sides. You can go there and visit all of this today, walk around in these ruins. Here's another view that perhaps shows that a little better. This is a first century street that ran alongside the walls of the temple mount. Here's the pile of rubble, ruins of shops, and so on, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Here's a reconstruction of Herod's Temple, a model of it in Jerusalem, based on the different historical descriptions of it. We have a pretty good view of what it would have looked like based on the descriptions of it at the time.

Here's another structure verified by archaeology. The next one is the High Priest's Palace there in Jerusalem. This was discovered in the late 60s, early 70s, as they started excavating in the upper, the country club area, you might say, of Jerusalem, where the wealthier people lived. They found this elaborate mansion there. It had very elaborate mosaics in the floors, beautiful frescoes painted on the walls, very elaborate furnishings. You can see this stone table here with stone water jars beside it, which incidentally were used for ritual purification by the priests. They also found that this particular home had ritual bats, mikvos, down in the basement, you might call it, had a menorah inscribed on one of the walls in the plaster there.

They concluded that this house belonged to a priestly family and a very wealthy one.

The wealthiest, the most elaborate house ever discovered from the first century in Jerusalem, destroyed, incidentally, in 70 AD, in the Roman takeover of Jerusalem, is burned, collapsed in on itself. That's why it's preserved to this day. Again, some of the elaborate mosaics there, beautiful colored stone tiles in the floor, and multi-story building here with stairways, columns, things like that. This is all enclosed in a museum today. Here's an artist's conception of what it looked like. Again, multiple stories, stairs going down to the ritual bats, and all of this. Very, very elaborate mansion, looking out and facing the temple mount off about 200 yards away or so. So this, putting all the evidence together, would lead us to believe that this is the actual palace of the high priest, which was in the family of Caiaphas, talked about earlier, so it was very a loss worry there. This is probably his family mansion there, because not only was he high priest, but various successors, sons and sons-in-laws, also became high priests. This is apparently the family mansion there in Jerusalem and indicates how much money he made off the temple practices, which we've talked about that previously. Next item on our list is Jacob's Well. This is a black and white photograph from the 1800s, showing what it looked like. Again, there was a Byzantine-era church built over it, but you can see this little dirt path and going down to a little entrance right here where the actual well is, down at the bottom of that. Byzantine-era church destroyed, again, possibly in the Muslim invasion, possibly by earthquake, we don't know.

But this is what it looked like then. This is what it looks like now. A more modern church has been built over the site, and you can actually see the well. You can lower a bucket down in it.

You can drink the water out of it, which is a mistake I made in 1998 when I visited it.

It promptly got Pharaoh's Revenge. We're in a couple of good days of touring in Israel, so I don't recommend it if you go there, but you can go there and see it if you would like. So this is another site. Again, this is where Jesus had the conversation with the woman at the well there in Samaria. This has been known, actually, for the last 2,000 years, that this was the site of Joseph's well. It fits perfectly with the geography right outside what would have been the ancient city of Sikar or Shechem near Mount Eve, or Mount Gerizin, where the temple ruins we saw just a moment ago. Another item we'll talk about, I've talked about it previously, so we won't spend much time on it, is Peter's house. Here's the synagogue in Capernaum we saw earlier.

The ruins of Eddardon are an aerial photo. Just 100 yards away or so is, again, an octagonal structure where a Byzantine church was built over what they believed to be the house of Peter. Here's a close-up. As they excavated down below the Byzantine church ruins, they found a first-century fisherman's house there that had been modified substantially. We talked about that when we talked about the healing of Peter's mother-in-law, so I won't review that again.

Many of the sites where we find Byzantine church ruins, I don't put a whole lot of stock in, but this one I do believe, based on the archaeological evidence, is probably Peter's house and most archaeologists agree. The next item here is the praetorium. This is where Pontius Pilate questioned Jesus. You can go to this site in Jerusalem today. It's not marked, but more and more archaeologists are beginning to believe this is the site of it. Unfortunately, the city wall of Jerusalem cuts right across, right through the middle of it. You can see some stairs here, level platforms, foundations for a large structure here. We know from descriptions at the time that the praetorium was the palace where Pontius Pilate stayed when he visited Jerusalem.

It was formerly the palace of Herod the Great. Here's a model of it near the city wall at that time. Quite a elaborate structure. When the Roman governors came in, they essentially took over Herod's palace, appropriated it for themselves as their place of residence when they were visiting Jerusalem during the Holy Days, like I mentioned earlier. So apparently, this remains of the praetorium. Here, many more archaeologists are coming to accept that. Another item here is the pool of Siloam, where Christ told the blind man to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.

After Jesus put mud on his eyes, he told him to go wash in this pool. This pool was discovered in only 2005, less than a decade ago. It was discovered and announced that they were digging to repair a sewer line in Jerusalem. As they were digging out to repair this line, they found these steps leading down into the ground. They dug and dug and dug further and came up with this very elaborate first-century pool, classic architecture from the first century.

You can actually see water in it to this day. Half the pool has not been excavated because it belongs to another church. I don't recall whether it's Catholic, Greek Orthodox, whatever. It's only half the pool has been excavated, but they can tell it was quite an elaborate structure. Here's what it would have looked like. We can see that much of it in the previous illustration there. But again, this was discovered only in 2005. I happened to be there in Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles just a month after it was discovered.

So I was able to get in there and get some pictures and so on and ran a short article in the Good News at that time. So again, this is quite remarkable that this number of structures, buildings, and so on that are mentioned in the Gospel would be confirmed archaeologically.

There's just really pretty powerful evidence that, yes, these writers knew firsthand the buildings that they were seeing, the structures that they may have walked through, entered, where different events in the Gospels took place there. It's quite remarkable and powerful evidence of the accuracy of the Gospels. Let's look at one other one here. I'll go through this quite quickly. This is just a listing of cities and towns mentioned in the Gospels that have been confirmed by archaeology. Don't worry, I'm not going to show you photos of all of these because they all look like piles of dirt and rock, which is essentially what they are.

But they have been verified as these locations. Again, this is alphabetical order, but the city or town of Aenon, Bethany, Bethlehem, Bethphage, Bethsaida, Caesarea Philippi, Capernaum, Cana, Corazin, the Decapolis, which is actually a series of cities, Emmaus, Gadara, Ganesaret, Gerasa, Gethsemane, which is actually a specific location, Jericho, Jerusalem, Magdala, Nain, Nazareth, Nineveh, Sidon, Sychar, Tiberius, and Tyre.

What is staggering about this list is that approximately 80% of the cities and towns mentioned in the Gospels have been verified archaeologically identified. 80%! There's only a handful that haven't, that are mentioned in the Gospels and haven't been identified. And some of those are so old, like Sodom and Gomorrah, for instance, were destroyed 4,000 years ago. They haven't found the ruins of those. Well, actually they may have, but they haven't been conclusively identified yet.

There's another town mentioned in the Jordan River Valley, which is probably buried under about 10 feet of silt from the Jordan River there. So there are other locations that have been excavated but haven't been conclusively identified. So the actual figure may be more like 90-95%. It's just that some of those others, the seven that aren't mentioned here, may have been excavated, found, but not conclusively identified as the particular location mentioned in the Gospels.

Also keep in mind, again, that 2,000 years have passed since the events recorded there in the Gospels. A number of these cities were destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD when they came through and invaded, or in the second Jewish war in 132-135 AD. So to be able to identify this many locations after 2,000 years, again, is just staggering from an archaeological standpoint. That's just amazing to make that many conclusive, positive identifications from a list of people, a list of places, towns, cities mentioned in the Gospels.

That's just about unheard of. You just, again, getting back to where the Gospels were written by forgers, you just simply do not get an 80% accuracy rate if you're inventing, if you're fabricating the information like that. It just does not happen. Now I'd like to continue on with historical evidence verifying the archaeology. And this is another slightly different category. This is not an exhaustive list, but it's details in the Gospels that have been proven correct, again, through either archaeology or other resources, other histories, journals from travelers, descriptions of customs, that sort of thing. I just jotted down these over about five, ten minutes as they came to me.

But notice some of the things that the Gospel writers get right. They're not writing an exhaustive history. They're just describing events, and these are things that they mention in passing. For instance, geography. They describe, and I've mentioned this in our studies before, going up to Jerusalem. You know, if you're living in Rome and faking a Gospel there, or living in Asia Minor and faking a Gospel from there, how would you know that Jerusalem sits on top of a mountain ridge, and regardless of which direction you approach Jerusalem, you have to go up to Jerusalem?

And that's consistently how it's described in the Gospels. In the same way, how would you know that from Capernaum you have to go up to go just about anywhere, because Capernaum is on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, which is several hundred feet below sea level, in a big bowl there in the Jordan River Valley.

So if you leave Capernaum, you've got to go up anywhere you travel, unless you're going down the Jordan River Valley to Jericho, where you then go up to Jerusalem. Or people who go down to the Sea of Galilee again, because it's in a big bowl in the upper Jordan River Valley. If you don't live there and you're faking it, how would you know those details? You wouldn't. We find in the Gospels, I've covered this before, where the different peoples lived, the Samaritans, the Zealots, the priests, the Gentiles, and so on. We've talked about construction methods when we talked about the miracle of the man who was lowered down through the roof of the house there in Capernaum, and Jesus healed his paralyzed man. And the construction methods, how the roofs were made of wooden beams and then fibers laid across that, and then layers of mud to create kind of a concrete, flat roof there. So even the construction methods that are mentioned just in passing, there, how a house roof was made that you could actually dig down through it and lower a human being through it, we find mentioned in passing in the Gospels. Climate and weather. We haven't talked about this much, but things like the sudden storms that come up on the Sea of Galilee.

The Sea of Galilee, because it sits in this big bowl, wind can come off of the plateaus, several hundred feet above, and you can be in perfectly calm weather and water out there in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, and 15 minutes later you've got waves 30 feet high, because of this cold front that's come in and dumping cold air down in there. And you can be thinking you're going to drown, as we read, happens with the disciples in the Gospels there. So details like that. How would somebody living far away, riding much lower, later know about details in the weather and climate like that? Crops and vegetation. We talked about last time when the grass was green in Galilee. It's only green there for maybe two, three months out of a year around Passover time.

We find things mentioned in passing, like when various harvests took place.

Other details. Agricultural practices talked about in many of the parables.

Fishing practices. Even types of nets they're used. I think there are three different types of nets referred to in the Gospels. How would somebody riding from Rome or Asia Minor or Egypt, who's faking a Gospel, know what type of fishing nets they use in the Sea of Galilee?

Again, it's just absurd. We find different jobs, trades, and occupations mentioned.

Clothing details. The fact that people wore, when they gamble for Christ's clothing, he's wearing an inner garment and an outer robe there. Sandals. People either wore sandals or went barefoot. That's what I mean by clothing details. The different roads and travel routes that were commonly used in the first century then. Food, diet, and even dining customs, where people would sit around a table, as we see at the last Passover between Christ and his disciples. I may at some point give an entire sermon on the seating arrangement at the Last Supper because there are a lot of implications from that. You can tell we're about half the people sat around the table based on the interaction that is described in the Gospels. Fascinating study there.

Religious practices like the ritual washing of people before their meals, different customs of the Pharisees, crucifixion methods, how Christ was crucified, even burial practices like the ossuaries that I talked about earlier. You find just detail after detail that the Gospel writers get right. And we know it from other historical sources. We know it from archaeology, these things. How would somebody who is inventing, fabricating these stories know all the details? Well, the answer is easy. They looked it up on Google.

Well, not quite. No. They just wouldn't know these things. And yet, detail after detail after detail is absolutely right and precise.

In line with this, there's one other thing. I decided to break it out of this list, but that is the value of money. The value of money and how that relates to the time in which the Gospels are set.

Now, what do I mean by this? Well, we're all familiar with inflation.

A dollar that you have today doesn't buy what a dollar did 100 years ago or 50 years ago or 10 years ago or a year ago. The value of our dollar has been reduced by inflation.

They had the same problem in the Roman Empire in the first century because the Roman emperors, like our emperors today, like to spend money on government programs. So they inflated the currency or devalued the currency. There's actually a whole museum in Rome you can visit that's dedicated to Roman coins. I visited it twice to the great irritation of my wife who thought it was incredibly boring. They have a display there that documents how the emperors devalued their currency. They did it by taking silver coins like this and mixing in other metals like tin or lead or things like that so that it's not 100% silver. It's maybe 75% silver and 25% lead. This type of thing is how they debased their currency. They made the coins smaller. They shaved off the edges, things like that.

So this happens to be a denarius, which is a coin that's mentioned in the Gospels in Matthew 20 verses 1 and 2. And what I'm getting at is, well, let me read the verse here and then I'll get to the point here. Matthew 20 verses 1 and 2, it's one of Christ's parables, for the king of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.

Now when he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard to work all day. We'll go into the rest of the story. But this coin is a denarius. It was a day's wages, as we just read. He agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day. This is the example that Jesus uses here. Now, is there a way to know that the time setting of the Gospels is correct?

That indeed, Christ was teaching in the late 20s, early 30s, A.D.

Is there a way to know that that is correct by considering the time value of money? What a given coin was worth in terms of a person's labor at that point in time? For instance, if you were inventing the Gospels 100 years later and you were giving this parable, how would you know what coin value to assign for a day's labor? Why wouldn't you just say, make it very general? He agreed with them to work for the day, and he sent them into his vineyard. Why specify a denarius if you don't have to? Somebody forging this story 100 years later isn't going to know what the value of a denarius was. If any of you was writing a historical fiction book about things that happened around World War I in 1914, how would you know what a person made in a day's work? What the average daily wage of a person would be? Any of you know off the top of your head? I don't. I didn't look it up either. Probably $2 a day, something like that. And that's my point, because a forger is trying to fabricate a story. How does he know what a day's wage was 100 years earlier? Again, he's going to look it up on Google, right? Well, no, that doesn't work.

So is there a way to know what a day's wage was in the period of late 20s, early 30s, A.D.? Well, indeed, there is. There's a Roman historian by the name of Tacitus.

There's a brief bio of him. Publius, or Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, was a Roman senator and historian, was born around 8056 and wrote his works early in the second century, so the 100s, early 100s A.D. In the Annals of Tacitus, he describes a speech to Roman soldiers in A.D. 14, about 15 years before what we just read in Matthew, suggesting that they receive a fair wage of what amount? A denarius a day. So in A.D. 14, we have a Roman historian recording a speech in which it is suggested that these Roman soldiers deserve a fair wage of a denarius a day.

It's 15 years from when Christ gave his parable there, giving wages, a day's wages, as a denarius a day. So here we see a perfect correlation between the value of a day's wages, as recorded by a Roman historian, and Jesus Christ's example. Again, would a forger know that? Would he know a day's wage 100 years earlier was a denarius a day? No, he's not. So this is one of those things, just detailed, just mentioned in passing in the Gospels, that we gloss over and don't realize that it's actually a proof that, yes, this proves, incidentally, through history, through comparison, that, yes, the Gospels are set in the late 20s, or certainly in the first few decades of the first century there. Just one of those incidental things. While we're talking about dates for Christ's ministry, I would like to bring in another undesigned coincidence that happens here.

Do we have other evidence that Christ's ministry takes place in the late 20s, early 30s A.D.?

I mentioned then there were other undesigned coincidences I didn't have time to cover, and let's talk about one that talks about the dating of the beginning of Christ's ministry and that of John the Baptizer.

Two totally unrelated things by different Gospel authors, and let's read about them. Luke 3, verse 1, Luke is setting out the dating. Luke's a very scrupulous historian. He's setting out the dating for the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptizer. He says, "...in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness," or out in the desert. So we see a time marker here in Luke, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Well, what was the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar? Tiberius began to reign in the year AD 12, and it became sole emperor at the death of Augustus in AD 14.

Coins indicate that his reign was dated from the earlier year, AD 12, in other words. Now, what's this with co-reigning here? That was actually a fairly common practice. It happened during a period of the Old Testament with some of the kings of Israel and Judah. Basically, if you were the king or the emperor in this case, and your son was going to succeed you, and you knew you didn't have too many more years on this earth, you would establish what would be called a co-reigning or co-regnancy or co-rule, something like that, where you and your son would both be emperors, and you would make joint decisions.

And this was kind of a training program for the next emperor to come along, or the next king. And it was a sensible way to transfer power peaceably and train the next king or emperor in what it means to be an emperor or a king there, kind of on the job training for a couple of years until the king or the emperor died, and then his son would step into the job full time.

This is what is being described here between Augustus and Tiberius here. So Tiberius is co-reigning with his father there for two years and then becomes the sole emperor in AD 14. So calculating from AD 12, you add 15 years to that, and what do we come up with?

We come up with John the Baptist beginning his ministry probably in AD 27. We can't get more specific than that, but probably AD 27. So this is Luke's account. Luke, again, very scrupulous, meticulous historian here. Do we have an undesigned coincidence that confirms this date from one of the other gospel writers? They're not the meticulous historians that Luke is. They're not that concerned with chronology. However, in John, we do have something here. John 2 in verse 20, this is at the beginning of Christ's ministry. It's around the time of his first Passover in Jerusalem after he's begun his ministry. And the setting for this is he's cleansing the temple there, overturning the money changers tables, and making a whip, and driving out the animals that they're selling and this sort of thing.

And he irritates some of the Jews there at the temple, and some of them say it has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days? We talked about this in the undesigned coincidences last time in a different context. But here we see an interesting time marker for the beginning of Christ's ministry.

Now, we just read John the Baptizer's ministry, started A.D. 27, but this is first Passover of Christ's ministry. So when was the temple begun being constructed 46 years earlier? Herod the Great began construction of the temple in about 18 B.C. Calculating from this day, Jesus' first confrontation in the temple near the beginning of his public ministry probably took place in the spring of A.D.

28, after John began his ministry the preceding year. How much older is John than Jesus? John is six months older. We covered that many months ago in the gospel. So John probably begins his ministry about six months before Jesus.

Jesus begins his at Passover 28 A.D. So John probably began his ministry, well, in the previous year actually Christ began his about six months earlier than this, which would have been in the late fall of 28. So John probably began his in the spring of A.D. 27, as we saw earlier. So here, totally different context, totally different gospel writers, and yet independently they give these time markers that help us understand that John begins his ministry in A.D. 27, in all likelihood, and Jesus in A.D. 28, about six months after John began his. Actually, I say Christ began his ministry. This is our first time marker in Christ's ministry, but again, it's about six months after Jesus has begun his ministry there. So again, this is one of those undesigned coincidences where two gospel writers have these bits of the puzzle, and you put them together to help form a more complete picture there. Let's shift gears now as we are getting closer toward the end of this.

Let's leap forward in time in our chronology and our time setting here. We've been looking at the period of the gospels themselves from about 4 B.C. up to early 30s A.D. The gospels themselves are then written late 50s, early 60s A.D., about 30 years after Christ's ministry.

Why does it take them so long? Well, several factors. One is it's evident from the gospels and other writings that they all expected Christ to return immediately. You can see that at the end of the gospels, beginning of Acts. Lord, will you at this time return to restore the kingdom to Israel? So they expected Christ to return soon. They didn't need to write down accounts of his life.

They didn't think they would be around 20, 30, 40 years later than that.

Other things, later there are other religious movements like Gnosticism starting to come along, false gospels, as Paul refers to and his epistles to the Corinthians, distortions, false Christs, coming along, false messiahs. So the gospel writers then start writing their accounts to counter some of these things. And they're probably beginning to realize that they aren't necessarily going to be around that much longer themselves. They're getting on up middle aged men, you know, 50s, 60s or so themselves. So they start to write these things down.

This is a brief overview of why it probably took a couple of decades for them to do that.

So again, gospels are written late 50s, early 60s AD.

Now let me comment here that, again, this is in the context of historical evidence that we can compare the gospels to. Let me mention that there are very, very few Roman histories or records from the first century. There are virtually none. There are the two Jewish references, sources, Josephus and Philo. You've probably heard of those two. Quite complete histories that focus on the Jewish people. But Romans, there aren't that many, simply because they don't survive. What were they written on? They're mostly written in the first century on papyrus, which is a type of paper. What happens to paper after 2,000 years? It disintegrates. It's powder. It's gone. It's dust. There's nothing left of it. So we do not have original documents there. What we do have in the gospels and other New Testament writings are copies of copies of copies transmitted down to us today.

We wouldn't expect to find many contemporary historical records of any kind that are contemporary with Jesus Christ and his ministry, or even the Apostle Paul, for that matter, from the first century. They just don't exist. There are a few fairly lengthy Roman works from that period. One is a book on agriculture. Well, you're not going to expect to find anything about Christ and Christianity and the gospels, and a book on agriculture. There's a comedy written by a friend of Nero. You're not going to expect to find Christianity talked about in that. There are a few other fragments of other works. Now, we know there are many more books written because other historians, writing a century or two, later refer to books that were written in that they had in their position at that time, but we no longer have copies of those. They're just gone. They're lost forever. We just do not have them. That's why we know there are many, many documents. We get up to the second century, and we have lost about 85 percent of what we know existed historically in that time. 85 percent gone. We've got about 15 percent left. So not a whole lot to choose from there in which we might find evidence of Christianity. There's just very little left, and again, virtually nothing from the first century. However, there are three Roman writers who do give us some evidences of Christianity and the gospels. Those three are here Gaius Setonius Tranquilus, who was a Roman court official writing about AD 120 and the lives of the first Caesars. Another one, Pliny the Younger, ruler. He was a legate in north central Turkey, or Asia Minor, writing also about 120. And Tacitus, a Roman historian we referred to earlier, writing about AD 115. Let's notice a few things that they tell us here. Let's start with Setonius.

Around AD 120, he writes that the Emperor Claudius, now he's writing in 120, but he's describing events that took place about AD 50 in the period of the Apostle Paul. And he describes then that the Emperor Claudius banished the Jews from Rome, who were continually making disturbances. Christus, which the Latin form of Christ would be Christus with an eye, is apparently a misspelling. Christus being their leader. So Christus we see here, or Christ, is the leader of a group of Jews in Rome who were banished from Rome because of some sort of conflict that is not named. Now keep in mind that Jews and Christians were indistinguishable in the Roman Empire at that time. Why is that? Well, because they were doing the same things. They met on the Sabbath. They kept the Holy Days. They wouldn't eat pork. Their religious practices were the same. So to the Romans, they were identical. You couldn't tell them apart. So as we see here, Claudius, because of some sort of conflict, we're not told maybe it was their refusal to worship the emperors, to pledge allegiance to them. We just don't know. But anyway, they're banished. Jews and Christians alike, as we'll see.

Incidentally, the same event is described in the book of Acts 18 and verse 2. It's talking about how Paul meets Aquila and Priscilla. And he, Paul, found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome. Here's confirmation of what we just read from Suetonius and vice versa.

And he, Paul, came to them to Aquila and Priscilla. This is just mentioned in passing, but it refers to this edict of Claudius that we just referred to here. So we do see here from this that there are a lot of Christians in Rome, that they follow somebody called Christus or Christus or Christ, and that they are banished because of some conflict there with the Roman authorities. The next person we come to, again writing about the year 120 AD, Pliny the Younger, he is writing about contemporary events in his time, about 120 AD, not 50 AD, which we just talked about. Pliny writes to the emperor Trajan in Rome, requesting advice on how to deal with Christians who refuse to reverence Caesar's image. What this means is emperor worship again. They're refusing to bow down and worship the idol of emperor there. So how do I deal with this? What do you want me to do, since they're refusing to bow and worship the emperors? And Pliny in passing notes that these Christians met regularly together and sang hymns to Christ as if to a God, as he put it.

See a couple of details here that there are Christians. Here, this is in North-Central Asia Minor. Turkey. Paul made many travels into Asia Minor. Epistle of Galatians is written to people not far from there. Colossians, same thing. Paul travels a lot through Asia Minor. We don't have record of him visiting this particular area, however, so we don't know if it was somebody else who went and evangelized and raised up churches in that area. But it agrees with what we see from the Book of Acts. So again, we see a lot of Christians in this area. We see they are refusing to participate in emperor worship, and that these Christians meet regularly together, and that they sing hymns to Christ as if a God. So they consider Christ to be divine. In other words, this sounds familiar. Well, it sounds like you could take this quote and plug it into the Book of Acts and it would fit perfectly there. Okay, so that's two historians who are toning us in plenty of the younger, writing about 120 AD. Next we come to Tacitus. Again, you've heard to him earlier about the Valley of the Daenerys. Tacitus is a noted Roman senator and historian.

He was born around AD 56 and wrote his works early in the second century. 110, 115, 120, along in there. The principal reference to Christianity in his writings comes from his book, The Annals, there, Chapter 15, Section 44. Now, what I'm going to read you in Acts is a fairly lengthy quote about the fire in Rome under the reign of Emperor Nero. This took place in AD 64.

Incidentally, yesterday was the anniversary of that fire in Rome in AD 64. So let's notice Tacitus mentions Christians and Christianity in passing in this passage. This isn't the subject.

The subject is the fire of Rome and Nero's reaction to it. He talks about Christians and passing. But notice what he says. Consequently, to get rid of the report, what report? In context, this is the report or the rumor that Nero himself had set the fire in Rome. You've probably heard that rumor before because Nero, there were slums and Nero, being the boss, wanted to get rid of the slums for his own urban renewal projects. Kind of sounds familiar. So somehow this fire mysteriously burns down the slums in a large part of the city of Rome also. But to get rid of this report or the rumor that he started the fires, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace of Rome. Christus, Latin form of Christ, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators or governors, Pontius Pilatus. And a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment by killing all these Christians, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.

Tacitus clearly is not a fan of Christianity, so this is not complimentary. He calls them lots of nasty things. He calls their beliefs the first source of the evil. Let's continue on with the quote, An arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty. Guilty in this context isn't guilty to starting the fires, but guilty to being a Christian or to not worshiping the emperor.

Then, upon their information, a vast multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, setting in on fire, as of hatred against mankind. So let's go back and dissect this statement and see some of the things, facts, that are just mentioned in passing. First of all, he records there was a group known as Christians. This is AD 64 in Rome. Their name came from someone called Christus, Latin for Christ. This Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Pontius Pilate was governor from AD 26 to 36, so 31 AD, which is when we believe Christ was crucified right in the middle of Pontius Pilate's governorship there. The Romans thought the Christians believed a, quote, most mischievous superstition. Another point, the Christians were much hated and were alleged to perform abominations. Now this is interesting because if you know anything about Roman religion, for them, pretty much anything went religious-wise.

You could do pretty much anything, worship any god, any goddess, in any way you wanted, and it was okay with the Romans. So for something to be a most mischievous superstition or an abomination as part of your beliefs and worship has to be pretty far out there as far as the Romans are concerned from their perspective. We see also from this that their movement originated in Judea but spread to Rome exactly as we see in Acts. By 64 AD there was a vast multitude of these Christians in Rome.

So let's consider this from a historical perspective. Again, from the perspective, if you believe the Gospels are fakes, fabrications that are written much later from other places in the Roman Empire or from Egypt or wherever, how do you square this?

If the Gospels aren't written until later on in the first part of the second century, how do you square this with Tacitus recording that there's a vast multitude of Christians in Rome in 64 AD when the city's on fire? How do you reconcile that? You can't. It just makes no sense.

Let's dissect these beliefs. Look at them, these statements, a little bit closer here.

So we have these Christians who came the name after Christus, or Christ, who was executed on their Pontius Pilate, disagree with the Gospels. Absolutely. A group known as Christians agrees 100% with the Gospels and Acts. They got their name from somebody called Christus, who said agree with the Gospels and Acts. Absolutely. Christ is executed under Pontius Pilate under the reign of Tiberius. Agree with the Gospels. Absolutely. The Romans thought the Christians believed a most mischievous superstition. Now, he doesn't define what this is. But again, Roman religion, you could worship anybody, anything. Your dog, your horse. Nero made his horse one of the high officials in his government. This is how nuts the Roman emperors were. But for it to be far out, or considered a mischievous superstition by the Romans, it's got to be pretty bizarre from their perspective. Let's just think about it. What would be a bizarre superstition from a Roman standpoint?

Could it be that they worshipped a man who was crucified and rose from the dead?

And that they believed that they, too, would rise from the dead?

Now, the Romans didn't believe in a resurrection from the dead. The Romans believed in variations of the immortal soul, the Elysium Fields, but they practiced cremation because they didn't believe there would be a literal resurrection. They cremated people. You'd find very few skeletons from Roman times because they cremated people. You do find a lot of ash and urns and things like that. Could that be the mischievous superstition? I think he'd make a pretty good argument by process of elimination. Maybe that was it. The Christians were much hated, were alleged, to perform abominations. Now, again, the Romans had strange religious practices.

Anything went. What would it take for the Romans to label a practice an abomination?

Again, a little thought exercise. Could it be something like the Christians believed in drinking the blood of their leader and eating his flesh?

As a misunderstanding of the Passover symbols.

Or cannibalism? Would the Romans consider cannibalism an abomination? Yes, they would.

I mean, pretty much anything went in the Roman Empire, but cannibalism, that's a no-no.

You don't do that. Is that the kind of abomination? Possibly. Could it be because perhaps the Christians believed that their leader, who had been crucified and raised from the dead and went away into the sky, is going to return and is going to overthrow the Roman Empire and establish a kingdom that is going to be built around all of the laws of these hated Jews? Would that be an abomination thought from the perspective of the Romans? You bet it would. Absolutely. Because they hated the Jews and their practices and so on. And it was incomprehensible to them that Rome would ever fall. Could that be the abomination? Again, we don't know. But again, to have the Romans consider something an abomination has got to be pretty far out. Again, their movement originated in Judea and spread to Rome exactly as we read in the book of Acts, the book of Romans, and there's a vast multitude of them in Rome by AD 64. Again, agrees perfectly with what we see in the book of Acts and Romans. Oh, what happened here? Oh, did it? Okay. All right. Yeah, I guess I haven't advanced it quickly enough here.

Must have went into sleep mode or something.

Okay. Well, let's see. I'll go on discussing our next author, then, Josephus. Again, we've covered three different Roman historians, Saturnius, Plinian, Tacitus here. Now let's move on to another.

And what I want to point out, too, is these are non-Christian writers, non-Christians. They detest Christianity. They want instructions from the emperor about how to deal with these rebellious Christians who believe these weird abominable thoughts and superstitions here. So let's move on to another one, then. There is not really a contemporary of these events because Josephus was born in AD 57, I believe it is. Let me catch up on my notes here. AD 37, excuse me. So, born a few years after Christ's crucifixion. Josephus was a member of a priestly family in Rome. He was a leader in the Jewish Revolt in the Jewish War of 67 to 70 AD. And, okay, here we go. We're back up and running. And he writes about first century events. He became a notable historian. He turned and joined the Romans and the Jewish Revolt when he saw that the Jews had no hope of prevailing against the Romans. He surrendered to the Romans, became an advocate to the Jews to surrender, and consequently was viewed as a traitor by many of the Jews to this day. But he went to Rome and then wrote his histories, the antiquities of the Jews in which he mentions a number of figures in the Bible, including from the New Testament. Specifically, he mentions Jesus, he mentions John the Baptizer, and he mentions James the brother of Jesus. Here, I already covered this.

He also talks about many other figures, the high priests, members of Herod's family, and so on, some of those sources we mentioned earlier, taken from Josephus. Let's note what he says about John, John the Baptizer, in Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 5, Section 2. Herod, who feared, lest the great influence John had over the people, might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion. So John the Baptizer is getting large crowds following him, which we see from the Gospels. And Herod, this is talking about Herod Antipas, starts getting worried because of these large crowds following John. And John is telling people to repent, to surrender to God, this sort of thing. He thought it best by putting him to death to prevent any mischief he might cause.

Accordingly, John was sent a prisoner out of Herod's suspicious temper to Machiras, and was there put to death. We know the story from the Gospels. He was Salome's dance and so on, and she asked for John the Baptizer's head on a platter. So we see confirmation of John's execution at the hands of Herod Antipas here, agreement with the Gospels in several forms here. So again, John is obviously a real historical figure because Josephus the historian writes about him and his popularity among the people and his execution at the hands of Herod Antipas.

Next, let's read what he says about James, the half-brother of Jesus. This is from Antiquities book 20, chapter 9, section 1. Festus, Roman governor mentioned in Acts, was now dead, and albinus, his successor, was but upon the road. So he, this is referring to Ananias, the high priest. This is a successor of Caiaphas, who had Jesus executed. Assemble the Sanhedrin of the judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others are some of his companions. And when he had formed an accusation against him as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned to death. And actually, more details, he was thrown off the temple. That didn't kill him, so he was stoned and actually beaten to death by a club. They are James, the half-brother of Jesus. So again, we find some confirmations here that James was the brother of Jesus, as we see in the Gospels and in the Epistle of James as well.

So again, confirmation as well as the hostility of the high priest and his compadres, companions, against Christianity. So now we come to his mention of Jesus. And let's take a look at this, and who could use book 18, chapter 3, section 3.

So a very lengthy quote here about Jesus. But does anything jump out at you, considering that Josephus is Jewish and not a Christian? Look at the underlined parts here.

Would a Jew who doesn't believe Christ is Messiah write that if it be lawful to call him a man, that he was a doer of wonderful works or miracles, would he write that he was Christ or Messiah?

Would he write that he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the prophets had foretold these and many other wonderful things concerning him? Would somebody who's a Jew and not a believer write things like that? Well, obviously not. So what's going on here? Josephus does appear quoted this way in the earliest copies of Josephus we have dating to early 300s AD. It's in all the copies. We don't have a copy where it doesn't show up like this. So what's going on? This is a problem for scholars because the early copyists, again, we don't have originals of documents from that time. We have copies of copies of copies. Who did the copying? In most cases it was Christian scribes, either true Christian or other varieties of Christians. They're copying these documents.

And some of you may be familiar with 1 John 5, 7, and 8, a famous insertion or infamous insertion about the Trinity. They're in John's Gospel. About there are three who agree and so on.

It is a later addition to the Gospel of John from the 1500s. All of our copies of John before 1500s do not have that verse in there for John 5, 7, and 8. After 1500s and in the King James version, it does show up. So what happened is some scribe inserted his own opinion in there and had got copied and copied and copied and passed down to our day. Apparently the same thing is happening here to this early copy of Josephus, where some scribe, Christian scribe, inserted, decided to expand on what Josephus says and put down what Josephus should have said about Christ and put in here that he was more than a man. He was a doer of miracles. He was the Christ. He appeared to them, as fact, three days after his execution and so on.

What can we look at to shed light on this? Well, in 1971 there was an Arabic language version of Josephus, or part of Josephus, this part of Josephus that was published.

Again, 1971, so this is fairly recent. It was from an Arabic language document. The Arabs copied and translated documents into Arabic, from Greek and Latin and Hebrew and other things translated them into Arabic, as the Christian scribes were copying things as well. So how different this version is of this portion of Josephus. At this time, notice what it leaves out.

At this time, there was a wise man who was called Jesus, and his conduct was good. He was known to be virtuous, and many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. It is what we read here agree with the Gospels. 100%.

He was a wise man called Jesus. His conduct was good. He agrees 100% with the Gospels.

Known to be virtuous. 100% agreement. Many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. 100% agreement with the Gospels. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die.

100% agreement with the Gospels. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon their loyalty to him. 100% agreement with the Gospels. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive. 100% agreement with the Gospels. Accordingly, they believed that he was the Messiah. 100% agreement with the Gospels concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders. In other words, his works, his miracles were foretold ahead of time. 100% agreement with the Gospels. So apparently what we have is a document preserved in the Arabic language that is closer to the original written by Josephus that leaves out the extrapolations added by a later Christian scribe. And this is probably very close to what Josephus originally wrote. It doesn't state as fact that Christ was the Messiah, but that's what his believers believed. It doesn't state as fact that he rose from the dead the third day, but that this is what his followers believed. And I think this is very accurate. But again, hear from Josephus who is not a Christian, he's a Jew, isn't terribly sympathetic to Christianity, but we see here everything he writes is in 100% agreement with what we read about in the Gospels. So again, to wrap this up, getting back to the questions we looked at earlier, who were the Gospel writers?

What was their motivation? Broken down logically, we have these three possibilities. They were deceivers, or they were dupes, or they were direct witnesses there. Either what they said and wrote was true, or it was false. If it was true, then we have the word of direct witnesses. If it was false, either they knew that it was false and they were deceivers, or they did not know that it was true, and they were thus dupes. So when we look at the historical credibility of the Gospels from these criteria, what do we see? We see overall a great consistency among the books. Again, you can read your harmony and see that theme brought out throughout. We see undesigned coincidences, as explained in the sermon that I gave last time. And we see that they give the same events, describe the same things, same miracles, same teachings, but they're seen through four different sets of eyes, four independent eyewitnesses, or people who interviewed the eyewitnesses and wrote down those events for us. And what about the last point here, which we've talked about today?

Do the Gospel accounts agree with other verifiable history, with history that was written the closest documents we have to that period? Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, the other writers there who aren't Christian, who aren't trying to defend Christianity, who are opponents of Christianity? Does it agree? Does it agree with history? Does it agree with the archaeological evidence? Absolutely. They record for us an amazing story of our Savior, of our Messiah, of our Teacher, our Lord, our Master, and our coming King of Kings, Jesus Christ.

And since we are at the end of time here, we will dispense with a discussion period. But if any of you have any questions or thoughts, come up and feel free to talk with me afterwards.