(14) Archaeology & the New Testament

One of the points we made last week is that rather than say that archaeology proves the Bible, because that's kind of overstatement, a better way to say it is that archaeology confirms the Bible, and that it provides great context for us. We're going to be looking at the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown next week, and then follow that with a look at Luke and Acts, the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts particularly. And just answer the question, how reliable and historian was Dr. Luke? One of the things we mentioned last week, we said that the New Testament, or that last week we said the Old Testament, and we'll make the same statement for the New, has its minimalists and maximalists. Everybody remember what was a maximalist? Right, and as the maximalist says, his starting assumption is the Bible is true unless proven false.

It's the assumption into which we bring someone into court. They are considered innocent until proven guilty. That's the starting assumption. So the guilt has to be proven rather than the innocence has to be proven. The minimalist starts off with the beginning assumption that the Bible is false unless you can very clearly, and boy they mean clearly with a capital C, prove that it's true. So it is a matter of assumptions and starting points. So the minimalists, he's not going to believe it unless you can rub his nose in it.

The maximalist says that the authors of scripture We're reasonable people writing honestly and starts off from that standpoint and says, unless you can bring some clear evidence of the otherwise, this is how we're going to look at. Okay. So anyway, important terms, they're going to be more common.

Basically these terms only came up in the last, I would say a few decades. So, because, because prior to that, a lot of the biblical archeologists had the maximalist assumption. The minimalists were rare and didn't even have a name. So anyway, this has only come up in the last two or three decades.

Archaeology of the New Testament provides a huge and growing amount of historical context. In other words, when you read something in the New Testament, there is a lot of understanding and an increasing amount of understanding of what world that was set in. What was it like? what were people's speech patterns, what words did they use, what assumptions did they make when they viewed things, all that is more and more well known. There are ongoing archaeological excavations and as we'll see here in the series of slides we have there this morning, a number of ongoing discoveries, some of them accidental.

One of the things that we mentioned last week, just in putting in a sewer pipe in June of 2004, that's when they discovered the steps that go down to the Pool of Siloam. Other discoveries like that have been made. We'll point them out. Dead sea scrolls. I'm going to say something a little unusual.

It is both New and Old Testament archaeology. Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, the first one was made, and this is another accidental discovery, 1947, discovered by a sheep herder who was trying to find and guide his sheep. So he happened upon, there are a number of caves in the cliffs up around the Dead Sea, and a number of these caves have been discovered to have scrolls and other objects hidden in them.

So, why would we say it's both Old and New Testament? Does that make any sense? Okay, alright. Okay, there are things relevant to both the Old and New Testament, including a number of Old Testament books, okay? Old Testament ended about 400 BC. New Testament, if you start somewhere around zero, it just says round numbers. Then you've got a 400 year gap, right? Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were from times in the gap.

Let's take a look at that. There have been finds of almost all the Old Testament books. Esther is the one exception. And in some cases, a great number of them. I mean like a couple dozen copies in varying degrees of preservation. And some other books, books that are not in the Old Testament or the New, no actual New Testament books included in them. Why would that be? Why no New Testament books? Pardon? It hadn't been written for one.

There actually at the end is a little bit of overlap in the time frame. But the people who hid these things, generally believed to be the Essenes, they're a Jewish group, not a Christian group. So they would definitely want to keep the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament. The Jews now call it the Tanakh. But they would have no interest in keeping New Testament documents, even if they're aware of it. Yeah, question.

What was the Gospel of Thomas considered? The Gospel of Thomas was a document that was found in Egypt and it appears to have its source about a hundred years after the New Testament era. So later, it has 114 verses and a Gnostic document and very biased in several different respects, including in order for a person to be saved they have to be a male. By the way, this is the only strong evidence I see of Essene teaching showing up in the New Testament. This is Matthew 5, 43 and 44.

You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. That was an Essene teaching. The Pharisees didn't teach that. The Sadducees didn't teach it. But it was taught by the Essenes. The Essenes actually said, you must hate your enemy. So they taught hate.

Talking about hate crime, these guys were into it. But I say to you, this is the same Greek word as we pointed out in Ephesians 5.32, where Paul is talking, so he's making an authoritative statement. Make sure you get connected and collected here.

Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls from about 150 BC to 70 AD. I think you've got basic information here like this on your handout. So it goes into the New Testament era. And then a few date from the 250 to 150 BC. Most of those in that time frame are biblical books. The ones in the later time frame, this one, 150 to 70 include biblical books and others. So generalization there.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, a number of them, we've got as many as two dozen manuscripts. Isaiah is one of the more numerous, almost two dozen copies, 22 copies. Some of them are well preserved like this one. Others of them are mere fragments. Some cases, hundreds of fragments. So it takes a lot to put them back together.

Now, isn't that a nice picture? And you might be asking, and I hope you are, why are we looking at this? The reason we're looking at it is that that doesn't look all that attractive except that it's a dried-up crocodile mummy. Here's the interesting thing.

We think of the Egyptians and we think of pyramids and we think of mummies and all kinds of things. Well, by the time around the New Testament and by the time the Romans had taken over, the pyramid thing was long gone. Matter of fact, the pyramids had all been built by the time the Jews came onto the scene. So the pyramids are quite old. But when you look at this here, What the Egyptians had kind of boiled it down to is they still mummified various animals, including crocodiles. They'd looked at that as the embodiment of a certain Egyptian god. And so crocodile mummy graveyards were found all over Egypt.

They stuffed, and the numbers are tens of thousands of documents. UC Berkeley has one of the larger collections of these, over 20,000. Some of the other universities spread around the country will have a thousand or more of these documents. And basically all they did is they took documents from the era and just stuffed them into the mummies because it was just, you know, give me some paper. And so they packed these crocodiles full of these documents from the time. They provided a wealth of insight into the lives of people because they just grabbed various kinds of documents. Anything they could get to stuff these mummies.

To give you some kind of context, here's Alexandria, the second largest city in the Roman Empire. It was right along the water there, had quite a history from the time of Alexander the Great into the New Testament era. So that's kind of at the north end. Those red dots that you see are the places where they found the crocodile graveyards. This is the area roughly where the Jews were camped out when they were enslaved. And this is the place, Heliopolis, had been named city of On. Joseph, the son of Jacob, had married Asenath, daughter of Potipharah, who was an Egyptian priest of On. So there's some connection there. Now, this is the area where most of the crocodile graveyards have been found. It's called the Fayum district.

And so anyway, those people grabbed papers of the era of any kind they get their hands on and stuffed them in the mummies. So now they have these crocodile mummies and the crocodile skins and the dry sand environment tended to preserve all the papers very well. So very interesting. So these mummies were found. The mummies were stuffed with Roman census declaration documents.

Remember in Luke, what was the thing that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem? Census. The Romans said, you will go to the place of your fathers. Well, they've got all kinds of census declaration documents. Because when you were there, you would say, have written down, I declare, and Joseph would have said, I declare my wife, Mary, and myself, Joseph. And then lay out a few things that would be a basis upon which, taken together, the Romans would tax the Jews and other people.

All kinds of these census declaration documents are included in the mummies. Letters both from and about Prodigal Sons. Real interesting. Having this background, as you read through the story of the Prodigal Son, when people began hearing Jesus tell the parable of the Prodigal Son, From the start of it, they would have said, yeah, I've heard that before. Yeah, I've heard that before.

What would have been shocking, absolutely startling, is the father's response. The usual response from all the letters that we get is the sons often, when they would come back, would be stoned to death or killed in some way. And if they were lucky, they came back as a slave. So what was, in the Jesus parable, what was the son hoping to do? come back as a slave. That's what he was rehearsing in his mind when instead of this aggressively negative greeting, the father is looking for him and running out to him. The reception that Jesus described was jaw-dropping to the people. It was like, you're kidding.

So that's one of the things that it describes. Birth certificates, like they probably had to file with Jesus' birth. personal letters of all kinds. We even have letters of students that have been sent off to school writing home for money. All kinds of things. Anyway, classical stuff. Some of it's really funny, some of it's really sad.

Here's a Roman census declaration, similar to what you see in Luke. Here is an agreement for the lease of vineyard, and it's very similar to this renting out of a vineyard that's described in Luke chapter 20 verse 9. So those kinds of things. Here's a tax document.

Remember, what did Matthew or otherwise known as Levi do for a living before the Lord called him? Pardon? Tax collector. And so what they would do is, and of course people were just delighted to get tax receipts, right? Matthew would say, okay, you paid your taxes, here's your tax receipt. And I'm sure they'd go, thanks, you know. But Matthew probably filled out a whole bunch of them. So what do you find among the documents that are stuffed into these crocodile mummies? Lots of tax receipts. A great many of them.

And you would be amazed at the things they taxed. They'd come into your garden and tax your cucumbers. People would have a fence in their yard and they'd come and tax the linearity of the fence. I mean, they'd go and measure the fence and how high it was and, we got a tax for that. It was astounding.

Now, archaeology is often presented as exciting and adventuresome and all that, and really you could almost like this Indiana Jones thing, that's kind of like Superman 1, 2, and 3, right? If you see the movies. And so lots of things, the movie The Mummy recently, archaeological things are oftentimes romanticized in phenomenal ways. The reality is, you look at these people and what are they doing?

Pardon? Yeah, this is digging. When they use a pick, one of the instructions that the archaeologists give the volunteers and others that are assisting, because it takes lots of hours, they don't go out there with a backhoe. They don't even use a hand pick aggressively. You're supposed to lift it and let it drop.

Why? Why would that be? Yeah, if you've actually got something, like a piece of pottery, you don't want to sit there and splatter it into tiny pieces. So you want to be careful how it's done. What this means is, you'll be looking at different areas. Notice they've got things with a string, stringed off. You climb in and out. A lot of hand work. No backhoes, okay? No machines. Yes?

A lot of sifting going on there too? Yes, and the sifting is interesting, is that even after they've gone through and dug carefully by hand, they will often sift the material additionally in order to get some of the smaller objects that are there that may well be valuable.

One of them we pointed out last week was one that was discovered just in recent weeks, recent months, I should say, in Jerusalem. And it was a fellow who was named twice in the book of Jeremiah. It was a clay seal impression. It was a little less than half an inch across.

You might easily have missed that, but that's the sort of thing that sifting catches. So yes, you're correct. They'll often sift and sometimes the amount that they sift is phenomenal. One place that we mentioned last week, Pool of Gibeon, 23,000 hours went into excavating and part of it is because you can't just go in there with backhoes and excavating machinery. You pick it all up by hand and pour over every detail. Yeah, good point.

Yes. Anybody been on an archaeological excavation? Yeah, I actually have not been either, but I have been on paleontology digs a number of times. And also been involved with engineering investigations kind of along the lines of CSI only for engineering.

And yes, you must be very careful in what you do. You sit there, a lot of times the things that you find may be very fragile. And so while they're still in place often, they're trying to figure out how do we keep this held together. Yeah, going at it aggressively is not a good idea.

Once you find something with a shovel or a pick or a trowel or something of that sort, yes, then you're down to brushes. Very gentle. So lots of hand work. Here's another aspect of it. You're leaning over and down in the dirt all the time, all day long, because that's what you're working with is dirt. What is in the dirt? And you're down there, you're working carefully, working by hand, taking out small amounts at a time. Let me give you some for instances.

The manger in which the infant Jesus laid was likely not wooden, like most of our manger scenes are typically shown. Why not wood? What's the problem with wood? Pardon? Deterioration. Yes, exactly. Wood deteriorates fairly quickly. It doesn't last. It's also very expensive. There are parts of Israel where things are wooded. The hills around Nazareth, for example, are well wooded. Some areas are not. You've got a lot of open fields for quite some distance, and having something that is expensive doesn't last very long. It's just not a good approach.

So a stone manger, whether a separate one like this or whether one built into a hillside or inside of a cave, would be far more likely. So in spite of our nativity scenes, this is the more likely scenario, okay? The limestone that's around, underlies much of Israel on the west side of the Jordan, is of a kind that it is relatively, and I speak relatively, soft, and exposure to the air tends to harden it over time. So what they would do is dig into things, shape them, and even carve in tombs and things of that sort, because over time, things would tend to harden with exposure to the air. and become a whole lot tougher to dig.

So cut it while it's fresh. The donkey on which Mary is depicted is riding to Bethlehem, probably more than they could afford. Nazareth, from what we can piece together from the archaeological information, probably less than 100 people in Nazareth. We're talking a small town, okay? And so here's Joseph, a carpenter, which is not a very high-income trade, Joseph a carpenter in a town less than a hundred people, probably more than he could afford. I don't know that for certain, the Bible doesn't say she didn't ride a donkey.

So it's just putting together the likelihoods from the information we have. Now Christ's earthly ministry of course a lot of it took place around the area of Galilee. I'm going to try to show you something that we had technical snafu's prevent us from doing earlier things out of the Isaiah message from a few weeks back.

This is looking at Isaiah 9, 1 through 3, and it says there, in the land of Zebulun, the land of Naphtali, treated with contempt then, but later on he shall make it glorious by the way of the sea on the other side of the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. And so what we want to take a look at Here's Nathalie and Zebulun. And these places here are what it's referring to.

Here's Nazareth. So here's the place where Jesus is from, not where he's born, but where he's from in terms of growing up until he went off into ministry. Here's Cana. What happened at Cana? wedding at Cana. This is again one of the places mentioned.

Capernaum. What happened at Capernaum? Peter's mother-in-law was there and quite ill. Interesting thing too, both Nazareth and Capernaum, we've got synagogue We showed several weeks ago, the synagogue ruins at Nazareth. Here's Peter's house in Capernaum. And based on the archeological excavations, which have been done fairly recently, it seems fairly well-connected that that was in fact, at least for a time, Peter's house.

And you can go there now. In this case, they got some shade over it, but after the excavation, you can see some of the parts of it that remain. shot. And so that's there. Here is kind of the big picture of that end of the Sea of Galilee. And by the way, Bethsaida, until they recently excavated, they weren't quite sure where it was. So in going through and doing the excavation, they're able to confirm its location.

Here's Capernaum, where Peter's house was located. Here's where the Mount of Beatitudes was. This is the place where it's believed that the Sermon on the Mount was given. Now, here, looking at these areas, Matthew 4, 12-16 confirms that this understanding, that is, that Jesus coming into these areas is, in fact, fulfillment of those of that prophecy there in Isaiah 9.

Here's the synagogue at Capernaum. However, what you see there is not where Jesus spoke. So why am I showing it to you? Well, that's a good guess. That's a good guess. Congratulations. That's good. That's good. It's not quite what I had in mind, but it's still good. What you see here, let me switch over to the next one.

This is this area in the light colored stone was built in the second century in investigating how things were done. What happened is that there was a synagogue there in the first century and it was made with the black foundation stone that you see in the bottom. And so what they did is when they rebuilt it in the second century, the century after they had the one where the Jesus spoke in, they took off the top part and replaced it, kind of did an upgrade with a lighter colored stone. So the bottom part there is the first century synagogue that Jesus spoke in, the foundation of it. And then the upper lighter colored part is the part that was built the next century. So at any rate, this passage here is definitely a fulfillment.

The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. Okay, here's a boat from the Sea of Galilee. Back not quite 20 years ago, they went through a drought and the water level dropped and they said, hey, what's this? So here they found a A boat is in the water and it had sunk and now with the drought, the water level having dropped, they revealed it.

And so you can see it's held together by a whole bunch of little frames and pins. But sometimes it's called the Jesus boat, not that we specifically know that Jesus was in it. But dating it, it appears to be from the first century in the Sea of Galilee of a boat that would have been the kind that the disciples would have used. So is it specifically one that Jesus wrote in? Well, we don't know. But it is one that would be typical and even from the same era of the time that Jesus was there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's one thing that's true in archaeology, in paleontology. I speak from personal experience.

Things are oftentimes very fragile. They will use different kinds of chemical substances, sometimes fairly simple. In paleontology, we use lacquer. We would use the brushes to brush the particles away and then come in with lacquer. The idea is the lacquer would soak into the material and help glue it together and actually put the lacquer on, let it sit for hours so that it would harden up. and sometimes several applications, whatever was necessary to hold the material together.

Sometimes what you have is very fragile. So you're correct. This kind of thing, it's not just a matter of having a frame and a bunch of pins to hold it together. Frequently, sometimes epoxies are used depending on what the character is, but you're right. Preservation can take a lot of work and sometimes some ongoing work to keep things in good shape.

Christ's earthly ministry in the southern part of this kind of range of movement centered around Jerusalem. We've made the point previously that if somebody during the New Testament times wanted to verify or even contest the evidence that the apostles appealed to, that if they were at the temple, they could walk a very short distance, relatively speaking, to these various places around the temple area and see them. Now, what's happened since then? What's happened since the time that Jesus was there and the apostles were there in Jerusalem?

Yes, you're right, there's roadways, there's buildings that weren't there. Okay, that's one thing. What else? Yeah, you had the Crusades took place. There have been a lot of back and forth interactions between European populations and Muslim populations since the Romans first drove the Jews out at the end of the first century. So lots of back and forth destruction of evidence.

So some of the things we might like to be able to look at are not there. We have the testimony with, I think, multiple lines of evidence of people who were there able to examine the evidence. One that we pointed out was the temple was there. If you wanted to verify Jesus' genealogy, go look at the temple records. That's where they keep them. Are they there now? No. One of the things that we can do is we can look at some of the things that are remaining now. And you can look at them and you can take a look at the locations that either very likely were or possibly were the places that the writers of the New Testament were talking about. Let's take one instance.

Here is the area of the Mount of Olives. This is to the east of the Temple Mount, right across from the Temple. Here in the Mount of Olives, right in here, you see that sort of an arc that goes there? That's the roadway, walkway, that comes over the mountain. It would have been the path along which Jesus would have come in order to come into the temple, especially coming from Bethany, just over the mountain there. This is a shot from the path looking towards Jerusalem, to give you an idea. That's what the path looks like a little more close up.

Here's the Garden of Gethsemane. We can still go there. Some of the trees, these are younger, some of the trees there are about 2,000 years old. So that would have made them very young, about the time when the events described in the New Testament took place. So if trees could talk, Okay, actually they do. That's the paper you've got. All right.

Then we also have over in this area here, this is known as the Essene quarter of Jerusalem. The Essenes would not have anything to do with the temple because they figured the way that the Sadducees and the Pharisees were handling things was just profane. So they would tend to shy away from it. Nonetheless, they had this area in Jerusalem. It's known as the Essene quarter over in the Southwest part of Jerusalem.

And in there, this is an area called the Cenacle. The floor area, it looks, kind of putting the information together, it looks to be the floor of the building, which is where the Last Supper was held. And quite likely also acts, I think about 1212 is where it describes this as John Mark's mother's house, a place that's actually reference several times, but that's the one place X 1212 where it's mentioned most specifically. The columns and building above it was modified or added on by the Franciscans in the Middle Ages, late Middle Ages. So that's not quite the same structure, but the floor structure appears to be original.

Here's another, which is the temple area. This is what's known as the Golden Gate. And it is the gate with some modification through which Jesus would have gone. And the Muslims in the 1400s hearing that this is where the Jews Messiah is supposed to come, ricked it up, and then put a bunch of Muslim graves around the bottom part of it because they figured that stopped the Messiah from coming. So anyway, that's the gate.

This is a picture, and this is black and white, I've got some others in color. This is the picture that shows the rubble from where the Romans shoved the temple structure off the edge of the temple mount. And so, remember, Jesus told them what was going to happen. Not one stone left upon another. And what we find is the Temple Mount was just wiped clean. The Romans just shoved all the blocks off the edge. And so this would be another shot. Some of those blocks are pretty large. So what you look at, they give you some sense of scale. Bless you. Here is another shot looking down there with some of the stones cleaned up. Look at some of it.

It just really caused a lot of settlement. and destruction of the adjacent foundation area there. And within that, they found the warning written in Greek to Gentiles, don't pass beyond this, and I'm paraphrasing, don't pass beyond this or you have yourself to blame if death ensues. But this was the warning that, remember when Paul was reputed to have brought a Gentile into there, It was violating these signs, is what everybody got upset about.

Yes? Oh, yeah, it's interesting. Dr. Randall Price, and I'll mention his name earlier if we get time for it. Dr. Randall Price has written a real interesting account of, here's kind of the story with all the reputed happenings with the Ark of the Covenant. And yeah, it's amazing.

There are a number of different accounts as to, you know, where did it go? And some people say they know. We'll see. I'm sure the Lord knows. Yeah, there's several different accounts, several different parties claim to have some knowledge of it. So I don't know how all of a sudden the thing starts replicating. Oh, yeah. Now that I'm not sure.

They found this one and another one and then another stone they found writing in Hebrew, the trumpeter's place. But anyway, those are the stones. So what Jesus told them, yep, it actually happened. The stones have been found. They've been accounted for.

Now, this is a model of the temple courtyard. The inner temple, the edge of the inner temple area, the naos, is shown in the lower left. And then the court of the Gentiles is the area of the outside. There's a colonnade that's around the perimeter, which is where the Jews would frequently gather. And this is where the apostles would would gather and tell people about Jesus.

And then you see the Fortress Antonia is the fortress there off to the side. This is a floor, the floor of the Fortress Antonia sometimes called the pavement. You can still see some markings in it that show the Romans games. They had various games that they played.

And then over in this area here, is areas where the crucifixion and burial of Christ would have taken place. This is one of, I would say, this clarification, there are for both the burial place of Christ and for the crucifixion, two different, for each of them, two different sites that are debated.

And I won't try to pick sides. This one here is called Gordon's Calvary. And notice there's sort of a skull-like appearance, because Golgotha means what? skull, right? So this by its appearance would seem to fit the description, but there's other things to consider. The fact that we're told in the Gospels that the burial place was near is the reason for my drawing the circle and saying both the burial and the crucifixion were within those areas.

But one of the difficulties, and of course, you know, what I think doesn't matter a whole lot to some of them, but A lot of the places that were of historical significance ended up getting a church built over them. I'd really wish they'd leave them alone. Because one of the things that it does is it really disturbs the site and makes it a whole lot more difficult to know what actually happened. They built a church on everything you could imagine. in some places that you can hardly imagine.

Okay. This is the inside of, and this is the garden tomb, which is one of the two places. Some would say this is too far to the north. That would be one critique of this place, but that's the garden tomb. This is the inside of that garden tomb site. Here is a stone to the outside, you know, so some of the information seems to fit. One of the things we pointed out previously is ossuary boxes. The ossuary boxes are real pivotal pieces of evidence because, except for the areas, the time just a few decades before the start of the New Testament era, when it was just beginning to be a practice, that practice being after someone had been laid in a tomb for about a year or so, the family or those who cared would come in and take the remaining bones and put them in these ossuary boxes, and in many cases mark who was in them. Oftentimes not with a professional engraver, but fairly informally, but at least mark them. And in one case, we have in Jerusalem 1968, and I'll bring up this point, This was one of those accidental finds.

They were doing construction because the point was made lots of building. So they're doing construction basically for housing subdivision and they ran into this. So boy, that disrupts the construction. They got to go and find out what this is all about. They found this here. And so here is this Yeho Hanan Ben Hagakal, scratched on the side. And what they found inside was the bones of a man that's probably 24 to 28 years old. The legs, the bottom leg bones are crushed.

So this would be similar to the practice you would find the Romans accommodating the Jews in this respect. All right, he isn't dead by the Sabbath, so kill him. And so the Jews would require that. The Romans would accommodate him. So you want him dead? Sure. and they would break the legs as a means of doing that because crucifixion was not a bleeding to death, but a suffocation by pushing up on the legs. So by breaking the legs, the person would be forced to die more quickly.

This is the one instance we have of a crucifixion being recorded in some archeological fashion, other than writing about it or drawing a picture, but actually seeing the nail and the heel bone. Here's a little more close-up of the etchings that's there, and there's a little more close-up of the nail and heel bone. What they did in this instance was, here they drove the nail through the heel bone and underneath the head of the nail, mostly deteriorated away, but a piece of wood, so it's interesting they used a piece of wood in there to kind of hold the leg onto the cross.

Here's one we brought up before with Caiaphas Ossuary. They're the bones of several individuals, and the rabbis had various rulings as to how many, whose bones you could put in the same box. And so this contained several individuals' bones, and of course, Caiaphas being one of the higher up Jews of the Sanhedrin, of course he would do what the rabbis said, right? So it has Caiaphas name on the box. The age of the person inside is dated by anthropologists about 60 years. Date, time, age, all those seem to fit. Is it absolutely the Caiaphas mentioned in the New Testament?

I can't say that. Does all the evidence seem to point that direction? Yeah, pretty much. Here's a good shot here that I got out of Bible and Spade. But it shows you a lot of detail went into the carving. That was unusual. Typically only of someone who was quite wealthy or well-known or something of that sort. Here's one that's real famous and controversial.

This is the James Ossuary. And one of the reasons it's controversial, this has been identified by some as James, the son of Joseph. And who would that be? James, brother of Jesus, son of Joseph, same father, right? Brother of Jesus. Now, James, and by the way, that's our English pronunciation, it's actually Yakov, which, how do I get James out of that? But anyway, Yakov, okay, Ben, Yosef, and then the brother of Jesus, we would actually say Yeshua, those three names were all common names.

So what makes this unusual? the combination of the three names and, here's a real unusual item, of all the ossuary boxes that have ever been found around Jerusalem, only one other has mentioned the name of a brother. So this kind of makes it rather unique. By the time that James was killed, and his death is not recorded in scripture, but it is recorded by Josephus, By the time James was killed, Jesus would have been more well-known, and so making the reference would make some sense.

So here's the inscription on the side. This is what it looks like a little closer up, and a write-up on it. I give a website reference. Bottom line is it's worldofthebible.com. Dr. Randall Price is the fellow who has that. He is the director of excavation for the Qumran, that's the Essene town plateau. And anyway, he has not only written about this, he says the evidence, even though this is controversial, the evidence actually points in favor of this being genuine.

Now, which groups would be opposed to this being genuinely James, the son of Joseph, brother of Jesus? Which groups would be opposed to that identification being real? Pardon? The minimalists would be one, yes. The minimalists, of course, they want to deny everything possible. Because their assumption is the Bible is false unless proven true and what they want to do is say this isn't proof Okay, you're correct the minimalists who else? The Muslims, okay, why would the Muslims want to discount this?

Yeah, they look at Jesus as far as they're concerned Jesus did not die on the cross it was somebody else that looked like him Okay They'd rather see the whole story, you know, go away as the New Testament records it. The Quran does speak of Isa, that's the Muslim name for Jesus, does speak of Mary, does have reference to it. Muhammad had contact with some Jews and with some people who I would say a Christian cult is probably the best way to characterize it. So he was not ignorant of it, but he denies the basics that Christ died on the cross.

Who else? Who else would be disturbed by it? Tom? Jewish nationalists. Why would they be disturbed by it? They don't want anything that is interrupting their dreams as far as their superiority, Right, and so any Christian claim would be disruptive. Yeah. So Jewish nationalists, who else? Can you think of a group that would claim that Jesus had no real brothers? Yeah, the Roman Catholic Roman Catholics would be another group who would not like this to be a genuine evidence of what we see in the New Testament.

Because what this says is that that inscription there says that Mary is not ever virgin. So to them it's disruptive. So you can see how we basically have about four groups who would be very unhappy to have this declared genuine. So they are going to be very skeptical of anything, even if all the evidence tends to point in that direction.

There's one other ossuary box. I put the arrow there to show you that like Hebrew, Aramaic reads right to left, opposite of what ours does. There's one other ossuary. I don't have a picture of it. It was interesting. It was discovered by a Jewish scholar, Eliezer Sukenik. dead now, but Eliezer Sukunic discovered an ossuary box and recorded it. It is in a deep, buried within an archaeological object storage vault held by the Rockefeller Foundation, believe it or not. And he didn't make anything of it, but on the side of the ossuary box it says, Jesus who ascended. The box is empty and we date it from the coins that are inside to 43 AD.

Very interesting. Very interesting. Dr. Price has said that he's going to investigate that further. He's got some contacts at the archives where the box is kept and the notes are kept that he says he's going to follow through on. So if I come up with anything on that, I'll let you know. Anyway, I'll keep my ear to the ground on it.

Carol? Well, I think it's very interesting what, you know, you would have some speculation why would you get this? Was there a possibility that they made a box and didn't use it? that they got a box for him in anticipation and didn't use it because he was resurrected? I don't know. So very, very interesting. It does lead to some questions and that's something I would hope Dr. Price would take a look at. Tom? Yeah, in terms of the attachment thing, I don't know. And that'd be something that hopefully Dr. Price would make some kind of connection with. Basically, all we have now is Sukunic's notes on it and the fact that it's stored deep in this archive, and that's about as much as we've got. I hope he's able to dig up some more, but we've run out of time.

So, do make sure that you've got the handouts. I have a supplemental handout on the James Ossuary. This is by Dr. Randall Price, and it does include some write-up on this One he intends to investigate as well. So anyway, if you want to take a look at that, and if I run out, I'll sure get you some work and email it to you.

Let's pray. Lord, as we look at these things, we do see in them multiple confirmations of the truth of what you've laid out for us in scripture. And we just, we thank you for that. We pray Lord, for the hearts of those who are skeptical for various reasons, who consider your word untrue unless proven otherwise, they are missing out, Lord, on great and marvelous truths and immense blessing. And, Lord, I'm afraid for many of them, they miss out on an eternity unless they have their eyes opened. Thank you for what you've given us, in Jesus' name. Amen.