By Dr. Paul Luther Maier
I think Christians should be aware that our faith is based on real events that happened in Real Time in history. We can celebrate our faith. Competitive religions are based on events that supposedly happened at a given time in history, but didn't really – or they were misinterpreted.
For example, one looks in vain for one single artifact that supports the Book of Mormon, or a single line in a book somewhere that would support the visions claimed by Joseph Smith. These people have no historical credentials whatever for what they profess; whereas we have thousands of artifacts to support the biblical writers. The authentic credentials for the Christian faith are exponentially stronger than for any other world religious system.
Good News
Christians don't often realize our luxury of having the only religious faith on this planet that is based on solid historical credentials (aside from our parent Judaism). I don't think we celebrate this sufficiently, or use it in our witness – especially with all the competition Christianity has today.
As we near the millennial milestone, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that statistically considered, Christianity is the most successful single phenomenon on this planet. There is no other religion, no other teaching, no other nation, no other philosophical school, no other enterprise that claims the loyalty of one billion, 900 million people across the world – in this generation alone. This is something we ought to celebrate.
What a magnificent fulfillment of the prophetic missionary command of Jesus in Matthew 28 about conquering the world in his name!
Competitive Pressures
Now for the bad news: the faith is under greater competitive pressure than ever. That should be especially evident here in multi-cultural Southern California.
More attention than ever is being paid to the life of Jesus and the birth of Christianity; but probably never before has the faith come under heavier scholarly scrutiny and negative critique than today. To be sure, we have our defenders of the faith. But we also have our sensation-mongers – scholars who are trying to get a hearing by overemphasizing and criticizing out of all proportion to what the sources would suggest. We have one put-down after another being published on the life of Jesus.
It began about 30 years ago with Hugh Shonefield's Passover Plot. Then followed Jesus as a mushroom cultist, in a book by John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Then came Morton Smith's book on Jesus as a master magician in The Secret Gospel, doing his miracles by magic. Several books came out with Jesus as "the happy husband." Whom did he marry? Mary Magdalene, of course, who always seems to get paired up with Jesus for some reason.
Vicious, sensationalist versions of the life of Jesus are published with no historical basis whatever. One of the latest of these non-books is Barbara Thiering's Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In it Jesus married Mary Magdalene, they got divorced, Jesus married somebody else, they had children, and supposedly there are people with Jesus' genes still walking around France today.
As if that were not enough, in 1986, a group was formed called "The Jesus Seminar." At their semi-annual meetings they have the audacity – with little black, gray, pink and red plastic balls dropped into a container – to vote whether Jesus could have said or done each of the things reported in the gospels – absolutely throwing historical methodology out of the window in the process of coming across with their own fantasies.
They have voted down almost every one of Jesus' major sayings. With the Sermon on the Mount, they allow Jesus one statementù"Blessed are the poor." In the Lord's Prayer they allow him the words "Our Father," and nothing else. Going on to his deeds, they deny that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and certainly not born of a virgin. Just in time for Easter last year they voted that, of course, Jesus could not have risen from the deadù that, in fact, his body was probably eaten by dogs.
That's the era we're living in, and these are the people who get all the sensationalizing publicity. That's the bad news.
What Really Happened?
Can we determine a way to ferret out what actually happened 2000 years ago? Can we go back to that first century and to the other centuries of biblical history, and once for all, lay to rest what did or did not happen?
There are ways of doing this. There are indeed marvelous extra-biblical resources which are very serviceable in checking up on the biblical record. So often as Christians, we assume that every bit of information about the people, places, and events that gave rise to our faith are locked inside the Bible; and it is the case of an all-or-nothing response. Either you believe the biblical record or you do not.
This is wrong. We have remarkable outside sources. I almost like to call them "God's backup systems," or better, "God's collateral revelation," traces in non-biblical sources which are extremely important in trying to weigh the credentials of the biblical record.
To enier into the ancient world, I use what I call a three-lane ongoing highway. The first lane is called geography, the second archeology, and the third history, i.e., the historical documents which have come down to the present day. These are all non-biblical avenues which, each in its own way, lead back to the biblical world.
Geography
First, the geography lane. Let's drop a bombshell here: there really was and is a place called the Holy Land. Bombshell? Yes, because our faith has a solid stage. Most world religious systems don't. They may claim to have one, a place where all the gods and goddesses go gamboling about – Mt. Olympus for the pagan Greeks orthe Himalayas, for example. But none of them is so geographically attuned as is the Judeo-Christian tradition.
God's people are very place-oriented in the Old and New Testaments; they interact with their Lord at very real locations. Much of the Bible is geography. Think Old Testament: Abrahamùmoving up from Ur to Haran, then to the Holy Land, down to Egypt, back and forth. The children of Israel going down to Egypt, and back out with all the way stations on the Exodus Trail. Joshua, conquering the land for the Chosen People, and all the tribes and cities that intersect with them.
On into the New Testament, with Jesus going from place to place. Or St. Paulùhis missionary journeys, going all the way to Rome. His passport was filled three or four times! Probably 80 percent of these sites, have been identified, and many of
them have even become archeological digs. What a luxury to know that the drama of salvation involves players that were on a very solid stage. As Christians we assume that all world religions have an equally solid geographical foundation. They do not.
There is one place I love to visit in particular in the Old City of Jerusalem, the remains of a tower which was there in Jesus' day, the Tower of Phasael. Herod the Great constructed it out of enormous "Herodian" blocks of stone. When Titus destroyed the city, he left one structure standing, the Tower of Phasael, at the northern end of Herod's Palace, where Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate. He wanted subsequent ages to know how difficult it was to conquer Jerusalem.
I look at those great stones with a question, "Tell me what you saw on that day called 'Good Friday'. You were there at this trial that changed history. You saw it all." So far they haven't answered me! But they are a demonstration of the tangible, the material, the inaugural proof in terms of the stage on which Christianity played out its beginnings. These Herodian stones witnessed the very trial of Jesus of Nazareth!
Archeology
The second lane of the highway to the ancient past is archeology. Here we have the chance to observe the stage not only on the surface, but also in depth. Scientific archeology is a young discipline not more than 120 years old. But look at what has been discovered already to increase our knowledge of the biblical world.
The discoveries are fascinating – like the epigraphical evidence that there certainly was a Pontius Pilate. This had been doubted by German higher critics in the last century. But in 1961 a stone was discovered at Caesarea inscribed with the name of "Pontius Pilatus, Prefect of Judaea" in two-inch Latin lettering.
Another recent find should have been displayed in sixty point type in newspapers across the world: the discovery of the actual bones of a biblical personality. If this had happened in the 1930s or '40s, there would not have been a newspaper in the Western world that would not have given it front page headlines.
Real Bible Bones
In November 1990 a bulldozer was working away in a forest south of the temple area in Jerusalem, digging for a water park. The dozer started to sink; it had punctured the roof of a burial cavern. Inside were 12 ossuariesùbone chests used as a space-saving way to bury people in the first century AD.
They put the bodies in asepulchre, let them rot away for a few years, and then gathered the bones that were left, and reburied them in what was called the "second burial system". Jesus would have been part of that. He was in the "first burial phase", and except for Easter, his bones would have gone into an ossuary.
The workers pulled one of the 12 ossuaries out of a niche. They found it to be richly carved with magnificent facing along the border, befitting a VIP. And who was that VIP? On the other side of this bone-chestwas found scratched in two places the name in Aramaic: Josef bar Caiapha, i.e., Joseph Caiaphasùthe High Priest who indicted Jesus before Pontius Pilate. We are talking about one of the main actors in the Passion Story. With the confirming epigraphic material on Pontius Pilate, we have two of the main personalities involved at Jesus' trialùeven the bones of one who was involved.
Before you people pass on, there will be new, dramatic archeological discoveries, which, if the ratio holds, will 8 of 10 times support and endorse the biblical record. I've given you only one or two highlights of what's been discovered.
This means you people either know more or can know more about how Christianity got started than any of the greatest names in Church history – more than Martin Luther. He didn't have archeology, or microfiche, e-mail, or whatever else, to keep in touch with the latest communications in biblical research. We know more on how Christianity got started than Thomas Aquinas or even St. Augustine.
It's a paradox: the further removed we are from the first century, the better fix we're getting on what happened there. Our children and grandchildren will have better information yet. Our data base is growing all the time.
History's Documents
The third avenue back into the ancient world would be the evidence from the historical documents that have come down to us.
Documents of history have survived across the centuries through manuscript transmission by recopying. The first century AD was remarkably supplied with non-biblical materialsùboth the Greek and the Roman worldùas well as with documents in the rabbinic tradition. By using them, we get a clearer picture of that age.
Never get cornered by a common challenge to the Christian faith: "If Jesus was so important, how come not even his name shows up in any non-Christian materials in the first century after he died?" This protest is loaded with the wrong premise. Christ's name does show up outside biblical or Christian materials in fascinating places. It appears in the writings of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, as well as in the Jewish rabbinic traditions where "Jesus the Nazarene" is found in the arrest notice of Jesus.
We also have the works of Flavius Josephus, who is far and away the treasure trove of additional biblical-type information that has survived the centuries. HebeginsatCreationand continues all the way down to his own day in the war against Rome, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD and even Masada, in 73 AD.
To be sure, his early stuff is not that of an eye-witness. He was not presentatthe Creation! Hewasborn in Jerusalem four years after the crucifixion. So he had a box seat for the events of the later New Testament era, and he used rabbinic tradition to add to the Old Testament record.
When we come to the intertestamental era and the Maccabees, Josephus' information improves, and is best for the New Testamentera. Wehave,forexample, about 800 times as much information about Herod the Great in Josephus, as in Matthew's Gospel. We have 10-15 times as much information on Pontius Piiate, as in the Gospel recordùtremendously important information. I don't understand why New Testament scholars don't use Josephus more. He is a virtual eyewitness of what took place in the first century.
Josephus in the Church
The Church has used Josephus, but only sparingly, to fit! in the biblical record. In Josephus, two crucial paragraphs correlate with the biblical record about John the Baptist and Salome. Her name in not in the New Testament. "Daughter of Herodias" is all the gospels say. Thank Josephus for her name and where this happened, at Herod's fortress Machaerus, diagonally across the Dead Sea from Masada.
Or, who was the first bishop of the Christian Church? It was James the Just (Acts 15), half-brother to Jesus. The New Testament doesn't tell us how he died. Josephus does. In 62 AD James was stoned to death by the Sanhedrin, in the absence of the Roman Governor Albinus, who hadn't arrived in Judea yet. Facts about Annas, Caiaphas – the details on the high-priestly clan in Jerusalem and why nobody liked them very much (except our current New Testament revisionist scholars) – all surface in Josephus.
With all this going for that Jewish historian, why isn't he read today? Your grandparents read him. In their libraries they would have the Holy Bible and standing next to it, the works of Josephus.
Two reasons may explain this. First, Josephus wrote too much, the equivalent of 12 books of Jewish history. In our hurried age who wants to wade through 12 books?
The other reason he isn't used today is that the most popular English translation, by William Whiston, is in King James-type English. Whiston, Isaac Newton's successor at Cambridge, knew his Greek. Butwho wants to read that sort of prose today? Consequently, I myself have done a new translation, a condensation of Josephus entitled, Josephusùthe Essential Works (Kregel, 1994).
(In the next issue of FOCL-POINT Dr. Maier concludes his account of the witness which extra-biblical documents like the rabbinic tradition and Flavius Josephus, a contemporary of the New Testament era, give us for our better understanding of the events of Holy Week and the certainty of their occurrence.)
*Paul Maier is Professorof Ancient History, Western Michigan University, and author of Josephus, the Essential Works. /Among his other books are, Pontius Pilate, Flames of Rome, In the Fullness of Time, and the religious fiction best-seller, A Skeleton in God's Closet. HisBasel University Ph.D. degree under Karl Barth and Oscar Cullman was granted with that university's first summa cum laude bestowed upon an American student. This popular article is excerpted from his first lecture given at the 1996 LUTHER ANDTHE BIBLE CONFERENCE at Lutheran Bible Institute in California.