The Christian knows that faith and reason alike are gifts of God, and that both have been given to him for the knowledge of the truth; he knows, moreover, that faith and reason cannot contradict each other, because truth cannot contradict truth. He therefore does not fear that the advances of science might harm the truth of Christian doctrine. This general proposition applies as well to the particular case of archaeological research related to the New Testament. Far from harming the Christian faith, such research only reinforces its credibility with rational arguments. We shall prove this claim by briefly presenting seven of the many archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century that confirm the historicity of various aspects of the New Testament writings. Our main source will be Vittorio Messori, Hipótesis sobre Jesús, Ediciones Mensajero, Bilbao 1978, supplemented with some data drawn from several Internet sites.
- Year 1920, Desert of Middle Egypt:
Bernard Grenfell discovers a papyrus, which is rediscovered in 1934 by C. H. Roberts in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. A year later Roberts publishes his find: the papyrus in question is the oldest manuscript fragment of the New Testament known up to that time. It is designated papyrus P52, or the Rylands Greek papyrus. It contains a text from the Gospel of John (18:31-33, 37-38) and is dated to the period 100-125.
It is unanimously acknowledged that the Gospel of John was the last Gospel to be written. Many non-Christian scholars of the New Testament (“critics” or “mythologists,” in Messori’s terminology) held that this Gospel had been composed between the years 150 and 200, or even later. Only in that way would there have been enough time for the formation of the “Christian myth,” which would find expression in the theology of John, clearly more developed than that of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The discovery of papyrus P52 demolished at a single stroke a whole mass of theories contrary to the Christian faith (cf. V. Messori, op. cit., 127).
- Year 1927, Jerusalem:
The French archaeologist L. H. Vincent discovers the Lithostrotos or Gabbatha, the paved courtyard of the Antonia Fortress, of approximately 2,500 square meters, where Pontius Pilate pronounced the sentence against Jesus.
“Now when Pilate had heard these words, he brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the judgment seat, in the place that is called Lithostrotos, and in Hebrew Gabbatha” (John 19:13).
“Lithostrotos” is a Greek word meaning “pavement”; “Gabbatha” is an Aramaic word meaning “elevation”… For the enemies of the historicity of the Gospels, these were merely mythological symbols, around which many speculations were woven… until it was verified that a real courtyard was involved, paved in the Roman style (cf. Ibidem, pp. 167-168).
- Year 1939, Herculaneum:
The mark of a cross is discovered on a wall in the slave quarters of a patrician house in this city, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. Around the cross were also the nails that had held in place the cabinet and the covering that concealed this emblem of Christian worship. This discovery shows that Christianity reached Italy very quickly, and it makes historically credible the text of Acts 28:14, which presupposes the existence of Christians at Puteoli (near Naples) as early as the year 61 (cf. Ibidem, 128).
- Circa Year 1960, Jerusalem:
The pool with five porticoes called Bethesda is discovered. It is an irregular quadrilateral about 100 meters long and from 62 to 80 meters wide, surrounded by arcades on its four sides and divided across the middle by a fifth arcade.
“Now there is at Jerusalem a pond, called Probatica, which in Hebrew is named Bethsaida, having five porches” (John 5:2).
Messori remarks that the mythological readings spun out of these few words defy enumeration. For the demythologizers it was beyond question that the pool with the five porticoes carried symbolic rather than historical value: the five tribes of Israel; the first five books of Scripture (the Pentateuch); a figure from Hebrew kabbalah, in which the number 5 stands for the faculties of the human soul; the five fingers of the hand of Yahweh; the five gates of the Heavenly City… These are but a few of the endless hypotheses the mythologists devised, even venturing daring parallels with Eastern religions and cults. Any explanation would do — except the possibility that this might simply be the memory of a real place — until, as he puts it, the pool passed from the weighty volumes of the German mythologists to the tourist maps of Jerusalem (cf. Ibidem, 167).
The philosopher and exegete Claude Tresmontant has called attention to an important detail of the verse just quoted. The author of the fourth Gospel uses the present tense to say that in Jerusalem there “is” a pool called Bethesda. This is a clear indication that this Gospel was written before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 — that is, much earlier than the great majority of experts suppose, who place the date of composition of this work around the year 95.
- Year 1961, Caesarea Maritima:
An Italian expedition discovers a limestone slab, 80 cm high and 60 cm wide, bearing an inscription that confirms that Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea in the time of Jesus, under the Emperor Tiberius.
Messori recalls that in the centuries-old debate over the origins of Christianity there were even those who doubted that Pilate had really been the administrator of Palestine at the moment when Jesus was condemned to death, while a certain school of criticism scornfully waved away the non-Christian writers who mention this official as nothing more than interpolations by Christian copyists (cf. Ibidem, 169).
- Year 1962, Caesarea Maritima:
The archaeologist Avi-Yonah discovers a black marble slab from the third century AD, with an inscription mentioning the town of Nazareth.
Messori notes that a whole storm of interpretations had likewise broken out over Nazareth and the title “Nazarene” applied to Jesus — surely a myth, the symbolic name of an imaginary town — until the trench of the Israeli excavators became the grave of the countless theories devised to explain why the evangelists had supposedly invented a locality called Nazareth (cf. Ibidem, 168-169).
- Year 1968, Capernaum:
The house of Saint Peter is discovered beneath the floor of a fifth-century church dedicated to the apostle. Messori describes it as a poor dwelling exactly like those around it, set apart by a single detail: its walls are covered with frescoes and graffiti — in Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin — invoking Saint Peter and asking for his protection. It has been established that the house was turned into a place of worship as early as the first century, which makes it the oldest Christian church known; and it bears witness that even before the year 100 not only was the worship of Jesus flourishing, but the “canonization” of his disciples was already ripening, since they were being invoked as protecting “saints” (cf. Ibidem, 128).
Conclusions:
Messori recalls the testimony given by Fr. Lagrange at the age of eighty, after fifty years of study in Palestine spent checking the details supplied by the Gospels against the customs, the history, and the archaeology of the land itself: the final balance of his labors was that no “technical” objections stand against the truthfulness of the Gospels, for everything they relate, down to the smallest details, finds precise and scientific confirmation. This is no hollow apologetics: the hundreds of austere fascicles of the rigorous Revue Biblique, directed by Fr. Lagrange himself, bear it out.
He likewise cites the observation of the celebrated English orientalist Sir Rawlinson, for whom Christianity stands apart from the other world religions precisely by its historical character: the religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt, India, Persia, and the East in general were speculative systems that never even attempted to give themselves a historical basis — the exact opposite of Christianity (cf. Ibidem, 158-159).
We conclude that science lends solid support to Catholic doctrine on the historical character of the Gospels: “Holy Mother Church has always and everywhere held, firmly and with the utmost constancy, that the four Gospels named above, whose historicity she affirms without hesitation, faithfully relate what Jesus, the Son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation, up to the day of his Ascension” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 19).
Author: Daniel Iglesias Grèzes
