The Christian knows that both faith and reason are gifts from 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. For this reason he does not fear that the advances of science might harm the truth of Christian doctrine. This proposition of a general order also applies 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 assertion 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. To this end we shall use as our main source Vittorio Messori, Hipótesis sobre Jesús, Ediciones Mensajero, Bilbao 1978, supplementing it with some data taken from various Internet sites.

  • Year 1920, desert of Middle Egypt:

Bernard Grenfell discovers a papyrus, which is rediscovered in 1934 by C. H. Roberts at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. A year later Roberts publishes his find: the papyrus in question is the oldest known manuscript fragment of the New Testament up to that time. It is called 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 of the non-Christian scholars of the New Testament (“critics” or “mythologists,” according to the terminology of Messori) maintained that this Gospel had been composed between the years 150 and 200, or even later. Only in this way would there have been enough time for the formation of the “Christian myth,” which would be expressed 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 Tower, of approximately 2,500 square meters, where Pontius Pilate pronounced the sentence against Jesus.

“Pilate 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 about which many speculations were woven… until it was proven that this was a real courtyard, 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 part reserved for slaves in a patrician house of this city, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. Around the cross were also the nails that served to hold the niche and the covering that concealed this symbol of Christian worship. This discovery shows that Christianity reached Italy very quickly and makes historically credible the text of Acts 28:14, which presupposes the existence of Christians in Pozzuoli (near Naples) as early as the year 61 (cf. Ibidem, 128).

  • Circa 1960, Jerusalem:

The pool with five porticoes called Bethesda is discovered. It is an irregular quadrilateral about 100 meters long and 62 to 80 meters wide, surrounded by arcades on its four sides and divided in 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).

“It is impossible to enumerate the mythological interpretations to which these few words gave rise. It was beyond doubt… that for the demythologizers ‘the pool with the five porticoes’ had no historical value, only a symbolic one. The five tribes of Israel; the first five books of Scripture (the Pentateuch); a symbol of the Hebrew Kabbalah, for which the number 5 represents the faculties of the human soul; the five fingers of the hand of Yahweh; the five gates of the Heavenly City… These are a few among the endless hypotheses devised by the mythologists, who also tried to draw bold parallels with Eastern religions and cults. Any explanation was good…; the only hypotheses excluded were those suggesting that it might be the simple recollection of a real place”, until “from the weighty volumes of the German mythologists, the pool ended up on the tourists’ maps of Jerusalem” (Ibidem, 167).

The philosopher and exegete Claude Tresmontant has called attention to an important detail of the verse quoted here. The writer 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, with an inscription confirming that Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea in the time of Jesus, under the Emperor Tiberius.

“In the age-old debate over the origins of Christianity there was even someone who questioned whether Pilate had really been the administrator of Palestine at the moment when Jesus was condemned to death. And the non-Christian writers who speak of that official? ‘Interpolations by Christian copyists,’ a certain school of criticism would answer scornfully” (Ibidem, 169).

  • Year 1962, Caesarea Maritima:

The archaeologist Avi-Yonah discovers a black marble slab from the third century AD, with an inscription that mentions the town of Nazareth.

“Regarding Nazareth too, and the epithet Nazarene applied to Jesus, a whole storm of interpretations was unleashed. A myth, most certainly: a symbolic name for an imaginary city,” until “in the trench of the Israeli excavators lay buried the countless theories devised to explain the reasons why the evangelists had invented a town called Nazareth” (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. “It is a poor dwelling, identical in everything to those around it except for one detail: the walls are covered with frescoes and graffiti (in Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin) with invocations to Saint Peter asking for his protection. It is an established fact that the house was turned into a place of worship from the first century onward: it is, therefore, the oldest known Christian church. And it testifies that, already before the year 100…, not only was the worship of Jesus flourishing, but the ‘canonization’ of his disciples was reaching maturity, as they were already being invoked as protector ‘saints’” (Ibidem, 128).

Conclusions:

“Fr. Lagrange confessed at eighty years of age, after fifty years of study in Palestine with the sole concern of comparing the details supplied by the Gospels with the reality of the customs, history, and archaeology of the land itself: ‘The final balance of my work is that there are no “technical” objections against the truthfulness of the Gospels. Everything the Gospels relate, down to the last details, finds precise and scientific confirmation.’ These are not words of hollow apologetics. The hundreds of exacting issues of the rigorous Revue Biblique, directed by Fr. Lagrange himself, confirm it.”

As the celebrated English orientalist Sir Rawlinson has observed: “Christianity is distinguished from the other world religions precisely by its historical character. The religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt, India, Persia, and of the East in general, were speculative systems that did not even attempt to give themselves a historical basis. Exactly the opposite of Christianity”. (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 maintained, with firmness and the utmost constancy, that the four Gospels just named, whose historicity she affirms without hesitation, faithfully relate what Jesus, the Son of God, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation, until the day of the Ascension” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 19).

Author: Daniel Iglesias Grèzes

Source: revistafeyrazon.wordpress.com