[squirt]

if a man were telling about a trip he took from St Louis to Chicago and he mentioned that he had stopped in Springfield, Illinois, to see the movie Titanic at the Odeon Theater and that he had eaten a large Clark bar he bought at the concession counter, investigators could determine whether such a theater exists in Springfield as well as if it was showing this particular film and selling this specific brand and size of candy bar at the time he said he was there, if their findings contradict what the person claimed, this seriously tarnishes his trustworthiness, if the details check out, this doesn't prove that his entire story is true, but it does enhance his reputation for being accurate, in a sense, this is what archaeology accomplishes, the premise is that if an ancient historian's incidental details check out to be accurate time after time, this increases our confidence in other material that the historian wrote but that cannot be as readily cross-checked, does archaeology affirm or undermine the New Testament when it checks out the details in those accounts? there's no question that the credibility of the New Testament is enhanced when you excavate and find that the author was accurate in talking about a particular place or event, as an eample, for a long time people questioned the validity of a statement by Josephus, the 1st century historian, that the Harbor of Herod the Great was as large as the one at Piraeus, which is a major harbor of Athens, people thought Josephus was wrong, because when you see the stones above the surface of the water in the contemporary harbor, it's not very big, but when we began to do underwater excavation, we found that the harbor extended far out into the water underground, that it had fallen down, and that it's total dimensions were indeed comparable to the harbor at Piraeus, so it turns out Josephus was right after all, this was one more bit of evidence that Josephus knew what he was talking about, so what about the New Testament writers? did they really know what they were talking about?

JOHN MCRAY PH.D