[squirt]

archaeology may support the credibility of Luke, but he isn't the only author of the New Testament, what would scientists have to say about John, whose gospel was sometimes considered suspect because he talked about locations that couldn't be verified? some scholars charged that since he failed to get the basic details straight, John must not have been close to the events in Jesus' life, that conclusion, however, has been turned upside down in recent years, there have been several discoveries that have shown John to be very accurate, for example, John 5:1-15 records how Jesus healed an invalid by the Pool of Bethesda, John provides the detail that the pool had 5 porticoes, for a long time people cited this as an example of John being inaccurate, because no such place had been found, but more recently the Pool of Bethesda has been excavated - it lies maybe 40 feet below ground - and sure enough, there were 5 porticoes, which means colonnaded porches or walkways, exactly as John had described, and you have other discoveries - the Pool of Siloam from John 9:7, Jacob's well from John 4:12, the probable location of the Stone Pavement near the Jaffa Gate where Jesus appeared before Pilate in John 19:13, even Pilate's own identity - all of which have lent historical credibility to John's gospel, so this challenges the allegation that the gospel of John was written so long after Jesus' death that it can't possibly be accurate, archaeologists found a fragment of a copy of John 18 that leading papyrologists have dated to about AD 125, by demonstrating that copies of John existed this early and as far away as Egypt, archaeology has effectively dismantled speculation that John had been composed well into the 2nd century, too long after Jesus' life to be reliable, other scholars have attacked the gospel of Mark, generally considered the first account of Jesus' life to be written, Mark is accused of being ignorant about Palestinian geography, which some say demonstrates that he could not have lived in the region at the time of Jesus, specifically, Mark 7:31 is cited, "then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis", it has been pointed out that given these directions Jesus would have been traveling directly away from the Sea of Galilee, what these critics seem to be assuming is that Jesus is getting in his car and zipping around on an interstate, but he obviously wasn't, reading the text in the original language, taking into account the mountainous terrain and probable roads of the region, and considering the loose way "Decapolis" was used to refer to a confederation of ten cities that varied from time to time, a logical route can be traced on a map that corresponds precisely with Mark's description, has there ever been an archaeological finding that blatantly contravened a New Testament reference? archaeology has not produced anything that is unequivocally a contradiction to the bible