My Favorite 5 New Testament Archaeology Discoveries in Recent Years!

To download the full article with all images and notes, click here: Shogren_Archaeology of the New Testament

Usually it’s the Old Testament that garners all the publicity for archaeological finds, and for good reasons: the Israelites inhabited the land for centuries and left behind all kinds of artifacts. Jesus and the apostles did not erect buildings or put up inscriptions or make special clay pots.

Nevertheless, New Testament archaeology has yielded some excellent and surprising finds. My criteria here are: finds from the last few years; finds that reveal some sort of physical evidence for the New Testament story; and frankly, things that I find cool. Consult an expert for rankings of findings in order of scholarly importance.[i]

#5. The Pool of Bethesda. The Pool of Siloam (John 9) was discovered in 2005, and it fit very neatly with the biblical description of the place where the blind man washed and was healed. The Pool of Bethesda, by contrast, was discovered long ago but positively identified only recently.[ii] It lay just north of the Temple, by the Sheep Gate, as John states.

In John 5, Jesus visits Bethesda and sees the lame man who had been waiting for years. John describes the structure as a pool “surrounded by five covered colonnades.” Now, a five-sided structure would have been rare indeed, and some skeptics used to dismiss John’s description and other elements of his gospel as a myth. But sure enough, the ruin of Bethesda shows that it definitely did have five colonnades and porticos, just as John describes it – and its architectural oddness is probably the reason why he mentioned it in the first place! It appears that the pool was a mikveh, that is, a place where people would bathe to purify themselves before entering the temple.[iii] The Pool of Bethesda backs up what John says, and suggests that he had reliable information about its details.

The Pool of Bethesda

#4. The Magdala Synagogue. We remember Magdala principally because it gave Mary her nickname, Mary Magdalene (more…)

Published in: on March 31, 2017 at 3:09 pm  Comments (1)  
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April Fools! No, they have not discovered the Gospel of “Q”!

What an announcement, that they discovered a Hebrew manuscript of Q! So wrote someone on a website from New Zealand (liturgy.co.nz) earlier today, but not everyone took note that it was published on April 1, 2016!

 

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In fact, the photo of the papyrus is nothing new; it’s the Nash Papyrus, which was discovered over a century ago (click HERE). And the authors left plenty of other clues in the stor, for example, that two of the scholars involved were Justin I. Dea and Ida Claire.

I love a good gag, but the problem is that this is already circulating in Spanish and will have ramifications: it will be used as “evidence” by certain false Messianic rabbis, who teach that the NT was originally written in Hebrew and use that notion to justify their rewriting of the Bible. They remove the deity of Christ, the person of the Spirit, salvation by faith, freedom from the Law, etc, because supposedly they were not in “the original Hebrew.”

For that reason I wrote, asking the site to explain that it was a hoax.

Whether Q existed it or, no, they haven’t discovered it yet, and according to the best available date, it would be written in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew.

Jokes are fun, until someone gets hurt!

April Fools! No, they have not discovered the Gospel of “Q”! by Gary S. Shogren, Ph.D., Professor of New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

 

Published in: on April 1, 2016 at 2:12 pm  Leave a Comment  
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