Paul Maier on The Real Jesus: New evidence From History And Archeology (Transcript)

Lazarus sounds like lapis lazuli. I don’t think it does, but let’s say it does. That’s the rich Mesopotamian blue, but if you add red to blue, you get purple, royal purple, and that’s the red top of the mushroom. I kid you not, this passes for reliable pros. Unbelievable. And the mummy-like wrappings that Lazarus had on, that’s indicated by the white flecks on top of the red top mushroom. This is madness, of course, and yet Doubleday published it, because half the book is scholarly notes in 20 different languages. None of them mean anything. There weren’t salad, but did they ever hoodwink the editors at Doubleday? And yet people were buying this book and made it something of a bestseller at the time.

And then there’s Jesus, the Master Magician. Oh, that’s a popular one. Yeah, Jesus did miracles like David Copperfield does miracles. And so, again, the secret gospel written by a professor of ancient history at City College of New York. And this, of course, Morton Smith, his name was, and this, of course, now has proven to be the secret gospel of Mark. Some of you specialists will understand what I’m talking about. It has proven to be a forgery by Morton Smith himself.

Unfortunately then we have Jesus, the senescent savior. Jesus didn’t die at age 33 or so. No, he lived on. Somebody took his place. This is, of course, what Muslims also believe. He lived on, didn’t die at Calvary, and lived on to a jolly old age in a mansion overlooking the Dead Sea or something like that. Sorry, folks, no evidence for that either.

Then there’s Jesus — Jesus the happy husband. Oh, yeah, that one’s, of course, repopularized by Dan Brown. Jesus, of course, was a Jewish rabbi and teacher. They had to get married in those days, so Jesus also had to get married, even though his wife isn’t named in the Bible.

Well, I’m sorry, didn’t they have Jewish bachelors in those days? Some guys, probably too ugly to find a wife. I’m sure they did, and yet there’s no evidence of that whatever, despite what Dan Brown and others may say. I don’t know why it’s Mary Magdalene all the time. Why is she always Mrs. Jesus? You know, even in Jesus Christ Superstar. Well, I don’t know it. I love him. I don’t know why I did that. That’s the last solo you’ll get this evening, folks. That’s the only one.

But they have tried to get him married off, and it doesn’t work simply because there is no evidence like whatever, and every tool that Dan Brown uses in the Da Vinci Code to try to get Jesus married off, and there are many scholars like him. They’re all like a bunch of worried mamas with a 55 year old son who hadn’t found his bride yet. Got to get him married off, you know? It doesn’t work, and in this case, any argument that Dan Brown uses in the Da Vinci Code, it’s like trying to get a rusty nut off of a bolt with a paper mache wrench. Use it the first time it falls apart. Numbers alone will do it.

What is the Da Vinci Code name for Leonardo’s great portrait of Jesus and the twelve disciples, right? How many heads should there be in the painting? Twelve plus one, otherwise known as thirteen.

Okay, now Mary Magdalene comes along, and Jesus wants to sit next to his wife, of course, so he tells John to go to the end of the table, right? How many heads should there be in the famous painting? Fourteen.

Now, the next time you see Leonardo’s great painting, count the number of heads. Thirteen. Well, maybe John was drunk in the wine and fell under the table. That’s been suggested too. Well, sorry, Leonardo’s tablecloth does not go down to the floor. There are only 26 legs there, folks. Count them. Not gonna work.

And so it goes one after another. The characters just show up. John Dominic Crossan, you’ve seen him probably in a lot of TV shows in Jesus. The wonderful Irish states, the author who has all of these put-downs on Christianity. For instance, he loves to rattle Christian cages. Jesus’s body wasn’t buried in Joseph’s tomb. Dogs ate his bones. You know, this kind of thing. Always his little bombshell.

Well, he wrote Jesus, the life of a Mediterranean peasant. And he has pictured Jesus as a wandering sage telling jokes against the government, kind of a corrosive character with a good sense of humor. I don’t know what image we can give Jesus on that one. Seinfeld the Savior, maybe? I don’t know what it would be. But you have these again and again and again.

THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS

And the latest is the Gnostic Gospels. Oh, I tell you now, we have all kinds of portraits of Jesus showing up from this apocryphal literature that shows up from the second century on, third and fourth century. Everybody making a big fuss about the Gnostic Gospels, never mind that nearly all of them are a word salad. And where they do have serious content, you have nothing there which is anything but derivative material from the four Gospels that we’re familiar with. Little gildings of a lily, little additions to the Bible. We had biblical novelists 2,000 years ago, or at least 1,900 years ago. And so again they’re giving us different images which are supposed to be sensational, and indeed the public very often runs with them.

Let me tell you, the selection of the canonical Gospels were not some kind of a March Madness situation, where you came down to the Sweet Sixteen, and then the Elite Eight, and the Big Four finally made it. Not the way it happened. And so all these other views you get of the portraits of Jesus, they’re really all caricatures.

And well, let’s take one of them, the Gospel of Philip. Now Dan Brown uses that to prove that Jesus got married. Now let me show you the papier-mâché wrench that he uses. Gospel of Philip claims that Jesus was married. No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. Gospel of Philip doesn’t even say that. But I don’t care if it did say that. I don’t care if the Gospel of Philip said Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and John was his best man. I don’t care who was a ring bearer or whatever else. But it’s a late 3rd century derivative Gospel. Nobody would give it the time of day. But again, those who want to see Jesus get married off, go with Dan Brown’s argument.

Okay, here’s the argument. The disciples come to Jesus and they say, Lord, why do you prefer Mary Magdalene over us? Think of it, folks. If Jesus were married to the woman, would that question make any sense, whatever? Jesus would have answered, because she’s my wife, you dunderheads. If I didn’t prefer her, I’d never hear the end of it. They just don’t work. They just don’t work. So enough of that. Enough of that jazz. You didn’t come for that this evening.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE PORTRAIT OF JESUS WHICH IS MORE ACCURATE?

Now, naturally, you heard from the introduction that I’m going to be kind of in favor of the Gospel views, but not just on that basis, not just because it’s in the Bible or anything else. But I liked it as an ancient historian. As a matter of fact, I was for 50 years a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, and I finally hung it up last year because the students were switching the adjective. No longer professor of ancient history, but ancient professor of history. That was it. That was enough. That was enough.

But no, what I like to do, and I think we all of us should, if you choose to react with the image of Jesus or so, use your specialty, whether it’s art or law or whatever else, use your specialty and approach this time-honored greatest story ever told. And in my case, I’m a historian, so I tried to use the tools of the historical discipline to pry apart all these wild images of Jesus and try to go back to what he really was in terms of the eyewitness testimony of contemporaries and in terms of the new evidence that we can get if we use all of the material which has come down to us from that all-important first century.

Well, don’t we have it all? No. We’re getting more every month, every year. There are more evidence coming, there’s more evidence coming in from the archaeological finds that are being made, there are more interesting research into the documentation of the time, we have 2,000 years of good biblical scholarship. Most of it has been good. You don’t hear about the good material, you always hear about the sensationalist, radical, revisionist views. They’re the ones that make all the press and whatever else.

But the solid scholarship which has been devoted to this so-called greatest life ever lived is copious and it’s getting better every year. You also have the new evidence of archaeology coming along, making spectacular discoveries, most of which you don’t even hear about. I’m just amazed at that. And by the way, everybody thinks that archaeology is an old discipline. We even have sympathy for the poor archaeologists. His career is in ruins. Not too hot a joke, I realize.

So if you ever try to dump one on the audience that way, do have a good chaser. Here’s a chaser, especially to our beautiful young co-eds here at Iowa State. Ladies, try to marry an archaeologist because the older you get, the greater interest your husband will take in you. But it’s a young discipline. It’s only 125 years old. Scientific archaeology began in the 1870s. And look at the hundreds of thousands of artifacts that have been discovered that beautifully, 90% of them rather immediately confirm the biblical record. You can argue about the 10% if you want. You don’t hear that. You always hear about the radical, over-the-wall archaeologists who have a totally different time grid from anybody else in the archaeological discipline, and therefore their evidence is going to come up differently, right?

Computer people have a word for it: Garbage in, garbage out. When you depart from the recognized international standard for archaeology and have your grid 150 years off, like some of them do, sure, you’re going to get different results. But by and large, 85 to 90 percent of the discoveries being made in any land of the biblical world today almost immediately agrees with the biblical record. You can quarrel over the 10 or 15 percent if you want, but most of the archaeological discoveries affirm the biblical record.

And some of the finds taking place are sensational in a good sense. For example, last century the German critics were coming along. I can attack the German critics because I have a German background myself. Maya, you can tell that. But anyway, they were saying, again, like some of the people today are saying there never was a Jesus, a historical Jesus. You can see it in your computer blog, jesusneverexisted.com. Some claims are made that he never existed, even as a historical personality. The man on whom we have more primary evidence, probably than anybody else in the ancient world. Yeah, he never existed.

Well, anyway, one of the critics was named Bruno Bauer. Now, he had originally been a good Christian, but he made shipwreck of his faith and then decided not only was Jesus not son of God, he wasn’t even a human being. He never lived.

Well, then even Bruno’s colleagues in Germany said, yeah, Aber, they said, wait a minute, Jesus does interact with historical characters like Caiaphas, the high priest, or Pontius Pilate, the governor who condemned him. Yeah, Bruno’s answer was, those are interpolations. Somebody wrote those into the manuscripts to make the New Testament look good.

Well, now, too bad old Bruno wasn’t around in 1962, when an Italian archaeological expedition was digging away at the waterfront theatre at Caesarea, and they came across a strangely shaped stone in a stair landing. They pried the stone out of the matrix, and they found an inscription on the other side. The inscription was in two-inch Latin lettering, and it reads as follows: ‘To the people of Caesarea, Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, has presented this building in honor of the Emperor Tiberius.’

You know, I just wish old Bruno had hung around and not gone on to his reward, or whatever direction that was. It shouldn’t be judgmental. Okay, I would have loved to have gotten Bruno’s head in an arm lock, and gently rubbed that unbelieving nose of his in the inscription. He could have learned via the Braille method alone that there was a Pontius Pilate. Yeah, here he shows up in stone.

Okay, this has happened repeatedly in history. All kinds of archaeological evidence has come along, most of it immediately confirming a biblical record. So to a historian, this says we better take a look, a second look, at this biblical material, and not decide that it’s all a collection of early mythology.

SECOND BURIAL METHOD

Now here’s another one. 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and of course, a stupendous archaeological discovery. I’ll give you another one that I think is right up there with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and nobody seems to know about it. I don’t know why, but listen, the bones of the first biblical personality ever to come to life were discovered in November of 1990. Kind of fresh discovery. I’m talking biblical bones. I’m talking the bones of a gentleman, there I’ve given you a 50% chance right there, a gentleman who is well known in New Testament history. And you would think that everybody, even non-Christian, should know his name.

Here’s a story. November 1990, a bulldozer was excavating south of the temple area in the Old City of Jerusalem. I should immediately point out, a bulldozer is not your average archaeological tool. Try brush. Well, the dozer wasn’t intending archaeology. The dozer was building the base of a water park, blue plastic slides and all, and it starts sinking into the ground. So they back it off, turn off the diesels, called in the archaeologists, they shined their flashlights down in the hole there, and without even going inside, these Israeli archaeologists could identify it as a first century AD burial site.

How could they know that? Because there was a collection of ten ossuaries inside. Those are limestone chests for burying bones. It’s called the Second Burial Method. They’re running out of space in a Mount of Olives. You know, like that last scene in Schindler’s List, remember the movie, you can see how grave, too many graves. So they were designing a space-saving way of burying people. So they now had the idea of putting the bodies in a sepulcher, let them decompose for a year or two, get the bones that remained, and put them in one of these limestone bone chests. Jesus Himself was in the second burial system. Hadn’t been for the resurrection, as Christians claim, well, they’d have gathered His bones a year or two later and done the same thing.

Anyway, now one of these ossuaries was magnificently carved. Beautiful, fluting around the edges, two giant rosettes with sub-whorls inside. I’ve never seen an ossuary so magnificently carved, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. So there’s a VIP inside there, obviously. And on the other side is the name of the VIP. Give it an Aramaic and I’ll bet quite a few of you will be able to translate. The name of the occupant was Yōsēf bar Qayyāfā. Yōsēf bar Qayyāfā. Who does that sound like? Caiaphas, the high priest who was the chief prosecutor against Jesus on Good Friday before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate. Very important person.

How come nobody seems to know about that, including Christian pastors? I can be talking to a pastoral conference of 300 pastors and I’ll ask about the biblical bones, but one or two percent will know. I don’t know how to get the story out. It is a lead pipe cinch, it’s correct. They’ve done carbon-14 tests on the bones. They are from 20 centuries ago. They’ve done other tests to see the age of the bone at death, and we’re talking about a 70, 75-year-old person. It works out perfectly only for this particular Caiaphas. The only one with that name, and it is, we might say, a lead pipe cinch, that is the case of the bones of the high priest. Even the Israel Museum, which is not Christian, has taken the question mark away. When they first brought it into the Israel Museum, they had a question mark whether this is the one. They’ve taken the question mark away.

I think it’s rather important to understand that the new archaeology taking place and the new finds being made are very, very friendly to the biblical version of what happens in the case of Jesus.

GEOGRAPHICAL TESTS

Then we’ve got another test we can level to see if we’re going to get reliable, fresh information on Jesus. What about the geographical test? We overlook that one all the time. Who needs geography anymore? We’ve got a Garmin global positioning device. You know, you can’t even read a map anymore.

Well, the Bible is chock-full of geographical names, so it’s very important to see if we’re getting a con job when it comes to the geography, or are these real places? Now, unlike the holy books of any other world religious system, the geographical locations inside of the Old and New Testament are absolutely authentic. Can’t tell you all of them. First ten chapters of Genesis, cut me some slack, can’t tell you where Eden is located, alright?

But after that, we find it’s been estimated that 93% of the place names are known, know where they are, and some have been excavated archaeologically. Now that’s important, because so many other holy books begin like an English fantasy novel, at a time long, long ago, at a place called Middle Earth, or something like that. I’m not trying to make fun of other systems, I know terribly politically incorrect, and I’d be stoned off the platform here, but I’m only trying to show that when you do talk about Bible lands, they are real. There is a real Jerusalem, a real Bethlehem, a real Nazareth, and places like that. We’re not kidding anybody, these are real places.

So one very important clue, when you’re checking out your holy book, is are these real places or not? Is the stage solid on which these things happen? And again, you find the Gospels passing that test beautifully. You got a travel record of St. Paul taking three mission journeys at least, Luke faithfully recording wherever they went from place to place, and they’re all traceable today. Yet Luke’s got the order right, he’s not screwing up the itinerary. So it’s very, very reliable, the geography is.

Then there’s a final test. The words that have come down to us across 20 centuries. WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER RECORDS? What about the inscriptions? What about the coinage? What about the history which is being written by others 2,000 plus years ago?

Now that’s very important information. Archaeologists dream of finding not only stones, but inscriptions. The words are so very important. We have indeed so much lost that I can’t even begin to talk about it from the first century. Library fires didn’t help. Oh man, remember the biggest library in the ancient world, 750,000 book scrolls? Library of Alexandria. And I tell my students in my ancient history courses, I used to, that if we’d have had the detail from those books that were burned up, the book scrolls in the great Library of Alexandria, every course in ancient history would be six times as long as it is, for which the students get their matches and are ready to burn down another library. I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I certainly know that.

But there’s been quite an amazing amount of secular outside material which has come down from the ancient Greco-Roman world, especially in that all-important first century. It’s not only beautifully confirming every Roman official that shows up in the Gospels in the New Testament, or the Jewish rulers like Herod the Great. My goodness, Flavius Josephus gives us two whole books on Herod the Great. He has only a cameo role in Matthew chapter 2, but Josephus gives us two whole books on Herod alone. Same kind of character that shows up in the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem. That’s the kind of guy who could do that, because after all, he married ten wives, all of them producing princes for him, and all the princes are scheming to succeed. If they didn’t have two or three collateral plots in the palace before they had cornflakes in the morning, something was wrong. And so Herod finally executed three of his own sons on suspicion of treason. He put his favorite wife to death, the beautiful Maccabean princess Mariamne, killed his mother-in-law.

All right, sorry ladies. Should have said killed one of his many mothers-in-law, okay. Yeah, killed several uncles, couple cousins. You might say Herod was a family man. Invites the high priest down to a swimming party at Jericho, drowns him. You know, it’s a kind of a guy who could have killed a dozen babies in Bethlehem very easily.

But then we have additional evidence on other personalities in the Bible, like John the Baptist. Now you recall, of course, his story, but so does Josephus. The first century Jewish historian, never turned Christian, but he writes sober history as he sees it. He also reports John the Baptist’s execution exactly like the Gospels do. He even adds precious detail to the gospel record. Yeah, I’m telling you, these outside sources from the secular world are very valuable, because they not only coordinate with the biblical record, but they add neat detail, in some cases threads that have been left hanging in the Bible are tied down by Josephus. Incredible character. He was a genius, no fact escaped him. He wrote this enormous history of the Jewish people, 28 book scrolls. He wrote 28 times the size of material in one gospel. So here we get all the delicious detail that beautifully completes our picture of Jesus and His times in the New Testament.

Now, case of JOHN THE BAPTIST. Where did he get executed? And don’t some wise guys say, at the neck. Yeah, we understand that. Where was the place where it happened geographically? Well, Josephus tells us it happened at Machaerus, which was the fortress palace of Herod the Great, at the northeastern corner of the Dead Sea.

Now, it’s important to know where things happen, right? And the Gospels don’t tell us where it happened. Josephus does. I’m not knocking the Gospels. I’m trying to point out they’re dealing in historical fact here, so much so that a non-Christian will report the same thing about what you find in the Gospel.

Hey, Josephus even, even, in fact I’m going to prove that all of you have used Josephus. You probably never heard of him before he came this evening. Joe who? People usually respond when I talk about Josephus. First century Jewish historian, born in the city of Jerusalem, four years after Jesus’ crucifixion. He is a box outside seat to the events reported in the Gospels.

If I were going to ask you who, what’s the name of the little gal, daughter of Herodias, who did her dance of how many veils or whatever that is, that caused the death of John the Baptist? All together now, what’s the name of the gal? Salome, you say correctly, that’s right. And now you’ll be shocked. You can’t find her name in the New Testament. All you get for the beheading of John the Baptist is daughter of Herodias. How do we know her name, Salome? Thank you, Josephus. See how beautifully the evidence coordinates?

WHO WAS THE FIRST BISHOP OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ANYWHERE ON EARTH? And don’t give me Simon Peter. He was not. The first bishop of the church, according to the Bible itself, was James the just of Jerusalem, Jesus’ half brother or cousin. We’re not going to get in that argument right now. But Eusebius, the earliest Christian Church historian, says it was James. And indeed, we wish the New Testament would finish off his history, but it doesn’t.

Guess who does? Josephus. He says that 29 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, James the brother of Jesus, who was called to Christ, was stoned to death by the Sanhedrin in the absence of the Roman governor, [Guyot and Godner he had] who tried to do exactly what Pontius Pilate tried to do, and that is get Jesus off the hook. But Albinus, his name was, he arrived too late. By that time, they’d done a kangaroo court execution on James, the half brother of Jesus, and here you have Good Friday 2. You have a perfect parallel to Good Friday.

Good Friday 1, you have Caiaphas, whose bones have just been discovered, who is the prosecutor. In 62 AD, 29 years later, you have Caiaphas’ brother-in-law, Ananus, who again saw that this stoning to death was kind of railroaded. But here you have, again, a perfect confirmation, a perfect mirror of what happened in Good Friday. And by the way, the second one was by a Jew who never converted to Christianity, so he’s not some sweet gospel writer trying to make the New Testament look good. This authenticates the evidence even more strongly.

And of course, in a famous passage, Antiquities book 18, section 63, Josephus gives us the longest reference to Jesus in first century sources outside of Christian literature. It’s in the middle of the reign of Pontius Pilate, and by the way, Josephus gives us about five major episodes in the life of Pontius Pilate which are not in the Bible. And they’re real, they happened, they explain why Pilate is acting so strangely on Good Friday, why he seems under pressure.

Here’s the answer Josephus gives us. This guy has not been mined enough for all the gold nuggets there inside. So anyway, right in the middle of Pilate’s administration, he gave this wonderful testimony to Jesus, almost in Christian language. In fact, it was too good to be true. Yeah. My colleagues in the ministry or in the rabbinate will know that everybody agrees that passage had been interpolated. Somebody thinking to do God a favor took a perfectly decent passage on Jesus and baptized it, made it too Christian for words.

Now the passage read something like this, about this time there was a wonderful man, if indeed one ought to call him only a man, he was the Messiah who rose from the dead. Now look, a good Jew would never have written that and stayed a good Jew. He would have been a Jewish Christian, like Paul of Tarsus. So we were told never to use that in the seminary.

So, wind the clock back to 1955. I just graduated from Concordia Seminary St. Louis. Young pup of a grad student, I was so ticked off at this largest reference that Jesus had been screwed up, that I wrote the world’s ranking authority on Flavius Josephus, a Jewish scholar in London named Paul Winter. And I asked Dr. Winter two questions. One, do you think that Josephus ever referred to Jesus? Because the critics were saying, throw the whole passage out. Second question, if you think he really referred to Jesus, how do you think the passage read?

Three weeks later, got an airmail letter. This does nothing for you people, either instant messaging, I know, I know, cut me some slack, 55 years ago. Okay, answer to the first question: Yes, he was quite sure that Josephus was referring to our Jesus. Second question, using his good textual critical skills, he prized away what he felt was a Christian addenda by some stupid monk in the second century or something, and gave me a version that I thought was very convincing.

Tragedy, Paul Winter died before he ever learned how close he had come, because the great good news is that another great Jewish scholar, Shlomo Pines of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered a manuscript tradition of Josephus that was not interpolated at that point. It reads almost word-for-word like what Paul Winter predicted it would read, if they ever got the accurate manuscript.

So in my translation of Josephus, that goes back in a text, and it’s only at the end of the chapter that we have the rather Sunday-schoolish laundered version that we can accept. And that is a very fair outside view of Jesus by someone who didn’t necessarily believe in Him, but he’s trying to write fair history.

Goes something like this: about this time there was a wise man called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations, the goyim, the Gentiles, the other nations, became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who would become his disciples did not abandon their discipleship. They reported that three days later he emerged from the tomb alive.

Now, notice he doesn’t say he rose from the dead. He said they reported that He rose from the dead. See, that’s the New Testament says the same thing. He’s trying to be fair. That’s something a good Jew could have written. In fact, he ends up by saying, accordingly, he could possibly have been the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders, and the tribe of the Christians so named after him has not disappeared to the present day.

So this is what he actually wrote, and so there’s brilliant outside testimony for like, duh, the historicity of Jesus, and there are five other major references, about twelve in all, but five other major references in secular literature about Jesus. So how somebody can come along and claim that Jesus was only a myth? I shall never know.

Just quickly to tick them off, Cornelius Tacitus, first century historian, he writes from the second century into the first, gives us a year-by-year account of what happened in ancient Rome. And for the year 64 he reports the great fire of Rome happened under Nero’s administration, and Nero’s throne is tottering because it happened on his watch. So to keep from being overthrown, Nero then has to search for other scapegoats, and he lands on the Christians. First time they show up in secular history.

He says, the Christians are named, careful scholar, he says, the Christians are named for a Christ who was crucified by one of our governors, Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was almost eradicated, but suddenly it gained new vigor again. You want an outside proof for the resurrection of Pentecost, there it is. Suddenly it gained new vigor, and even flowed as far away as Rome, that common cesspool into which garbage flows from all over the Mediterranean. So there’s a hostile source, doesn’t like Christianity, so much garbage, but that very fact alone proves that his concession that there was a Jesus crucified by Pilate and had followers is absolutely authentic historically, because it satisfies the great criterion of embarrassment.

I’ll get over these sidebars in a second, but listen, I got to give you a couple sidebars here on how does a professor of ancient history figure out if something claimed 2,000 years later really happened? The guy may be padding his story, may be telling a fairy tale. We know the ancients loved to pad their numbers, the historians, so how do we know that a fact claimed by an ancient historian is true?

There are 12 tests, but two of the biggest. First is the criterion of multiple attestation, meaning, are there a lot of different sources not copying from one another that agree that this happened? Then that’s a pretty firm, I mean, a lot of people say Julius Caesar assassinated, Ides of March, Julius Caesar, and it keeps going around, and yeah, probably happened.

The other one is the criterion of embarrassment. You’re arguing in a given direction, and yet you come across evidence that contradicts your thesis, but you got to admit it because everybody knows it’s true, but you build a wall around it trying to explain it away, right? Then 2,000 years later, that problematical counter evidence is absolutely authentic. See it? See, otherwise they wouldn’t have had bothered to defeat the argument.

So here in a hostile source, it would have been in their interest to shut up about Jesus entirely. Tacitus thinks there’s so much sewage, but he was an honest historian trying to figure out where this crazy sect started, okay? This is pretty overpowering evidence. Tacitus alone would prove the historicity of Jesus, but we have more. Suetonius, another famous Roman historian, writes Lives of the Twelve Caesars, gives quite a bedroom history of them, and so forth. It was a bestseller in the Middle Ages, by the way. It’s the way it usually goes.

But he says that in the reign of Claudius, there was a big demonstration riot in the Trans-Tiber area and Rome over the claims of Christ. Pliny the Younger, governor of Asia Minor, he was across from the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side of Istanbul. That’s where Bithynia is located, northwestern Turkey. He writes the Emperor Trajan, about the year 110, and he says, ‘Dear Emperor, what do I do about these Christians? They get up early Sunday morning and they sing hymns to Christ as if he were a god.’ You know, so much for Dan Brown’s claim this happened at the Council on Nicaea, 225 years later. Uh-uh, early on. What do I do about them? They’re against the law, aren’t they?

We got Trajan’s answer. He said, ‘Dear Pliny, yes, the Christians are against the law, and so if you can make a perfect case against them, I guess the law has got to be followed. But don’t go hunting them out, and don’t take any unsigned accusations which are inconsistent with the liberality of our age.’ See, there is a case where the Roman Empire is moderating. See, the persecutions were not one long horror story. They were on again, off again, on again, off again.

But again, Jesus, as God mentioned Christ, and so forth. The Jewish rabbinic traditions mentioned Jesus. They’re hostile also, but they admit there was a Yeshu Ha-Notzri, Jesus of Nazareth. They even give us the arrest notice published by the Sanhedrin for his arrest. Goes something like this: ‘WANTED YESHUA HA-NOTZRI. He shall be stoned, because he’s practiced sorcery, and he lured Israel into apostasy.’ Now again, you might, hip, quick, shoot, reaction might say, wait a minute, there’s no good. Jesus was crucified. He wasn’t stoned. And isn’t it terrible to call the Lord’s miracles sorcery? No. For those two reasons, it’s authentic.

Future tense is used in this Aramaic inscription. Future tense, haven’t arrested Jesus yet. No Jew would have ever written he’s going to be crucified. That’s a Roman punishment. If they’d have caught Jesus anywhere but Jerusalem, any time except for when the Romans were there, how would they have terminated him? Stoning. Penalty for blasphemy.

Rabbis have this wonderful account about how God’s creating angels, went across the world to create the world. Angel in charge of the forest, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, studded in all the trees. Angel in charge of the seas, poured out the oceans. Angel in charge of the rocks, however, hit some headwinds flying over the Holy Land. Had to drop them all there. It’s the weapon of choice. Anybody’s been at the Holy Land, is that right? Limestone outcroppings all over the place. It’s the rockiest spot on earth. So this is realistic.

And folks, did you notice the criterion of embarrassment showing up in that statement? Sometimes I’m asked, can we prove the miraculous? Well, obviously not to everyone’s satisfaction. This one comes close. He’s practiced sorcery. Now wait a minute. Wouldn’t it have been simpler for that hostile source not to mention that? Because sorcery and miracle are the same thing if you’re not talking cause. A miracle is something extraordinary or supernatural with help from above. Sorcery is the same thing with help from below. But in conceding that Jesus is doing something extraordinary or supernatural from a hostile source, this becomes very, very important testimony.

So not only do the rabbinical traditions mention him, the two references in Josephus, you cannot say both were interpolated, not at all. Second time he talks about Jesus, half-brother James being stoned to death. It doesn’t work to say that Jesus was not a historical figure. Just doesn’t work at all.

You know, even some of the big critics of Christianity will concede finally that, yeah, there was at least a historical Jesus. We don’t believe it anymore about him, but at least there was a historical Jesus.

And I think the critics who try to dismantle Jesus by using the approach he never even lived, are using a false shortcut. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work intellectually. In fact, anyone making that statement should probably be embarrassed for having made it.

Okay, those are the sources we use in trying to bring out some new information on Jesus, and I want to tell you those are the sources that I’m looking for: The surrounding evidence, the geographical evidence, the archaeological evidence, and the documents have come down to us. I do not get this additional information by direct revelation, okay? You know, if this were the Bible Belt, I’d have to make that very clear, because all your television evangelists and the tube and the Bible Belt, you know, are talking about the wonderful two-way conversations they have with God. You know, I told God and God told me, and I told God and God told me. I don’t like those claims.

I don’t mind a person saying I told God is called prayer, but God told me, better give that one a rest, huh? How subjective can you get? No, no. These are the sources we use.

In terms of real quickly now, to finish my presentation here, that’s so you have a little hope. Going real quickly through the life of Jesus, here are some of the new items that we can talk about. Again, remember the Nativity account begins with a very un-Christmassy figure. You know, not Mary or Joseph or baby Jesus or Magi or shepherds, Caesar Augustus.

How un-Christmassy a figure can you find? Has anyone ever gotten a Christmas card with the marble bust of Caesar Augustus on the front? You know, a little slogan inside, Caesar’s Greetings. Do not think it would fly, but this is Luke’s method. I’m using Luke’s method. Luke is the one, especially the author in the Bible, who’s always throwing an anchor out into the mainstream of Greco-Roman history to orient the people properly.

So Luke begins with somebody everybody knew. The great Augustus, one of the best emperors Rome ever had. Too bad he was the first one, and no more. But, well, there were a few more. But nevertheless, this is to orient everybody. Luke’s very concerned about the political background, and indeed Augustus did take censuses when he died, and he was put inside, his urn was put inside the mausoleum. Urn displaced in history, I guess you might say. Anyway, all right, I shouldn’t have said that. I won’t use it again, I promise.

We have him having arranged the 36 major items that he accomplished for the Empire. Point number eight, I took a census three times. Very, very important document there. I can show you a census document from neighboring Egypt. It’s at the University of Michigan Graduate Library. A guy registers himself at his own ancestral village for the house-by-house census of somebody during Hadrian’s time, which was about a hundred years after the first Christmas.

Neighboring Egypt that took a Roman census every 14 years. The neat thing about that document is it’s not a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s the original papyrus, in which a guy named Horace registers himself and his family. Boy, they love that name. I’m Horace, a cultivator of state land, 48 years old. I’m the son of Horace, who is the son of Horace, and I herewith register my wife, Tapachousas, daughter of Horace. Oh, I hope that’s a different Horace. And I register my firstborn son, Horace who is seven years old, no identification marks. And our second son, Horion, that means Horace-like. Yeah, one year old with no identification marks, and so on. That scar, he says he has, he’s 48 years old with a scar on his left eyebrow. See, that’s in place of a Social Security number, I guess, whatever it might be.

So we have the census documents. We have some archaeological evidence, believe it or not, and that is the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Let me explain why. Now, I used to be skeptical the first six times I was in Bethlehem. I was convinced, oh come on, we know Jesus was born here, but we don’t know where, and so forth.

Well, wait a minute, I did a study on the paper trail going back to that spot. For 19 centuries, the church knew that that was the cavern, or grotto, or cave where Jesus was born. Constantine’s engineers, when they’re building that first Church of the Nativity, interviewed Macarius, the Christian bishop of Jerusalem. Do you know where Jesus was born? Of course we do. Yeah, church picnics, or whatever, whatever’s like it, or Christmas parties, who knows.

Anyway, so he could point out where, and that’s why Constantine built at that site over the grotto that was hallowed since time immemorial. Now let’s go back a century more. Let’s go to the church father Origen, who tells us whenever he went to Bethlehem, even the pagans there were willing to tell anyone who would listen where the great Jesus was born, whom the Christians worship. Now we’re talking 220 AD. What I didn’t tell you is that Origen means son of Horus, but anyway, in Greek, yeah, okay.

Now let’s go back to Justin Martyr. We’re talking now within two or three generations of Jesus. He talks about that grotto where Jesus was born. Finally, I had to bury some of my doubts, because folks, the place where Jesus was born was a tourist magnet, a pilgrim magnet, this was their Eiffel Tower, this was their Tower of London, their Colosseum, their Acropolis, their Parthenon, this brought the tourists and their money. Why would they ever forget something like that? So maybe I’m getting senile as I’m getting older, but on the other hand, I’m starting to doubt some of my doubts about some of those sites. So even archaeology comes along.

In terms of Jesus’ youth, the synagogue at Nazareth where he gave his first public presentation has been discovered. He then changes his address to Capernaum, as you well know, that’s his main post office address during his Galilean ministry. Well, the synagogue where Jesus taught is a later, two or three centuries later structure, but it’s built on the foundation stones of the very synagogue where Jesus taught.

Just one block further south toward the Sea of Galilee, we have the House of Peter discovered, which is where Jesus hung his hat during his three years of ministry. Remember, he stayed at the House of Peter. The authentication there might take 15 minutes, I’m not going to take it. But nevertheless, wherever Constantine wanted to consecrate a sacred location, he built a double octagon around the place. He had a double octagon around the cave, he had a double octagon around the House of Peter in Capernaum. We have the notation of a pilgrim nun in 380 AD. Her name was Egeria. She writes, ‘Today we worshipped in the very House of Peter where Jesus lived, which the Emperor has turned into a Christian church. And indeed, the two-room house had the middle partition taken away and made a nave of a church out of it.’

And there are other clues there with graffiti on the walls, Jesus’ names of the disciples, Peter, Andrew, and so forth. Pretty exciting.

A boat has been discovered that Jesus could have used, yeah! They call it the Jesus boat, that’s too much, we can’t call it that, call it the Galilee boat. 1986, no rain had come for weeks on end, it was a dry spring in memory, and the waters of the Sea of Galilee starts dropping, dropping, dropping, and so big, wide, halo, a beach shows up for the first time. Two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar, you see how Gennesaret shows up today? The one of the four names, Sea of Galilee? Anyway, these two brothers discover a buried ship’s hull, and they were convinced it was a medieval Arab craft of some kind, until they called in the world’s ranking marine archaeologist, he flew in from Texas by the way, and he identified it as a first century AD or first century BC biblical horizon hull. How do you know? Mortise and tenon construction used only at that time. Then they did a C14 test on it, obviously, and by the way, carbon-14 is getting better and better, not worse and worse, don’t confuse carbon-14 with uranium, lead, or potassium-argon, no, no, this is pretty reliable stuff, and it dated back 20 centuries, exactly right.

So this craft alone gives us a neat commentary on Mark’s gospel when he talks about the stilling of the tempest. In Sunday school I was a terror, I didn’t mean to be, but I was always asking Sunday school teacher crazy questions. I was pleased, for example, at a Peter’s house, they opened the roof and let Jesus down for the paralytic healing, remember that one, you Christians, okay, but my question, I was pleased that Jesus could heal a cripple, but teacher, what did they do about the roof afterwards? That’s what I drew from the lesson, hey, roofs are hard enough to keep dry, what, oh Paul, you know, get lost.

Stilling of the tempest, I was pleased that Jesus could turn off the wind, but how could Jesus sleep through a storm in the first place? Paul, ask your father, and so forth. Hey, now we know, because that Galilee boat that was discovered, the only protected spot would be under the rear decking where the helmsman would stand to guide the craft, and the only protected spot is under that decking, out of the cold wind, wet, Jesus can take a snooze.

Now Mark says he’s also sleeping on the pillow, the cushion, what kind of a throwaway detail is that? And why does Mark say the? He implies it’s part of the boat’s rigging, he should have said a pillow, a cushion. No, you wouldn’t say a rudder, would you? You’d say the rudder. Okay, so Mark is trying to tell us it’s part of the boat’s rigging, now we know what it is.

That crazy boat could be either rowed or sailed, because there’s the remains of a mast block for the, what am I trying to say, the mast. But now a storm, so what are you going to do with no keel to hold the boat up? Well, there’s one way to do it, ballast sack. Put your ballast sack on the windward side, however far out you have to take it from the center of the hull to account for the wind, and that’ll peak it pretty stable. But a storm is coming up. What do you do with the ballast sack? You don’t want an eccentric boat going through the water. You stow it a center of midships out of your way. Jesus is sleeping on the ballast sack. That’s what that crazy pillow was and cushion. These are little fine details you can add to the biblical record when you tell the whole story.

When it comes to the Passion story, of course, there the needle goes off the scale. John gives us almost an hour-by-hour, day-by-day account what happened during Holy Week. And I’m glad he did, because Jesus didn’t take a move during Holy Week that hasn’t been doubted or denied by some critic somewhere. And yet every last detail in Holy Week rings out perfectly according to the canons of Roman jurisprudence. This is how a governor would have conducted a Roman trial at that time. The whole thing opens up when again you hear the politics behind the Good Friday episode. Really it’s the last aspect of the greatest story ever told that hasn’t been told yet, except in a wonderful historical novel called Pontius Pilate. The author’s name escapes me, although it is available on the table and back.

Okay, I wasn’t going to mention that commercial, but did anyway. Sorry about that. Okay, when you get Pilate’s story, you do get the whole biblical background for what’s happening on Good Friday. Why Pilate is acting defensively. Why he cannot cross the crowd when push comes to shove. And they play out the trump card about, if you release this man you’re not Caesar’s friend. Whoever speaks treason against, whoever calls to this man a king is speaking treason against Caesar.

The next line in John’s Gospel, Greek verb, starathato, let him be crucified. It was the end of the trial as far as Pilate was concerned. They played out the trump card. What is that trump card? Yeah, the untold story of Good Friday.

Resurrection! Boy, you know, here I am making Mel Gibson’s mistake. Remember Mel Gibson back when he had a reputation? Does the Passion of the Christ, you know, two and a half hours of agony and 30 seconds for the resurrection. You know, it’s a little unequal. I’ll tell you one thing though, make a long story short. We are able, categorically, to prove that the tomb was empty. Now if that doesn’t prove a resurrection, I’ll be the first to say that. But the two phenomenal things happened on Good Friday. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And again, I think we have 90% proof for that, or 85% or 80%. But there’s a little item there called faith, which God, the greatest psychiatrist of all, wants people to respond to because otherwise God is only a puppet master. He’s only a marionette controller, and then we have no free will to oppose his thinking or whatever, and you know again the God we have.

Well, we can prove the empty tomb. It’s one of the byproducts of the resurrection. Two chapters in one of my books prove that. And so generally, to wrap it all up, the real Jesus shows up pretty well in the Gospels, and I think in subsequent decades he’ll show up even better, with more information coming in of an archaeological nature.

All right, very good, you have a voice that carries very well. Did most of you hear it? He’s talking about Professor Karen King of Harvard Divinity School and the Jesus wife document, one of the Coptic Gospels, supposedly. Remember the Smithsonian got all excited about it. Take big ads, they’re gonna have a television special on it, trying to show that Jesus refers to his wife. It’s a fraud, total forgery. The Smithsonian show never happened. Why? Duh, because it was proven to be a fake, because they had some of the same mistakes copied in the Coptic inscription in this little fragment. They only had a fragment because you can’t really do much more in fraud by the way of adjusting a little fragment, see? And so it’s a fraud.

And that has happened before, believe me, including the famous Judas Gospel, a lot of spooky things about that one that are not hunky-dory at all. These people who commit archaeological fraud, and they do that also, I just hope there’s a special cell in the warm place for these people who try to defraud trustworthiness. But it’s a good question, I’m glad he asked it. It’s totally worthless, that claim.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]

PAUL MAIER: I don’t think they’ve caught the forgery yet. I would highly suspect the guy that brought that document to Karen King, I really would, simply because he kind of innocently says, I hear you people are into Gnostic Gospels, I don’t know if this thing has any worth, you might check it out. And of course she immediately bought his hook, line, and sinker, and no further word about it. Mums the word ever since, because it’s a fraud. Yep, you bet.

Okay, in the absence of all those with loud voices, please use microphone, or stay where you are for that matter.

MALE AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]

PAUL MAIER: Oh wait, no, I can hear you pretty well, but why can’t we get the electronics working? Oh they’re working on it, okay good. Okay, go on.

MALE AUDIENCE: [Inaudible] In Jesus’ replies, I tell you, if they keep quiet, this should be over. I was wondering if the verse about the promised land, I hope you don’t mind.

PAUL MAIER: Good, yeah, good question. I’ve used that already, that’s called misusing the Bible, because it was a case of the Palm Sunday entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the Pharisees rebuked him, look how they’re praising you, and he says listen, if these kids didn’t sing the stones themselves would cry out. That is the context, that’s what Jesus meant by it.

But let me tell you, a lot of Christians have used that for archaeology, because the stones do in that sense continue to cry out. Yes, yeah, nice point.

MALE AUDIENCE: Yeah, so we heard a lot about people misrepresenting Jesus, right? Like, you know, authors are high on mushrooms, or Jesus is a happy husband, or etc., right? Yeah. But for me, I can’t really think of a less likely story about Jesus than that, you know, he was born from a virgin, or, you know, son of a jealous God whom we haven’t really heard from since, raised from the dead, etc. So I guess my question is, you know, why do you think that this story, which seems so horribly unlikely, is true, whereas, you know, all of these other seemingly comparatively sensible stories aren’t? Thank you.

PAUL MAIER: Okay, it’s a very good question. We have extraordinary things that are happening, as claimed in the New Testament, and I’m not trying by any means say that I’ve proven all this. Of course I haven’t. Have you seen anybody resurrected from the dead lately? I haven’t, you know, and so the many things that happen, which again are beyond our normal experience, and so I can understand why somebody would ask a question like that. Sure it’s unlikely to have anybody born of a virgin. The whole incarnation is unlikely, the whole resurrection is unlikely, but maybe that is what proves it true.

If you had a story that was perfectly coherent in many ways, then you might say that was invented by humankind. But when you have a story which is larger than normal life, God does things differently, you might say, and so that objection alone, that you have extraordinary stuff happening here, an unlikely combination of elements, wouldn’t necessarily negate anything, because we’d expect that God to do something differently.

Now I admit, if there were no contextual evidence, and we’d only heard about this divine being being born of a virgin, and suffered, died, and rose again, in the clips of the creed alone, and there were no context, it would be difficult to believe. But when you have this whole thing preceded by a mess of messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, some of them absolutely uncanny. I just did a book on Advent, and I guess I was reminded again about these spectacular prophecies made by a Jewish prophet named Isaiah. This guy acts like he was at Golgotha, 700 years before Christ, he’s giving predictions about what’s going to happen to Jesus at Calvary. And other prophets like him. You don’t find any book written over a 1,300 year period where you have prophecy on the one end, fulfillment on the other. So that’s part of the context.

And then you have all this other context in which you can test out any of the political authorities that Jesus was involved with, and get part of their biography from Roman history, secular history. So you have something totally here that absolutely has magnificent confirmation on the outside. That’s why I love these outside sources. They are so neat, not only in affirming the scriptural thing, but in giving us neat additional detail. This is why I was so turned on by these accounts ever since Sunday school. Always wanted to know more.

Good, we got others standing up or going to the microphone? Good show.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Oh good, thank you. What would you say is, I’d be curious to hear what your reasons are.

PAUL MAIER: Proof of the empty tomb? Okay, I’ll give you the three-minute version, not the 20-minute version, okay? We have two forms of argumentation which we use. One would be an argument that the church has used for 20 centuries, and it’s still as good as new, and has never been contradicted. Goes like this. It’s the answer to the question, and here’s the question, where did Christianity first begin in terms of the organized proclamation that Jesus was the Messiah who rose from the dead? I want one spot on earth, and the answer is not the Holy Land, not Galilee, not Judea. One place on earth, the city of Jerusalem, is where the proclamation began that Jesus defeated death on Easter. Nowhere else.

Now the point is, in Jerusalem, least of all, could the organized proclamation of Jesus as the resurrected Lord ever have been promulgated if the moldering body of Jesus of Nazareth were still in the tomb available for view. There would have been no debate between the disciples and the Sanhedrin. They wouldn’t have been in and out of prison as they were in the early chapters of the book of Acts. That would have been the end of it. Caiaphas would have simply have said, you poor, deluded, I should say, fishermen, you believe in this dead criminal? Look, let me show you his body. He couldn’t do that, the body was not available.

Now I’m not telling you, saying that an empty tomb proves a resurrection, of course it does not. But if you reverse it, you can’t have a resurrection, at least a decent one, without the tomb being empty as its first symptom.

Now the second argument that I add to that traditional argument is the criterion of embarrassment. Remember that one? Okay, I searched out Jewish rabbinic traditions, all of them agree, the tomb was empty. They don’t say the tomb was empty, they say Jesus’ body was stolen. Same thing, you know, you can say either there’s money in the bank or it was robbed. Well that means the money’s not there anymore, okay, same deal. So because of those two, particularly, I challenged really any scholar to disprove my historical methodology on that one. It got interesting responses to that. New York Times Book Review gave me a rave review and so did Billy Graham. I couldn’t believe satisfying both Billy Graham and the New York Times Book Review.

Most interesting letter I got was from a Jewish scholar in Tel Aviv, [Dr. Galia Kornfeld]. He was writing a book on the Jewish Jesus rather than the Christian Christ, so we knew which way he would take it, but he came across that argument and he was convinced by it, didn’t become a Christian, no, but he had agreed the tomb was empty. And then I asked him, of course, how do you explain the empty tomb? And he responded by saying he thought that Jesus never really died. And in the cool of the tomb he revived, well back in some days we learned that was the old swoon theory, you know, the resurrection. And then I had to explain to Dr. Kornfeld the batting average for death by crucifixion was about a thousand among the Romans. They didn’t let guys escape by feigning death. Even in these human demolition derbies called gladiatorial combat, they had a little guy dressed like Pluto with a red-hot poker and he would touch all the bodies that were on the ground, and if they flinched, Pike went right to the heart. And in fact that’s kind of what happened on Good Friday. They didn’t have red-hot poker there, but they had somebody with a lance piercing Jesus’ pericardium and so on.

So then Dr. Kornfeld said, I understand that and I will indeed let you provide a response to my version of it. I couldn’t believe he would do this. He was as good as his word. You know, he gave this explanation for the empty tomb. I nailed him to the wall with it, in a nice way of course, it was his book. But he gave me the last word. See, this is Christian-Jewish cooperation of first water. So the evidence is really very strong.

MALE AUDIENCE: Is there any documentation that the tomb was sealed with a seal? Once they buried Jesus in this tomb, and wouldn’t there be Roman guards there? I’ve heard there were Roman guards that, you know, there were, when Jesus rose, there was a constant that they lost their lives. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

Paul, would you repeat the question?

PAUL MAIER: Of course I plan to. The question was about the Roman seal, Roman guards around the tomb, would there be any archaeological evidence for that? No, we don’t happen to have particular archaeological evidence there. But we do know there were rolling stone tombs, I can show you 15 of them, in and around Jerusalem, for example. One of these would have had a Roman seal on. Not that it was sealed, caulked, cemented, no. Like the seals you see in your electric meters, you know, little wires, then that was the seal that nobody’s tampered with your meter box. And so that’s the kind of seal they would have, probably even a string or something with a seal. And so that you wouldn’t expect something like that to survive.

Now I must, however, debate with you on the Roman guard around the tomb. We’re not sure it was a Roman guard. I think it was a Jewish temple guard. Why would I say that? Well it all depends on what Pontius Pilate said that evening when members of the Sanhedrin came and said, look, this deceiver claimed that he’s going to rise from the dead, and it was Saturday morning, yeah, this deceiver was going to rise from the dead, make sure the tomb is sealed. So guarded, I should say.

Now what does Pilate say? He says either, yeah, okay, take a guard, or you already have a guard. Make the tomb as safe as you can. Greek is usually very specific, so help me, both of those interpretations are decent translations of what Pilate said, and to this day we don’t know whether that was a Roman guard or Jewish temple guard. I personally think it was a Jewish temple guard, because where do these guys report? They don’t report to their commander, they don’t report to Pilate, they report to the Jewish temple authorities. There’s no way on God’s green earth they would have gone, a Roman force to a Jewish temple authority, no. So I think the evidence is pretty overpowering. It was a Jewish temple guard, and so does Tertullian and a few of the church fathers. But again, good question, I’m trying to knock your question, believe me. Yes?

MALE AUDIENCE: (Inaudible)

PAUL MAIER: How did Jesus get to Kashmir? I don’t know that they ever went to Kashmir. Oh yeah, there is a claimed grave of Jesus somewhere in Asia, I guess in Kashmir, India, yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, halo, I’m not going to grant any authenticity to that one at all. They do try to get Jesus traveling all over the world as a kid. Everybody wants a piece of the action. Christians are no exception. Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Ames, or whatever, you know, you all want to have something to do with the biblical come. Very interesting itch, isn’t it? Fun questions, any others?

MALE AUDIENCE: Yeah, so I’d like to thank you for coming out. And so in dialoguing with some of my friends about these issues, and some more on the radical fringe of these ideas, would question the underlying assumption that we have the text of the New Testament without interpolation. Or they would say we have a gap between the writings of the documents, and when we have the manuscripts. Even though they would grant yes, this is the best evidence out of any work in antiquity, they would still be so skeptical as to say there’s a gap there. And so how do you think the process of textual criticism comes in to that?

PAUL MAIER: Okay, very good question. You have to remember that the critics of the Bible will first of all try to deny the evidence as plainly presented. But if they can’t do that, then they will criticize the manuscript transmission, saying that you have a late manuscript here, and therefore it’s not reliable. Fact is, we have late manuscripts for all the characters from antiquity. So it’s not really much of an argument.

But again, you have to remember that Islam and Mormonism both claim that our biblical documents have been somehow miscopied. And they use the illustration, of course, of the children’s game called telephone. I whisper a secret in your ear, it goes down, and so forth, you wouldn’t have 800, but in a group of at least 10 or 12, you’d have a model, then, of biblical transmission. That argument was all but destroyed by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Why? Two complete scrolls of the prophet Isaiah found at Qumran. The earliest scroll we had of Isaiah before that was from 1006 AD. Now these scrolls were two hundred years old in Jesus’ day. Do you see a twelve hundred year gap here? Yeah. The Qumran scrolls read 99.3% the same way as they do today, and as they did 2,000 years ago. Generally these are very carefully transmitted. Now to be sure, any pastor will show you a Greek New Testament where the bottom of the page is 20% critical apparatus, showing how the various documents may disagree in tiny spellings, or punctuation, and then they’ll make a big fuss about it.

Bart Ehrman, a case in point, University of North Carolina, has made a whole cottage industry out of those terrible variations. Well, the variations aren’t terrible. There are really minor differences in spelling, sometimes a little bit. Not one variation of anything in the Old or New Testament has in any way changed any meaning or any doctrinal point in Judaism or Christianity. So really, that argument fails.

No more questions?

MALE AUDIENCE: One question. You said the 90% correspondent with Josephus. I feel like the other 10% might be kind of important. Just one quick question. The events around Jesus’ death are listed in the Bible, like the massive earthquake and eclipse, and saints rising from the dead and walking around Jerusalem. I feel like, I mean I’ve heard this before, it seems like those are the sort of things that would definitely be recorded by a historian of that caliber. And the fact that they weren’t, I’m just curious, what would you say about it? Just trying to bring up a small point.

PAUL MAIER: You know, I just wish I had stopped with the previous question. You have asked the most difficult question you can ask of anybody interested in the Bible. I find that passage in Matthew very, very difficult, I must say. And I’ll be honest, I do not have a good answer for that one. I really don’t. Not that I necessarily have good answers anyway. What I’m trying to say is that one especially is quite difficult. It really is. I’ll be honest about it. But the other details, like the darkness, and the earthquake, and that kind of stuff, and it’s in that context, remember? Yeah, that we can show evidence for.

Phlegon, P-H-L-E-G-O-N, is a Greek author of wonders, like Ripley. Believe it or not, by Ripley, again, your parents will know all about that, most of what Ripley reported is true. You know, biggest tomato in the world ever grown in Iowa or something like that, you know.

Well, Phlegon, his name was, was also a Ripley 2,000 years ago, and he reported these strange things that had happened. You know what he said? He said, in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad, there was a great darkness at noon, so much so that at Nicaea, in Asia Minor, you could see stars in the daytime, and an earthquake took place which demolished many of the buildings in Nicaea. He’s writing only about what he experienced.

Now, what is the fourth month of the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad? Just for the heck of it, I figured it out. It is April of A.D. 33. That is the date for Good Friday, and that’s not how I arrived at that date. Believe me, it was only after we had the date in concrete that suddenly I realized, hold it, Phlegon’s talking about the same thing.

And just two months ago, they announced also in Jordan River excavations that the strata from 33 A.D. do show an earthquake disruption. So science is coming through for us in many ways. But again, as I realize, I have not answered your searching question. That’s right. But again, I see Dr. Don here ready to sweep me off the platform. He’s the hero. He’s shutting me up. So let’s hear it for Don.

For Further Reading:

(Through The Bible) – Book of Isaiah (Pt.2): Zac Poonen (Transcript)

Who was Jesus, Really? Searching for the Historical Jesus: William Lane Craig (Transcript)

The Historical Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection That Even Skeptics Believe: Gary Habermas (Transcript)

Days of Noah & Lot: Derek Prince (Transcript)

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