What archaeological evidence is there for Jesus & the historicity of the Gospels?-Podcast Episode 94

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Welcome to the

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GodQuestions Podcast. We like to spotlight or highlight different ministries or different individuals who are doing something that we find interesting, and that's definitely the case in today's episode.

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I'd like to introduce you all to Titus Kennedy. He is the author of Excavating the

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Evidence for Jesus, a fascinating book, especially if you're at all interested in biblical archaeology.

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So Titus, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So Titus, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your background, about who you are, what you do and why you do it?

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Sure. Well, I'm a professional archaeologist. That's what I spend most of my time doing in various forms.

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And that could be excavating, research, writing articles, books, teaching. And I kind of got into archaeology because I had always enjoyed and had been interested in history, even in elementary school.

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And I got introduced into archaeology itself when one of my teachers gave me a book on the excavation of Troy.

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And I then began to start reading books about the archaeology of the

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Bible and noticed how there were so many discoveries that connected to the

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Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. Some of it helped us understand the text better.

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And other times it demonstrated the historical accuracy of the Bible. And eventually, end of high school,

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I decided I wanted to try to study archaeology and see if that would be a viable career path for me.

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So I ended up doing my bachelor's at Biola University. And then

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I did a master's in Near Eastern Archaeology at University of Toronto, followed by another master's and a doctorate in Biblical Archaeology at University of South Africa.

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During that time, I volunteered on various excavations and then got hired as a staff member.

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And now I'm directing some of my own archaeological excavations and projects. That's amazing.

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So what specifically led you to write Excavating the Evidence for Jesus? So I had ideas for a few different books and some of them focused on particular time periods.

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Other were more general issues. My first book was a focus on artifacts or objects throughout all the different time periods of the

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Bible. And then another one that I'm working on right now is sites, locations connected to all different regions and periods of the

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Bible. But I also really wanted to write a book on the archaeology of Jesus because Jesus is the focal point of the

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Bible and Christianity, the most important person in history, really the most famous person in history, no matter who you are or where you're from.

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And so I thought that was something that I should really try to work on and get out there, especially since I thought it was something that we could benefit from in an updated version of what have been the more recent finds in archaeology or what are some of the questions that may have been figured out that 20, 30 years ago, people were unsure of.

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And so I came at it from a perspective of an archaeologist rather than a literary scholar, a

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New Testament scholar. And I'm hoping that I can give some different insights and some updated material for people.

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One thing that I found most interesting about your book is how it how archaeology argues for the historicity of the

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Gospels and obviously the rest of the Bible as well. But your book focuses mostly on the

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Gospels. So why do you think is important for us to have confidence in the historicity of the

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Gospel accounts of Jesus in his life? Well, if we don't have confidence that the

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Gospels themselves are giving us accurate information about historical matters, then why would we rely on it for accurate information about theological or spiritual matters?

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I think that those two tie together. If a writing, a work, if you will, a biblical book is going to be considered reliable, then it should be reliable no matter what it's talking about, whether it's geography or historical characters or theology.

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And so archaeology can help us to understand a component of that. And then we can say, well, from this perspective, at least the text is reliable.

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For sure. What place does evidence have in the life of believers?

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You run across a lot of believers that are just like, all we need is faith. We don't need to be able to prove everything.

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So what's the right balance there between faith and trust and ultimately things we can't prove?

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For example, Hebrews 11 talks about even the existence of God cannot be explicitly proven.

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So the balance between faith and evidence and trust me, I am on your team. I love evidence.

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I love research. I love some of the things you bring out in your book that give credence to the historicity of the gospel accounts.

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But in your experience, what is the right balance for us to have there as followers of Christ? Well, we should have reasons for what we believe.

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First, Peter 315 is often cited or quoted as a verse that gives this idea.

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So we need to know why we believe these things. It's not just nonsense or irrational blind faith.

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That's one of the reasons why we have all of these stories and all this information in the

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Bible is it's showing that God is actually working through history in reality.

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It's not just a set of random spiritual commands or laws.

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And if it is true, if this is the truth in the Bible, then we should be able to see corroborating testimony, evidence that demonstrates that it's true.

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You know, we don't need to or we can't prove every little thing. But where we see interplay between the historical record and the

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Bible, we should see agreement there if the Bible is true. And so I think it's important that people recognize that they understand that and that they know some of these things, that they have some reasons for what they believe.

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Otherwise, it's no different than any other religion that just says, believe this spiritual tenant, follow the spiritual law.

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One of the things I found most interesting about your book was different things that you've discovered over the years or even things that were meaningful to you in archaeology in your study of the

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Bible, helping you to understand the Bible better. Would you give us a couple of those things that archaeology has helped ordinary

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Christians, even theologians, to understand the Bible better? Well, a few examples that I can think of that I didn't necessarily have anything to do with, but one comes from the

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Old Testament, and that is a passage which talks about this this odd word that's only found once,

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Pym. And originally, translators had no idea what this was.

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They didn't have any other sources which talked about this word. And so they just guessed on the translation.

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It's found in the book of Samuel. And then excavations at the site of Gezer uncovered this stone weight with the inscription

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Pym on it, and they weighed it and they found it was two thirds of a shekel in weight.

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And then later, other Pym weights had been discovered. And so we know that this was a specific type of weight that was used in the judges period, in the monarchy, early monarchy period.

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But it went out of use later. And that's why it doesn't appear in other texts, later biblical texts or even beyond that.

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And so the information was lost. And here's a case where archaeology has helped to allow us to translate the text correctly.

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Yeah. So I'm shifting gears a little bit, sort of giving evidence when we're arguing for the

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Christian faith. What are some archaeological discoveries that you think are tremendous evidences that we can use to maybe convince someone who's skeptical or convince someone who's doubting?

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How can archaeology help us to make a better case for the validity of the

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Christian faith? In terms of the gospels specifically, we can look at really a conglomeration of the evidence.

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Almost all of the locations that are mentioned in the gospels have been found and many of the cities and towns have been excavated.

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And what's found in those excavations agrees with the text and the gospels.

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You know, things like Capernaum, for example, where there was a first century synagogue and then

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Peter's house, which is located very nearby, or Nazareth, that it was a town occupied in the first century by Jews who observed the

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Mosaic law, or that Bethlehem was occupied in the first century.

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The pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, that it had five stoas. And that explains, we're able to explain what it looked like because John, he mentions that but he doesn't say what the shape is or the pool of Siloam.

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There's just so many locations and not just towns or cities, but even specific buildings or structures like I've been mentioning.

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So let me give our audience a good example of this. And that over the years, I think it was probably maybe about 10 years ago, we first received this question.

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It's like, so why should I believe the Bible when, according to short history,

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Nazareth wasn't even inhabited during the time of Jesus? And what would you say in response to that claim?

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Well, that we've now found that Nazareth definitely was inhabited at the time of Jesus.

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They found much first century pottery there, stone carved vessels which were used in ritual purification in Judaism.

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They found houses and tombs also from the first century. So we definitely know that the historical context, many of the claims of the

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Gospels are accurate. They've been verified through archaeology. And, you know, we could go into specific sections of the

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Gospels, too, and see how much archaeological information lines up with those.

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Like the trial of Jesus, for example, has an immense amount of corroboration through archaeology.

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So go and give us a couple more of these. I don't want you to completely spoil the book, but just kind of let our appetites a little bit more of the sort of things that people are going to discover if they or learn about, at least if they were to purchase your book.

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So in the trial of Jesus, we have a few different characters and locations that are presented with characters.

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We have Annas, we have Caiaphas, we have Pontius Pilate, we have

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Jesus, we could even say Herod Antipas, although he plays very minor role in that.

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And and also Peter, of course, appears. And then the locations that we have are places like the house of the high priest.

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And then we have the meeting place of the Sanhedrin, and then we have the praetorium.

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So all all of those places and all of those people are corroborated by archaeology.

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We have ancient historical texts, most notably Josephus, who mentions these various people.

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But then we have the tomb of Annas, which has been discovered, a high priestly house of the first century in Jerusalem, which may have been the same one that was occupied by Annas and Caiaphas.

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We have the ossuary or burial box of Caiaphas with his name inscribed upon it, as well as one of his granddaughter, which states that their family was of the priestly line of Ma Uzziah, mentioned way back in the

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Book of Chronicles. And then we have some remains of the the capitals, the column capitals from the place where the

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Sanhedrin met, which was about on the southeastern side of the Temple Mount. And then we have the praetorium of Pilate, which has been partially excavated.

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It was located in the former palace of Herod the Great. We've got an inscription of Pilate that was found at Caesarea.

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We have a ring with Pilate's name on it that was found at Herodium. We have the

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James ossuary, which has Jesus's name inscribed on it, which has been shown to be an ancient inscription, not a forgery.

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So we just have so much evidence corroborating even this one little day in the life of Jesus, all these characters, all these places.

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So let me ask you a question that's something that's fascinated me. I've been to Israel on two different occasions and both were fantastic trips.

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But on one of them, I saw two who definitely knew more about history of Jerusalem archaeology than I do, arguing about whether what's commonly called the

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Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock is, is that actually where the Solomon and Herod's Temple were located?

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Or was it actually some other spot somewhere in the city? Sure, you're very familiar with this, but how can archaeology help us even discern an issue like that?

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Well, there's no structure in the city of David that we could identify with anything relating to the foundations of the temple.

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I mean, the Temple Mount is called that because that's where the temple was located.

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The dimensions for the temple or for the whole temple complex are actually given in Josephus and they wouldn't even fit in the city of David.

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You also don't build your holy places on lower ground. You build them on higher ground.

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And that's Mount Moriah up there. That's why it was up there. We could look at a variety of different things, but no, there's no professional archaeologist that thinks that the temple was located in the city of David and not on the

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Temple Mount. Well, thank you for, I mean, that's what I believe, but it's just kind of weird when you hear what every other person

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I've ever said said it was that this is where Zerubbabel and later Herod's Temple was and Solomon's Temple before that.

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And now you're saying it was in this location and this is actually the complex of the

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Romans up there. But no, so archaeology is super handy and even helping us to settle some of these debates when, again, 2000 years ago, a lot can change in geography and so forth, but not to the point that we can deny this discoveries of archaeologists.

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Right. And there are always various theories floating around out there about all sorts of different time periods in biblical history.

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So it's good to look into things and double check.

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And, you know, I'm not against new ideas or hypotheses, but oftentimes we have the same kind of fringe theories that are floating around out there for many, many years.

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And they've been refuted on several different levels by a variety of scholars.

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And they just persist because people aren't thinking critically about certain things.

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Sure. So let me ask you, for you personally, whether it's something that you've discovered or something that someone else has discovered in biblical archaeology, what are some of the most meaningful archaeological discoveries for you personally?

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If we're talking about the entire Bible, then I could pick a few out.

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So one that really changed. Drastically, the views in modern scholarship was the

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Tell Dan Stele. So in the 80s and early 90s, many, many archaeologists and ancient historians and even biblical scholars were starting to say or agree that David was a mythological king because we had no evidence from ancient times that he existed.

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And then in 1993, a fragment of this Aramean victory stele was discovered at the site of Dan in northern

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Israel. And it talked about these different Israelite kings that the Arameans had supposedly defeated.

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And it said that they were from the house of David, which is a phrase that's also found multiple times in the

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Old Testament. So finally, we had this ninth century B .C. inscription that is mentioning

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David as the king and founder of the Israelite dynasty. And that completely changed almost overnight the views of many archaeologists and historians.

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So that would be a big one, I would say, for the Old Testament. And then as far as the

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New Testament, we've got so many. One of my favorites is pretty controversial still just because it was involved in this antiquities trial, and that's the

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James Ossuary. And I find that so interesting because it's got the names James, Joseph and Jesus on it.

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But if I were to pick another one, I would probably say the Nazareth inscription is one of my favorites, because what we have here is essentially the official

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Roman reaction, the story of the resurrection of Jesus and and their idea that the disciples must have gotten together and stolen the body of Jesus from the tomb and then spread this.

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And it went around the empire like wildfire. And they wanted to stop it and make sure nothing else like that ever happened again.

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Well, that's that's that's fascinating. It's so interesting. And again, many more of these in your book,

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Excavating the Evidence for Jesus, highly recommended. It will include links to where you can learn more about Titus and his work and the books he's written in the show notes at podcast .gotquestions

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.org and also at the description field on YouTube when this video goes live.

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So Titus, in closing, why should Christians be interested in archaeology and archaeological discoveries?

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I would say two main reasons for that. So, first of all, a discipline like archaeology can reveal new information from the past.

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So it can help us to better understand the historical context of the Bible, whether that's the

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Old Testament or the New Testament. And in so doing, then, we can get a fuller picture of what the author was writing and what the author's intent was in those books, and even to more accurately translate and interpret those passages.

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So that's that's one item. The second would be that archaeology provides evidence that demonstrates the reliability of the scriptures.

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And this is something for Christians, which just can help them to continue to have confidence in their faith and in the

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Bible, but it can also be used in discussions with seekers or skeptics when they ask questions like, why would

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I believe what the gospel say? Why would I believe what the Bible says about the

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Exodus or about King David or Solomon? Is there any evidence?

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Because I want to know that there is some evidence that this is actually correct before I'm going to consider believing the spiritual and theological claims in the

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Bible. Absolutely. So again, this has been the Got Questions podcast with Dr.

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Titus Kennedy. Titus, thank you again for coming on the show and sharing some tidbits from your book with us.

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Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. This has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions?