Archaeology and the New Testament

By Frederick Fyvie Bruce

Church Book Room Press Ltd., 1947

In 1920 a miscellaneous lot of Egyptian papyri was bought for the Rylands Library in Manchester. About fifteen years later, while some of these were being examined by an Oxford scholar, Mr. C. H. Roberts, one tiny scrap of papyrus attracted his attention. It proved to be a fragment of a very early Greek copy of St. John’s Gospel. One side of it contained John xviii. 31-33, and the other side contained verses 37 and 38 of the same chapter. This proved that the fragment was part of a copy of the Gospel written in ordinary book-form (or codex-form, to use the technical term) and not in the form of a roll. But more than that: when expert papyrologists examined the fragment to determine its age, they concluded from the style of writing and other features that it must have been written in the first half of the second century A.D., at a time (to quote the Rylands Librarian, Dr. H. Guppy) “when the ink of the original autograph can hardly have been dry. This must be regarded as the earliest fragment by at least fifty years of the New Testament.” As the Fourth Gospel was traditionally written down in Ephesus at John’s dictation about A.D. 100, this fragment shows that it was known in Egypt in a very short time after it was first produced.

This illustrates the chief way in which archaeological research illuminates the New Testament. New Testament archaeology is less picturesque than Old Testament archaeology; it is not so much concerned with the excavating of ancient cities and the disinterring of potentates who have lain for millennia in their graves; but its importance for illustrating and confirming the Biblical record is just as great.

Papyrus was a plant whose inner bark was dried in strips, which were then gummed together so as to form conveniently-sized sheets and rolls of writing material. People wrote on it with reed-pens, and the ink they used was compounded of charcoal, gum and water. Papyrus, though very convenient as a writing-material, was not at all durable; when exposed to damp it rotted quickly. So, while it was in common use in many parts of the ancient world, papyrus documents have survived only in such environments as the dry sand of Egypt and the volcanic ash of Herculaneum. Papyrus documents have been discovered belonging to all ages of ancient Egyptian history, but we are at present interested in those which belong to the later centuries B.C. and the earlier centuries A.D., when there was a large Greek-speaking population in Alexandria and other parts of Lower Egypt. This Greek-speaking population was literate in all its strata. The common people wrote letters and kept the ordinary commercial accounts of daily life on pieces of papyrus; and for odd jottings some of them found an even handier writing medium in broken pieces of unglazed pottery―ostraca, as we call them.

These scraps of papyrus and pieces of pottery soon found their way to the rubbish-dumps, where they lay undisturbed for centuries. It was towards the end of the last century that scholars began to take an interest in them. Unlike the papyri containing literary texts, of which many were also found, the papyri which threw most light on the New Testament were those written by ordinary people in their everyday vernacular. For it was realized before long that this everyday vernacular presented remarkable similarities to the kind of Greek in which much of the New Testament was written. Scholars had long recognized that the Greek of the New Testament was different in several respects from the Greek in which the great classical authors had written, but they were not sure how to account for the difference. One German scholar in 1863 referred to New Testament Greek as “a language of the Holy Ghost”, specially produced for the purpose of recording the New Testament revelation. In England, Bishop Lightfoot saw what New Testament Greek really was. In 1863 he declared his belief “that if we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other, without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the understanding of the New Testament.” His words were prophetic. For when the attention of scholars was turned a few decades later to the vernacular papyri, they discovered that the “language of the Holy Ghost” was the language of the common people.

The pioneer in comparing the language of the New Testament with that of the vernacular papyri was a German scholar, Adolf Deissmann. The study was taken up by others, among whom we may name two British scholars, J. H. Moulton and George Milligan, who between them produced a monumental work, The Vocabulary of the New Testament illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-literary Sources (completed in 1930), in which the results of this comparative study are made accessible to the student.

There was at first a quite natural tendency to go too far in assuming that the language of the New Testament could be entirely explained in terms of the new discoveries. The New Testament idiom is indeed vernacular when it deals with mundane affairs, although much of it (as we might expect) has a Semitic flavour not found in the Egyptian papyri. But there is also a large literary element in the New Testament for which we must seek parallels in the later Greek writers;¹ and in order to understand what we may call the theological vocabulary of the New Testament we cannot dispense with the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek made in Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C.

Another, and very different, form of documentary evidence is that of inscriptions cut in the stonework of public buildings, monuments, and the like. Quite a number of these throw light on the New Testament narrative. At the Greek city of Delphi, which was included, in the Roman province of Achaia, an inscription was discovered some years ago containing a proclamation by the Roman Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), which enabled us to fix definitely the time at which Gallio was proconsul of the province. His period of office seems to have been the year beginning in July, A.D. 51. As he was proconsul of Achaia during Paul’s stay in Corinth (Acts xviii. 12), this gives us a fixed point from which we can determine other dates in the lifetime of Paul, both backwards and forwards.

In Acts xvii. 6 we are told that when Paul was at Thessalonica, his opponents laid information against him and his friends before. “the rulers of the city.” The literal rendering of the title used by Luke for these officials is politarchs. This word is not found in any classical author, but it is found in some nineteen inscriptions ranging between the second century B.C. and the third century A.D. In the majority of these inscriptions the word Politarch is used of magistrates in Macedonian cities, and in five of them Thessalonica is the city referred to. Thessalonica had five or six politarchs―five at the beginning of the first century A.D., and six in the middle of the second century.

It has often been pointed out that Luke is particularly careful to give the officials who figure in his narrative their proper titles, and this is one out of many such examples. Another has reference to the title of the leading citizen of Malta in Roman times, who is mentioned in Acts xxviii. 7 as Publius, “the chief man of the island,” or, more literally, the first man of the island. Inscriptions both in Greek and in Latin have been found which show that “first man” (Gk. prōtos, Lat. primus) was actually his technical title.

The story of the riot in Ephesus in Acts xix. represents the ecclesia or citizen-body of that town as meeting in the theatre. That it did in fact meet there is shown by an inscription in Greek and Latin found in the theatre which records that a Roman official, Vibius Salutaris, presented a silver image of Artemis (“Diana” of the English Bible) and other statues “to be set up in the theatre during a full session of the ecclesia.” The mention of the silver image of Artemis reminds us of the part played in the riot by Demetrius the silversmith, “who made silver shrines for Diana” (Acts xix. 24). The ruins of the Ephesian theatre itself were excavated some years ago, and it is estimated that the theatre must have had room for 25,000 people. It was, of course, an open-air theatre, like all theatres in Greek and Roman lands.

In Acts xiv. 11 we read that, when Paul and Barnabas visited Lystra in Asia Minor in the course of their first missionary journey and healed a lame man, the people of the town shouted in their native Lycaonian tongue, “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.” Then they proceeded to identify the two visitors with two deities, calling Barnabas Zeus (whom the Romans called Jupiter) and Paul Hermes (the Roman Mercury), “because he was the chief speaker.” But why these two gods in particular? Because these two gods had a traditional association with that part of Asia Minor. The Roman poet Ovid tells a legend of how they once came to that district incognito, and found no hospitality except in the hut of an aged and impoverished couple, Philemon and Baucis. More precise evidence, however, came to light in 1910, when Professor W.

M. Calder found near Lystra an inscription recording the dedication to Zeus of a statue of Hermes along with a sundial by men with Lycaonian names. Sixteen years later Professor Calder, along with Professor W. H. Buckler, found in the same vicinity a stone altar dedicated to the to the Emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia, the widow of Augustus, and that fixes the date of the dedication between A.D. 14 (when Tiberius became Emperor) and A.D. 29 (when Livia died). Luke’s reference to “Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene” in A.D. 27 is, therefore, entirely correct.

The other matter where Luke’s accuracy has been called in question is more important. It is his statement, with regard to the census made at the time of the birth of Christ, that “this enrolment (A.V. taxing) was first mane when Quirinius (A.V. Cyrenius) was governor of Syria “ (Luke ii. 2). Now we know that Quirinius became governor of Syria in A.D. 6 and held a census then which led to a rebellion in Palestine. This is the “taxing” referred to in Acts v. 37; but it took place much later than the birth of Christ, which must be dated not later than 4 B.C., the date of the death of Herod the Great (Matt. ii. 1; Luke i. 5). What then? Has Luke confounded two separate enrolments? So it has been widely thought. But the combined evidence of inscriptions found in Italy and Syria shows conclusively that Quirinius was Roman governor of Syria twice,

A.D. 6 being the second-time, that his earlier governorship of Syria was given him in order that he might carry on a war against the Homanadenses, a mountain tribe of Asia Minor, and that this war must be dated between 10 and 7 B.C. Tertullian (about A.D. 200) tells us that Christ was born when the governor of Syria was Sentius Saturninus, i.e. between 8 and 6 B.C. The fact is, that though Saturninus was the regular governor, Quirinius appears to have been appointed as an extraordinary governor (or legatus Pro Praetore, to use the Latin term) for a special military purpose. Luke does not say that Quirinius organized the census on this earlier occasion, but simply that it took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria.

Luke’s description of the manner in which the census was carried out, by every one going to his own city, is illustrated by Deissmann from an edict of A.D. 104, in which Vibius Maximus, Roman Prefect of Egypt, gives notice: “The enrolment by household being at hand, it is necessary to notify all who for any cause whatsoever are outside their nomes [administrative divisions of Egypt] to return to their domestic hearths, that they may also perform the customary dispensation of enrolment and continue steadfastly in the husbandry that belongs to them.”

Luke, however, is not the only New Testament writer to be illustrated by inscriptions. Paul, writing his Epistle to the Romans from Corinth about the beginning of A.D. 57, sends greetings to Rome from some of his companions, and adds, “Erastus the chamberlain of the city (i.e. the City Treasurer) saluteth you” (Rom. xvi. 23). In the course of excavations in Corinth in 1929, Professor T. L. Shear uncovered a pavement bearing the inscription: “Erastus, procurator and aedile, laid this pavement at his own expense.” The evidence indicates that this pavement existed in the first century A.D. and makes it likely that this Erastus was none other than Paul’s friend.

Another inscription at Corinth mentions the market-place or “shambles” referred to by Paul in 1 Corinthians x. 25 (Gk. makellon). In Corinth, too, the judgement-seat of Gallio (Acts xviii. 12) is now pointed out, but its identification is not so certain.

The identification of “sacred sites” is a further branch of New Testament archaeology, and a fascinating one at that. But, while we can usually be sure of the general location of the places where our Lord and His Apostles lived and worked, it is rarely possible to fix the scenes of some of the great events of New Testament times within a matter of square yards. Nazareth we know, and Capernaum we know, but where in either city was the house where our Lord stayed? The Sea of Galilee is still there, and the site of the Capernaum harbour is now known, for some of the stones of the harbour-work were uncovered several years ago when eucalyptus trees were being planted on the spot to counteract the malarial effects of the marshy land thereabout. The geographical features of the Holy Land are still what they were in Biblical times, and from them one can frequently picture “what must have been,” to quote the title of a chapter in Dr. W. M. Christie’s fascinating book, Palestine Calling. Sychar’s well, where Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman about the living water, is still there, though a chapel has been built over it; and the neighbouring village of Askar still preserves the name of Sychar.

But when we come to buildings and more exact identification of sacred spots, we are more often at a loss. Tradition goes far back in many cases, but not far enough. The cave in Bethlehem which is now pointed out as the stable where Jesus was born was so pointed out in the time of Justin Martyr, who was born in Samaria about A.D. 100. It may be the place, but we cannot be sure. Even more problematical are the sacred sites in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was twice destroyed by Roman armies after the time of Christ, once in A.D. 70 and again in 135. The second destruction brought about an almost complete breach in the Christian tradition of Jerusalem. There was no continuity between the Jewish-Christian Church of Jerusalem before A.D. 135 and the Gentile-Christian Church of Aelia Capitolina (as the city was re-named) after that date. So, what with the destructions and this lack of continuity, there was little chance of true traditions of sacred sites in the city being handed down from one Christian generation to another.

The Temple site, of course, is readily identifiable, being now occupied by the sacred Moslem precinct of the Haram-esh-Sherif, where the primitive altar-rock may still be seen cropping out. The Mount of Olives is still where it was, with the Garden of Gethsemane at its foot. The Pool of Siloam still stands south of the Temple area as it did when our Lord sent the blind man to wash there (John ix. 11), and the Pool of Bethesda (John v. 2) can be identified with a fair measure of certainty in the north-east area of Old Jerusalem (the area called Bezetha in the first century A.D.), where it was discovered as a result of excavations near the Church of St. Anne in 1888. 

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