How do we know the Bible is not a myth (part 3)

Archaeology is objective. If we can test parts of the Bible objectively with archaeology and it holds up, it's not a far reach to trust the bits we don't yet have evidence for, like miracles and such.

The town of Bethsaida was not an Old Testament town. Before there was a town called Geshur. This town was from the time of David, and was lost until the last 10-15 years. The entrance had been deliberately burned and destroyed in 732BC by the Assyrians. But that dates it to be more recent than the time of David. So is the discovery correct?

Geshur is the town from which the mother of Absalom (David's wife) was from. This time of David is below the current ruins and so is inaccessible without destroying the current city ruins.

Geshur is unique in that there are no religious sites i.e. churches, synagogues, mosques. This makes it easier to dig there.

There are some gospels that were found in the 40s called the gnostic gospels that were written in the 2nd & 3rd century. We can discount them by testing what they say about the times and places of Jesus based on the physical evidence we have. Things like place names. The official gospels we have contain hundreds of references to place names, whereas these later ones do not. The official gospels have about 4.5 place names per 1000 words, but the others seem to have less than 0.5.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is a hard place to conduct archaeology. There are various pressures from politics, religion, and civil groups. But there is a lot there from the time of Jesus.

20 or so years ago the pool of Siloam where Jesus did miracles was surprisingly small comparing it to the Biblical accounts. The pool originally found was actually 450AD, years after Jesus. In 2004 a sewage system in Jerusalem was broken. What was discovered were steps and later an enormous pool was uncovered that joined up to the original pool. This was the true pool of Siloam. From the pool a road was excavated that goes beneath the modern city of Jerusalem. This road has to have been tunnelled along.

The death and resurrection of Jesus

At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people took great care in burying their dead. The bones were preserved in burial boxes called osseries.

Romans never permitted the proper burial of a crucified man. The Jews did not bury unclean criminals. The bones would have been burned. But discoveries in the 60s found an ossery of a crucified Jewish man. This, alongside others in that time prove that had Jesus been buried, it would have been done properly.

The tomb that tours will tell you is Jesus'tomb is not archaeologically correct. It's a much older tomb. At the church of the holy sepulchre there is a tomb from the 1st century where osseries were placed. We don't know for sure where Jesus was buried is because He wasn't! The tomb was empty and so Jesus left no evidence He was there and so the tomb is irrelevant.

The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is actually in the response of the people in the world. The impact of His life was too large and too quick to be from a false teacher. In the 3rd century in Dorset people were talking about Jesus. The impact of Jesus on people is far more important than His impact in archaeology.