“Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy … this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”[1]

He also wrote

“Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness.” [2]

Who is Sir Willam Ramsay? According to McDowell he is one of the greatest archaeologists of all time. Here’s Wikipedia on him …

Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (15 March 1851, Glasgow –20 April 1939) was a Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
…
William Ramsay paid particular interest in the New Testament events, particularly the Book of Acts and Pauline Epistles. When he first went to Asia Minor, many of the cities mentioned in Acts had no known location and almost nothing was known of their detailed history or politics. The Acts of the Apostles was the only record and Ramsay fully expected his own research to prove the author of Acts hopelessly inaccurate since no man could possibly know the details of Asia Minor more than a hundred years of the event. He therefore set out to put the writer of Acts on trial. He devoted his life to unearthing the ancient cities and documents of Asia Minor. After a lifetime of study, however, he concluded: ‘Further study…showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement’ (The Bearing of Recent Discovery, p. 85). On page 89 of the same book, Ramsay accounted, ‘I set out to look for truth on the borderland where Greece and Asia meet, and found it there [in Acts]. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment…’ When Ramsay turned his attention to Paul’s letters, most of which the critics dismissed as forgeries, he concluded that all thirteen New Testament letters that claimed to have been written by Paul were really his. [3]

[1] Ramsay, Sir W. M., The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915, p. 222.
[2] Ramsay, W. M., St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1962 (originally published in 1895), p. 81
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mitchell_Ramsay

“As a matter of fact, however, it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. (Glueck, Nelson, Rivers in the Desert, New York: Grove Press, 1959, pp. 31-32.)

Glueck apparently also claimed to have found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom and got laughed at. But a recent discovery has vindicated him. Enjoy …

King Solomon’s Copper Mines?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2008) — Did the Bible’s King David and his son Solomon control the copper industry in present-day southern Jordan? Though that remains an open question, the possibility is raised once again by research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
…
For years, scholars have argued whether the Edomites were sufficiently organized by the 10th to 9th centuries BCE to seriously threaten the neighboring Israelites as a true “kingdom.” Between the World Wars, during the “Golden Age” of biblical archaeology, scholars explored, as Levy describes it, with a trowel in one hand and Bible in the other, seeking to fit their Holy Land findings into the sacred story. Based on his 1930s surveys, American archaeologist Nelson Glueck even asserted that he had found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom. By the 1980s, however, Glueck’s claim had been largely dismissed. A consensus had emerged that the Bible was heavily edited in the 5th century BCE, long after the supposed events, while British excavations of the Edomite highlands in the 1970s-80s suggested the Iron Age had not even come to Edom until the 7th century BCE.

“Now,” said Levy, director of the Levantine Archaeology Lab at UCSD and associate director of the new Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), “with data from the first large-scale stratified and systematic excavation of a site in the southern Levant to focus specifically on the role of metallurgy in Edom, we have evidence that complex societies were indeed active in 10th and 9th centuries BCE and that brings us back to the debate about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible narratives related to this period.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases…1027174545.htm

Yes, it sure does. Combine this kind of cool stuff with the ongoing demise of the Documentary Hypothesis, the Rise of the Rohl Chronology and such, and Biblical historicity advocates like me are finally starting to have fun again!

Yesterday, he highlighted and commented on an article which appeared in Haaretz (a leading Israeli daily newspaper).  From Joel’s blog …

The Messiah stories are particularly interesting to me. Iran, as I mentioned the other day, is running a new documentary TV series on Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology (End Times theology), consistent with President Ahmadinejad’s on-going call for the Muslim world to prepare for the “imminent” arrival of the Islamic Messiah, known as the Mahdi. The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

There’s a new scientific discipline out there called “Geomythology.” What is it? And how does it work? Here’s the article that alerted me to it … “Tracking Myth to Geological Reality” …

Science 4 November 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5749, pp. 762 – 764
DOI: 10.1126/science.310.5749.762

Tracking Myth to Geological Reality

Kevin Krajick*

Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth
…
More and more geoscientists are willing to combine their work with such stories these days, in a budding discipline called geomythology. Volcanologist Floyd McCoy of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, says discussing myth has traditionally been “a good way to sink your own credibility”; it can put you on the list with flaky Atlantologists and other amateur zealots. But, says McCoy, “I’d be a fool to write it all off. There is a new realization that some myths have something to say.” Myths can sometimes alert researchers to previously unheeded geohazards; in other cases, where science has demonstrated the danger, legends “enrich the record” and reinforce the fact that people lie in harm’s way, says paleoseismologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Seattle, who has spearheaded many studies of seismic events in the Pacific Northwest. The trick is teasing out which myths carry kernels of truth that can be connected to hard data.

Deities of flood and fire

The movement traces in part to the 1980s, when scientists realized that the slow march of geologic time is sometimes punctuated by biblical-scale catastrophes, such as the giant meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. After this was accepted, some (usually those with tenure) felt freer to wonder if near-universal myths of great floods and fires implied that such disasters also have punctuated human time. In the 1990s, Columbia University marine geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan argued that rising Mediterranean sea levels following the last deglaciation topped what is now the Bosporus Strait and roared into the Black Sea 7600 years ago, serving as the original inspiration for the biblical flood. Their work triggered sharp criticism and a torrent of research, resulting in growing acceptance of some sort of Black Sea flooding (Science, 22 September 2000, p. 2021). Whether the book of Genesis somehow grew from this is a further step, admits Ryan, who presented his latest findings at the International Geoscience Program in Istanbul, Turkey, in early October.
…
Myths may provide unusually precise tools in the Pacific because some are tied to royal genealogies that can be roughly dated. In Hawaii, where the genealogies go back 95 generations, archaeologist Bruce Masse of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has compiled stories of battles between the fire deity Pele and others that seem to relate to volcanic eruptions; the reigns of kings at the time of the “battles” correlate within a few decades to radiocarbon dates of burned vegetation under lava sheets. Other tales apparently record celestial events. One, said to have taken place during the reign of King Kakuhihewa, narrates a human sacrifice at dawn interrupted by giant owls who fly across the sun. When Masse lined up the number of generations with recent NASA tables that calculate times of past events, he hit a match: A rare solar eclipse took place over Hawaii precisely at sunrise on 10 April 1679.

See also my article entitled “Comet or Meteor Impact Around the Time of the Flood?”

Why am I, a Bible-believing Creationist, interested in this? Because myths are not the only records that scientists should take notice of. They should also take notice of one of the most carefully recorded and transmitted collection of records on the planet — the collection of documents we now call “The Holy Bible.” Just think what a radically positive difference it would make in our study of geology (and many other disciplines) if all scientists took these records seriously!

By the end of the decade [1970s], however, and continuing throughout the 1980s and into the present decade [1990s], one major study after another, like a series of hammer blows, has rejected the main claims of the Documentary Theory and the criteria on the basis of which they were argued. Winnet’s view, for which he expected few if any converts, is now in the driving-seat, so to speak, and those who adhere to the Documentary Theory are very much on the defensive. As a result, Pentateuchal research since the mid-1970s has become a mirror image of what it was in the years following the publication of Wellhausen’s study of the composition of the Pentateuch in the mid-1870s: whereas at that time the Documentary Theory which he had so persuasively argued was in the ascendant, commanding ever increasing support, today it is in sharp decline–some would say in a state of advanced rigor mortis–and new solutions are being argued and urged in its place. (p. 95-96)

This author still is an advocate of the DH, but the recent convulsions have caused him to modify his positions somewhat.

If you are a Questia subscriber as I am, you can read the book yourself here … http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=10126098

And one of those “new solutions” is some form of tablet theory. Not necessarily Wiseman’s … his has some problems. But some form resembling it.

First, Champollion was entirely wrong in reading name-ring 29 as Iouda-ha-malek (‘Judah the Kingdom’). As Wilhelm Max-Muller pointed out as early as 1888 (Rohl footnote 5), ring 29 should be read Yad-ha-melek which translated literally means ‘Hand of the King’ and should be understood as ‘Monument’ or ‘Stela of the King.’ In other words, it is a location in Palestine where some un-named ruler had erected a commemorative stela. More damaging still to Champollion’s hasty reading is the geographical location of this Yadhamelek;(6) its position in the list locates it in northern Israel, well outside the boundaries of Judah, and so name-ring 29 cannot possibly be translated as ‘Judah the Kingdom.’

Below is a map of Shoshenk’s campaign with Rehoboam’s fortified cities shown with letters. As you can see, name-ring 29 would most logically fall somewhere close to name-rings 30 & 31 and 27 & 28 on the map … that is, nowhere close to Rehoboam’s kingdom at all.

Finally, I Kings 11:40 tells us that Jeroboam, the king of Israel (Northern kingdom) took refuge with Shishak to escape the wrath of Solomon. If Shishak = Shoshenk (Champollion’s view), then why would Shishak invade his ally’s (Jeroboam’s) kingdom in the northern part of Israel and leave the southern kingdom untouched? This is not logical.

SUMMING IT UP
Rohl goes on to explain how this fundamental error of Champollion has caused the Third Intermediate Period (TIP) Chronology to be out by several centuries, thus causing archaeologists to look in the wrong dynasty for evidence of Israel’s activities. Again, the points Rohl makes are …

1) Champollion mistranslated name-ring 29 on Shoshenk I’s campaign list, causing him to equate Shoshenk I with the Biblical Shishak.
2) Champollion failed to notice that the location represented by name-ring 29 could not possibly have been ‘Judah the Kingdom’ because of the positively identified locations of the name-rings surrounding name-ring 29
3) No Egyptologists since Champollion (except Rohl) — including the great Kenneth Kitchen — have questioned Champollion’s assertion that Shoshenk = Shishak, thus perpetuating a several century error in Egyptological studies
4) Once we correct this error, we find all kinds of evidence for Israel’s activities as Rohl shows in this book (See my article HERE)

Why does this matter? It matters because now, with Rohl’s New Chronology, the Biblical accounts of the Israelites are confirmed as historical by the findings of archaeology. The Bible is a real history book which relates real activities of real people. It is not a “Bronze Age myth” as skeptics like to say. In fact, it is the most accurate history book in the world … which makes sense that it would be if it truly is the Message of the Creator to Mankind.

Yet there are many traditions not only of the Great Flood, long-lived patriarchs, a Golden Age before the Flood, and many other details paralleling the accounts in Genesis, there are also traditions of Sacred Writings handed down from these patriarchs. It is some of these writings that we postulate were the source material for Moses when he compiled the Pentateuch and added his own material. Many folks have asked me for evidence of these writings, so I present this now. Linked below is a scan from Volume 2 of a fascinating 3 volume set I have by George Stanley Faber, entitled The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (London, 1816).

“Respecting the Sacred Books”

I have referenced him before and his Volume 1 is available in a Google Full View Book HERE. Various forms of “Genesis Tablet Theories” are now coming to the fore and the previously reigning theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, is garnering more and more skepticism.

LINKS
My Book Review on the Wiseman Hypothesis
“Modified” Wiseman Hypothesis by Curt Sewell
Wikipedia Article on Wiseman Hypothesis which references my blog article.
See also Garrett, Duane, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch, Baker Book House, 1991, referenced in my recent Formal Debate on Genesis.
Current ongoing debate on The Documentary Hypothesis.