question of whether the New Testament accounts of Jesus are accurate. While serology and toxicology aren't able to shed any light on the issue, another category of scientific proof-the discipline of archaeology-has great bearing on the reliability of the gospels. Sometimes called the study of durable rubbish, archaeology involves the uncovering of artifacts, architecture, art, coins, monuments, documents, and other remains of ancient cultures. Experts study these relics to learn what life was like in the days when Jesus walked the dusty roads of ancient Palestine. Hundreds of archaeological findings from the first century have been unearthed, and I was curious: did they undermine or undergird the eyewitness stories about Jesus? At the same time, my curiosity was tempered by skepticism. I have heard too many Christians make exorbitant claims that archaeology can prove a lot more than it really can. I wasn't interested in more of the same. So I went on a quest for a recognized authority who has personally dug among the ruins of the Middle East, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient findings, and who possesses enough scientific restraint to acknowledge the limits of archaeology while at the same time explaining how it can illuminate life in the first century.
When scholars and students study archaeology, many turn to John McRay's thorough and dispassionate 432-page textbook Archaeology and the New Testament. When the Arts and Entertainment Television Network wanted to ensure the accuracy of its Mysteries of the Bible program, they called McRay as well. And when National Geographic needed a scientist who could explain the intricacies of the biblical world, again the phone rang in McRay's office at well-respected Wheaton College in suburban Chicago. Having studied at Hebrew University, the cole Biblique et Arch6ologique Franaise in Jerusalem, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, and the University of Chicago (where he earned his doctorate in 1967), McRay has been a professor of New Testament and archaeology at Wheaton for more than fifteen years. His articles have appeared in seventeen encyclopedias and dictionaries, his research has been featured in the Bulletin of the Near East Archaeology Society and other academic journals, and he has presented twenty-nine scholarly papers at professional societies. McRay is also a former research associate and trustee of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem; a former trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research; a current trustee of the Near East Archaeological Society; and a member of the editorial boards of Archaeology in the Biblical World and the Bulletin for Biblical Research, which is published by the Institute for Biblical Research. As much as McRay enjoys writing and teaching about the ancient world, he relishes opportunities to personally explore archaeological digs. He supervised excavating teams at Caesarea, Sepphoris, and Herodium, all in Israel, over an eight-year period. He has studied RoInan archaeological sites in England and Wales, analyzed digs in Greece, and retraced much of the apostle Paul's journeys. At age sixty-six, McRay's hair is turning silvery and his glasses have become thicker, but he still exudes an air of adventure. Over the desk in his office-and in fact also over his bed at home-is a detailed horizontal photograph of Jerusalem. "I live in the shadow of it, he remarked, a sense of longing in his voice, as he pointed out specific locations of excavations and significant findings. His office features the kind of cozy couch you'd find on the front porch of a country home. I settled into it while McRay, casually dressed in an open-necked shirt and a sports jacket that looked comfortably worn, leaned back in his desk chair. Seeking to test whether he would overstate the influence of archaeology, I decided to open our interview by asking him what it can't tell us about the reliability of the New Testament. After all, as McRay notes in his textbook, even if archaeology can establish that the cities of Medina and Mecca existed in western Arabia during the sixth and seventh centuries, that doesn't prove that Muhammad lived there or that the Koran is true. "Archaeology has made some important contributions," he began, speaking in a drawl he picked up as a child in southeastern Oklahoma, "but it certainly can't proved whether the New Testament is the Word of God. If we dig in Israel and find ancient sites that are consistent with where the Bible said we'd find them, that shows that its history and geography are accurate. However, it doesn't confirm that what Jesus Christ said is right. Spiritual truths cannot be proved or disproved by archaeological discoveries." As an analogy, he offered the story of Heinrich Schliemann, who searched for Troy in an effort to prove the historical accuracy of Homer's Iliad. "He did find Troy," McRay observed with a gentle smile, "but that didn't prove the Iliad was true. It was merely accurate in a particular geographical reference." Once we had set some boundaries for what archaeology can't establish, I was anxious to begin exploring what it can tell us about the New Testament. I decided to launch into this topic by making an observation that grew out of my experience as an investigative journalist with a legal background.
In trying to determine if a witness is being truthful, journalists and lawyers will test all the elements of his or her testimony that can be tested. If this investigation reveals that the person was wrong in those details, this casts considerable doubt on the veracity of his or her entire story. However, if the minutiae check out, this is some indication-not conclusive proof but some evidence-that maybe the witness is being reliable in his or her overall account. For instance, if a man were telling about a trip he took from St. Louis to Chicago, and he mentioned that he had stopped in Springfield, Illinois, to see the movie Titanic at the Odeon Theater and that he had eaten a large Clark bar he bought at the concession counter, investigators could determine whether such a theater exists in Springfield as well as if it was showing this particular film and selling this specific brand and size of candy bar at the time he said he was there. If their findings contradict what the person claimed, this seriously tarnishes his trustworthiness. If the details check out, this doesn't prove that his entire story is true, but it does enhance his reputation for being accurate. In a sense, this is what archaeology accomplishes. The premise is that if an ancient historian's incidental details check out to be accurate time after time, this increases our confidence in other material that the historian wrote but that cannot be as readily cross-checked. So I asked McRay for his professional opinion. "Does archaeology affirm or undermine the New Testament when it checks out the details in those accounts?" McRay was quick to answer. "Oh, there's no question that the credibility of the New Testament is enhanced," he said, "just as the credibility of any ancient document is enhanced when you excavate and find that the author was accurate in talking about a particular place or event." As an example, he brought up his own digs in Caesarea on the coast of Israel, where he and others excavated the harbor of Herod the Great. "For a long time people questioned the validity of a statement by Josephus, the first-century historian, that this harbor was as large as the one at Piraeus, which is a major harbor of Athens. People thought Josephus was wrong, because when you see the stones above the surface of the water in the contemporary harbor, it's not very big. But when we began to do underwater excavation, we found that the harbor extended far out into the water underground, that it had fallen down, and that its total dimensions were indeed comparable to the harbor at Piraeus. So it turns out Josephus was right after all. This was one more bit of evidence that Josephus knew what he was talking about." So what about the New Testament writers? Did they really know what they were talking about? I wanted to put that issue to the test in my next line of questioning.
The physician and historian Luke authored both the gospel bearing his name and the book of Acts, which together constitute about onequarter of the entire New Testament. Consequently, a critical issue is whether Luke was a historian who could be trusted to get things right. "When archaeologists check out the details of what he wrote," I said, "do they find that he was careful or sloppy?" "The general consensus of both liberal and conservative scholars is that Luke is very accurate as a historian," McRay replied. "He's erudite, he's eloquent, his Greek approaches classical quality, he writes as an educated man, and archaeological discoveries are showing over and over again that Luke is accurate in what he has to say." In fact, he added, there have been several instances, similar to the story about the harbor, in which scholars initially thought Luke was wrong in a particular reference, only to have later discoveries confirm that he was correct in what he wrote. For instance, in Luke 3:1 he refers to Lysanias being the tetrarch of Abilene in about A.D. 27. For years scholars pointed to this as evidence that Luke didn't know what he was talking about, since everybody knew that Lysanias was not a tetrarch but rather the ruler of Chalcis half a century earlier. If Luke can't get that basic fact right, they suggested, nothing he has written can be trusted. That's when archaeology stepped in. "An inscription was later found from the time of Tiberius, from A.D. 14 to 37, which names Lysanias as tetrarch in Abila near Damascus-just as Luke had written," McRay explained. "It turned out there had been two government officials named Lysanias! Once more Luke was shown to