Archaeological Evidence and Jesus - Peter S.  Williams

But let us get stuck into the topic for this webinar, the archaeological evidence and Jesus. So I'm going to focus on archaeological evidence, what it says about Jesus, rather than textual evidence. We live in an era of uninformed claims about Jesus. So here's some recent examples. Neo-atheist Victor Stenger in his book, The New Atheism, argues that Jesus probably didn't exist. Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book, The God Delusion, says that the Gospels are works of fiction. And the idea of a divine Jesus was, according to Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, an innovation decided upon at the Council of Nicaea, which happened in 325 AD. Well, archaeology is one of the sciences that is of great interest to apologists where our interests overlap. Archaeology is the systematic study of the material remains of past human behaviour. And we tend to bracket out from archaeological remains textual remains, although archaeologists will dig those up. Perhaps archaeology would talk about inscriptions on statues or coins and so on, but less about texts on papyri, for example. So let me give you an overall argument before we look at some specific cases, as it were. This is an analogy from the philosopher Lydia McGrew in her book Hidden in Plain View. And she says this. She says, if you sample a loaf of bread on both ends and several points in the middle and find it good, it would be cavailing. That is, it would be being far too overly sceptical to say that, well, perhaps just the parts you haven't tasted happen to be the mouldy ones. That is, the more we can sample something and test it and see that it's good, the more confidence we should have that the bits that we haven't tested yet will also be good. We make that inference from the evidence available. And it's like that with archaeology in the Bible. You certainly can't prove everything in the Bible with archaeology, but the more that we find there are things in the Bible that we can independently check with, for example, archaeological discoveries, that gives us an increasing confidence in even those parts of the Bible or the Gospels that we can't independently check in that way. So there's a sort of overall inference going on here, as well as arguments in particular instances. Let's look at archaeological evidence under three main categories. Archaeological evidence for historical places, such as cities, particular buildings. Historical people, where we can get evidence of general sort of titles of positions, specific names of people sometimes, people's titles and their relationships one to another sometimes. And historical culture, the historical background material culture of Jesus's day and even the culture in terms of people's beliefs about Jesus. So we'll look in turn at historical places, historical people and historical culture, beginning with historical places. Let's go right back to the earthly beginnings of Jesus's story and Bethlehem, which some sceptics have said didn't exist at the time of Jesus, but in 2012 archaeologists dug up this. It's a very screen-filling picture, but it's actually of something very small, a little clay seal impression about the size of your thumbnail it would be. And Shukran archaeologist says here we can read the word Bethlehem in a clear Hebrew inscription from the first temple period on a bule, one of these, that's the technical name for one of these clay seal impressions, found in Israel. It arrived from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, maybe about paying some taxes. This is the Bethlehem next to Jerusalem referred to in the Bible. So we know that Bethlehem did exist in the first temple period and we knew that it existed afterwards and therefore it's pretty plausible to say that it existed during Jesus's time as well. But of course Jesus was born in Nathareth, another place that sceptics have raised questions about, but in recent years we've begun dugging up quite a lot of the archaeology of ancient Nathareth. So here's a house discovered in 2010 and a quote from the excavation director Yardena Alexander saying the discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nathareth and thereby sheds light on the way of life at the time of Jesus. The building that we found is small and modest and is most likely typical of the dwellings in Nathareth in that period and she even says this may well have been a place that Jesus and his contemporaries were familiar with. It's a logical suggestion. Capernaum is somewhere where Jesus uses a base of operations, mentioned 16 references to Capernaum in the Gospels, in particular Jesus taught in the synagogue there according to the Gospels of Mark and Luke. And here is a picture of a synagogue in ancient Capernaum but the clearer, lighter coloured stone is of a more recent synagogue but it seems to have been built upon the foundations at the bottom there you can see in the darker coloured stone the black basalt stone seems to be the foundations of the first century synagogue. So this is the foundations of the synagogue that Jesus taught him in Capernaum where Jesus healed the centurion's servant because of the centurion's faith for example. Peter's house so-called is also in Capernaum or the house of his mother-in-law. This was a sort of series of discoveries really there was the remains of an octagonal 5th century church there and in the 1960s archaeologists discovered the remains of a 4th century church underneath that 5th century church and then they discovered that that 4th century church had been built around a 1st century house that had clearly been used as a Christian meeting place they reckon since around the second half of the 1st century. And interestingly Constantine, the emperor Constantine's mother Agiria in the 4th century had made a journey to the holy lands and wrote in her diary that in Capernaum the house of the prince of the apostles, so Peter, has been made into a church with its original walls still standing. It's where the Lord cured the paralytic and in this room in the house that the church had been built around the walls of that room had been plastered and there were various prayers, Christian prayers scratched into the plaster there. 1st century Jerusalem, this is of course a computer model of 1st century Jerusalem but we have lots of interesting actual archaeology from 1st century Jerusalem such as the pool of Bethesda. John 5 verses 1 to 15 describes this pool in Jerusalem near the sheep gate surrounded by five covered colonnades and until the 19th century there was no evidence outside of the gospel of John for the existence of this pool and liberal scholars were minded to think that it was really symbolic that John was really talking about the five books of the Pentateuch or something, the five covered colonnades and so on, it must be symbolic. But then archaeologists in the 19th century dug up this pool in the spot that the bible said it should be and discovered that it did indeed have five covered colonnades. In 2004, so much more recent discovery, archaeologists stumbled upon the 1st century ritual pool of Siloam mentioned in John chapter 9 where engineers uncovered ancient steps during some maintenance on some sewage pipes and they gradually uncovered more and more of these steps and found that these steps surrounded a square ritual bathing pool near the mouth of Hezekiah's tunnel. The water at the bottom there you can see in the picture comes ultimately from Hezekiah's tunnel and you can see a picture on the bottom right hand side there of a coin and some of the pottery discovered with the pool and so on. Those are important finds because this is often how archaeologists are able to date the things that they find, it's to do with the style of pottery that's found at that level to do particularly with coins because people tend to put dates on coins and so on. So that's very interesting, another pool from John's gospel. Another very recent find, Solomon's Portico was the double colonnade that surrounded the temple built by Herod and in 2017 saw the discovery of an ornamental capital from one of these portico columns in the temple built by Herod. The capital is kind of the architectural feature in a column that goes between the tube of the column and the thing whose weight it is bearing and you can work out from this capital that the column had a circumference of about 30 inches round at its top. John 10.23 says that Jesus visited Solomon's Portico and the Book of Acts says that the early church used it as a meeting place and here we have some remains from that portico. Let's move on to looking at archaeology to do with people in the Gospels that Jesus knew. So Luke 3 verses 1 and 2 are very interesting because Luke is situating what he's writing about in contemporary history and he mentions a lot of famous names in order to do that. So he says in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the emperor, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod Tetrarch, that is the governor of a quarter of the province of Galilee, and his brother Philip Tetrarch of Arcturia and Draconius, he's mentioned by Josephus in Antiquities, and Licinius Tetrarch of Albany during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert. So he's mentioning lots of historical people to historically situate the biography of Jesus that he's giving and we can look to archaeology on many of these names. So here is Tiberius Caesar, a bust of him and a famous Tiberius Denarius coin from 1437 AD, commonly referred to as the tribute penny from the Bible, which shows a portrait of Tiberius Caesar. The Pontius Pilate inscription discovered a stone that had this inscription on it that had been reused for other purposes, but the inscription was still on it. A Latin inscription from the first century that mentions Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea. It seems like Pilate had paid for a temple to be produced to the glory of Caesar, to Tiberius of Tiberium, and it talks on this about Tiberium, Teus Pilatus Ectus, and you have the sort of bits of the words are missing, but it's very clear that basically this is Pilate saying, you know, I've paid for this temple for you, so please give me brownie points kind of thing. That was discovered in 1961. Much more recently, in 2018, this ring of Pilate was discovered, a seal ring, so a ring that you would use to press into clay to make one of those little boulet seal impressions excavated at Herodium. It was excavated a lot earlier, but only sort of they'd been going through the finds of the excavation and recognising what they were, and this was discovered therefore in the finds that had earlier been excavated, and it carries the inscription of Pilates, of Pilate, belonging to Pilate, in the Greek letters set around a picture of a wine vessel. In the Greek it's the so-called dative form of the name which would ordinarily be written in minuscule letters slightly differently, different types of letters, but this inscription on the corroded copper alloy ring was finally read using quite advanced photographic techniques in order to make out what was on the ring. The archaeologists reckon this ring was probably not fancy enough to have been worn by Pilate himself, but was rather likely worn by someone authorised to act on Pilate's authority, so maybe Pilate's slave in charge of his procurement of wine shipments or something like this, and that slave would have used a Pilate seal to make official communications about Pilate's business. Here's a bronze coin of Herod the Great. One side has a tripod and a ceremonial bowl with an inscription Herod King, and the year that the coin was struck, year three of Herod's reign, so this dates to 37 BC. Israel professor of archaeology Ehud Netzer in the 1990s discovered some broken pottery in Masada bearing the Latin inscription Herod the Great King of the Jews or King of Judea, the first find to mention the full title of King Herod as given in the Bible. This pottery was part of, again, a jug used to probably transport wine, has been dated to around 19 BC. Now Licinius was an interesting conundrum because scholars said look Luke doesn't know what he's talking about here because everybody knew that Licinius wasn't a Tetrarch but rather the ruler of a place called Chalcis half a century before the time that Luke is writing about. But then later archaeologists discovered an inscription from the time of Tiberius of 14 to 37 AD which names someone called Licinius as Tetrarch in Albia near Damascus. So it turned out that there had been two different government officials in that area who just happened to have the same name and Luke didn't know what he was talking about after all. Caiaphas the priest and a tomb located in the south of Jerusalem were discovered several of these so-called ossuries or bone boxes where the Jews at that time would do the second burial, buried someone, later on they would go to the tomb and gather up the bones and put them in these bone boxes or ossuries. One of these ossuries discovered in this particular tomb is one that many historians believe relates to the former high priest Caiaphas and his family. You can see how ornate and costly this bone box would have been and then it was traditional to scratch in the name of who's in there and so on. So on the side and back of the ossuary is inscribed Caiaphas's name and he is talking about Yosef Bar Caiapho, the son of Caiaphas. Here's another bone box discovered in 2011 and touted as the bone box of John the Baptist discovered in Bulgaria. Now if I get the name right here, the archaeologist's name is Pop Konstantinov. Pop Konstantinov had an archaeological team that uncovered a reliquary or ancient container for relics in which there were eight bone pieces attributed to John the Baptist, although they later in analysis found out that some of them were animal bones, so someone had sort of beefed up the collection at some stage, but some of them were human bones and this reliquary was found embedded in an altar in the ruins of a monastery on Sveti Island or John's Island, a small island in the Black Sea in Bulgaria. Professor Pop Konstantinov told the media that he bases his support for the finds authenticity on a Greek inscription found in another box that was found with the reliquary and this inscription said, God save your servant Thomas to St John, June 24th. June 24th being the feast day of St John the Baptist. The island's name, the monastery's dedication to St John, the inscription found in the same place with it and so on are all considered supporting evidence and one might be minded to take this with a grain of salt, particularly since we know that the medieval reliquaries tended to be used as sources of income for monasteries and people would beef up the collection and if you put together all the bones of the saints that are meant to be around there, you find out they have more digits or limbs than they should properly have. However, in this instance, interestingly, they did some carbon dating on the human remains in the box at Oxford University and they dated the right-handed knuckle bone found in the box to the middle of the first century AD when John is believed to have lived until his beheading ordered by King Herod. So the carbon dating of that particular bone also fits with the suggestion that this is indeed a reliquary of St John the Baptist, maybe. But this one I think is, we can be more confident about, three additional names mentioned on a particularly significant ossuary. It's a mid-first century AD chalk ossuary that was noticed in a collection in an antique store in 2002 and, of course, Hebrew you read from right to left, so the inscription here on the box, read right to left, is which, in other words, is James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus, which is quite an interesting combination of names to discover from that era. We know from Josephus that James was martyred in Jerusalem in AD 62, 29 years after Jesus's crucifixion, which would date this ossuary, if it is indeed his ossuary, to sometime around or after AD 63 and this inscription from then as well. There was some controversy about this find because it wasn't dug up in situ, which raised questions about its authenticity, but a 2014 peer-reviewed science paper in the Open Journal of Geology, for example, supported the authenticity of the ossuary and the inscription on it. The patina, the material that builds up over time on the ossuary surface, matched that in the engravings and microfossils in the chalk in the inscription were to be naturally deposited and to indicate that the full inscription was of the same antiquity as the chalk box itself. Here is that paper, just the first and last pages of it, if you want to look it up online, The Authenticity of the James Ossuary by Rosenfeld et al in the Open Journal of Geology, 2014 issue number four. So it's Herschel Shanks, who at that time was editor-in-chief of the Biblical Archaeological Review, said he thought this box is more likely the ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus of Nannereth, than not. In my opinion, it's likely that this inscription does mention the James and Joseph and Jesus of the New Testament. Let's move on to our last category of historical culture. I'll give you just one quick example of background material culture and then look at a particularly interesting issue about people's beliefs about Jesus, what we can tell from archaeology. So here's a first century fishing boat. In the 1980s Israel suffered a drought which caused the waters of the Sea of Galilee to recede and two local fishermen, who also happened to be amateur archaeologists, fortunately, discovered a boat buried in the mud that had been revealed by the drought. It turned out to be a very well-preserved fishing boat from the time of Jesus. The design of the vessel, which measured over 27 feet in length, was apparently typical of fishing boats used during that time in the eastern Mediterranean. Archaeologists raced against time to recover this boat from the mud before the waters returned and made their job a lot more difficult, and also to stop it from drying out and so on. It's quite an interesting archaeological story if you want to go and research into that. Pots and lamps found beside the boat helped to date it to the first century and that was confirmed also by radiocarbon dating the wooden planks. It's interesting to note that in the back of the boat they found a raised section that seems to comport with the description of where Jesus was sleeping on the back of the boat in the story of the calming of the storm. They reckoned that the boat could accommodate some 15 people, so there would certainly have been room for Jesus and his 12 disciples in such a boat. There's a closer-up picture of this boat now in the museum in Israel. So let's look at this issue of beliefs and come back to Dan Brown's popularisation of the theory that during his lifetime Jesus wasn't thought of as divine and people didn't actually come to think of him as divine until much later on. Brown puts forward the theory that this was something voted on at the Council of Nicaea. Here's a quote from the novel The Da Vinci Code, one character after another, and Jesus was viewed by his followers as the mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. Not the son of God? Right, Professor Teebing said, Jesus's establishment of the son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea, which is historical rubbish even if it makes for a good conspiracy thriller novel. But we can apply some archaeology to this concept. If I take you to this third century, third century, remember the Council of Nicaea is in the fourth century, so third century AD, church at Dura Europos. This is a reconstruction of what the place looked like, a teaching area, a courtyard and some steps going up here to a baptistery. It's the baptistery that we're particularly interested in because it contains some wonderful paintings on the wall of this baptistery. Here is one of them, sorry it's a slightly fuzzy picture but you should be able to make out. Here we have a person lying on a bed and a person carrying a bed and a man in a toga with an outstretched arm standing over this figure in the bed thinking, you know, what biblical story from the Gospels does this put you in mind of? And given that this is a painting in a house church it comes to mind very readily that this is a picture of Jesus healing the paralytic as told, for example, in Mark chapter 2. This painting has been dated to, it's the early part of the third century to around 232ish AD. This house church is in modern Syria and it's interesting that the key point, of course, of this story of Jesus healing the paralytic that this painting is clearly referring to is Jesus's claim to be on a par with God in terms of pronouncing the forgiveness of sins and then he turns to healing the paralytic in his debate with the religious scholars there who are recorded as saying, you know, he's blaspheming, who can forgive sins but God alone. So here is a painting that seems to indicate that the people in this third century, early third century church, had a view of Jesus that put him on a par with God as far as forgiveness went. Or the picture next to it, folks in a boat here on the water, someone standing on the water, hands outstretched and slightly lower down, seem to be sort of sinking, his feet beneath the waves, another figure. This is quite clearly, if you know, the gospel story of Jesus walking on the water and Peter jumping out of the boat and going to him and then losing his nerve, his trust, his faith and beginning to sink into the water. But also the kind of the point of this story is not just, you know, Jesus has magical powers to walk on water but seems to be an enacted parable as many of his miracles were. But this against the Old Testament verse from Job 9.8, for example, talking about God, he alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. So maybe there's a sort of resonance to a divine claim there as well. And right above the baptistery pool is this painting of a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders with his flock of sheep. As John 10.11 records Jesus saying, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. But this was a reference back to the Old Testament. Psalm 23, for example, talks about the Lord God is my shepherd. And Jesus was taking that imagery and applying it to himself. And here in this church right above the baptistery pool is a picture of the good shepherd. Well, let's go to this even slightly earlier Christian prayer hall or church discovered in the grounds of Megiddo prison in 2005. It's a picture reconstructing what it would have looked like, a hall with a central table for communion in the middle of it. And these top down view here of these pictures made out of the little tiny tiles. We put the little tiles together to make the bigger picture. There's some very interesting things here, particularly the fact that the fish in one of the pictures, the fish because of the Greek word ichthys was an early Christian symbol because they made an acrostic. That is where you take the letters of one word and you use each letter of that word as the first letter of another word that has meaning. So you have ichthys and each of those words in the Greek became the first letters of the phrase Isis Christos Theos Soter. Sorry if I've mangled the Greek there, but which translated into English means Jesus Christ, God's son, saviour. So we have this early fish Christian symbol that talks about Jesus not only as Christ but as God's son. But even more significant than that is this inscription here, which I've given you a blown up version of here, which talks about someone who had given money to donate for the table in the middle of the room. And it says the God-loving Akeptos has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial or to the God Jesus Christ as a memorial. So here we have in black and white, if you like, overlined. The Greeks didn't underline, they overlined and it's indeed overlying the God Jesus Christ. The famous Alexaminos Graffito, which is Latin for graffiti, found on a wall in the Palatine Hill district of Rome dated to around about AD 200. And we have here a picture of a donkey-headed human figure on a cross being crucified with another figure looking up at the man on the cross raising a hand and the inscription scratched into the plaster here is Alexaminos worships his God or perhaps Alexaminos worship your God. So someone making fun of someone who worships someone who had been crucified. But why the donkey head? Is it simply, you know, he's made an ass of himself by getting crucified? Maybe there's more to it. Historian Tom Pollan points out that to Greek scholars, the question of what might be found within the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple was a tantalizing one because they weren't allowed to go into the Holy of Holies as non-Jews. Poseidon, a Greek writer, never knowingly without a theory, says Pollan claims that it contained a golden ass's head. Others believe that it held the stone image of a man with a long beard sitting on a donkey. So there's this sort of tradition of an association of donkey imagery and the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple in Greek thought. So this donkey imagery being used here in this sort of cartoon making fun of someone might suggest that the God being worshipped here, because you worship a God, is supposed to be the Jewish God. But, you know, a crucified person that someone might be foolish enough to think was the Jewish God, clearly this is Jesus. But it also indicates that there were people at this era who considered Jesus to be divine, therefore to be indeed the Jewish God. And an inscription, a rather strange inscription to our ears, which seems to be a sort of ancient funerary inscription that might contain a sort of blend of Christian and perhaps Gnostic beliefs. It has the fancy identification name of NCE 156, this particular inscription, but it's been dated to the latter half of the second century and is about the earliest Christian material object we possessed, says researcher Gregory Snyder from the US in this article in the Life of Science website. And this inscription reads as follows in their translation. It says, to my bath, to the brothers of the bridal chamber, carry the torches. Here in our hall, they hunger for the true banquets, even whilst praising the Father and glorifying the Son. There, with the Father and the Son, is the only spring and source of truth. But it's particularly interesting, this imagery of praising the Father and glorifying the Son, the Father and the Son in sort of the same breath, if you like. And one final example of this, a slightly controversial example, the Pompeii Rotas or Satos Square. Pompeii, of course, was destroyed by the volcanic eruption in AD 79, so we can date this pre-AD 79. It's found in other Roman places, including Cyrencester here in England and Pompeii. It's a Latin palindrome, written horizontally and vertically in a square of letters. It literally, the spelling has a backwards spelling that could be translated as Arepo, the sower, holds the plough at work with care. But you can arrange the letters into the shape of a cross with the single letter N, perhaps as a divine name at the centre, as it is in the centre of the square. And then the words Our Father, which is the opening of the Lord's Prayer, and the letters Alpha and Omega at the end, both horizontally and vertically. So you can arrange those letters into this form. Of course, according to Revelation 1.8, Jesus says, I am the Alpha and Omega, who was and who is to come, the Almighty. The letters can also be arranged into a prayer that says, I pray to you, Father, I pray to you, Father, you heal. So the symbolism of these letters is pretty clearly Jewish, have a look at Isaiah 9.6 or 46.10, and or Christian. But the fact that you can arrange the letters into the shape of a cross with the beginning of the Lord's Prayer and the Alpha and Omega might be taken as being suggested that this was being used as a Christian puzzle or way of communicating that there are Christians around here, just as the fish symbol was used perhaps. So here, if we put these discoveries on this nice timeline here, we take the crucifixion as being about AD 33 on the left there, and the Council of Nicaea at 325 AD on the right there, we can see we have a spread of finds pointing to people having a divine view of Jesus. The Pompeii Rotis Square would put those beliefs within 50 years of the crucifixion. The NCE inscription within 150 to 200 years, and the others that we looked at, the graffiti and the pictures and so on, within 200 to 230 years. But that's still over 100 years before the Council of Nicaea. Yohanan is our only archaeological remains of a crucifixion victim, and the particularly interesting thing about this is he's a crucifixion victim who had been reburied in an ossuary. He'd been crucified, we can still see the nail through his ankle bone here, but then given at least a semi-honourable burial, which critics have sometimes denied would have happened to a crucified man and have said, for example, that Jesus, having been crucified, wouldn't have been buried. But here we have archaeological proof that at the very least a crucified person could be buried in a sort of honourable manner. Crucifixion is very embarrassing. The Alex of Ninos Graffito makes this point. This perhaps earliest surviving depiction of Jesus is of how embarrassing his crucifixion was in that culture. As the sceptical New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman says, it's highly improbable that the earliest Palestinian Jewish followers of Jesus would have made up the claim that the Messiah was crucified, and even less plausible that they would make up a claim about that and then attribute deity or sincerely believe that this Jesus figure had been crucified and yet come to believe that he was God, that he was divine, unless they had some pretty powerful reason for so doing. As Rob Bowman says, it would never have occurred to anyone in the first century to invent a story about a crucified man as the divine saviour and king of the world. Something extreme and dramatic must have happened to lead people to accept such an idea. Jesus's empty tomb. Dan Bahat, former city archaeologist of Jerusalem, says we may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchral Church is the site of Jesus's burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of this site. A few years ago they had to renovate the monument inside here of the smaller earlier church, the bigger later church is built around this smaller earlier church built around the traditional site of Jesus's burial. Mortar recovered from the 2016 renovation was dated to as early as AD 345 using something called optically stimulated luminescence, about which I know nothing, but they dated it and that supported the traditional dating of the construction of the first church of the Holy Sepulchre to mark the tomb of Christ during the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine when Agiria, his mother, went on that pilgrimage. Frederick Heibert from the National Geographic's Archaeologist in Residence said that this appears their renovation works gave them visible proof that the location of the tomb had not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered about. You can see under the cracked marble casing of the alleged tomb shelf that Jesus's body would have been laid on, they took away the marble casing to restore it and here you can see the original rock surface of what is plausibly the burial place of Jesus. Then drawing towards the end of the presentation here, this so-called natherus inscription, a Greek inscription on a slab of stone, very likely written during the reign of the emperor Claudius who dates from about AD 41 to 54, so early 1st century, and this is a proclamation that forbids under penalty of death the robbing of bodies from tombs. Now tomb robbery had been illegal before but this is a proclamation kind of upping the ante, upping the penalty for robbing bodies from tombs and it was acquired in the 19th century in Nathareth. So this makes sense in light of the Jewish argument that Jesus's body had been stolen by the disciples and that there's an association between Jesus and Nathareth, perhaps that's why this is to have been found there. So let us summarise. We can look just purely at archaeological evidence and that archaeological evidence indicates to us that Jesus, son of Joseph and brother of James, who was buried in Jerusalem in the first century, the middle of the first century, that Jesus existed in the early to middle first century, that Jesus was crucified which would probably have killed him, that a crucifixion victim in that culture could be buried, that Jesus probably was buried, which again indicates he was probably dead, in a certainly now empty Jerusalem tomb just outside the first century city walls. That grave robbery was an offence that may have been particularly associated with Nathareth where the New Testament said that Jesus lived by the middle of the first century, which perhaps ties in with the controversy over the empty tomb. That despite his crucifixion, Jesus was considered to be divine by some people within around 50 to 175 years of his execution. That in the early third century, sort of 200 to 230 AD, we can show that Jesus was not only held to be divine but clearly held to be divine in the Judeo-Christian sense over a century before the Council of Nicaea. And also we can see that the first century biographies of Jesus that we have in the New Testament, and those are the only first century biographies of Jesus that exist, they have been repeatedly verified by archaeological discoveries relating to all sorts of things from places, particular places, people, people's titles, the material culture of the time, all of which should encourage us to trust those Gospels even on matters that we can't independently verify with the archaeology.