Real
History, Toilets and All.
OUR FAVORITE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS. Breakpoint.
Just before or after New Year’s, everyone—or at least so it seems—comes
out with a “Best of” list. These best-known lists can contain movies, music,
television shows, books, whatever.
But there are other “Best of” lists worth noting, and in the case of
today’s BreakPoint, worth mimicking. Christianity Today recently ran an article
entitled “Biblical Archaeology’s Top Ten Discoveries of
2016.”
Great idea. So we here at BreakPoint wondered, “Why not come up with our
own list of recent favorites from biblical archaeology?”
Since time does not permit me to list ten finds, I will settle for three
that we talked about on BreakPoint in 2016. At a minimum, these finds shed new
light on the world of the Bible and help us in understanding the words of
Scripture. In other cases, they actually confirm portions of the scriptures
whose historicity, until recently, was in doubt. But all are a potent reminder
that biblical faith is rooted in actual human history, as befits a people who
confess that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
So with no further ado, drumroll please.
Number three in our list are the recent discoveries that shed light on
the life and time of what I called “least-understood yet incredibly-important
person in the Bible,” Mary Magdalene. As I said back in April, “more people
[mistakenly] ‘know’ that she was a prostitute—which is based on a misreading of
Luke, chapters 7 and 8—than the fact that she was the first witness to the
Lord’s resurrection.”
An excavation of her home town, Magdala, just five miles
from Capernaum, discovered the remains of a synagogue, and even more exciting, a
first-century Roman coin bearing the image of Tiberius. As the head of the dig
told the New York Times, there was “circumstantial evidence” that Jesus had been
at the site.
What’s more, the evidence shows Magdala to have been a prosperous town,
which is in keeping with Luke which tells us that Mary was among the women who
“provided for Jesus and His disciples ‘out of their
resources.’”
Number two on our list of best biblical archaeological finds is the
excavation of a “monumental pool from the Second Temple period, the period in
which Jesus lived.” In other words, the Pool of Siloam. You’ll recall from John
9 when Jesus encountered the man born blind, he spat on the ground, made mud,
placed it on the man’s eyes, and told him to go “wash in the pool of
Siloam.”
The finding is further confirmation that the fourth Gospel “rests on
extraordinarily precise knowledge of times and places, and so can only have been
produced by someone who had an excellent firsthand knowledge of Palestine at the
time of Jesus.”
But my personal favorite was the discovery of a toilet. Specifically, a
toilet discovered at Tel Lachish. It was discovered in a “large room that
appears to have been a shrine.”
“The room contained two four-horned altars, whose horns had been
intentionally damaged.” As John Stonestreet told BreakPoint listeners, the
damage was, in likelihood, part of King Hezekiah’s reforms.
But what about the toilet? Well, if you’re going to desecrate a pagan
shrine, nothing does the trick like turning it into an outhouse, which is
exactly what another reformer, Jehu, did to a temple of Ba’al in 2 Kings.
Apparently, Jehu wasn’t unique in this regard.
Findings like these should not surprise us. As John put it, “The Bible is
the best-attested book of antiquity. Nothing else is within the same solar
system.” Our faith is firmly rooted in history, not some “once upon a
time.”
So for more on biblical archaeology and a link to Christianity Today’s
list of biblical archaeological discoveries, come to
BreakPoint.org.
