Recently, I watched a Channel 4 TV programme called, “Pilate: the man who killed Christ”. It was a strange programme to be broadcast the day before Christmas Eve, when we were preparing to celebrate the Birth of Jesus. But I particularly remember it for two reasons.
Firstly, one of my lecturers at New College, Helen Bond, played quite a big part in the programme. And secondly, when I was in Israel last June, I saw one of the things she talked about.
It was a stone. Not your common or garden ordinary stone. But a carved stone, with an inscription on it. And, you’ve guessed it, the inscription includes the name of Pontius Pilate.
The stone was found at Caesarea, an important Roman town, on the coast of the Mediterranean. That stone is the only historical artefact from the time of Jesus that confirms any of the Gospel story. It confirms that Pontius Pilate was the governor, or prefect, of the area, just as we read in the Easter story.
All other historical evidence was written afterwards. Some of Paul’s letters in the New Testament were written as early as 20 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. The Jewish historian Josephus was writing at around the same time, and he mentions Jesus too.
Although I haven’t seen that inscription stone itself, I have seen a copy of it, when I was at Caesarea last June, on a trip to Israel organised by New College. I took a photo of it as you can see above.
Why is this stone important? Because it is physical evidence.
Everything else that we know about Jesus is hearsay. It began as verbal testimony, and then later it was written down, a long time after the events actually happened.
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, written about 52AD, he tells his readers about the Resurrection of Jesus. He tells them that Jesus appeared to over 500 of his followers, before he returned to be with God his Father. And Paul specifically states that most of these 500 are still alive today. They were eye-witnesses. It’s all there in 1st Corinthians chapter 15.
Of course, after some 2000 years since the events of Jesus, it is no longer possible to provide eye-witnesses. We are dependent on the accuracy and reliability of those early disciples.
Did they remember all these events accurately?
Did they write them down correctly?
Were they copied reliably, time after time, down through the ages?
The earliest fragments of the New Testament, written on papyrus, come from about 140AD. They match the same text in the earliest full text of the New Testament, from about 400AD.
And they mean the same as our present-day English translations. So that gives us some degree of confidence that we can go back more than 1500 years and believe in the accurate transmission of the New Testament documents.
But were they written accurately in the first place? Pontius Pilate was a real person, and a real Roman Prefect, at the time of Jesus. The Gospel account is accurate, even spelling Pilate’s name correctly.
In Acts chapter 18, we read of another Roman official, Gallio, a pro-consul of Greece, even more senior than Pilate. Between 1885 and 1910, nine fragments of a temple stone were found that refer to Gallio, the pro-consul of Greece, and a friend of Claudius the emperor. So Gallio was a real person too.
Although I haven’t seen these stone fragments I do have a photo from the museum where they are kept, and you can see that below. In the Greek capital letters, Gallio is written, 'ΓΑΛΛΙΩ'.
Today I was preaching about Paul meeting twelve disciples at Ephesus who had not heard of the Holy Spirit. Paul told them of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost - and then they too spoke strange things of God and prophesied.
We're so dependent on hearing information from other people. It's nice to know that some things are written in stone. They help us to grasp hold of the things people tell us and act on what we've been told.
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