Struggling to answer someone's questions about your faith, Pastor Greg Laurie recommends a great book to help. You know, I remember the first time that I shared my faith; I was so young, and I was challenged by an atheist. I did not have a clue as to what I should say, and I wish I'd had a copy of this book by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler. And the title of it is "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist." And we want to send you this book for your gift of any size, available at. Harvest dot org.
So you have a brand new book out that is titled "The Stones Cry Out." So what is this book about, Dinesh?
Well, as you know, Pastor Greg, I've written books in the past on Christian apologetics, but I wasn't exposed to biblical archaeology until I went to Israel for the first time. The end of 2022, I was very charmed to be kind of in the land of the Bible. These places I had heard about and sort of dreamed about since I was a kid, but then I was exposed a little bit to the artifacts that had come out of the ground.
Some.
Some of them in the last fifty years or even more, but some of them just in the last ten years, and they are authenticating or validating the historicity of the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New. And I was like, I turned to my wife and I said, "Wow, why isn't this information being shouted from the rooftops of every synagogue and church?" And part of the reason we came up with was that the archaeologists are secular. Most of them have appointments in university. They don't want to be seen as proving the Bible, even though they're doing so-called Near Eastern archaeology.
So I thought this is truly fascinating because if the historicity of the Bible can be validated, even down to its minor details, that actually adds to the credibility of the whole.
So I embarked on a kind of three-year project to really learn the field. Biblical archaeology has been around for about 150 years since the second. Second half of the 19th century, it's made hundreds and hundreds of discoveries in the areas that relate to the Bible, and so this book is a kind of summary of what we now know from biblical archaeology that corroborates the Bible. I'm also happy to report that in 150 years, there is not a single important finding of biblical archaeology that contradicts the Bible. Wow!
So is your next film going to be titled? Indiana De Sousa and the Lost Ark. I really do like the comparison. I'm sort of missing the Indiana Jones hat, and I haven't yet located the Ark of the Covenant to be sure. And you know, I got to tell you, Greg, a lot of archaeology, as I've now experienced it, I've actually been in some of these digs, is is very Sort of painstaking work, and not only that, but it it doesn't always excavate big things.
You know, we think of Agatha Christie's novels, which are set against the spectacular backdrop of the pyramids, or we think of Indiana Jones and these sort of great cities coming out of the ground.
Sometimes, what will come out of the ground is a tiny half inch. Clay seal. These seals were used to seal correspondence. They're made of clay. The clay impressions and the the correspondence is lost, but the seal hardens.
The clay hardens and remains.
So the clay seal will have a guy's name on it, and the archaeologists won't even know who that guy is. They'll stick the the clay seal somewhere in a museum or in an academic storage facility, and then three years later, somebody looks at that seal and they go, "Whoa, that guy's in the Book of Isaiah." Isaiah, or that guy's in the book of Jeremiah, and that guy might be a cameo appearance in the Bible—not an important figure. He's mentioned in two lines and never again. And yet, once you're looking at that clay seal, you realize that this guy, you know, Jehuqal, son of Shallumaya, has now jumped into the pages of history via the pathway of archaeology. Wow!
Yeah, I remember when it was said by some, "Well, the Bible's not true." Talk so much about Pontius Pilate. There's no historical record of a Pontius Pilate, but then of course they found the Pilate stone, and it seems. Do you know Jeremiah Johnson? Of course, yes. It seems like he mentioned something about a Pilate ring that's been discovered more recently, and and you alluded to the fact that some recent discoveries have been really significant.
So, what are some of those recent discoveries?
Well, just in the last several days, archaeologists have confirmed the location of biblical Betsaida, which is a location where Jesus did miracles. What happens is sometimes these biblical places get lost. I mean, obviously, biblical places don't come with name tags. You know, you've got to correctly identify a location.
Now, I'll give an example. Since you mentioned Pontius Pilate, you know, my mind flashes to the great trial scene of Jesus. He's arrested. He's taken to the home of the High priest, and so the major figures here are King Herod, Pontius Pilate, the high priest Caiaphas, and of course the accused man Jesus.
Now, there's really interesting archaeology on all four of these men, but I want to focus for a moment on Caiaphas because the Bible just gives one name. He's Caiaphas, yes. But the Jewish historian named Josephus tells us that his first name is Joseph Caiaphas.
Now.
Now, if we. If we fast forward two thousand years, they were recently digging in the aristocratic or priestly quarter of Jerusalem, and out of the ground come a bunch of these. They're called ossuaries. They're stone boxes. And in the first century A.D., if you died, your bones were taken out of the the tomb.
You were buried in a tomb, but then when your body decayed, they would take your bones out and put in a box and. Put your name on it.
So that's the ossuary.
So these archaeologists are looking at about twenty of these ossuaries, and one of them is particularly ornate and it stands out. And they look more closely, and the name on it is as follows: Yehoshu'f Bar Kayafa.
So Yehoshu'f is Joseph. Bar is son of. Caiphas, Caiphas, and you look inside the box, and it's the bones of a 60-year-old man, and the bones are then dated, and they date to the first century A.D.
So it's Caiphas. Think about it. We've, you know, you've preached about these great scenes where Caiphas is stirring up the Sanhedrin, and then they go to Pilate, who is of course reluctant to crucify Jesus, but the but Caiphas is insistent. This man, this villain of the Bible. We're not just talking about his name popping out on a stone inscription or some sort of a writing on on the wall.
You're actually looking at his bones.
So this is what archaeology. It gives you this chilling feeling. These real people and places and events kind of spring to life. And I think it's a great encouragement to the believer and a little bit of a bafflement or confounds the skeptic. Yes.
On my last trip to Israel, they took me to a site that had, at that point, not been made open to the public yet—the Pool of Bethesda. And what was so exciting to me about that is here's this narrow pathway that they said Jesus would have walked across on his way to the temple.
Now, you know, people always want to know where did Jesus walk, and the problem is there's layers of civilization in Jerusalem. You know, the the Crusaders built over this, and someone. Built over that, and so a lot of what Jesus, the places where Christ actually walked, were are thirty feet below. But there's a couple of spots of southern steps. We know he would have been on those steps somewhere.
But when you walk past the Pool of Bethesda, you are on the actual path that Christ himself would have walked. Have you seen that one in particular? And do you have anything you've discovered about that site? Yes, I want to. There are really two famous pools that have been that were lost to history and have been discovered very recently: the Pool of Bethesda and the Pool of Salome.
Now, both of these are highly significant because Jesus performed miracles at each one. The Pool of Salome is huge; it's the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and and for a long time, historians thought that the These pools were going to be small places for ritual baths, but it turned out that these pools were huge. And out of town Jews, which by the way is including Jesus, right? Jesus lived in the northern part of Israel. He would come to Jerusalem for holy days or holidays.
He would bathe in the pool of Siloam or cleanse himself ritually, and then he would walk the pilgrimage road about five hundred meters to the temple.
So. Like you said, there are certain places where people don't know exactly where Jesus walked. They'll say, "Well, the Via Dolorosa is over here," or "No, we think it's over there." But it seems beyond a doubt that he would have bathed in this particular pool and walked this pilgrimage road to the temple because that was standard for out-of-town Jews in Jesus's time. What are your thoughts on the Garden Tomb? Do you believe that?
What do you think? How would you rate that? Like, I think ninety percent—that's the tomb Jesus was buried in. Fifty percent, forty percent, or I just don't know. No, I think that the.
For some time, there was a kind of a legitimate dispute about the site of Jesus's crucifixion. Yeah, is it at the site of the Garden Tomb or the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?
Now, the best argument for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is that in the second century, by the way, just a few decades after Jesus's death and after the apostles lived, the Roman Emperor Hadrian decided to stamp out all the Christians. Sites and he knew what they were because there were Christians at that time alive who had known the apostles.
So what does Hadrian do? He goes and he builds pagan monuments on top of those sites. Interesting. And ironically, this kind of despiser of Christianity unwittingly ends up marking some of those sites by doing this.
So in the fourth century, when Constantine converted to Christianity, he sent his mother to Jerusalem. She just knew where to look, right? She went and found all those pagan sites. She took them down, and she usually built churches right on top of that.
Now, that's the side of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which has been for centuries the traditional site of the crucifixion. In the 20th century, some people began to doubt that because they thought that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was inside the city of Jerusalem, and as you know from the Bible, Jesus was crucified. Outside the city, so this was the kind of serious objection to that particular site. But subsequent archaeological work, more recent, has confirmed that Jerusalem was obviously much smaller in the old days than it is later.
So, as it turns out, in Jesus's time, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that site, was indeed outside the city, just as the Bible says. And for that reason, I. I think that is the most likely spot for Jesus's crucifixion. Fascinating, you have written, and I quote: "There is only one nation in the world whose identity and very existence is based on a book. That nation is Israel, and that book is the Bible." You believe that the modern state of Israel, if I am not mistaken.
Is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy when the Jews returned to their homeland and established a nation, 1948. You believe that was part of God's plan, am I right? Absolutely, I think that it is predicted more than once, several times in the Bible, that the Jews will be scattered to the ends of the earth, and they will return.
Now, in the past, the Jews have been scattered, but not to the ends of the earth. Yes. After the Assyrian invasion, some Jews were relocated into Assyria. After the Babylonian invasion, some Jews were relocated to Babylonia and later Persia. But the notion of Jews.
Being scattered to the ends of the earth, taking that kind of literally, and returning—that's only happened once. And not only is it happened once; it's never happened to any other people. True.
So I think it is of great biblical significance.
Now I realize there are some people today who say, "Well, you know, the Jews went to Europe and they intermarried, and so on." And all of that may be true, but nevertheless, I think that for these people who were scattered. Two thousand years ago, to come back. Is an event that is, first of all, extremely unlikely. For most of the centuries, you would have said there is really no way for this to happen. Yeah.
But it did happen, and so yes, I do think that not only is it a fulfillment of prophecy, but it surely has to be taken as the single most important indicator of the last age or of the end times. In other words, we've kind of come full circle with the Jews. Yes, and. You know, there's no doubt that there's a connection to the Holocaust because, after the loss of six million Jewish people, I think they understood that we need our own homeland, and it was as if on cue. And I believe they were on cue because, actually, according to Ezekiel thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, it's it's a sign of the last days.
He even says repeatedly. That this will happen in the last days, so it seems to me that this is an indication or a fulfillment, a Bible prophecy that Christ is coming back. You know, there's an archaeological tie into this, which is that the greatest discovery of biblical archaeology in the 20th century is the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yes. And what does the Dead Sea Scrolls do?
Well, they basically confirm the accuracy of the Hebrew Bible. The oldest Hebrew Bible prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls was from about 1000 AD.
So think of it: more than a millennium after the events that it's talking about.
So a lot of Skeptics were like, wait a minute! The scribes could could have made changes; they could have made additions and subtractions. How do we know that the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament that we're reading now, is like the same one that Jesus read?
Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were dated back to somewhere between the third century BC before Jesus to about the first century BC or even AD, they confirmed that the Hebrew Bible had not been altered. Had not been changed in any meaningful way, and and and guess what? What was the year that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered? Answer: 1947. One year before the founding of the state of Israel, the nation of Israel.
So it's almost as if the ancestral history, the presence of the Jews in their ancient homeland, the kind of great charter of the Jews, namely their Hebrew Bible, is validated. Yes, twelve months. Before Israel is reconstituted as a nation. Wow, it's incredible.
So, if you were talking to a non-believer, Dinesh, and and you were going to argue the reliability of Scripture on archaeology alone, what would what what archaeological discovery would you refer to that you think is one of the more compelling?
Well, if I had to just pick an example, you know, just right off the top of my head, and I picked this one because it is it is one that the skeptics were gloating over for a long time. When the Israelites are crossing over from Egypt through the desert, they're coming to the Promised Land. They have to go through Jordan, which is at that time Moabite territory. The Moabites are the enemies of the Israelites, and the king of Moab, Balak. He rounds up a fortune teller named Balaam or Balam, son of Beor, and he tells this guy, "You need to curse the Israelites; it'll give them all kinds of problems." And this Balam guy is ready to do it, but the Bible says that God stops him; God prevents him from cursing the Israelites.
Now, in the Bible, this Balam has a donkey; it's a talking donkey, so you can just imagine the skeptics are like, "This is ridiculous." This thing is all made up. It's obviously some kind of preposterous legend. Except, let's come to a few decades ago. They're digging in Jordan, and these are secular archaeologists, and they find an old plaster inscription, and it says as follows: "The warnings and sayings of Balaam, son of Beor." So, number one, it's this—it's Balaam, same name. And you might say, "Well, there could be two Balams or three Balams." But it's Balam, son of Beor, same dad.
Not only that, it's in the right location, which is Jordan, Moabite territory. And finally, what's his job? The warnings and sayings of Balam, son of Beor, indicates he's some sort of a soothsayer. He's some sort of a fortune teller.
So this Balam, again, this preposterous character with the talking donkey, is now historically validated. And so my argument to the skeptics goes something like this: Look. You cannot with archaeology prove the theology of the Bible. I'm not trying to prove the miracles, but guess what? If the archaeology is true down to its minute detail, stretching over the entire 2,100-year history of the Bible, all the way from the patriarchs to the Book of Acts, if I can show you a hundred archaeological artifacts that corroborate the Bible, with not a single one going in the Opposite direction doesn't make doesn't that enhance the credibility of the Bible as a whole?
Yes, our mutual friend, Frank Turek, you know, who'd go out in college campuses and take questions from students, and he told me recently that the atheism is not as prominent as it once was. That now it's kids asking questions more about, oh, personal lifestyle choices, and he poses a question to them, and Frank will ask the students if I could prove Christianity. Is true? Would you believe it? And he said, many of them say no.
So it's not always an intellectual issue. It's not always convince me with archaeology or or convince me with something else. It's simply that they don't want to live by the teachings of what the scriptures say, as Jesus said, people don't come to the light. Because they don't want their evil deeds to be exposed, so there comes a point where we can make the intellectual arguments, and I recommend people get your new book, *The Stones Cry Out*, to help with those intellectual arguments, which have their place. But ultimately, it comes to the person willing to turn their back on sin and put their faith in Christ.
I agree. The most that archaeology, the most that Christian apologetics can do, is remove the rational obstacles, you know, to belief. Hey, everybody! Thanks for listening to my podcast. Before you go, I wanted to let you know about the important work we're doing here at Harvest.
You know, we've had the same goal these last fifty years, which is simply this: we want to know God, and we want to make Him known, and we do that in a lot of ways—documentary films. Animation, radio, television, large-scale evangelistic events, and more. If you want to be a part of what we're doing to fulfill the Great Commission, you can support us with whatever you can give at harvest.org/donate. Again, that's harvest.org/donate, and thanks so much.
