"The New Testament can be described today as the best investigated book in the world literature”. So said Hans Kung in his book “On Being a Christian”. And he was right. Over the past 300 years, the Christian Greek scriptures have been more than investigated. They have been more thoroughly dissected and minutely analysed than any other literature.
Conclusions reached by some investigators
The conclusions reached by some investigators have been bizzare. Back in the 19th century, Ludwig Noack in Germany concluded that the Gospel of John was written in 60 C.E. by the beloved disciple who, according to Noack, was Judas! The Frenchman Joseph Ernest Renan suggested that the resurrection of Lazarus was likely a fraud arranged by Lazarus himself to support Jesus’ claim of being a miracle worker, while the German theologian Gustav Volkmar insisted that the historical Jesus could not possibly have come forward with Messianic claims.
Bruno Bauer, on the other hand , decided that Jesus never existed at all! “He maintained that the real creative forces in early Christianity we're Philo, Seneca, and the Gnostics. In the end he declared that there never had been a historical Jesus that the genesis of the Christian religion was late in the second century and was from a Judaism in which Stoicism had become dominant”.
Today, few hold such extreme ideas.But if you read the works of modern scholars, you will find many still believe that the Christian Greek scriptures contain legends,myth, and exaggeration.
Is this true?
The Archaeological Evidence
Archaeological discoveries have illustrated or confirmed what we read in the Greek scriptures.Thus ,in 1961 the name of Pontius Pilate was found in an inscription in the ruins of a Roman theater at Caesarea. Until this discovery, there had been only limited evidence, apart from the Bible itself, of the existence of this Roman ruler.
In the Luke's Gospel, we read that John the Baptizer began his ministry “when Lysanias was district ruler of Abilene”. (Luke 3:1) Some doubted that statement because Josephus mentioned a Lysanias who ruled Abilene and who died in 34 B.C.E, long before the birth of John. However, archaeologists have uncovered an inspection in Abilene mentioning another Lysanias who was tetrarch during the reign of Tiberius, who was ruling as Caesar in Rome when John began his ministry. This could easily have been the Lysanias to whom Luke was referring.
In Acts we read that Pual and Barnabas were sent to do missionary work in Cyprus and there met up with a proconsul named Sergius Paulus, “an intelligent man”. (Acts 13:7) In the middle of the 19th century , excavations in Cyprus uncovered an inspection dating from 55 C.E. that mentions this very man. Of this , archaeologist G. Ernest Wright says:”It is the one reference we have to this proconsul outside the Bible and it is interesting that Luke gives us correctly his name and title”.