(continuation...)

One of the best kept secrets in the last quarter of a century from those who try to learn history exclusively from the popular media is the massive amount of evidence that has come to light or been more accessibly compiled supporting the accuracy of the New Testament documents. For details just on the Gospels themselves, see the first book I ever wrote, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987), which will be appearing this year in substantially revised form for a twentieth-anniversary edition. Recent works by Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Ben Witherington, Tom Wright, and a host of others all rely on solid, sober scholarship of a kind Dan Brown, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel will apparently never care to publicize. Bolstering conventional belief about anything has never made much money and that’s all it’s really about in these endeavors. (Lest you think I’m being too cynical, Darrell Bock has shared stories with me of what representatives of the major networks told him face to face he’d have to raise in millions of dollars before they’d ever consider doing it.). In a postmodern world, post-Communist world truth gives way to fiction to fuel capitalism. It is tragically reminiscent of the comment Russians used to make during their Communist era when their two major news organs were Pravda (meaning “Truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “News”): “there is no pravda in izvestia and there is no izvestia in pravda!” My, how far things have deteriorated in this country in the seventeen years since the fall of the Soviet regime!

Craig L. Blomberg
Distinguished Professor of New Testament
Denver Seminary
Littleton, CO
March 2007


http://www.denverseminary.edu/dialogue/jesusbones