Evidence of Jesus
When the militant atheist, Christopher Hitchens, was alive, he made the audacious claim that the authenticity of the gospels has been shown to be “in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research”. [i] In reality, this comment is so manifestly outrageous as to beggar belief. Here’s why: Galilee synagogues For many years, contemporary scholars were troubled by a lack of synagogues. Prior to 2008, no archaeological evidence for any synagogue existing in Jesus’ time could be found in the region of Galilee. As the gospels mention that “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues” (Mt 4:23), this was a bit of an embarrassment. Some scholars concluded that the claim that Jesus preached in the synagogues of Galilee was an invention of the gospel writers. But then, in 2009, archaeologists discovered the remains of a pre-AD 70 synagogue in the Galilean town of Magdala (the town where Mary Magdalene came from). Later that year, they