The treasures of the British Museum

London is a place of wonder. My mother brought me her from a small mining village in derbyshire at the age of five, and I have lived here, on and off  for most of my life. A very cosmopolitan city in its own right , it has several museums of great interest to me.

The Natural History Museum now has a large wing devoted to the Theory of Evolution, and it's place in biological science. the Geology Museum , right next door , tells the story of the earth and it's crust. We have already been to the Planetarium at Greenwich , and will be visiting the other sites in due course - but today, i want to take you to the British  Museum and tell you about it. 

For it is here that you will find the most fascinating artefacts in human history. there is a small ivory casket to be seen, with the Legend of Wayland on one side, and on the other, a strange inscription. the carving below the inscription appears to be of three men holding out small offerings to a seated woman with a child on her lap, and the inscription , in Saxon Runic script reads  Mann , Ansur, Gifu  Issa.  Which transliterates into our alphabet as M A G I - this casket was intended as a gift to a saxon warlord or local king , but the giver maybe hedged his bets and put a pagan scene on one side and a Christian scene on the other, as if he wa not sure which one the recipient would like most.. it dates from the 5th century, when Christianity was new to these islands.

You also find the Rosetta Stone here. It has an inscription in Arabic, Demotic Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Greek and Arabic are a perfect match for the same message - and the discoverers wondered if the Hieroglyphic text was another repeat - indeed it was, and so the code was cracked and many other inscriptions in many temples and other places could be deciphered.

But some of the most fascinating pieces on show , for me, are the ones where the Bible intersects with history.

Many years ago, I saw an inscription from Assyria, that mentioned Sennacherib.  He was the king of Assyria mentioned in the Bible. it told the story of the campaign he launched against Hezekiah, and how the Hebrew king was shut up like a bird in a cage in the city of Jerusalem as it was under siege.

Here is the bible intersecting human history. there really was a King Hezekiah , and a Sennacherib. secular , independent sources agree on that. We have yet to find any contemporary references to Solomon , though.

But here we see two people mentioned in the Bible, are also seen in a secular document.

Now, the Bible says that the Angel of the Lord came down and slew 185,000 of the Assyrian army in a single night. The Assyrian inscription says that Hezekiah  bought Sennacherib off  with an awful lot of gold, silver, precious stones and the like.  So which story do you want to believe here?

There has been no unearthing of a mass grave, and military historians tell us that Rome at it's hight did not deploy armies of that size in the field. So large a number represents a huge logistical problem in terms of supplying , feeding and deploying in the field. how did the smaller Assyrian Empire out do the much bigger and later empire of Rome many centuries earlier? the Bible does not say.

And the Bible is full of such encounters, where Secular History meets Biblical Narrative. And often , we have to choose which one we believe. for many years, scholars were sceptical of the references in Scripture to the  Hittites. Until fairly recently, the Bible was the only source that mentioned these people. Luke was also the only person who mentioned a Proconsul of Rome ruling over a comaratively small place somewhere in the Med. Luke was obviously making this encounter up, the sceptics said. there was no way that a great Procunsul  would have such a small remit. the whole tale was fabricated to put paul in front of a great Roman magnate, it was claimed. And yet, just as modern archeologists  discovered the whole powerful Hittite civilization in more recent times, an inscription has been unearthed hat names the very procunsul that Luke names, and says that he was ruling over this small place when Luke says he was. We cannot always dismiss the bible out of hand at every turn. And yet, there are still some places where the Bible has yet to be vindicated.

In the life story of Jesus , we read in the Gospels that he cast out demons , and that He even had a conversation with the Devil himself.. Now, I believe Jesus to be a historical figure, like Herod the Great or Pontius Pilate. These people are known and acknowledged as real people by secular historians. But Satan the Devil ? this , for me, is where Narratve and history clash instead of weaving and knitting together. but I hope to resolve this question , one way or another, befoe much longer.