In the beginning ...

It was 5:30 in the afternoon, and it was late September, 2010. as I stepped off of the air conditioned plane, I felt like I had just stepped into a sauna. It was 30 degrees centigrade outside, and I was in Israel, at Ben Gurion Airport.

The coach , thankfully was air conditioned, and I was going on a week long tour of the Holy land with my wife.  Mandy. She had been here before, but for me, a kid born in the North of England and raised in north London in a poor area, this was my first venture out of Europe. it was like going into another world. i was stepping back into a place that i was only familiar with via TV , maps and books. And now, here I was, about to visit the places where Abraham , Isaac and Jacob tended their sheep, where King Solomon reigned in splendour and Jesus had walked and talked with His disciples by the sea of Galilee.

Looking out of the coach window, I could see the flat land of the coastal plain. This would have been philistine territory, once, but was now part of the modern state of Israel, and we were on the road to Jerusalem, the capital city - a holy place to 3 of the great religions of the world. for not only was it ruled over by King David and visited by Jesus of Nazareth, but Mohammed, the founder of Islam also came here - and today, on the site of Solomon's temple, there stands the Dome of the Rock, the second most holy place in Islam outside of Mecca itself.

The Israelis had brought irrigation to their farms, and the are was surprisingly green, with olive groves and date palms growing in abundance. we had a guide with our party,  who explained that we were literally going ' up to Jerusalem', for the capital was built on a limestone ridge that formed the central massif of the country. Jerusalem was a few thousand feet above sea level. not only would it be cooler up there, our guide explained, but the high ground caught the warm  , moist winds that came in off the Mediterranean  and cooled them , so that seasonal rains fell on this side of the country. However, when we got to the top, we would see into the 'rain shadow' as it was called. i remembered my geography lessons, in decades previous, where this was explained. The green and pleasant landscape suddenly stopped, and we gasped in amazement at the vast , barren landscape on  the other side of the central ridge.  The bedrock itself was limestone, a relatively soft and permeable rock that easily forms caves as the water soaks in and forms underground streams - and this feature also affected the history of this ancient land, right up to modern times. This is the land where the Bible began.

"But wait",  some may say "didn't the Bible begin with the Garden of Eden, somewhere north of  modern day Iraq? Er, yes, that is where the story was set at first , and then we follow Abraham who left his home town , Ur of the Caldees and trekked down as far as Egypt before moving back up to Canaan, where his son Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob had 12 sons who eventually formed the 12 tribes of Israel. Well, that is the story. But is it true?

In actual fact, I was about to enter on a journey that was the greatest adventure of my life so far-  one that took me from my 21st century life in London  back through to the time of the Patriarchs, and then Jericho where Joshua is supposed to have fought the famous battle, then on to the age of David and Solomon, and eventually to the very places where Jesus spent his time on Earth before He met His death in Jerusalem. And as I went from place to place, a very different picture of Israel's past appeared.

For although the Bible sets out a chronology that takes us by way of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the time of Noah and on to Adam and Eve, there is nothing in the Archaeological record to show that most of these people ever existed. Solomon , the Bible tells us, had all the surrounding  kings and potentates paying him homage and sending him tribute - but not a single entry from any palace ledger from any other place ever mentions Solomon. We have no records of a foreign princess being married off to him, no entries in any archive concerning any items being given in tribute.

It is as though Solomon never existed, and the Hebrews simply made him up, creating a glorious past for themselves with Good King Solomon as a sort of King Arthur figure, presiding over a splendid court in a golden age. Later on , we get the later prophets like Isaiah talking about invading Assyrians laying siege to Jerusalem, and then the story moves on and the Hebrews get taken into exile in Babylon. here , historians and archaeologists are a bit more helpful - they can show us the tunnel that Hezekiah the king had built to supply Jerusalem with a safe supply of water in times of trouble, and we even have a tablet on the wall in the British Museum that Sennacherib, the Assyrian emperor had made that gives us his side of the story. here at last, we find that the Bible and Secular History  are both talking about the same people and the same events.

But earlier on , we see very little of the Bible's grand tale being confirmed by secular sources or archaeological discoveries in Israel. we find mention of peoples like the Hittites and the Philistines - but when we look for signs of the Exodus, or the conquest of Canaan, and even Solomon , we seldom see what the Bible tells us. instead  we see the general outline that John Romer, a prominent archaeologist sets out in his book. it would appear that one small tribe in Canaan split off from the surrounding kingdoms and went independent, they then wrote themselves a splendid history where Yahweh, their god, promised all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile, in return for their obedience to Him .Yahweh took them out of Egypt, sent them into Canaan on a genocidal campaign against the locals, but they merely subjugated most of them instead, and that was the trouble.

Archaeologists have no trouble in spotting a Jewish settlement when they are digging in the ruins. Jewish settlements may turn up pottery, old tools and such - but no pig bones I learned. up and down the land we went over the course of many days. And over and over, it was the same old story.If the Bible said that Joshua conquered the place, the archaeologists would point out that the place appeared to be in pagan hands right up to the time of the Israelite monarchy, and then the people suddenly started eating kosher.the Real story of the Bible begins not in distant Eden, but on that small hilltop that was Josiah's stronghold.

The Law of Moses clearly set Hebrew people apart from their surrounding neighbours. even though the Hebrew religion has strains of Canaanite influence running though it, it was pointing people in a different direction - away from the pantheistic nature worship of the pagans and towards the monotheism of the Priests who ran the Temple.And the biggest lurch in that direction occurred in the reign of  Josiah, when the Temple priests found a lost book and gave it to the king to read.  we will discuss this event in the next entry of this blog. I will attempt to explain why they did this, and what makes me so sure that they faked their own history.

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.