Saturday, October 25, 2003
This is certainly interesting, but I fail to see how it will 'rewrite the history books, changing our understanding not only of the Holy Land but of the life of Jesus himself'. This is a lot for a two thousand year old Roman bathhouse to do!
Significant as such discoveries are, I am always cautious when too much weight is placed upon them. When we are told to read the Scriptures delivered to us in a new way, due to new discoveries in archaeology, I sense that we are being trained to operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion when treating the inspired text. Whilst they might serve to throw light upon the text, they should not be made normative for our reading of the text.
