HE FOLLOWED THE SCIENCE AND IT LED HIM TO JESUS

In my latest book, Discovering the Real Jesus, I include the amazing story of how Sir William Ramsay (1851-1939), a world-renowned archaeologist and professor at Oxford University, was transformed by his scientific investigations. Ramsay, an agnostic, thought he would scientifically discredit the New Testament by visiting and examining all the places mentioned by Luke in the Book of Acts.

Ramsay was a product of the liberal, German higher criticism of the 19th century, and he taught that the New Testament is an unreliable religious treatise written in the mid-second century by individuals far removed from the events described. According to these critics, who are still with us, the New Testament documents are filled with inaccuracies, myths, and legends.

However, after years of retracing Luke's account of Paul's travels in Acts and doing archaeological excavations along the way, Ramsay completely reversed his view of the Bible and first-century history. His research convinced him that Acts was written in the first century by Luke, the traditional author, and he acquired a very high regard for Luke as a historian. He wrote:

Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, he is possessed of the true historic sense; in short, this author should be placed along with the greatest of historians (Hyatt, Discovering the Real Jesus, 71).

In 1896, Ramsay began publishing his discoveries in a book entitled St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen. The book caused a furor of dismay among the skeptics of the world, for its affirmation of the biblical record was totally unexpected. The evidence that Ramsay presented was so overwhelming that many atheists gave up atheism and embraced Christianity.

Over the next 20 years, Ramsay published other volumes showing how he discovered Luke to be accurate in the tiniest details of his account. In his book, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, he wrote, "You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian's and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment” (Hyatt, Discovering the Real Jesus, 72).

Ramsay then had to consider that Luke had also written the third Gospel. The archaeological evidence was so overwhelming that he gave up his agnosticism and became a Christian, which shocked the intellectual world. He followed the science, and it led him to Jesus.

This article is derived from Dr. Eddie Hyatt’s latest book, Discovering the Real Jesus, available from Amazon and his website at http://eddiehyatt.com.