THE WITNESS OF ARCH^OtiOGY TO THE BIBLE. 



217 



translations of Hebrew, has been greatly modified if not aban- 

 doned by the recent discoveries of Greek papyri among the 

 rubbish heaps of Egypt. The unearthing of business letters 

 and documents, private epistles, even love-letters, ill-spelt peti- 

 tions and accounts of Greek-speaking farmers in upper Egypt, 

 have proved that these idioms are those of people who could not 

 by any possibility have been brought under the influence of 

 Hebrew thought. 



The papyri have given us the everyday language of the com- 

 mon people of that time, and though it differed from classic 

 Greek, it had a widespread, varied and cultured usage.* It 

 was the language by which the Holy Spirit " could make Him- 

 self understood everywhere by the masses to whom His revela- 

 tion came." (Moulton). We may well believe that the fact 

 of the New Testament being written in Greek implies that the 

 Spirit of God handed the Truth over to Gentile custodians when 

 the Jews as a nation had rejected their Messiah. f That lan- 

 guage, with its power of conveying delicate shades of thought, 

 its precision, and flexibility and rich fulness has become the 

 channel of divine revelation to us in the New Testament. 



" When Greece went forth, under Alexander the Great, to 

 conquer the East, the union of oriental and occidental was at- 

 tempted in every city in western Asia. None of these cities 

 seems to have been so successful as Tarsus, in estabhshing a 

 fairly harmonious balance between the two elements." It is 

 from this fact that Sir William Eamsay tells us that " Tarsus 

 was the city which should produce the Apostle to the Gentiles." 



Only ' a Hebrew sprung from Hebrews ' could be the 

 Apostle of the perfected Judaic faith; but he must be born and 

 brought up in childhood among the Gentiles, a citizen of a 

 Gentile city, and a member of that conquering aristocracy of 

 Eomans which ruled all the cities of the Mediterranean world. 

 The Apostle to the Gentiles must be a Jew, a Tarsian citizen 

 (i.e., a Greek) and at the same time a Eoman." 



The Empire of Eome. 



Luke has been described as, *' rather provocative as a his- 

 torian," " provocative of criticism, and never in error." He is 

 in constant touch with the great Eoman Empire, its cities, its 

 institutions, its governors and officers. Are these allusions ac- 

 curate, or are they full of blunders? 



The fascinating writings of Sir William Eamsay have answered 

 this question. He has brought the test of archaeology to bear 

 upon it, and unhesitatingly places Luke among the historians 



* See " The Decidinc: Voice of the Monuments," p. 125. 

 t See " Biblical Guide," Vol. VIII. 



