First a comment from the New Zealand Herald:
“Out of the earth.”
‘IN this delightfully-written little book, Professor E M Blaiklock MA DLitt. has provided an epicure's feast that can be enjoyed by all.
Out of the sands and dust of Bible lands, he re-creates for us the background against which archaeology sets the Birth, Sayings and Resurrection of our Lord, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, the Apocalyse, and the conditions of life for the Early Church. He selects with great skill just those points that the ordinary reader is most likely to be able to appreciate; and the picture that he draws is of a world that was strikingly similar to the world of to-day —anxious, war-ridden, disillusioned. We are, as Prof. Butterfield has remarked, in
many ways in the religious situation of the first century, and that situation often provides us with the key to our own problems.
Dr. Blaiklock's lightly-worn learning and spiritual insight are too little known in this country, and this book will certainly make readers ask for more.

OUT OF THE EARTH
The Witness of Archaeology to the New Testament

BLAIKLOCK, M.A., Litt. D.
Professor of Classics University of Auckland, New Zealand

" Truth shall spring out of the earth"
—Ps. 85- 11 (A.V.)

What to expect:

CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION
I. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BIRTH OF CHRIST .
II. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SAYINGS OF CHRIST
-PART ONE
III. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SAYINGS OF CHRIST
PART Two
IV. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
V. ARCHEOLOGY AND THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
VI. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE EPISTLES
VII. Archaeology AND THE APOCALYPSE
VIII. ARCHAEOLOGY
AND THE EARLY CHURCH
PART ONE
IX.Archaeology AND THE EARLY CHURCH
PART TWO

INTRODUCTION

“SIR," said Dr Samuel Johnson two centuries ago, "all that is really known of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few pages. We can know no
more than what the old writers have told us."
The remark was true as far as the self-conscious writing of history goes. But Johnson had not realized that man writes history unconsciously and indelibly in more ways than one. Man tells his story in the election slogan scratched on a Pompeian wall, in a scrap of potsherd marked with a candidate's name, in the redwood chips of a Pueblo cave, the split moa bones of a New Zealand swamp, in the papyrus remnants from a Fayum rubbish heap, in the brown stain of Roman ditch and posthole in a London cellar, in gravestone and inscription, in coins lost and buried, in his own frail bones laid at last in Roman catacomb, Danish bog, or Saxon burial barge, in house foundations, and time-defying trench and earth-work. Man's footprints are inevitable and manifold and it is to the credit of the modern world that man has learned to trace, to recognize, and to read the story thus recorded.
In the sombre age in which we live research has been overshadowed by the scientist. For good and ill chemist and physicist have changed the pattern and prospects of human life, and humanity at large, dazzled by such achievement, has been unaware of vast increases in knowledge in less obvious but no less important regions of the mind.
History is one such sphere. Since Schliemann's enthusiasm gave Troy back to Western knowledge ninety years ago, a succession of archaeologists of increasing skill and effectiveness have thrust back the frontiers of known history by centuries, and thrown vivid light on the recorded story. And very much of that astonishing achievement falls within the boundaries of the last generation. Two events, in fact, awakened the general public to the new science and the knowledge it was giving as recently as the early 'twenties. The first was Carter's discovery in 1922 of Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, since when the newspapers have realized that archaeology is always headline news. The second event was the publication in 1924 of the earlier volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History, which revealed to a select reading public the successes which archaeology had already achieved. This was, no doubt, the moment Sir Mortimer Wheeler had in mind when he spoke of archaeology being discovered "not only by the public but by the professors." The literary record, at any rate, is now read side by side with the evidence which archaeology supplies, and more often than not with results in all spheres which rebuke the habitual scepticism of a century ago. It was the mood of the nineteenth century to question and distrust tradition.
It has been the experience of the twentieth century that tradition, even when embedded in myth and legend, must be handled with care and circumspection.
In more than one sphere it has been shown that what the past said about itself was in the main more likely to contain truth than falsehood. Schliemann's discovery of Troy and Mycenae, and Sir Arthur Evans' work in Crete, the ancient home of the Philistines, provided classical scholars with chastening illustrations of this fact.) Similar, and more striking vindications of Biblical historiography have taught historians to respect the authofity of both Old Testament and New, and to admire the accuracy, the deep concern for truth, and the inspired historical insight of the varied writers who gave the Bible its books of history.
At first it was the Old Testament which came to vivid life. From Layard's discovery of Nineveh, over a century ago, which initiated the era of Biblical archaeology, to the recent near-tragedy of Wendel Phillips' attempt to excavate Sheba, which revealed the exciting possibilities of new discovery, and the still more recent underwater archaeology on the Dead Sea, the story makes a fascinating record of exploration. Garstang's work at Jericho, Woolley's excavation of Ur, Starkey's discovery of the Lachish ostraka, the finding of the Tell-el-Amarna letters, the Ras-Shamra tablets, the stele of Hammurabi, the Moabite Stone, the Siloam Tunnel, these and a score of other astonishing events punctuate three generations of Old Testament archaeology, and offer promise of abundance yet to find
The archacology of the New Testament was later in the field. The following chapters will show some of it
beginnings in the work of Grenfell, Hunt, and Ramsay the close of the last century. Its discoveries do not contain the dramatic moments such as those Layard enjoye when the sand fell away from the winged bulls of Ninevel when Woolley found the headdress of the royal lady Ur, or when Garstang first saw the stones of Jericho flung outwards from their foundations.
And yet drama does not need stage properties so vast or strange. It was surely a moment of high triumph for Hunt when he deciphered the word KARPHOS (a mote) on a scrap of papyrus, and knew that he held a sheet of the sayings of Christ almost contemporary with the writing of the Gospels; or, indeed, for the Abbé Cumont, when he was first confronted with the stone slab from Nazareth.
Macalister has somewhere defined archaeology austerely as "the discovery and classification of the common objects of life." The archaeology of the New Testament has precisely that task. Its stock in trade is discarded paper, the humble gravestone, the petty inscription. Its future work will have little to do with the ruins of city and palace, and the burials of kings; it will leave to others the more pretentious monuments of the ancient world, and build its future story round such "common objects of life" as the Christian lamp, which the summer of 1956 saw found at Caerleon, the Christian grave relics of the York Museum, the chapel murals in the Lullingstone villa, or the fragment of the Fourth Gospel, found in 1935, which took back the manuscript tradition of that famously vindicated book to within a generation of its author. It will find a widening sphere in the closer investigation of the Catacombs; it will join hands with the Roman historian in the elucidation of life in the highly Christianized provinces of Asia and North Africa. Papyri, still unearthed or un-deciphered, will no doubt have much to offer. The discovery of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 shows what possibilities lie here.
The spade has obviously not yet finished with the Bible.
"I believe in the spade," said Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"It has fed the tribes of mankind. It has furnished them water, coal, iron, and gold. And now it is