The Case For Christ

thought might challenge him. So the fact that he killed some
babies in Bethlehem is not going to captivate the attention of
people in the Roman world. "And third, there was no television,
no radio, no newspapers. It would have taken a long time for word
of this to get out, especially from such a minor village way in
the back hills of nowhere, and historians had much bigger
stories to write about."
As a journalist, this was still hard to fathom. "This just wasn't
much of a story?" I asked, a bit incredulous.
"I don't think it was, at least not in those days," he said. "A
madman killing everybody who seems to he a potential threat to
him - that was business as usual for Herod. Later, of course, as
Christianity developed, this incident became more important, but
I would have been surprised if this had made a big splash back
then."
Maybe so, but this was difficult to imagine for a journalist who
was trained to sniff out news in a highly technological age of
rapid and worldwide communications. At the same time, I had to
acknowledge that from what I knew of the bloody landscape of
ancient Palestine, McRay's explanation did seem reasonable.
This left one other area I wanted to inquire about. And to me, it
was the most fascinating of all.
RIDDLE OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
Admittedly, there is an allure to archaeology. Ancient tombs,
cryptic inscriptions etched in stone or scratched onto papyrus,
bits of broken pottery, worn coins-they're tantalizing clues for
an inveterate investigator. But few vestiges of the past have
generated as much intrigue as the Dead Sea Scrolls, hundreds of
manuscripts dating from 250 B.C. to A.D. 68 that were found in
caves twenty miles east of Jerusalem in 1947. They apparently had
been hidden by a strict sect of Jews called the Essenes before
the Romans destroyed their settlement.
Some bizarre claims have been made about the scrolls, including
John Marco Allegro's absurd book in which he theorized that
Christianity emerged from a fertility cult in which adherents
tripped out on hallucinogenic mushrooms!" In a more legitimate
but nevertheless much-questioned assertion, papyri expert Jose
O'Callaghan said one Dead Sea fragment is part of the earliest
manuscript ever found of the gospel of Mark, dating back to a
mere seventeen to twenty years after Jesus was crucified.