Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (1851-1939) was a British archeologist and New Testament scholar. He was the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor, and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament. He taught at Oxford and the University of Aberdeen. He was knighted in 1906 to mark his many contributions to scholarship. Ramsay also gained three honorary fellowships from Oxford colleges, nine honorary doctorates from British, Continental and North American universities, and became an honorary member of almost every association devoted to archaeology and historical research. Ramsay was the best of the best.
Ramsay was born into a home of wealth, skepticism, and atheism. He excelled in all his studies, and was usually first in his class. His New Testament education was in the Tubingen school of thought, which questioned the reliability of the New Testament. Then, equipped with the best education and his powerful intellect, Ramsay was determined, once and for all, to see that trust in the Bible would be demolished. Unlike the philosophers who contemplated and criticized religion from their libraries, he would go to the source. Well trained in archeology, he would visit the sites named in the New Testament, find the evidence to prove the Bible wrong in its historical and geographic details, and show the whole world that Christianity was nothing but a fabricated myth.
Ramsay considered the Achilles’ heel of the New Testament to be the book of Acts. This book includes the three missionary journeys of Paul, with detailed accounts of names, places, and roads throughout the Roman world. Many of these had never been named in any other historical account, and their existence was doubted.
Ramsay went to the Near East and began his work. The skeptical world was excited. No one was more qualified for the task of discrediting the New Testament than he. Christians who were familiar with Ramsay and his goals for this research expedition were worried.
That was 1881. For fifteen years Ramsay labored tirelessly, following the route laid out by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally, in 1895, he published the important book St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen. However, to everyone’s surprise, it was a very different book than he had first intended to write. In his extensive studies, Ramsay found Luke to be a perfect guide and an excellent historian, accurate to even the minutest details. Ramsay wrote that he became convinced against his will that Acts was “written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical study” and that Luke’s words can be trusted “to a degree beyond any other historian’s.” He added, “It was gradually borne in upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth.”
For forty more years, Ramsay continued his studies, excavations, and book writing—all to the increasing dismay of the unbelieving world, and to the ongoing delight of Christians. Finally, Sir William Ramsay committed his life to the Christ of the Scriptures that he found to be unfailing true.
In the decades since Ramsay’s death, archeology has continued to prove the historical accuracy of the Bible with every discovery– and there have been hundreds of such discoveries.
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Frank Morison (pen name of Albert Henry Ross) (1881-1951) was another skeptic who set out to write a book against Christianity. But after he did his homework, he too ended up writing a detailed defense of the truth of the Biblical story. Morison was a British journalist who was also a trial lawyer, so he knew how to write and how to examine evidence. When he set out on his task to disprove Christianity, he firmly believed in the philosophical maxim of T. H. Huxley that “miracles do not happen.” Period.
Morison had planned to apply his skeptical mind to the earliest accounts about Jesus in order to prove that dead men stay dead. He would do so by destroying the credibility of those documents. He wrote: “When I first began seriously to study the life of Christ, I did so with a very definite feeling that his history rested on very insecure foundations.”
However, as Morison did his research, he slowly came to the conclusion that he could not write the book he intended. As he studied the evidence for the resurrection of Christ, he found it to be not false, but compelling. Morison still wrote his book, but one that presented the exact opposite position than the one he set out to write. The name of the book he did write is Who Moved the Stone? Morison entitled his first chapter “The Book that Refused to Be Written.”
Morison wrote in the preface of the book:
(This book) is essentially a confession, the story of a man who originally set out to write one kind of book and found himself compelled by the sheer force of circumstances to write another. It is not that the facts themselves altered, for they are recorded imperishably in the monuments and in the pages of human history. But the interpretation to be put upon the facts underwent a change. Somehow, my perspective shifted –not suddenly, as in a flash of insight or inspiration, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, by the very stubbornness of the facts themselves… To tell the story of that change, and to give the reasons for it, is the main purpose of the following pages.
In his conclusion, 190 pages later, Morison wrote: “There certainly is a deep and profound historical basis for that wonderful sentence in the Apostles’ Creed which says, ‘The third day he rose again from the dead.’” Morison said that by the researching and writing of that book, he was brought to the “unexpected shores of salvation.”
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Acts 17:10-11 — The brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, to see whether those things were so.
Hebrews 2:1 — Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.
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Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant that I may be grounded and settled in your truth by the coming of your Holy Spirit into my heart.
What I do not know, reveal to me;
What is lacking within me, make complete;
That which I do know, confirm in me;
And keep me blameless in your service. Amen.
–Clement of Rome, First century, A. D.
