Go ahead, cross-examine Luke as a historian. Look at all the details in these two verses!
“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”
(Luke 3:1, 2 Unless otherwise stated: Scripture is taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Used by permission. All rights reserved).
There are ten names, counting both given for Pontius Pilate. Luke lists six titles of rulers and five regions of their rule. There is also a timestamp, “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.”
For a moment, ponder the amount of cross-examination to which these twenty-two facts expose themselves. With such detail at our disposal, we can validate or debunk the information by seeing if the time, places, titles, and names are consistent. In every place where we have had the information to check, we see that these verses are factual on all accounts.
True, by themselves the details in a couple of verses don’t prove that the Bible is from God. However, they are what you would expect to find if God moved someone to record events; they would be accurate. When you take the 52 chapters of Luke’s writings into account (Luke and Acts) and note that the only historical records that are parallel to them in quality are other books of the Bible, then you have a robust part of the case for the divine origin of Scripture. The Bible wasn’t written just to be a history book, but where it records history, it is correct.
Luke was more than a historian. He was an inspired writer – moved by God to pen the words he wrote.
Van
