Dear friend,
I want to tell you about a man named William Ramsay.
He was born in 1851 in Scotland. By the time he was thirty he was one of the most respected archaeologists in the world. He had studied at Oxford. He had dug through the ancient ruins of Asia Minor — modern day Turkey — with some of the finest minds of his generation. He knew the ancient world the way most people know their own neighborhood.
And he believed the Bible was unreliable.
Not because he was a bad man. Because he was a careful man. A scientific man. A man who had been trained to follow the evidence wherever it led. And the evidence, as far as he could see, did not support the historical claims of the New Testament.
So he went to prove it.
What he found instead changed his life. And I believe it will change how you read your Bible tonight.
Before I show you what Ramsay found let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. It traces a pattern through Scripture that I believe is unfolding right now in America. The same God whose Word Ramsay set out to disprove is the same God I believe is at work in this country today. You can find the guide by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me tell you what Ramsay found.
Ramsay focused his attention on the book of Luke. Specifically the book of Acts which Luke also wrote. Acts is a historical document. It names real places. Real people. Real officials with real titles. Real roads and real cities and real courts of law.
And that is exactly what made it so easy to attack.
If Luke got the details wrong — if the titles were wrong or the geography was wrong or the officials did not exist — then the whole book could be dismissed as fiction. As religious propaganda dressed up to look like history.
Ramsay went to Asia Minor with that specific goal. He was going to find the errors. He was going to show the world that Luke had made things up.
He dug for years.
And here is what he found.
Luke got everything right.
Not mostly right. Not right in the big things but wrong in the small ones. Everything.
The titles of the local officials that Luke used — titles that had not been used anywhere else in any ancient document — turned out to be exactly correct for the specific city and the specific time period Luke described. Ramsay found the inscriptions in the ruins. The titles matched perfectly.
The geography Luke described — the roads, the harbors, the distances between cities — turned out to be accurate to a degree that astonished Ramsay. Not approximately accurate. Precisely accurate.
The specific details of Roman law and Roman court procedure that Luke described in the trials of Paul turned out to match what Ramsay found in the legal records of the period. Detail by detail. Without error.
Ramsay spent years looking for mistakes. He could not find them.
And then he wrote something that has stayed with me for decades.
He wrote that Luke is a historian of the first rank. That this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.
This was not a preacher saying that. This was not someone trying to sell you something. This was one of the most rigorous archaeologists of the nineteenth century saying that the man who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts was one of the most reliable historians who ever lived.
I want to tell you why this matters.
Because Luke did not just write history. Luke wrote about miracles. About healings. About a man who walked on water and fed thousands with a handful of food and rose from the dead on the third day.
And Ramsay's discovery does not prove those things happened. Nothing can prove a miracle to someone determined not to believe in one.
But here is what it does prove.
It proves that the man who wrote those accounts was not making things up. Was not writing fiction. Was not creating a religious story out of nothing. He was writing with the same precision and the same care and the same attention to verifiable detail that the greatest historians of the ancient world used.
Which means when Luke writes that he investigated everything carefully in order to write an orderly account — which he says in Luke chapter 1 verse 3 — he means it. He did the work. He checked the details. He was not guessing.
And if he was that careful about the details you can check — the titles and the geography and the legal procedures — then it is worth asking how careful he was about the details you cannot check.
The answer Ramsay arrived at after years of trying to prove the opposite was this.
He trusted Luke completely.
There is something about a hostile witness that carries a weight that a friendly one never can.
If I tell you the Bible is reliable you might think I am saying it because I am a man of faith who wants it to be true. You might be right.
But when William Ramsay — a man who went to Asia Minor specifically to find the errors, who had every professional reason to want the Bible to be wrong, who had no faith to protect and no reputation to build on the Bible being true — when that man comes back from years of digging and says Luke is one of the greatest historians who ever lived, that is a different kind of testimony.
That is the testimony of someone who looked for the exit and could not find it.
I think about Ramsay often when I look at what is happening in this country right now.
Because the same pattern appears everywhere. The person who sets out to disprove something and cannot. The hostile witness who becomes the most compelling advocate. The evidence that accumulates until the person looking at it honestly can no longer explain it away.
I have watched that pattern play out in the political world too. The people who set out to finish one man and found that the more they threw at him the stronger the case became that something else was happening. That the survival was not political. That the pattern had a name in Scripture.
I wrote about that pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. The same God whose Word Ramsay could not disprove is the same God I believe is at work in what you are watching right now. Read it this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I think it will give you the same thing Ramsay's discovery gave me the first time I read about it. Not just information. The specific, settled feeling of knowing that the thing you believe is standing on something real.
I want to close with something Luke wrote at the very beginning of his Gospel.
Luke chapter 1 verses 3 and 4.
It seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
That you may have certainty.
That is why Luke wrote. Not to entertain. Not to persuade through emotion. To give the people who believed something to stand on. Evidence. Verifiable, careful, historically accurate evidence that the things they had been taught were not stories. They were history.
William Ramsay went looking for reasons to disbelieve. He found reasons to trust instead.
You can trust it too, friend. The Book in your hands has been tested by some of the sharpest minds in the history of archaeology. And it is still standing.
God bless you. I mean that tonight more than usual.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do two things:
One. Read Luke chapter 1 verses 1 through 4 this week. Four verses. Read them slowly. Pay attention to what Luke says about how he wrote his Gospel. He investigated everything carefully. He wrote an orderly account. He wanted you to have certainty. Let that be the foundation you stand on this week when the questions come.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
The God whose Word Ramsay could not disprove is the same God I believe is at work right now. That guide will show you where. I think it will give you the same certainty Luke was trying to give Theophilus two thousand years ago.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.