National Catholic Register, Fr. Dwight Longenecker: Everybody likes a good mystery, and we like to watch as the sleuth sifts the clues, eliminates false leads, tracks down the culprit and gets his man.
I enjoyed putting pieces of the puzzle together when I was writing my book The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. It was intriguing to find scraps of evidence here, an archeological discovery or detail from an ancient text there, and see how the geography, politics and economics of the time converged to a solution.
Bible scholars go through a similar process when they attempt to date the New Testament. Modernist scholars undermine the historical reliability of the New Testament by supposing the gospels were written long after the time of Jesus and the apostles. (Go here to read more about their erroneous ideas.) They teach that the stories of Jesus were exaggerated and elaborated with later “mythical” elements borrowed from pagan culture. Article is here.
