An apologetic argument that biblicists persist in using in their attempts to prove the inerrancy of the Bible is that the historical accuracy of Luke was such that it strongly indicates that he was divinely inspired. This argument is almost always accompanied by claims that Sir William Ramsay, a renowned British archaeologist, had been a biblical skeptic until he began his field studies in the topography of Asia Minor. What he learned led him to conclude that Luke was a "first-rate historian."
Norman Geisler appealed to this argument in the Till-Geisler Debate. He said that Ramsay had found that in Luke's "references [in the book of Acts] to 32 countries, to 44 cities, and 9 islands, there were no errors." One can go to the internet and find hundreds of website articles written by preachers and would-be apologists who chant this same theme song about Ramsay's opinion of Luke as if geographical and sociological accuracy in a written work is somehow proof that it was divinely inspired. Wayne Jackson, a fundamentalist preacher whose articles have often been quoted in The Skeptical Review, was so excited over what he thought was attention to details in the book of Acts that he said, "Only inspiration can account for Luke's precision" ("The Holy Bible-Inspired of God," Christian Courier, 27 [1]: 1-3, May 1991).
The problem with this argument is the same as that which was noted in "The Absence of Evidence" on pages 5-7 of this issue. When biblical "maximists" find extrabiblical confirmation of some information recorded in the Bible, they read into the evidence far too much and conclude that if some of what the Bible says is true, then all that it says must be true. Their argument is that if biblical authors were right in A, B, and C, then they must have been right in D, E, F, G, H, I, J, etc. The fallaciousness of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has even a minimal sense of logic.
Whether Sir William Ramsay was as "skeptical" as claimed by biblicists or merely had reasonable doubts about inerrancy is a matter of dispute, but for the sake of argument, let's just assume that he was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist when he went to Asia Minor. Everything he cited as his reasons for concluding that Luke was a "first-rate historian" concerned the commonplace and ordinary, but not one of Ramsay's discoveries confirmed any of Luke's many miraculous claims. Accuracy in references to 32 countries, 33 cities, 9 islands, and other geographical matters is hardly sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that Luke wrote by divine inspiration.
Geographical, sociological, and political accuracy in secular books is not at all unusual. Any long-time resident of Fulton County, Illinois, can read Spoon River Anthology and easily recognize that its author, Edgar Lee Masters, was familiar with the geography of the region in which this book was set, but that by no means would prove that Masters was divinely inspired as he wrote. He was simply familiar with a geographical region that he had lived in. If Luke had traveled with the apostle Paul, as claimed in the book of Acts, why should we not expect that he would have become familiar with the places they visited?
The book of Acts claimed 26 different miracles between the ascension of Jesus in 1:6-11 and the apostle Paul's survival of the bite of a venomous serpent in 28:3-6. These miracles were as extraordinary as the claims that Peter struck two people dead (5:1-11) and resurrected Dorcus (9:39-42) and that Paul struck a sorcerer blind (13:4-12) and raised Eutychus from the dead (20:7-11), yet not one scrap of extrabiblical evidence has ever been found to corroborate Luke's claims that all of these events happened. Some of them allegedly happened in the presence of witnesses that sometimes numbered several thousand, as in the case of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 in the presence of "devout Jews" from "every nation under heaven"(v:5) to whom Peter said that Jesus of Nazareth had been approved of God to them by "mighty works and signs which God did by him in [their] midst" even as they themselves knew (2: 22), yet despite the alleged openness of many of these extraordinary events that filled the works of Luke, not one of them has ever been confirmed by unbiased, disinterested contemporary records. As noted on page 7 of this issue, that is a silence that screams.
The accuracy of Luke even in ordinary matters is by no means
agreed upon in scholarly circles, but that is another subject for
another article. Certainly, what accuracy has been found in his works
doesn't prove divine inspiration.
