It was a very busy twenty years. First you had the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. Somewhere in the Roman Empire at that time, the Gospel of Mark was being written while, elsewhere, Paul was founding churches and writing letters to them. The blaze began on the 19th of July (our modern calendar) in 64 AD. It burned for six days until it was brought under control. Emperor Nero blamed the fire on the Roman Christians which led to the first of many imperial persecutions of that growing religious body. Across the Mediterranean, in the fall of AD 66, various militant groups of Jews had skirmished with the Romans in Jerusalem to the point where they finally prevailed and drove the Romans out of the city. The revolutionary government and Pax Judea would only last four years when, in AD 70, the Romans overpowered Jerusalem, burned the temple and expelled the Jews. The diaspora would last until 1949. By that year when the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, the Gospel of Luke and other New Testament books are being written. Paul has journeyed over 15,000 miles in his mission work. Rome is at the zenith of its power and then, on 24 August, AD 79 (our modern calendar), a volcano erupts destroying the Roman city of Pompeii (modern Naples) about 140 miles south of Rome. The date was recorded precisely by the writer and historian Pliny the Younger who watched his more famous uncle, Pliny the Elder, perish in a boat in the bay as it was bombarded with volcanic rocks from the eruption. Alas, no original copy of Pliny the Younger’s description has ever been found. Being an ancient writing, such letters were copied by monks (yes, they copied more than the bible) and survived for centuries because of such preservation. Pliny’s letter attesting the volcanic eruption was written to Tacitus, a Roman senator; thus, it was an important piece of history. He emphasizes the factual truth of his account by writing, “I have faithfully related to you what I was either an eye-witness of myself or received immediately after the accident happened, and before there was time to vary the truth,” Why would we doubt any of his account, especially knowing how fastidious the Romans were in their record-keeping. But there are plenty of reasons archaeologists have doubted the date. First, Pliny’s letter was written twenty years AFTER the event. All we have are copies and translations of copies from centuries later. Various versions of these purported “copies” of his letter have a date ranging from August to November. Some of the confusion on dates may be related to the transition from the Roman to the Gregorian calendar. Secondly, archaeologists have found autumnal fruits and heating braziers in the ruins. These would not have been present had the eruption occurred in August. A new investigation of a previously unexcavated part of the ruins was undertaken this year. On the wall of a house being remodeled before the volcano erupted, a date was found, written in charcoal, probably by a workman, that would be 24 October AD 79 in our modern calendar. There is a cautionary note about the distinction between facts and truth. Modern-day facts such as “On what date did this thing occur?” are hard enough to ascertain, let alone, facts from 2,000 years ago. When it comes to the bible, what some people consider as “fact” is subject to the same problem of copies and translations of copies that Pliny’s letter had. Whether things happened in the bible exactly the way they are recorded or not can always be debated. We need to pay more attention to the deeper truths.