A Brief Introduction
The gospel of Matthew, by all reckoning, was the first gospel and even the first book in the Bible to be written. Thus memories of places and events were fresh in the minds of the writer, and he was liable to automatically include these in his narrative. And This is exactly what we find in this gospel.
Of all the gospels, Matthew is rich in contemporary linguistic usages, imagery, place-names, and other information which have a strong imprint of the society out of which this gospel came to us. The book is a gold-mine of the kind of information that can be examined with the help of archeology, or that kind on which archeology throws much additional light.
The other gospels also came soon after that, with the gospel of John arriving last on the scene. Of these, Mark contains plenty of historical information, while Luke, due to the purpose for which it was written, is saturated with history and geography-related information. The gospel of John was written for a theological purpose, and therefore it has a higher proportion of theological material in comparison to historical one. Yet, even this gospel is not theology alone, but rather theology interwoven with history. Thus when all the four gospels [and the Acts] are taken collectively, they abound in information related to history, geography, and place/culture related comments unique to the time and place where these events took place. And, not surprisingly, archeology has thrown plenty of light on all this.
Of course, there is one surprising element. In comparison to the history in the Old Testament, which spans 4000 years and countless events, person, and countries, the history recorded in the entire New Testament covers less than 50 years. Thus one expects to find only a tiny amount of information related to the New Testament in comparison to the OT. However, this has not been so. The amount of information that has become available related to the New Testament is voluminous, and the researches continue to sift and sort them even in the twenty first century.
