Ear to the ground

I heard the first two minutes of an interview with Peter Hitchens. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ZE_tsltm4

I stopped listening because Eric Metaxas is so obnoxious. There are two kinds of interviewers: those who showcase the guest and those who showcase themselves. 

Anyway, Hitchens said he spends lots of time in London because:

It's the capital city, I'm a national newspaper journalist. If I don't work in the capital I lose touch with events very quickly. You can pick up gossip and rumor and feelings about things... 

The reason I mention this is that critics of Bible history generally and the Gospels in particular constantly impugn the historicity of Scripture as if they know what really happened. Yet as Hitchens noted, there's a lot of information you can only pick up on site. You must be at that time and place or speak to people from that time and place, to fill in the gaps. 

Even though Hitchens lives in the age of the Internet, where there's such an abundance of real-time information his fingertips, that's still not enough to keep on top of national events. He must be at the epicenter of the events he covers to have the behind-the-scenes viewpoint that provides a connecting thread. 

Imagine how much less critics writing 2000+ years after the fact are in a position to correct the Bible. There's so much information that was never written down. Even if we had more surviving writings from that time and place, there's so much they'd leave out. So much linking material. So much contextual background information. Bible history gives us a synopsis. Many events are inexplicable in isolation.