Tablet Ignites Debate On Messiah And Resurrection

[stepnkev]

What are some thoughts on this stone tablet found. Supposedly it discusses old writing before the time of Jesus mentioning a messiah. After reading it, it seemed to contain some uncertanty by the experts who translated. What are some other thoughts? Has any one else heard of this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/mi...nyt&emc=rss

JERUSALEM â?? A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

Dominic Buettner for The New York Times

When David Jeselsohn bought an ancient tablet, above, he was unaware of its significance.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era â?? in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

â??Some Christians will find it shocking â?? a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology â?? while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,â? Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tabletâ??s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

â??I couldnâ??t make much out of it when I got it,â? said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. â??I didnâ??t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. â??You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,â?? she told me.â?

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stoneâ??s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesusâ?? day as an important explanation of that eraâ??s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohlâ??s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stoneâ??s passages were probably Simonâ??s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet â?? â??In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justiceâ? â?? and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words â??Lâ??shloshet yamin,â? meaning â??in three days.â? The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is â??hayeh,â? or â??liveâ? in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, â??In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.â?

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says â??Sar hasarin,â? or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of â??a prince of princes,â? Mr. Knohl contends that the stoneâ??s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

â??This should shake our basic view of Christianity,â? he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. â??Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.â?

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was â??hayeh,â? or â??live.â? Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohlâ??s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. â??There is one problem,â? he said. â??In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohlâ??s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.â?

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books, â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? and Mr. Knohlâ??s analysis deserved serious attention. â??Here we have a real stone with a real text,â? he said. â??This is truly significant.â?

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? shows it.

â??His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,â? Mr. Knohl said. â??This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.â?

[Ron Beron]

What are some thoughts on this stone tablet found. Supposedly it discusses old writing before the time of Jesus mentioning a messiah. After reading it, it seemed to contain some uncertanty by the experts who translated. What are some other thoughts? Has any one else heard of this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/mi...nyt&emc=rss

Given the rash of fake antiquities I hope that this isn't one of them, because it seems to open some new ideas.

[Sevenbak]

What are some thoughts on this stone tablet found. Supposedly it discusses old writing before the time of Jesus mentioning a messiah. After reading it, it seemed to contain some uncertanty by the experts who translated. What are some other thoughts? Has any one else heard of this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/mi...nyt&emc=rss

JERUSALEM â?? A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

Dominic Buettner for The New York Times

When David Jeselsohn bought an ancient tablet, above, he was unaware of its significance.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era â?? in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

â??Some Christians will find it shocking â?? a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology â?? while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,â? Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tabletâ??s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

â??I couldnâ??t make much out of it when I got it,â? said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. â??I didnâ??t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. â??You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,â?? she told me.â?

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stoneâ??s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesusâ?? day as an important explanation of that eraâ??s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohlâ??s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stoneâ??s passages were probably Simonâ??s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet â?? â??In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justiceâ? â?? and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words â??Lâ??shloshet yamin,â? meaning â??in three days.â? The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is â??hayeh,â? or â??liveâ? in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, â??In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.â?

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says â??Sar hasarin,â? or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of â??a prince of princes,â? Mr. Knohl contends that the stoneâ??s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

â??This should shake our basic view of Christianity,â? he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. â??Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.â?

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was â??hayeh,â? or â??live.â? Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohlâ??s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. â??There is one problem,â? he said. â??In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohlâ??s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.â?

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books, â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? and Mr. Knohlâ??s analysis deserved serious attention. â??Here we have a real stone with a real text,â? he said. â??This is truly significant.â?

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? shows it.

â??His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,â? Mr. Knohl said. â??This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.â?

[Sevenbak]

I love it! I hope it's authentic. In the mouth of 2 or 3 witnesses shall every word (of Neum, Zenock, Zenos, etc.) be established.

1 Nephi 19:21 And he surely did show unto the prophets of old all things concerning them; and also he did show unto many concerning us; wherefore, it must needs be that we know concerning them for they are written upon the plates of brass.

[Avatar4321]

Given the rash of fake antiquities I hope that this isn't one of them, because it seems to open some new ideas.

Is it really a new idea? I could have sworn we believed the mission of the Messiah was known before He came.

[Sevenbak]

Is it really a new idea? I could have sworn we believed the mission of the Messiah was known before He came.

It was.

Gen. 49: 10 sceptre . . . until Shiloh come.

Gen. 49: 24 from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel.

Num. 24: 17 there shall come a Star out of Jacob.

Deut. 18: 15 raise up unto thee a Prophet.

Ps. 2: 7 (Ps. 2: 12) Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee.

Ps. 22: 1 my God, why hast thou forsaken me.

Ps. 22: 16 they pierced my hands and my feet.

Ps. 24: 10 Who is this King of glory.

Ps. 34: 20 He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken.

Ps. 68: 18 thou hast led captivity captive.

Ps. 69: 9 zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.

Ps. 69: 21 in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

Ps. 110: 4 priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

Ps. 118: 22 stone which the builders refused is become the head.

Ps. 132: 17 make the horn of David to bud.

Isa. 7: 14 a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son . . . Immanuel.

Isa. 9: 6 unto us a child is born.

Isa. 11: 1 there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse.

Isa. 25: 9 this is our God: we have waited for him.

Isa. 28: 16 I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone.

Isa. 40: 3 Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

Isa. 42: 7 To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners.

Isa. 50: 6 I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks.

Isa. 53: 5 he was wounded for our transgressions.

Isa. 59: 20 Redeemer shall come to Zion.

Isa. 61: 1 anointed me to preach good tidings.

Jer. 23: 5 raise unto David a righteous Branch.

Ezek. 37: 12 I will open your graves.

Dan. 9: 24 to make reconciliation for iniquity.

Dan. 9: 26 shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself.

Hosea 11: 1 I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.

Hosea 13: 14 I will redeem them from death.

Jonah 2: 6 Thou brought up my life from corruption.

Micah 5: 2 Bethlehem . . . out of thee shall he come forth unto me.

Hab. 3: 13 thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people.

Zech. 3: 8 (Zech. 6: 12) I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH.

Zech. 9: 9 thy King cometh unto thee . . . riding upon an ***.

Zech. 11: 13 I was prised at . . . thirty pieces of silver.

Zech. 13: 6 I was wounded in the house of my friends.

Mal. 3: 1 Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.

[e=mc2]

This is fascinating! Thanks for the link.

[Sargon]

This could potentially have a great impact on Book of Mormon apologetics.

Critics often complain that the BoM speaks in too great detail of the future Messiah, Jesus Christ. Now we have evidence that a major theme of Jesus' ministry was already a developed Messiah motif before Christ ever came onto the scene.

â??Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.â?

Joseph just keeps getting luckier and luckier.

2 Ne. 25: 13

13 Behold, they will crucify him; and after he is laid in a sepulchre for the space of three days he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings; and all those who shall believe on his name shall be saved in the kingdom of God. Wherefore, my soul delighteth to prophesy concerning him, for I have seen his day, and my heart doth magnify his holy name.

Hel. 14: 20

20 But behold, as I said unto you concerning another sign, a sign of his death, behold, in that day that he shall suffer death the sun shall be darkened and refuse to give his light unto you; and also the moon and the stars; and there shall be no light upon the face of this land, even from the time that he shall suffer death, for the space of three days, to the time that he shall rise again from the dead.

[smac97]

Here:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

I'm not sure I understand that last bit. Is there some sort of popular consensus that Jesus's comments about his upcoming resurrection were ad hoc or otherwise without forewarning?

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era â?? in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

"Some Christians will find it shocking â?? a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology â?? while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism," Boyarin said.

Again, I don't understand. What is "shocking" about Jesus fulfilling "a recognized Jewish tradition at the time?"

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

...

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 BC The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century BC

...

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Yardeni and Elitzur dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation," also the title of their article. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read "Gabriel's Revelation," he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Okay, here's where we get some explanation:

Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus' day as an important explanation of that era's messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Knohl's interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone's passages were probably Simon's followers, Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet â?? "In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice" â?? and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

So I guess the "shocking" aspect of this discovery is supposed to be that Jesus and/or his followers (mis)appropriated a popular Jewish tale about a messianic figure named Simon who would die and resurrect three days later.

Is that about right?

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words "L'shloshet yamin," meaning "in three days." The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Yardeni and Elitzur, but Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is "hayeh," or "live" in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, "In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you."

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says "Sar hasarin," or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of "a prince of princes," Knohl contends that the stone's writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

But how is this problematic for the traditional Christian narrative of Jesus being a messiah (albeit not the one the Jews of his time were apparently hoping for (that is, one who would fight against Roman authority)?

"This should shake our basic view of Christianity," he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. "Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

Or the "earlier messiah story" was a corrupted remnant of prophecies of Jesus.

Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

So NT scholars who have believed that Jesus' "numerous predictions of his suffering" were "written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day" is a problem for believing Christians...how, exactly?

But there was, he said, and "Gabriel's Revelation" shows it.

"His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come," Knohl said. "This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel."

Interesting stuff. I guess I'm too tired at the moment to sort it out.

Thoughts?

-Smac

[Zakuska]

Third thread on this today...

Topics have been merged ~ Mods

[MatthewG]

Third thread on this today...

LOL I was just going to say that LOL.

I read this article and was like oh this would make a great thread and when I got here there were already 2 threads going! Guess no one looked before posting.

[Muc'ul Ajwalil]

This could potentially have a great impact on Book of Mormon apologetics.

Critics often complain that the BoM speaks in too great detail of the future Messiah, Jesus Christ. Now we have evidence that a major theme of Jesus' ministry was already a developed Messiah motif before Christ ever came onto the scene.

Joseph just keeps getting luckier and luckier.

LOL on the JS one liner...it does seem that way more often...

Nothing really shaky to me...given that the Book of Mormon mentions that subject as well as other prophets whose works we have because of latter day revelation...

The Messiah was going to be cut off according to Daniel in the Bible...and be raised up...the three days I don't see anywhere in the Old Testament as we have it today though...

[charity's child]

I find it amusing how the writers of the article are so sure this will cause people to "re-evaluate Christianity" Maybe it will cause the scholars to pause and re-think, but I think any Christian with real faith will say "so, didn't we already know this?"

[charity]

RE-think? How about thinking in the first place?

[Cold Steel]

â??This should shake our basic view of Christianity. Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.â?

Many scholars are fools. Knohl, an admitted iconoclast, assumes too many things by this finding. If the 3-day motif were widely known in the days of Jesus, then why didn't the apostles catch on earlier than they did? And why isn't it found in other messianic literature? We see a form of this in John's writing on Patmos, where he sees the two latter-day prophets resurrected after three and a half days. To find one stone and then draw so many wild conclusions from it is, unfortunately, a typical response of many. The story of Noah, found in Genesis, is thought by many scholars to be based on the "older" Gilgamesh legends. One can rightly assume that there was a common event behind both stories, but to base one's conclusions on the oldest available story just doesn't follow. You can accept something like that for years, then find something older somewhere, then you have to rewrite everything you thought you knew about something.

The record of archeologists, astronomers, geologists, etc., are full of building on foundations of errors. These guys make bold pronouncements, then have to eat their words when more is found. It may be understandable, because human knowledge is progressive; however, perhaps they should be less bold when making some of their conclusions. Look at the Book of Mormon, fer instance. With each spate of new discoveries in the Middle East and Mesoamerica, the more plausible the Book of Mormon becomes. That's not supposed to happen unless it's true. One would think if something were false, the more that is learned, the less plausible it would be.

To base such bold conclusions on one stone that may or may not be genuine is jumping the proverbial gun, but some people are so anxious to discredit the legitimacy of Christianity that it skewers their thinking. You find this stone and you can conclude that Jesus and his followers, knowing this tradition, used it to their own advantage. Of course one might also conclude that it might have been based on an older tradition, one which Jesus fulfilled. It's like riding into Jerusalem on an ***. Critics say Jesus formulated this stunt knowing the prophecies tied to the Messiah. Others might conclude that by so doing He fulfilled the prophecy. Again, two possible conclusions from one event.

In the Book of Mormon, we know there was indeed a tradition of the Messiah rising from the dead after three days, but we don't know if that tradition carried over in the Old World.

[Fig-bearing Thistle]

This could potentially have a great impact on Book of Mormon apologetics.

Critics often complain that the BoM speaks in too great detail of the future Messiah, Jesus Christ. Now we have evidence that a major theme of Jesus' ministry was already a developed Messiah motif before Christ ever came onto the scene.

Joseph just keeps getting luckier and luckier.

Of Course Joseph Smith already read this stone tablet, and then hid it so that it would be found in our day.

[Sevenbak]

Of Course Joseph Smith already read this stone tablet, and then hid it so that it would be found in our day.

Yeah, he had Orson Hyde write the stone while he was dedicating the land of Jerusalem. He then hid it somewhere it could be found.

[etana]

Third thread on this today...

Topics have been merged ~ Mods

I posted on this in February http://www.mormonapologetics.org/index.php?showtopic=33244

Ada Yardeni seems to think it is genuine.

[Mudcat]

Perhaps this sheds some light upon the long suffering faith of Simeon.

Luk 2:25 And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.

Luk 2:26 And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

Luk 2:27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law,

Luk 2:28 Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

Luk 2:29 Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:

Luk 2:30 For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

Luk 2:31 Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

Luk 2:32 A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

[bluebell]

Perhaps this sheds some light upon the long suffering faith of Simeon.

ooohh, mudcat's back....

[Mudcat]

ooohh, mudcat's back....

Im just on vacation from vacation for a moment.

[bert10]

It does bolster the LDS position. For we have always said that to enter into the Everlasting Covenant of the Father is also to be for some adopted into Israel.

And I think it also makes this verse concerning when the Blood of Christ shall cleanse us...a lot clearer for some.

1 John 1:7 - But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

Peace be unto you

bert10

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/mi...nyt&emc=rss

""â??His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,â? Mr. Knohl said. â??This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.â?"

What are some thoughts on this stone tablet found. Supposedly it discusses old writing before the time of Jesus mentioning a messiah. After reading it, it seemed to contain some uncertanty by the experts who translated. What are some other thoughts? Has any one else heard of this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/mi...nyt&emc=rss

JERUSALEM â?? A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

Dominic Buettner for The New York Times

When David Jeselsohn bought an ancient tablet, above, he was unaware of its significance.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era â?? in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

â??Some Christians will find it shocking â?? a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology â?? while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,â? Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tabletâ??s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

â??I couldnâ??t make much out of it when I got it,â? said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. â??I didnâ??t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. â??You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,â?? she told me.â?

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stoneâ??s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read â??Gabrielâ??s Revelation,â? he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesusâ?? day as an important explanation of that eraâ??s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohlâ??s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stoneâ??s passages were probably Simonâ??s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet â?? â??In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justiceâ? â?? and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words â??Lâ??shloshet yamin,â? meaning â??in three days.â? The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is â??hayeh,â? or â??liveâ? in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, â??In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.â?

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says â??Sar hasarin,â? or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of â??a prince of princes,â? Mr. Knohl contends that the stoneâ??s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

â??This should shake our basic view of Christianity,â? he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. â??Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.â?

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was â??hayeh,â? or â??live.â? Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohlâ??s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. â??There is one problem,â? he said. â??In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohlâ??s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.â?

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books, â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? and Mr. Knohlâ??s analysis deserved serious attention. â??Here we have a real stone with a real text,â? he said. â??This is truly significant.â?

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and â??Gabrielâ??s Revelationâ? shows it.

â??His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,â? Mr. Knohl said. â??This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.â?

[Nevo]

This could potentially have a great impact on Book of Mormon apologetics.

Critics often complain that the BoM speaks in too great detail of the future Messiah, Jesus Christ. Now we have evidence that a major theme of Jesus' ministry was already a developed Messiah motif before Christ ever came onto the scene.

I think this assessment is premature given the fragmentary nature of the tablet.

[Anijen]

RE-think? How about thinking in the first place?

sorry for being off topic here i just gotta say welcome back Charity! Missed ya.