DM: Could this be the biggest find since the Dead Sea Scrolls? Seventy metal books found in cave in Jordan could change our view of Biblical history

[drtdrums]

Check this out.

It's beginning to look like more Middle East Archaeologoo.

Elkington and Feather have the credibility of ****roaches.

[Predicto]

Check this out.

It's beginning to look like more Middle East Archaeologoo.

Elkington and Feather have the credibility of ****roaches.

"If that doesn’t make sense to you, let me put it in plainer language: David Elkington has experience in selling horse dung to gullible audiences. And it seems to me that he aims to profit off of his role in this affair."

heheh

[drtdrums]

"If that doesn’t make sense to you, let me put it in plainer language: David Elkington has experience in selling horse dung to gullible audiences. And it seems to me that he aims to profit off of his role in this affair."

heheh

I can't describe how much I dislike hucksters like Elkington (at least, like he appears to be). I'd be ok with caning in these cases. Is any branch of study more shat upon than archaeology? ...well, besides actual scholarship around ancient texts. Peer review?? What's that?

[Predicto]

I can't describe how much I dislike hucksters like Elkington (at least, like he appears to be). I'd be ok with caning in these cases. Is any branch of study more shat upon than archaeology? ...well, besides actual scholarship around ancient texts. Peer review?? What's that?

Nostradamus, UFOs and Dinosaurs! Next on the History Channel.

[Thiebear]

Not a religious person myself.

I find books from that timeframe enough in an of itself.

[drtdrums]

Nostradamus, UFOs and Dinosaurs! Next on the History Channel.

I know, right? I have a stroke every time I flip past Ancient Aliens. I play a game where I time them to see how long it takes them to say something completely asinine. I haven't hit a minute yet.

My favorite was that the stone (diorite) at Pumapunku could only have been cut by diamonds because it's soooo hard. Or, well, laser beams *Dr. Evil*. The expert said it. It must be true. Especially since that expert became an expert by writing a book.

Moh's scale be damned.

[boobiemiles]

Jesus was not a Gnostic. Gnosticism sprang up in the second century AD or later. The fact that Gnostic's self identify with Jesus is no more deterministic than Christians who are rooted in the time of Jesus self Identifying with Jesus. Jesus was not a Christian either. Jesus was a Jew, A Rabi, or religious teacher within the Jewish faith to be precise. So were his mother, father, and his brother(s) and all the people Jesus preached to in his lifetime. We have no evidence in the bible that he ever traveled outside of the jewish geographic community.

And no, because some events in the bible are fact does not mean the whole bible is historically accurate. The bible is made up of many genre's of writings, some is preported to be history, some is predictions about the future, some is poetry, and some is fiction; presented as such. Parables designed to illustrate a point rather than be taken as verbatim historical events. The fact that some of the bible can be supported factually by independent source just supports those specific points... But really it's not at all a black and white which historians are interested in... Proved or not proved. It's more of a stratus with shades/layers of support for different aspects of what's in the bible. From things we know, things we suspect, things we have no evidence for until hundreds of years, sometimes even a 1000 years after the event.

But that's really not that uncommon in history. We have no comprehensive journal of Caesar's conquest of Gaul until 1000 years after the fact and their is not much scholarly dispute that Cesar did in fact conquer Gaul. The Iliad by homer was likely written 400 years after the events of the war but still convey significant information about events which historians believe today actually occurred.

Typically in history more is good, less is bad. The bible and the documents around the time and shortly after Jesus, has quite a bit of detail. Detail that can be used to both prove and disprove what comes to be accepted knowledge.

There are branches of theology which study religion strictly on scientific and secular grounds. If that is what you are interested in I would refer you to any book written by Ninian Smart a pioneer in the field of secular religious studies.

If that is what you want to discuss I would avoid folks who identify with the christian apologist branch of theology because their doctrine isn't really about honest debate so much as it is seeking evidence from any source which support their articles of faith.

Honestly I stop reading your respponse after the first sentence. Jesus was a gnostic. As a matter of fact i think its the only way his story makes sense. A gnostic believes the body is a conduit and the soul is the true nature of a man. The soul is enternal, and the body is only temporary. Honestly when I think of Jesus in that light the his narrative makes sense. But to each his own. If you think Jesus walked on water without an inflatable raft, or inflated inner tube, then so be it. If you feel the powers of the universe was in the hands of one man more power to you. A man that died like a lot of the oppressed during the Roman Occupation, then good. At the core of religion is faith. I need substance to believe myself. Death is inevitable, and religion is suppose to prepare you for judgement. Personally I think there is an after life, and we will be judged the way we conduct ourselves on the planet. Jesus, John the Baptist, or Moses, won't be judged. God won't judge you on how well you recite scripture, he will judge you on how you lived in it's wake.

[JMS]

Honestly I stop reading your respponse after the first sentence.

So did I...

---------- Post added April-1st-2011 at 02:59 PM ----------

Just kidding..

Jesus was a gnostic. As a matter of fact i think its the only way his story makes sense. A gnostic believes the body is a conduit and the soul is the true nature of a man. The soul is enternal, and the body is only temporary.

So you are claiming that Jews, Christians and Moslems are all gnostics then because all believe the body is temporary and the soul is eternal.

In my world religions class Gnostics belived in the doctrine of salvation by knowledge. Hense the name Gnostic (gnosis "knowledge"). If you are a protestant christian you believe Jesus tought salvation through faith. If you are a catholic you believe jesus tought salvation through good works and faith. Nobody believes Jesus tought salvation through knowledge.

Jesus, John the Baptist, or Moses, won't be judged. God won't judge you on how well you recite scripture, he will judge you on how you lived in it's wake.

Jesus won't be judged. because he is eternal begotten and not made; of the very same nature as the Father.

John the Baptist will be judged.

Moses was judged and was found wanting. ( didn't get to go into the land of Israel ).

I agree that for me, how well you can recite scriptures doesn't enter into judgment day.

[boobiemiles]

So did I...

Good. Like I said everyone's journey to salvation is a personal quest. You beleive what you want, and I will do the same. Hope to see you on the other side. God bless.

[S.T.real,lights,out]

Very interesting stuff!

[techboy]

One of my go to sources on stuff like this is Dr. Michael Heiser, who runs a blog called Paleobabble (among others), and has this to say today: Lead Codices: It’s Looking Like a Hoax:

Dr. Jim Davila over at PaleoJudaica as this post this morning on the codices. The post features a short, to-the-point, evidence-based analysis by professor Peter Thonemann, of some of the pages of the codices, noting inconsistencies in the story and, more importantly, how the textual contents were copied from a known source in a Jordanian museum!

There are some nice high-resolution photos at the link as well.

How was the professor able to establish fakery so quickly? Simple. Once texts like this are released (that is the key — letting experts see them), it is a simple matter to do what professor Thonemann did: transcribe them and then look up the words in concordances (digital or otherwise). In this case, there were a number of known words (specific forms) and they all happened to occur in the same text(s) — in order (!) once those source texts are checked. This required experimenting a bit with the alpha and lambda letters since they are similar in form (and that was bungled by the forger). Once at this point, you know you have LINES from known texts. The next step is to find where those texts were published through a simple database source. Publications usually note the provenance of a text (where it was found) and where it is now held, in the case of a manuscript or archaeological artifact. Voila!

For any ancient astronaut theorists or cult archaeologists out there — this is *precisely* why the people you blindly follow do *not* submit their work to peer review. It is too easy to be exposed by real experts.It is also precisely why I continually ask people who promote such nonsense, “show me the texts — the specific lines cited.” That demand is never met, which hardly surprises me. When selling snake oil, you don’t hand the recipe to a chemist.

Now, a prediction. None of this will make any difference to “researchers” who want to press some point of nonsense to peddle the paleobabble that makes them money and gives them a following.

Not really surprising...

[AsburySkinsFan]

Honestly I stop reading your respponse after the first sentence. Jesus was a gnostic.

Well I can say with the utmost assurance that I stopped reading your post after the second sentence. You couldn't be more wrong, and no amount of spouting revisionist history will help your cause.

[JMS]

Well I can say with the utmost assurance that I stopped reading your post after the second sentence. You couldn't be more wrong, and no amount of spouting revisionist history will help your cause.

I guess I'm more versed in the herisy of the 2nd through 4h century when Catholics were burning gnostics at the stake, than I am on modern gnostics and their gnostic gospels. I didn't mean to offend the guy, wish he was less defensive and could explain in a less confontational atmosphere what they are all about. Never met a modern gnostic before...

But he's right, to each their own.

[AsburySkinsFan]

I guess I'm more versed in the heresy of the 2nd through 4h century when Catholics were burning gnostics at the stake, than I am on modern gnostics and their gnostic gospels. I didn't mean to offend the guy, wish he was less defensive and could explain in a less confrontational atmosphere what they are all about. Never met a modern gnostic before...

But he's right, to each their own.

Gnostics have been around for a very long time and they are at most a diverse group that tends to be fairly synchristic, in that when they see Jesus they take what they like and then mix it with what they want and leave out the stuff that they don't want in order to make Jesus look like they want him to look. In the end it's just staring into the looking glass for Jesus and falling in love with the reflection. That's why I laugh when someone today blatantly dismisses the testimony of the early church, if there was any group that knew who Jesus was and what Jesus was about it was them, and yet they dismiss their testimony as if they are clueless about Jesus. For me it's just annoying because the early church tossed the gnostics out on their ear for false teaching and ever so consistently they still claim to know Jesus better than his own apostles.

[China]

Well this ought to get some people's dander up.

Jesus as an openly gay man

What if the newly found codices provided evidence of Jesus's same-sex activity? Michael Ruse imagines the implications

The most astounding finding from the newly discovered lead codices is that Jesus Christ was unambiguously and openly gay. He and his disciples formed a same-sex coterie, bound by feelings of love and mutual support. There are recorded instances of same-sex activity – the "beloved disciple" plays a significant role – and there is affirmation of the joys of friendship and of living and loving together.

A whole new complexion is given to that rather puzzling passage where Jesus exhorts his followers to break family ties: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14, 26). It seems clear now that this is less a negative repudiation of family and more a positive exhortation to join in affirmation of a gay lifestyle and love.

There is at least one new parable, that of the two young men. There are clear echoes of the relationship between David and Jonathan, for Jesus speaks of one young man having his soul "knit with the soul" of the other, and loving him "as his own soul". Intriguing is evidence that the Catholics might be closer to the truth about the status of Mary, the mother of Jesus, than are the Protestants. She has a much bigger role in the life of Jesus than many hitherto expected, with Jesus frequently returning home and making much of her.

Conversely, there is at least one incident when Jesus quarrels violently with Joseph, who shows great hostility and makes wild claims about "manliness". Before, one might have thought that, given Mary's virginity, Joseph's attitude was reflecting the ambiguities of his status in the family; but now it seems more probable that we have here a classic example of the Freudian triangle: over-possessive mother, hostile father, gay son.

Why have we known so little about all of this before? A newly discovered Pauline epistle, appropriately to the Athenians, suggests a major Platonic influence, particularly of the Republic. The classically educated Paul, who was himself gay, saw that same-sex activity was inimical to the success of Christianity in the highly homophobic societies in which he lived. Hence, same-sex affections and activity were concealed, to be known to and practised by only the leaders in secret – the guardians of Christianity as one might say. Obviously, this is a tradition that has flourished and lasted.

Click on the link for the rest

[Predicto]

[Koolblue13]

Oh George

That was awesome.

[techboy]

Well this ought to get some people's dander up.

What a bizarre piece,

As it happens, I know of Dr. Ruse's work, and so my first reaction was "Why is a philosopher of science writing an article about a (probably forged) textual find?"

My second reaction was "Why is an atheist philosopher of science writing stuff like:"

Finally, the most important news is that nothing in the newly discovered codices challenges in any way the essential message of Christianity. Jesus was the messiah; he died on the cross for our sins; and through his death and resurrection made possible our eternal salvation. Our overriding obligation is to love God and we do this by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Christianity will never be the same again. Christianity will go on completely unchanged.

And my third reaction was "Has he even seen the tablets? Why hasn't anybody else been talking about this?"

And then I read the first part more closely :

Michael Ruse imagines the implications.

Oh.

Still, how weird.

[HOF44]

[techboy]

As it turns out, Dr. Peter Thonemann isn't real happy with the Daily Mail, as he wrote in the Sunday Times (on Wednesday? :whoknows:):

Elkington actually asked him to look at his stuff a while ago...

Who could resist? Photographs of a mysterious-looking copper notebook duly arrived. Strange sequences of Greek letters curled around depictions of a palm tree, a walled city, a crocodile and, oddly, Alexander the Great. Curiouser and curiouser! The three lines of Greek all turned out to be variants on the same two puzzling phrases: “. . . without grief, farewell! Abgar, also known as Eision . . .”. The name Abgar is pretty unusual; might he be attested elsewhere? Half an hour’s work in the library turned up the two phrases in their original context: a perfectly ordinary Roman tombstone from Madaba in Jordan, datable to ad 108/9, and currently on display in the Archaeological Museum in Amman. “For Selaman, excellent man, without grief, farewell! Abgar, also known as Eision, son of Monoath, built this tomb for his excellent son, in the third year of the province.”

The mystical kabbalistic inscriptions on Elkington’s copper codex turned out to be mechanical copies of a line from an ancient tombstone. It is as though it carried the words: “or not to be that is the question whether”. Now, if you were looking to produce a plausible-looking sequence of letters in an ancient language, you could do worse than to pop into the British Museum, pick a stone and copy the letter-shapes. I replied to Elkington informing him that this particular “codex” was a modern forgery, produced by a resident of Amman within the last fifty years or so.

Nothing dismayed, Elkington and his colleagues seem to have decided to go ahead and publish their finds. To judge from the photos which have appeared in the press over the past week, all of these supposed early Christian codices are the product of the same Amman workshop as the book I saw last year. The forger’s repertoire is fairly predictable: pseudo-Christian symbols copied from ancient Greek and Judaean coins (palm trees, Hellenistic kings and so forth) interspersed with gibberish-inscriptions clumsily adapted from real ancient texts, Greek and Hebrew.

One can hardly blame the newspapers: no editor could reasonably be expected to resist the combination of Jesus, the Kabbalah, mysterious death threats and a secret code. But it is a bit depressing that no one thought to consult any one of the dozens of British specialists in the field. As the Jewish Chronicle made clear when it originally reported on the find back in early March, those professional scholars who have had sight of these objects have dismissed them as obvious fakes. There are various reasons why we bother to fund research in the arts and humanities and this episode could have been one of them.

There's a bit of free ammo for the liberals on the board at the end, as a special bonus.

[RansomthePasserby]

What if the newly found codices provided evidence of Jesus's same-sex activity? Michael Ruse imagines the implications