Apologies if this has come up somewhere else, but I thought I’d mention some very interesting stuff which has come up in the press recently. The Time article linked on the News section here refers to the fact that a tablet has been discovered, dated with some confidence in the 1st century BC, where there seems to be a passage suggesting that a “messiah-like” figure would die and rise after three days.

I was listening to BBC World news item about this and the BBC interviewer was trying to suggest this should disturb Christians, and the Jewish (I think) archaeologist said: “Of course not- it shows that some Jews in the 1st century expected a dying and rising Messiah, which is just what the NT says Jesus fulfilled!”

There’s another interesting article about this in the International Herald Tribune here.
Good quote from the end of this article:

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 “Gabriel’s Revelation” shows it.

Sounds right to me! There is also some comment on this by Ben Witherington, here.

Hi,
Interesting but probably some caution needed for now....

From the International Herald Tribune article:

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 Knohl’s thesis, Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. “There is one problem,” he said. “In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl’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.”

Grace & peace,
Terry

We need to be very cautious in jumping onto this text as evidence for anything. If one reads the media reports, the tablet is owned by a Swiss-based collector who allegedly purchased it from a Jordanian dealer. This collector has owned it for 10 years and its importance has ‘suddenly’ come to light. This tale is scarily similar to that of the notorious James Ossuary, which caused much excitement several years ago and was subsequently exposed as a fake. Many people made alot of money from that object (conference, travelling exhibition, book deal, global TV documentary, you get the picture) and yet it was without a secure archaeological provenance, having been apparently hidden in some private collection for years before being ‘discovered’. Quite frankly I think it is a scandal, given the origins of this new tablet and the furore that surrounded the James Ossuary, that this text was even discussed at a scholarly conference. Let’s all take a cold shower and ignore this object.

Hi Karin,
On behalf of the non-conformists on these forums, welcome as a contributor in this format....
and thanks for your Gafcon blogging.
Grace & peace,
Terry

Hi Karin
Welcome to the forums!  And thanks for bringing your archaeological expertise to bear on this ‘discovery’.  Even if it proves authentic, of course, it hardly changes anything.  As if we need to have evidence that a concept of a dying and rising Messiah existed beforehand to accept that Jesus would have said such things!  That’s just a crashing example of scholars imposing their own suppositions on the text.
Bob