Published by admin on 09 Jul 2008 at 12:53 pm
The Continuing Controversy: the Stone Scroll/Gabriel’s Revelation
This morning I found one article (in the Times UK) on this subject but it was so one-sided it could have been written by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (it offered elaboration of only Israel Knohl’s theory). Here’s its thrust…
The death and resurrection of Christ has been called into question by a radical new interpretation of a tablet found on the eastern bank of the Dead Sea.
After a little bit of digging, I came across an article that presents both Professor Knohl’s point of view and the opposing POV–that the information so far provided by the “tablet” is supportive of and consistent with the Christian view of the Resurrection. The Christian point of view is presented by Dr Timothy Gray, a professor of Biblical Studies at the Augustine Institute in Denver.
Here’s a link to that article (in the Catholic News Agency)… (excerpt) The interpretations of scholars reported in the International Herald Tribune, Gray said, was “very striking” for its insistence that any evidence must undermine Christianity. “On the one hand, scholars argue no Jewish tradition about a messiah suffering shows that the Church added this idea. And once you show a document, an ancient document to point to, showing that they did interpret a prophet like Daniel to expect a suffering messiah, well then people say ‘Well this proves Christianity can’t be true.’” “You can’t have it both ways,” Gray said.
Scholars divided on interpretation of ‘Gabriel’s Revelation’ tablet
Tags: Augustine Institute, Binyamin Elizur, Catholic News Agency, Christ, CNA, Dawkins, Gabriel’s Revelation, hitchens, Israel Knohl, Jesus, Jesus Christ, knohl, messiah, Moshiach, religion, resurrection, Stone Scroll, Times UK, Timothy Gray, yardeni
Dan McGrew on 30 Sep 2008 at 7:54 pm #
I’d really like to see an actual picture of the artifact. Even better, I’d LOVE to see all the text recovered, in it’s original Hebrew. I can’t seem to find that anywhere. It’s more difficult than looking for Big Foot.
Marmalade on 24 Mar 2009 at 4:42 am #
If it undermines Christianity, it is simply because it is pre-Christian.
“On the one hand, scholars argue no Jewish tradition about a messiah suffering shows that the Church added this idea. And once you show a document, an ancient document to point to, showing that they did interpret a prophet like Daniel to expect a suffering messiah, well then people say ‘Well this proves Christianity can’t be true.’”
The suffering savior is a Pagan motif and so isn’t original to Judaism as far as I can tell from my studies. However, that isn’t to say that earlier Jews didn’t incoporate the suffering savior motif prior to some later Jews who became known as Christians.
As an example, allegorical interpretation originated from Greek thought. Allegorizing the Bible was done by the Jew Philo before Christianity. Numerous Christians used Allegory in the same way towards Biblical passages such as Genesis. Did the early Christians get their use of allegory from Philo who got it from the Greeks or did the early Christians get their use of allegory directly from the Greeks. Most probably it was both. All of these various traditions were mixing together for centuries before and after the beginning of the Common Era.
So, the important part is that the suffering savior, like allegorizing, is unoriginal to both Judaism and Christianity.