Strange but true. The Times of London last month (see headline below) announced,”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.” Huh? This “radical new interpretation” is neither radical nor new but it is a comedic non sequitur.
The logic (actually, illogic) behind the headline goes like this:
[A] three-foot stone tablet [discovered near the Dead Sea and purported to be 2,000 years old] appears to refer to a Messiah who rises from the grave three days after his death - even though it was written decades before the birth of Jesus . . .
Israel Knohl, a biblical studies professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued yesterday that line 80 of the text revealed Gabriel telling an historic Jewish rebel named Simon, who was killed by the Romans four years before the birth of Christ: “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”
Professor Knohl contends that the tablet proves that messianic followers possessed the paradigm of their leader rising from the grave before Jesus was born. . .
. . . and, therefore, Jesus of Nazareth or His followers just made it look like Jesus rose on the third day. Right.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
TxBluesMan 08.05.08 at 12:00 pm
Actually the correct term is Jesus the Nazirite - the town of Nazareth wasn’t established until well after the reported death of Jesus, with settlement after the First Jewish War (c. 70 A.D.).
Nazirites were a Jewish sect that took special vows of abstention from wine, not cutting the hair, and not approaching dead bodies. The abstention period ends with the Nazirite being immersed in water, and it is a known fact that John the Baptist was a Nazirite (see Luke 1:15).
Jesus of Nazareth is from a mis-translation from the Hebrew and Greek.
I’m not commenting on the correctness or error of the main point of the article.
Gravitas 08.05.08 at 12:21 pm
Are these scholars unaware that the Book of Isaiah prophesies specifics about the Messiah, i.e., Christ, and that the oldest copy of that Old Testament document has been radiocarbon dated to approximately 200 BC? In other words, it was written or transcribed before the life of Christ.
The term that applies is prophecy. Garbled in the tablet, perhaps by time and memory, but containing elements of accuracy, like many of the Apocrypha. Messianic prophetic traditions are well documented among Jews before the time of Christ; this is just a variation on the theme. More than one Messiah (”Anointed One”) was anticipated — Messiah ben David, who we would understand to be Christ, and Messiah ben Joseph, who would be of the tribe of Joseph (Ephraim or Manasseh’s descendants are named in some traditions.
That oldest Isaiah text was also found near the Dead Sea, in the caves of Qumran, probably within sight of the tablet mentioned. Its discovery and subsequent pre-Christian dating upset all sorts of Biblical scholarship.