Bad news for the Christians

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , , , ,

There’s a 1st cen­tury BC tab­let which has been found pre­dict­ing a Mes­siah that will rise after three days. I can’t really see this shak­ing Chris­tian­ity by con­nect­ing it to Juda­ism. The whole concept of a Mes­siah is Jew­ish. It’s not like Judea was short of Mes­si­ahs in this period. As for proph­ecies Mat­thew is known to have drawn on Jew­ish proph­ecies for his gos­pel, hence the whole being born in Beth­le­hem thing. It is of his­tor­ical interest though. It seems like a mes­siah proph­ecy we didn’t know about before. That could have told us more about the devel­op­ment of Christianity.

Sadly it can’t tell us a lot, because the mater­ial is unproven­anced. Any­one who’s Chris­tian has had inform­a­tion about tab­let of import­ance to their faith trashed and it’s inform­a­tion which can­not be replaced. It’s been com­pared to find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls.* It’s not like find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s like burn­ing them unread and sift­ing through the ashes to see what you can make out.

How­ever as long as there’s a mar­ket for unproven­anced and illi­cit antiquit­ies there’ll be a profit to be made from other people’s beliefs.

See also: The Boston Globe and Jim West’s web­log.

*Actu­ally in some ways it is. An awful loot of inform­a­tion about them has been lost too due to the trade in unproven­ance antiquities.

The Burg­lars. Photo (cc) John Carl Johnson