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TechnoratiAn eclectic Jewish scholar is causing a media stir by claiming that Jesus and his disciples copied the idea of a messiah rising again after three days, basing his interpretation of scattered text found on a so-called ancient tablet. This idea fails to hold up when compared with the assessment of other Biblical scholars – many who say the relic is too badly preserved to even read.
The tablet is not a new find but is catching news waves because Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible studies at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, was slated to present his interpretation of the text on Tuesday at a Jerusalem conference marking the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The three-by-one foot tablet – dubbed "Gabriel's Vision" because it contains apocalyptic text ascribed to the angel – displays 87 lines of text on gray-colored stone. It is owned by a collector in Zurich who said he acquired it from an antiquities dealer in Jordan.
Knohl contends to The New York Times that his reading of the fragmented text of line 80 "should shake our basic view of Christianity" because it presents the resurrection of after three days as a motif developed before Jesus and not unique to Christianity.
The Jewish scholar takes his loose interpretation one step farther by arguing that "what happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story,” according to The Times.
But many respectable biblical scholars are rejecting Knohl's controversial reading of the text based on the fact that most of the text is missing.
Even Knohl's colleague, Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and also a professor at Hebrew University, finds his interpretation far-reaching.
"In crucial places of the text there is a 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 the text there are a lot of missing words," said Bar-Asher in The Times article.
Ben Witherington, a reputable New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., weighed in on the topic, saying on his blog that it's not clear that the text is even talking about a risen messiah. In a Time magazine article, he additionally points out that the Gospel texts don’t just rely on the observed fact of the Resurrection but on testimonies of eyewitnesses to Jesus' post-Resurrection self.
"This stone certainly does not demonstrate that the Gospel passion stories are created on the basis of this stone text," Witherington concluded on his blog. "But what it does do is make plausible that Jesus could have said some of the things credited to him in Mark 8:31, 9:31, and 10:33-34."
Ada Yardeni, a Hebrew language specialist, who published an article on the tablet over a year ago in the Hebrew-language journal Cathedra, also agreed that line 80 was illegible.
In her review, she did note that the relic, thought to be dated sometime between the late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E., bore some resemblance to the Dead Sea Scrolls but found the text "very hard to read" and the tablet "badly preserved." While she said the text was "intriguing," she suggested that it probably "only emphasizes the variety of Jewish movements at the turn of the era."
One scholar who was expected to listen to Knohl's argument on Tuesday shared his take on the issue to UK's The Independent. Continue >>
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