Word: tablets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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David Jeselsohn has been an avid collector of Mediterranean antiquities all his life. But 10 years ago, his curiosity was aroused by a mysterious stone tablet with ancient Hebrew writing that appeared in London, offered by a reputable Jordanian dealer. Jeselson bought it and then, distracted by more collecting, forgot it. Today, however, some scholars say that the fractured, three-foot-long sandstone tablet challenges the uniqueness of the idea of the resurrection of Jesus Christ...
...controversial tablet, dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation," dates back to several decades before Jesus's birth and announces the raising of the Messiah after three days in the grave. If correct, this places the concept of a Messiah's resurrection firmly within Jewish traditions of the day. These controversial speculations could have come out years earlier, but as the Swiss-Israeli collector sheepishly told TIME in Jerusalem, ""It's my fault that it took so long to be examined...
After the purchase, Jeselsohn stashed the tablet in his Zurich home and moved on to other collectibles. Then, three years ago, he invited an Israeli scholar, Ada Yardeni, to Zurich to examine writings on ancient pottery shells. The expert's eye, however, was drawn instead to the tablet with its 87 lines of Hebrew script. "She was fascinated" says Jeselsohn. "Yardeni said the writing was just like on the Dead Sea Scrolls...
...fast, say some Christian academics. "It is certainly not perfectly clear that the tablet is talking about a crucified and risen savior figure called Simon," says Ben Witherington, an early-Christianity expert at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. The verb that Knohl translates as "rise!," Witherington says, could also mean "there arose," and so one can ask "does it mean 'he comes to life,' i.e., a resurrection, or that he just 'shows up?' " Witherington also points out that gospel texts are far less reliant on the observed fact of the Resurrection (there is no angelic command in them like...
...fame. Even the authors of its initial research seem a little dubious about his claims that it is a dry run for the Easter story. But, as often happens in such cases, they seem better disposed to a slightly toned-down assertion: in this case, that the Gabriel tablet does indicate a very rare instance of the idea that a messiah might suffer - a notion introduced in Judaic thought centuries before by the prophet Isaiah but which supposedly went out of style by Jesus' time. If that more modest theory gains traction, it will forge a link between a trend...