Am I the only one who gets tired of reading news reports trumpeted as "shaking the faith" or "redefining who Jesus was" that turn out to be significantly less than advertised? Here's yet another such "revelation".
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.Yawn. Yeah, my faith is quaking in its boots.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The article goes on to quote a professor of Taludic studies (a Rabbi?!?!?), who proceeds to pontificate to Christians what they should think of this momentous find.
"This should shake our basic view of Christianity," he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. "Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."Suuuuure it was. Anything you say, pal.
The danger of these articles is that most people are inherently lazy in their news reading habits and seldom get past the first 5 paragraphs of an article. Because, had a brotha kept on reading into the guts of the article, they would find this.
Regarding Knohl's thesis, Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. "There is one problem," he said. "In crucial places of the text there is 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 text there are a lot of missing words."Ah, yes! The old fill-in-the-missing-words-with-your-preconceptions ruse. In fact, the main section the Rabbi/professor trumpets as the money quote has two unreadable words and an "unusual spelling" as part of it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: these people are NOT about revealing Jesus in a historical context, they're about destroying the faith of the weak. Read what they have to say, but do so with a generous dose of cynicism, and make sure to look for those "disclaimer" paragraphs: that's where you'll find the information that makes discernment possible.
