Tablet ignites debate on Messiah

[NotWorthy]

It would seem that one would have to consider which Jews, since some didn’t believe in an afterlife, some didn’t believe in a personal God, and most likely, some didn’t believe that a messiah was going to save the country either. They were used to a succession of messiahs, some were prophets and some were kings. In fact, the Jews had astrologers and such in their courts. It’s really hard to say what the Jews believed as a whole. What were the Jews expecting?

I could tell you what the Jews were NOT expecting - someone like Jesus Christ!

 

[allhers]

The rest of the story is here.

From what I can gather, the crux of the matter is that this tablet allegedly shows that the idea of a resurrected messiah surfaced a couple decades before Christ. It is claimed by some scholars that this shows that Jesus and His apostles simply borrowed an existing theme of some Jewish circles. I would require far more information on the authenticity of the tablet and the translation to have any sort of real discussion. But let’s just suppose that the tablet is authentic and the interpretation in the article is correct. How would you respond to these scholars? ** It seems that they believe that a pillar of Christian belief is that there is a uniqueness in the resurrected Messiah and that such an idea had not existed prior to Christ; they seem to believe that ‘Gabriel’s revelation’ disproves that uniqueness and will shake the foundation of Christianity. What say you?/**QUOTE]

To that I say I have an unshakable faith.

 

[Q_Bee]

I could tell you what the Jews were NOT expecting - someone like Jesus Christ!

This is a non-sequiter. The point is not to test faith here, is it? I thought we were talking about the known information in a unbiased way. Must be my mistake.

 

[Nullasalus]

Nonetheless, we have his sole word concerning his vision. That is all I meant to say.

Granted - I don’t think anyone would expect a single person’s vision to be corroborated.

I did not intend for my remark to be curt. However, I am not arguing theology, but the known facts on the matter. So, I’m not allowing myself to be influenced by the posts that draw upon an elevated view of the material to change my focus.

I haven’t been arguing any elevated view either - just pointing out the facts of the matter, and the reasonable limitations we have to expect when it comes to history. Nothing more.

The difference would be in whether Jesus’ mission was to mitigate the circumstances of Roman occupation or to save ‘the world from its sin’. The Jews believed that the ‘sins of the father’ were in effect to the forth generation, but RC theology presents sin as being inherited from the first humans.

I don’t think ‘The Jews’ believed that, due to one caveat - their beliefs (Much like RC teaching on many issues) were not monolithic. They had divisions in their own time, some more mainstream and carrying more authority over time, some less so. How to explain perceived differences between judaism and Christianity - there’s a lot to go on there, but I’m not sure what this has to do with the OP discovery.

Not to mention, I don’t think there’s a clear line between Jesus’ mission re: the Jews and the Roman occupation, and the effects of atoning for sin among all people. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one or the other, even if (obviously) certain aspects of that mission are certainly differing in importance.

 

[whowantsumadebo]

People are jumping way far ahead in making any judgments about this find. Here’s why:
The news source is very sketchy on what the tablet actually says and what it does not say.
The interview tried to make Boyarin’s statement agree with Knohl’s thesis. When read in isolation, Boyarin’s words don’t suggest that the tablet talks about a suffering and rising messiah; Boyarin is a much more careful scholar than that.
From what information is available on the tablet, it seems Knohl is still striving to pull out messianic references. There is no mention of Simon the rebel, no direct reference to death or resurrection, and a lot of blemishes in the stone. Knohl is desperately attempting to make this tablet agree with his already established thesis.
So…we should wait until we actually know what the tablet says.

 

[Sam_777]

For those considering Islamic’ Quran as a book from God, then indeed Jesus is the Messiah.

And for those considering it from Satan, then again indeed Jesus is the Messiah, the same devils who called Jesus the “Son of The Most High” in (Luke 8:27-28).

So in both cases its confirmed that Jesus is the Messiah, and I see nothing to worry about.

 

[thistle]

For those considering Islamic’ Quran as a book from God, then indeed Jesus is the Messiah.

And for those considering it from Satan, then again indeed Jesus is the Messiah, the same devils who called Jesus the “Son of The Most High” in (Luke 8:27-28).

So in both cases its confirmed that Jesus is the Messiah, and I see nothing to worry about.

I don’t consider the Quran a Holy book. Mohammed was Satan’s best student!

 

[Teflon93]

My first reaction is, “What were they thinking? They’re too late for Easter and too early for Christmas”.

Here’s the money excerpt:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“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.”

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was “hayeh,” or “live.” Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohl’s thesis, Mr. 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.”

So this is nothing more than another Jesus Seminar-type debunker trying to get some grant money.

Bart Ehrman will have another breathless book out on it soon, surely, but it’s the same old **** in a new bottle.

Think about it this way:

If a tablet turned up in the desert dated conclusively to the generation before Christ, and that tablet predicted that the messiah was coming and would save the world in three days, would you presume it was referring to a) Jesus or b) somebody else?

That answer will tell you more about yourself than the tablet.

The subtext of this story is not that Jesus was a mythical figure, but that objectivity is a mythical concept when it comes to the media and the scientific community.

 

[NotWorthy]

This is a non-sequiter. The point is not to test faith here, is it? I thought we were talking about the known information in a unbiased way. Must be my mistake.

No, but to say there was a “collective” expectation of what the Messiah was to be is like lumping all Protestant religions with the same beliefs. You might as well start a career herding cats.

The Pharisees had a different belief than the Saduccees and the Essenes and the Zealots!

 

[Q_Bee]

No, but to say there was a “collective” expectation of what the Messiah was to be is like lumping all Protestant religions with the same beliefs. You might as well start a career herding cats.

The Pharisees had a different belief than the Saduccees and the Essenes and the Zealots!

One thing the news release HAS done is to give many people a new opportunity to interject apologetics into a discussion of another type.

It would appear that the Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots all had an expectation of a messiah. I can’t say that I know what Saduccee expectations might have been. Does anyone here know what Saduccee expectations were in the 1st century CE? How about Ebionites or Nazirites?

 

[ChrisWRIT]

Wow, I can’t believe it, a group of people that deny that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, finding a stone that “proves” they were right?

Whoda thunkit?

:yawn:

Chris

 

[Q_Bee]

Wow, I can’t believe it, a group of people that deny that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, finding a stone that “proves” they were right?

Whoda thunkit? :yawn: Chris

Is it really a matter of people who deny that Jesus was the Christ or is it a matter of the discovery of a stone that may shed some light on 1st century BC and 1st century CE in Palestine?

The difficulty here is that a messiah means one thing for Jews and another for Christians. But, even Christians should be able to recognize that the Jews had many messiahs, and not all of them died and were buried. Wasn’t one of those claimed to have been taken up into the heavens Elijah?

On the other hand, Christians claim one of the messianic figures to be the one and only messiah. This stance puts the issue into a strange bind if previous messiahs, failed or otherwise, are not taken into account.

If the stone turns out to be what it is proported to be, then our faith is informed by it, and we know more as we read scriptural passages that tempers how we reflect upon the words.

Suppose that exegesis in the early centuries of Christianity was operating on a pausity of information. After all, many of the early leaders were not from the region where the actual ministry of Jesus occurred. As we see in the Gospel of Luke, lack of knowledge of the region and the persons involved leads to a variance from other accounts. But, it is yet to be seen whether or not this piece of potential historical information is going to have any efffect on belief in the doctrine of a one and only messiah or the efficacy of Christianity as a whole.

 

[whowantsumadebo]

Well, I have a copy of the Journal of Religion article Dr. Knohl wrote regarding the tablet, so I know what the tablet actually says. I can say that Dr. Knohl relies heavily on his previous work and his over-zealous crusade to reduce Christianity to just one of many competing messianic movements of the era.
Dr.Knohl’s article contains a lot of “if’s” “could be’s” and “I believe’s.”
He takes cautious liberty in filling in holes on the tablet, and renders a Hebrew word as “resurrect” instead of “live,” where it’s not even clear what the word should be.
At least he makes biblical scholarship exciting and scandalous, but he’s definitely not right in his assertions.
I don’t think I’m allowed to post the article.

 

[Lief_Erikson]

If the tablet really does describe a Messiah rising from the dead after three days, it disproves nothing. God could easily have given people a prophesy to this effect, particularly emphasizing it shortly before the coming of his Messiah so that people would be more likely to recognize him.

 

[Q_Bee]

If the tablet really does describe a Messiah rising from the dead after three days, it disproves nothing. God could easily have given people a prophesy to this effect, particularly emphasizing it shortly before the coming of his Messiah so that people would be more likely to recognize him.

Yes, that’s a potential answer. And another might be that there were certain themes in Jewish mythology that were not intended to be literal. For instance, do ordinary people see angels in their normal waking state, or does the appearance of an angel suggest that the incident occurred in a state of visionary experience? The answer depends upon whether or not one’s faith is based upon a literal understanding of religio-mythic events.

 

[Q_Bee]

If a tablet turned up in the desert dated conclusively to the generation before Christ, and that tablet predicted that the messiah was coming and would save the world in three days, would you presume it was referring to a) Jesus or b) somebody else?

There were many messiah figures in 1st century BC and 1st century CE Palestine, so it could have been about any of them, don’t you think?

 

[Teflon93]

There were many messiah figures in 1st century BC and 1st century CE Palestine, so it could have been about any of them, don’t you think?

It could be about anything, including pure fiction.

There was only one messiah; there were many false messiahs.

The appearance of false messiahs before Christ does nothing to debunk Christianity, as Christianity does not rest on the novelty of the messiah concept; nor could it, given the Christian belief that Christ fulfilled long-revealed prophecies.

Only those who are completely ignorant of Christian theology and history, are those who are fundamentally dishonest, could advance such claims on the basis of the evidence presented.

The media and this lone scholar seem to be excellent candidates for either category.

As noted, the only thing shocking about this finding is that The Discovery Channel or The History Channel didn’t wait until Holy Week or Christmas to cover it. Perhaps they have a breathless producer en route.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

The rest of the story is here.

From what I can gather, the crux of the matter is that this tablet allegedly shows that the idea of a resurrected messiah surfaced a couple decades before Christ. It is claimed by some scholars that this shows that Jesus and His apostles simply borrowed an existing theme of some Jewish circles. I would require far more information on the authenticity of the tablet and the translation to have any sort of real discussion. But let’s just suppose that the tablet is authentic and the interpretation in the article is correct. How would you respond to these scholars?

Nobody would employ an electrician who knew nothing about fuses or circuits - & the same applies to this question. For people who ignorant of an issue to pronounce on it is a form of intellectual intemperance. That it is related to the Bible gives people the illusion that because they have some familarity with the Bible, that qualifies them to pronounces on issues like this.​

It seems that they believe that a pillar of Christian belief is that there is a uniqueness in the resurrected Messiah and that such an idea had not existed prior to Christ; they seem to believe that ‘Gabriel’s revelation’ disproves that uniqueness and will shake the foundation of Christianity. What say you?

Three things:​

1. I don’t know of any scholar who believes that there was any notion in pre-Christian Judaism of a dying & resurrected Messiah:

• a suffering and dying & resurrected Servant, yes
• a dying Messiah, yes
• a suffering Messiah, yes
• a resurrected Messiah, no
  OTOH, it’s entirely possible my reading is behind the times & out of date

There are different Messianic ideas in the Judaism of Jesus’ time & slightly before - not just one. There is not even just the one Messiah; some schemes have two.

AFAIK, the Christian notion of the Messiah, which is made up of & influenced by all sorts of other ideas (the Son of Man, the Heavenly Man, the Suffering Servant, the Davidic King, for instance) is a unique mixture of notions: & if that is true, one would not expect it to exist in that composite form before the time of Jesus - least of all if His self-consciousness was the setting in which they all came together for the first time. If that is what happened, then the indirectness with which He is revealed in the Gospel is explained. Some passages even seem to suggest that he is the Forerunner of the Messiah, & not the Messiah.

If the resurrected Messiah is an unique figure, why is that troublesome ? If Jesus is unique, really so, surely it is not going to be very likely that this unique figure will be known of in advance. If He can be known of in advance, then He is not unique, & is just another crucified Jew, like so many others.

1. As to what has in fact been said, a news article is not a good source for the detail of the debates on the issue.
2. Having faith in Christ is validated by the Person of Christ - everything else could collapse, & He would still be Who He is. In many ways He is not unique in the slightest - if He were, He would not be humanly credible, & would not be God-with-us. Israel was unique in only one respect - its vocation; leave that out, & it was a rather backward, primitive, unimportant statelet (or two). It is different because of God’s choice of it, & for no other reason. God is Unique, & only God, so God alone can confer uniqueness. This is why it is so suicidal & anti-Christian to try to “prove the Resurrection” - for the Unique God is not amenable to study by the academic disciplines; they have no method for doing so.

 

[Teflon93]

The trouble here is that the whole story is based on the presumption that Christianity isn’t true. Christ wasn’t God, didn’t die on the cross for our sins, and didn’t rise from the dead. That is the operating assumptions under which those pushing this story labor.

Now, mind you, they haven’t proven any of the above. They haven’t even attempted to. What they’ve done is engage in purely circular reasoning—since Christianity isn’t true and Christ didn’t do the things Christians say he did, any pre-Christian references to the beliefs which come to be known as Christianity must debunk Christianity. It is a curious and completely vapid argument.

Apply it to another context. Let’s say that 2 billion of us happen to be part of a group that believes wholeheartedly that an event known as the D-Day Invasion occurred. Somebody who claims that it didn’t occur produces an historical account of an amphibious invasion occurring a full generation before D-Day—the Gallipoli Campaign. A-ha! they cry----this proves D-Day didn’t happen, because clearly people had known about the potential for amphibious invasions a full generation before it was purported to happen!

Let me provide a real world and less silly debunking of such thinking.

For centuries, people thought Herodotus was lying when he recounted the story of how the Phoenicians had sailed around the southern tip of Africa, which was thought to be only a modern accomplishment. A close reading of Herodotus combined with the actual sailing experience revealed details which confirmed the story. This accomplishment—thought to be mythical—was historical after all. And a lot of smug, pointy-headed scholars went to their graves completely wrong.

When 2 billion people believe the same thing, and sustain that belief over two millennia, one should require extraordinary evidence in contradiction.

Or at least mild skepticism of the sort completely absent in this story.

 

[Q_Bee]

When 2 billion people believe the same thing, and sustain that belief over two millennia, one should require extraordinary evidence in contradiction.

Hmmm, a couple of billion people could also have believed the earth to be flat. I don’t see how numbers actually has anything to do with whether or not something is true, especially when it comes to how one feels about something. One might be able to say that the majority of ancient peoples believed in sacrificing their children to the gods just as easily, but the numbers will not support the notion that sacrificing children to the gods is a right belief. I think we have to go beyond herd mentality.