Gabriel's vision: precursor to Jesus?

[Jayhawker Soule]

From Haaretz ...

• article 1: 'In three days, you shall live'
• article 2: Dead Sea tablet suggests Jewish resurrection imagery pre-dates Jesus

This is interesting stuff, although I'm a little suspicious at the dearth of peer review ...

 

[Halcyon]

It also seems a little suspicious that the tablet was bought from an antique dealer and no-one seems to be sure where it came from.

Considering the time frame of Gabriel's Revelation being so close to that of Jesus's time, isn't it a distinct possibility that rather than Simon being a precursor to Jesus, that Simon was Jesus?
That instead of the movement dying out, and then being re-created by another group under a different name, that the movement simply "evolved" over time replacing character names with those relevant to the times they lived in - or perhaps Jesus originated in a splinter group from the Simon believers.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Davila at PaleoJudaica notes the following:

IS THE "VISION OF GABRIEL" GENUINE? Søren Holst e-mails the following interesting observations on the "Vision of Gabriel" (or the "Dead Sea Scroll in stone"):

I just discovered that Norwegian Qumran scholar Årstein Justnes was blogging about a seminar on this text as early as May.

Not much is added to what you've already blogged concerning the content of the text, but it is reported that ideas in the seminar varied as to the genre of the text (Torleif Elgvin: "prophetic/charismatic", Magne Sæbø: "midrash", [J.J.?] Collins: "Quais-prophetic" )

Justnes, however, has severe doubts about the authenticity of the inscription (and he is not prone to doubting authenticities all over the place). He gives five reasons:

1. peculiar language with "artificial" expressions
2. unfocused and incoherent content
3. ink-on-stone is a previously unheard-of writing medium impossible to date by C14
4. provenience unknown (except for the vague "east of Jordan")
5. clever forgeries have been copious lately

Personally, I'd say 5 is irrelevant until proven relevant, 4 is highly deplorable but hardly decisive, 1 and 2 could point either way (as my old teacher Fred Cryer used to say, "a new inscription that does NOT have oddities but is done strictly acc. to Gesenius/Kautzsch -- now, THAT's suspicious") -- but 3 is certainly interesting.​

Yes, it is.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

This seems to be developing into a broadly disseminated news story. Here are a few exerpts from the International Herald Tribune ...

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone's authenticity. ...

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. ...​

Stay tuned ...

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Thanks, Jay.

I am looking at "The Messiah Before Jesus" right now. If it's not peer reviewed (and I don't think that it is...), it's because it doesn't interact with scholarship. I'll work through the other stuff.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

This seems to be developing into a broadly disseminated news story. Here are a few exerpts from the International Herald Tribune ...

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone's authenticity. ...

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. ...​

Stay tuned ...

Incredible.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

NT scholar Ben Witherington talks about it briefly in his blog - Ben Witherington: The Death and Resurrection of Messiah--- written in stone.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

NT scholar Ben Witherington talks about it briefly in his blog - Ben Witherington: The Death and Resurrection of Messiah--- written in stone.

To be honest, I got to his deprecating "one eclectic Jewish scholar " and stopped reading ...

 

[angellous_evangellous]

To be honest, I got to his deprecating "one eclectic Jewish scholar " and stopped reading ...

Yeah, that's very unfortunate. I don't like Witherington all that much, but he's widely read.:cover:

 

[doppelganger]

Here's an English translation of the stone's content, if anyone is interested.

http://bib-arch.org/news/dssinstone_english.doc

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Here's an English translation of the stone's content, if anyone is interested.

http://bib-arch.org/news/dssinstone_english.doc

OK, I don't see the suffering servant = Messiah here, and nothing about resurrection after three days.

 

[NoahideHiker]

That would have been awesome if the Messiah was Simon instead. The NT would sound really funny if it read, "Simon says do this. Simon says don't do that. Aha! Simon didn't say, you're out.".

Even if this turns out to be true and it does plug a couple holes the argument for Jesus there are still the pointed disqualifying elements that prevent him from being Ha Moshiach.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

That would have been awesome if the Messiah was Simon instead. The NT would sound really funny if it read, "Simon says do this. Simon says don't do that. Aha! Simon didn't say, you're out.".

Even if this turns out to be true and it does plug a couple holes the argument for Jesus there are still the pointed disqualifying elements that prevent him from being Ha Moshiach.

The thing is, the substance used to "plug the holes" comes from the Gospel of Mark.

The whole argument is circular:

1) The writing on the stone has several holes in it - and these holes are filled with words from the Gospel of Mark, back-translated into Hebrew to fit in the spaces between the words that are actually there.

2) These words happen to represent ideas previously thought to be extremely rare or non-existent in Judaism: the idea of the suffering Messiah, resurrection of the Messiah, and kingdom of heaven (as represented in the NT).

3) Then, they say that the stone sheds light on Mark. How surprising!! Had they not used the NT in the first place to fill in critical gaps in the stone text, it would be less likely that it is so parallel...