Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Early Christian Writings Found?

Not directly related to what we're doing here but I thought it was interesting enough to pass along.

Early writings found

While the find is intriguing, we have to remember that counterfeit relics and forgeries are very common in the middle-east.
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6 comments:

  1. The various blogs by academics I've read on this range from probably fake to certainly fake.

    Exploring our Matrix has some useful roundups.

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  2. I did like the lead booklet though. Looked cool.
    I also saw a story from the Guardian in the UK that stated that the text portrayed Jesus as openly and happily gay. They had even less credibility then the story above.
    Everyone has an agenda I guess.

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  3. You might find 'secret Mark'
    interesting. The status of the letter is still disputed.

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  4. Yeah, when I saw that the Hebrew writing was paleo/proto-Hebrew, I went "huh?"

    The Hebrew script in the Dead Sea scrolls is much closer to modern Hebrew than the proto-Hebrew on the plates. That writing system was out of use by the Christian era.

    Most people don't realize that the Bible was written down using an older version of Hebrew that looked completely different. It was basically the Phoenician alphabet, adopted as an abjad. (The Phoenician script was also the ancestor of the Latin alphabet.) The Hebrew abjad stayed consistent at 22 letters, but their shapes changed over time.

    Phoenicians are bad guys in the Bible, but the Israelites are obviously culturally indebted to them.

    While we're on the subject, did you know that the Philistines were Mycenaean Greeks? And that the Mycenaean greeks had a writing system called Linear B (circa 1400 BCE) that was deciphered in the 20th century?

    But the Philistines did not use Linear B. They used a form of the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script, writing an unknown non-semitic language! Cypro-minoan script was also found at the Syrian city of Ugarit...

    (Incredibly interesting 2007 NYT article on Philistine culture.)

    But that's not the "Ugaritic texts" I've mentioned. Ugaritic was basically a close relative of Hebrew, and the writing system was an abjad (with 9 more characters) but it looked completely different. It took the form of a cuneiform, a writing method used by the Assyrians and Babylonians, usually in a more complicated syllabary.

    The transjordan tribes (Edom, Moab, Ammon), spoke "Canaanite languages, closely related to Hebrew and Phonecian." No idea what writing system they used.

    Thats all I got. I just wanted to babble about language okay.

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  5. Thanks Abbie,
    Question, how do you include active links in the comments? I can't figure it out!

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  6. good ol HTML:

    (a href="http://www.godisawesome.com")This website is awesome you guys.(/a)

    Replace the () with <>.

    ReplyDelete