July 6, 2008
The Gabriel Tablets
The release of inscriptions from 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 quiet a stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it appears to speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If this turns out to be an accurate rendering, and the date holds, this turns out to show that the idea of resurrection did not come from Christianity per se, but was part of a larger, Jewish world of anticipation and thought. The Jewishness of early Christianity is more positively confirmed by this extraordinary finding.
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7 Responses to “The Gabriel Tablets”
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Lynn! Good to see you here. And thanks for posting this; I saw a brief mention of this in the Dallas paper this morning. My immediate thought was: I wonder what N.T. Wright thinks about this, since it tends to have a serious impact on important arguments in his book Surprised by Hope. And this led me to think of how often scholars will form an opinion about the authenticity of such a find before a full study has been done, because they have a favorite position to protect. It’s a kind of hope to shape the world to fit one’s theory instead of the other way around. Not that the practice (or impulse) is limited to matters of religion: scientists do the same thing. The process, though, illustrates a fluidity of thought that is belied by the incremental results that constitute what gets shown.
Daryl, great to hear from you. I thought this was a good way to open up the conversation that is usually dogmatically closed around the true context of early Christianity. It has been my sense for a long time that the wider evolution of religious and spiritual thought going on the Middle East of that era is often missing in the debates. This is just one example. Yes, you’re right about N.T. Wright. His mind is fairly well made-up, and he often dismisses the other arguments that are legitimately made because they do not fall easily within the parameters of western theological thought-form. But shifts are taking place. Bart Ehrman is a good example, and there are many others who are listening the the wealth of new materials that are indeed showing up.
Actually, I think this would fit with Wright’s scheme pretty well. If you read his book on Paul he argues the need to read Paul more Jewishly.
Besides, as useful as this new find is, I am surprised to hear that scholars dispute that claim. For heavens sake, it doesn’t take much work to see that 2 Samuel 7, God’s promise to David “I will be your Father, and you will be my Son” language was around long before Jesus. Heck, “messiah” simply means anointed one, as does “Christos”. For that matter, anytime David is referred to as “anointed one” in Septuagint the word “Christos” is used.
So, when a fella reads Jesus’ baptism in Matthew, he ought to realize that this is a confirmation of his Davidic heritage and Kingship over Israel rather than the shoot from the hip “2 person of the Trinity” conclusion folks normally come up with. And then we got the “suffering servant” motifs in Isaiah…
I suppose what I am saying is I don’t understand why this is so radical. Interesting, yes. Of scholarly use, most definitely. But paradigm shifting, I’m not so sure. Or, I don’t get it.
Its not radical to you, Andrew, but for conventional religious teaching–that the three-day reference is directly related to the history of Jesus and nothing else, this suggests that Jesus was working within a mythological motif all along. That motif is clear from the canonicals to me, but Christianity has wanted to claim an aspect of historical “uniqueness” as proving its superiority over Judaism, for example, and that the action of God in Jesus trumps everything else, including history.
I too think Paul should be read in a Jewish way, but there are also multiple forms of Judaism, the Hellenism of Paul is in distinction to the more Semitic forms of James and even Jesus. So why doesn’t Paul quote Jesus or explain his teachings? His teachings, for Paul, in my view, are not relavent to the theology of Jewish Hellenism that Paul is working out, and thus in the West, at least we miss a whole genre of Jewishness that was resident in Jesus and only latent in Paul. So lots going on here, I think.
I see, Lynn. That makes a little more sense of it, but I do think people over-distinguish Paul’s Jewishness from Jesus’, at least if the scholarship I am familiar with is correct. This is not to say they were the same.
As for Paul not quoting Jesus, he wasn’t exactly hanging around him during his public ministry. Outside of the whole “road to Damascus” thing, he did exactly have contact with him. But, I suppose, that is precisely your point.
Andrew: You know much more about N.T. Wright’s body of work than I do, so I can’t argue much about his whole “scheme” and his views concerning Paul. But my comment was directed toward specific arguments that he made in Surprised by Hope in which he goes to great pains to argue that 1) clearly something happened at the time of the reported resurrection and 2) the fact that resurrection was not part of general religious expectations at the time makes it (in Wright’s view) less likely that they would so suddenly hit upon this answer to the death of Jesus, which would otherwise spell the end of thoughts of Jesus becoming a “real” king at some point. And as Lynn points out, it’s clear that this view depends upon and furthers the idea that the death of Jesus is, in effect, the first unique event in history–the mark of a change in the way time is perceived. For a wonderful analysis of this change in views of historical movement, see Frank Maunel’s The Shapes of Philosophical History. So I don’t think Wright can possibly think that this find doesn’t have an impact on the point he makes in setting up his whole discussion (in S b H) of the way we all ought to understand the resurrection.
What is curious to me, and many others, is that since Paul, for the West at least, is the main interpreter of Jesus (the hermeneutical gate), it is curious that he never quotes him or considers his teaching as central to his own hermeneutic–and yet Jesus’ teachings contained the central insight that he was seeking to convey. Instead, what we get from Paul is a religion “about” Jesus (especially about the “final events of his life and their significance read through Jewish Hellenism), but not the religion “of” Jesus as he expressed it. And yet, we have made Paul’s hermeneutic the primary lens through which we read and explain Jesus. Wright, from my perspective, falls into the same hermeneutical mode (trap?). This is why the Gospel of Thomas, for example, appears to be so critical–its another stream of interpretation, fairly independent (if not entirely) from Paul. We’re closer there to the religion “of” rather than the religion “about” Jesus. I think this is what Bart Ehrman is attempting to describe in his Lost Christianities, and in this regard Daryl’s comments about our conventional views concerning the uniqness of Jesus and his impact upon history, in my view, are entirely correct, which means the path taken in the western tradition needs to be seriously reexamined.