August 21, 2008

As the latest in a series of "shocking" discoveries purporting to undermine the foundations of Christianity, Gabriel's Tablet is certainly an exciting artifact, but unlikely to live up to its hype, says Craig Hazen, founder and director of the master's program in Christian apologetics at Biola University.

Dubbed the "Dead Sea Scroll on stone," the unveiling last month of the three-foot tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew has some scholars re-evaluating their views of Jesus because it is believed to date from a few decades before his birth and may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

The tablet is just one of several archaeological finds in recent years, including the purported Gospel of Judas, family tomb of Jesus at Talpiot and others, fueling documentaries and sensational newspaper and magazine stories alleging the discoveries could destroy the Christian faith.

"This discovery has not yet been exploited by groups like National Geographic (Gospel of Judas) or film director James Cameron (The Jesus Family Tomb) for money and publicity,” Hazen says. “The 'Gospel of Judas' and the 'Jesus Family Tomb' were announced with the intent of capturing headlines and driving people to buy books and DVDs.

"There is some historical value to each of these finds, but their real place in the historical record was stretched beyond recognition in order to attempt to embarrass the Christian faith and make money."

Last month, The New York Times reported the tablet owned by Israeli-Swiss collector David Jeselsohn was generating quite a hubbub because it suggested the death and resurrection of Jesus was not unique but rather part of recognized Jewish tradition – a finding one scholar described as "shocking" and a challenge to Christian theology.

So far, no one is challenging the authenticity of the tablet, pocked with holes and missing words. Virtually everyone who has examined it has concluded the script and Hebrew construction are consistent with late 1st century B.C. to 1st century A.D. The most controversial aspect of the tablet is the way one of its holes is being filled in by a scholar in Jerusalem, Hebrew University Professor Israel Knohl. He believes part of the text is about a messianic figure named Simon, not Simon Peter of the New Testament, and that it should read, "In three days, you shall live, I Gabriel command you." Knohl believes the tablet demonstrates that the idea of a messiah rising from the dead after three days was part of common Jewish thinking at the time.

But even if Knohl is correct, it only counts against the traditional Christian view if one wants to make a "huge naturalistic and fallacious leap" to the conclusion that because the concept was circulating, that proves it was the actual source of the resurrection account, Hazen says.

"And again if Professor Knohl's interpretation turned out to be accurate (and one does not commit a cause-and-affect fallacy) it could actually be used to show that some Jews at the time of Jesus were in tune with a dying and rising messiah, which could be used to bolster the Christian position," says Hazen.

However, when the dust settles, I don't think Professor Knohl's interpretation will win the day. His conclusions are highly speculative and I think research being published in the next few months will show that alternative interpretations are equally strong, if not stronger."

In fact, the tablet helps confirm that not all Jews at the time of Jesus had abandoned the idea of a "suffering messiah" in the tradition of Isaiah 53.

William Lane Craig, a research professor at the Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, says the reference to the "Prince of princes" on the Gabriel Tablet is an allusion to the phrase in the book of Daniel, which is not speaking of the coming messiah, but of God, who is the Prince of princes, that is, of the angels correlated with various nations.

"The three-day motif is very common in the Old Testament and in Judaism," Craig says. "The line on the tablet predicting that in three days you shall live, also sounds very similar to Hosea 6:2: 'After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.' This passage has nothing to do with the messiah or the resurrection of an individual but is talking about the restoration of Israel, its national fortunes, prosperity, and so forth. The idea this tablet has anything to do with an individual with messianic pretensions is fanciful."

Shortly before Easter of 2007, filmmakers James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici released “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” documentary revealing archaeologists had discovered in the early 1980s a burial box near Jerusalem with the names on it of Maria, Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne e Mara, and Judah, their son. Although the names were among the most common during the time of Jesus, the filmmakers claimed to have found the box that once held Jesus’ bones.

But Darrell L. Bock, a research professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, says scholars have largely dismissed the claim.

“The reason is there are just too many leaps in creating the argument, one of which is the common nature of most of the names found on the tomb, and the other is the presence of certain figures on the tomb that shouldn’t belong there,” says Bock. “We are now at the point where books are coming out such as, ‘Buried Hope or Risen Savior: The Search for the Jesus Tomb’ by Charles Quarles, showing what is problematic about it.”

And while a National Geographic documentary regarding the lost Gospel of Judas created a stir in 2006 – raising the possibility that Jesus ordered Judas to betray him – Bible scholars almost unanimously agree it’s a Gnostic text written in the middle of the 2nd century, says author, apologist and New Testament historian Mike Licona.

“It might tell us about some Gnostic writing, what some Gnostics believed, but it’s worthless in terms of what Judas and Jesus were like,” says Licona. “I don’t know a single scholar who says it represents what actually occurred.”

While the Gospel of Thomas and other lost gospels unearthed in 1945 in the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi portray a Jesus who didn’t perform miracles, die on the cross or rise from the dead, Ravi Zacharias, an apologist, Cambridge-educated author and a visiting lecturer at Oxford University, says the authorship is debated and some of the text is nonsensical.

“It’s interesting that in a composition of scriptures covering over 1,500 years and 66 books, where the storyline remains intact, that the skeptic is willing to take some small fragment or some small document which is supposed to debunk the Bible,” Zacharias says. “I don’t think I have actually seen a single piece of evidence, realizing how critically the Bible has been studied for all these years and centuries, which stand the scrutiny of having been accepted by scholars and standing tests of veracity of the scriptures.”

Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune author of “The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ,” says he believes we’re seeing the plateau and the beginning of the decline in the popularity of these assaults on the faith.

“As people are hearing the other side of the story, these objections are losing their punch and people are being reassured in their faith,” Strobel says.

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