A stone tablet pre-dating Jesus with inscriptions suggesting resurrection is making news. Written using ink on stone, and dating to some time between late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E, the tablet is written like a scroll in two columns. Though it was discovered a decade ago, the news worthiness came from the research of Hebrew University scholar Israel Knohl who claimed that the tablet mentions a messiah who will arise after three days. Does this shake the foundation of Christianity and as Time Magazine asks, was Jesus’ resurrection, a sequel?

Some letters in the tablet are not clear and hence the translation is vague, but it seems to be written by someone named Gabriel in the style of prophecies. The first column is about the destruction of evil within three days, followed by a promise that God will soon appear. The tablet also mentions a war that led to bloodshed in Jerusalem.

This was the time when Jewish rebels were trying to overthrow the Roman monarchy following the death of Herod and there was an expectation that a messianic figure would restore the Davidic monarchy. One such messianic leader was Simon, who the first century historian Josephus wrote, burned the royal palace at Jericho and destroyed many other royal residences, till he was beheaded by Gratus, an officer of the royal troops.

Prof. Knohl reads line 80 of the tablet as, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you” and believes this to be a reference to Simon written by his followers.

The tablet is proof that Jewish people were familiar with the concept of a messiah who would be resurrected. This revelation is not new because there are such predictions by the Hebrew prophet Hosea and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This tablet emphasizes two concepts. First, the traditional Jewish view was of a triumphant messiah who would be a descendent of David and not one who suffers. But the one mentioned in the tablet is that of a suffering messiah who resurrects after three days and this exact motif was chosen by later Christian writers. Second, the messiah mentioned in the tablet died for Israel and not for people’s sins.

Several scholars have believed that this suffering messiah motif was not an original creation of the Christian communities.

Several scholars, myself included, along with Michael Wise, Michael Fishbane, and Israel Knohl, have argued for some years now that the“Suffering Messiah” ideas, reflected in our Synoptic Gospels, were not creations of the Christian communities after Jesus’ death, nor even unique to Jesus himself, but in fact were ideas current within messianic varieties of Judaism reaching back into the 2nd century BCE or earlier.[Knohl’s Gabriel Text Interpretation Makes the NYTimes]

These two concepts, Prof. Knohl says, change our view of Christianity.

“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.”“

His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer sohis blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said.“This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view ofJesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.[Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection]

Almost ten year after the ten year Trojan war the Greek hero Odysseus, who was the leader of the group inside the Trojan horse, reached home to find that his wife Penelope was being harassed by 108 unruly suitors. Disguised as a beggar, he experienced the suitors’ intentions, tested Penelope and decided to act. In Book 20, the seer Theoclymenus warned the suitors.

Plutarch and Heraclitus thought this was a reference a solar eclipse and some scholars dated it to the eclipse on April 16, 1178 B.C.E.

Many scholars think that the lines refers to an allegorical eclipse, not a historical one. Since the above passage was suspect, Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina decided to ignore it. Instead they picked on non-allegorical astronomical references in Odyssey such as

1. Reference to Pleiades, Boötes and Ursa Major given by Calypso, a nymph.

2. Seeing Venus before arriving in Phorcy’s Bay.

3. New Moon on the night before the massacre of the suitors.

Using these three references, they searched for a date between 1250 – 1115 B.C.E. where the astronomical references cohered. With off-the-shelf astronomical software like Starry Night Pro, they applied the constraints and only one date matched perfectly – April 16, 1178 B.C.E.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if someone analysed the astronomical references in Mahābhārata and used software to find the date?In fact it has already been done by B. N. Narahari Achar of the University of Memphis. Like the Odyssey analysis it was done solely on the basis of astronomical references listed in the epic. Unlike the Odyssey which has just three astronomical references, the MB has about 150 references with the major ones being mentioned in Udyogaparvan and Bhishmaparvan.

Mr. Achar took one important reference – the appearance of Saturn and Aldebaran near one another – and found 137 possible dates between 3500 B.C.E and 500 C.E. The next constraint that Mars executed a retrograde motion before reaching Antares was added and choices reduced to 17 dates. He applied two more astronomical references – a lunar eclipse near Pleiades and a solar eclipse near Antares – and intersecting the constraints, the unique year for the war was found to be 3067 B.C.E. and this was found to cohere with other references given in the epic.

Since astronomy has offered dates for Odyssey and Mahābhārata, the question to ponder is on how the authors of the two epics knew about the celestial events. This become interesting in the case of Homer^[1] because Vyasa^[2] was the author and a character in Mahabharata but Homer lived five centuries after the Trojan war. How did Homer know about it.?

(To be continued)

Notes:

[1] Modern scholars believe that Homer was not a historical poet and his poems were the collective work of generations of poets. They believe that Homer was the name given to anonymous poets the way the Gospel writers were named Mark, Matthew etc.

[2] Mahābhārata, by tradition, acknowledges that it evolved over a period of time and had contributions from various authors.

References:

1. Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?,” June 24, 2008.

2. B. N. Narahari Achar, Reclaiming the Chronology of Bharatam

Using images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian programmer stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Images taken by Landsat and IKONOS helped archaeologists find several building sites near Tikal in the Guatemalan rainforest. In India, satellite images have shown evidence of paleo channels in Haryana believed to be the mythical Saraswati.

Archaeologists are now using radar and satellite imagery to explore regions affected by violence and sites which are inaccessible.

Here in Cambodia, the new archaeology has changed the history of a civilization. The low-key Evans, a director of the University of Sydney’s Greater Angkor Project at just 32 years old, has already mapped northern Angkor, another heavily landmined area, from a computer screen in Australia. He has used radar and satellite images to chart its vast network of canals and reservoirs, proving that Angkor was once the largest city in the world, a metropolis consuming an area about the size of present-day Los Angeles. His work also underpins a radical new explanation of why, in the 15th century, the Angkor civilization died out, a finding that holds grave undertones for the megacities of the 21st century.[The Space Archaeologists | Popular Science]

Early this year, film makers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron made the case in their documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, that a tomb found in Jerusalem belonged to Jesus. This claim was made based on the fact that the tomb contained ossuaries with inscriptions reading “”Jesus son of Joseph”, “Miriam”, and “Judah son of Jesus”, among others. When the tomb was discovered in 1980, it had ten ossuaries; currently it has only nine.

The tenth ossuary, the documentary claimed, was the James ossuary which surfaced in Israel in 2002. This limestone box carried an inscription “James son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus” and if it was proved to be true, could be historical evidence for a man named Yeshua.

The American TV program 60 Minutes found the Israeli who possessed the ossuary. They also tracked down an Egyptian who had fabricated various artifacts for the Israeli. A committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared it a forgery. Most scholars believe it to be fake.

Now Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeological Review, who first published news of the ossuary has come out with a letter in which he alleges that most scholars claim the ossuary is a fake, based on a hunch and they have not been able to reason it properly. Some expert paleographers still believe the inscription to be authentic and it turns out no committee of the IAA has found it to be fake. Even the Egyptian shown on 60 minutes admitted that he had not seen the ossuary before.

Shanks letter which is similar in tone to B. B. Lal’s lecture on the 19th century paradigms, finally says

Either I’m way off the mark or there has been a successful effort to “hustle” this inscription. Maybe it’s just a better story if the inscription is a forgery than if it’s authentic. Maybe the IAA hates the antiquities market enough to lump the ossuary inscription with other alleged forgeries where it has a better case. Or perhaps the strong suspicion that Oded Golan is a forger is enough. Perhaps he’s forged other stuff.[Help Me! I’m Desperate!]

This brings the ossuary back into news and if the inscriptions are found to be true, it could profoundly affect the historicity of the Jesus.

In a column analyzing the BJP victory in Karnataka, Indian Express columnist Seema Chisthi wrote the following paragraph.

The much-Sanskritised chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who had also campaigned in Karnataka, was calmly in conversation with the TV anchor, commenting on national issues. Very difficult to engage on matters outside Gujarat usually, he signalled his stepping onto a national stage on Sunday — a Sanskritisation (a phrase coined by a Kannadiga sociologist M.N. Srinivas, incidentally) in political terms, which could have violent consequences for not just his party, but also for how politics may take shape quickly, and feverishly, before 2009.[He who holds Bangalore

Usually you see the word saffronization associated with the Hindutva folks, not Sanskritization. This word, which was used as a pejorative during the anti-Brahmin movement, is not in vogue in public commentary these days, but the revival is with mischievous intent. Narendra Modi and Sanskritization, well you get the association. Now the name of a language has become a synonym for communal politics.

In fact this attempt to brand Sanskrit as a non-secular entity happened once before, believe it or not – by the Central Board of Secondary Education. It was an attempt to pull the rug off India’s cultural heritage and history by branding an entire language as not-secular.

At that time the Central Board of Secondary Education decided not to offer Sanskrit as an elective because

1. If they offered Sanskrit, they would have to offer Arabic and Persian since they were also classical languages. If Sanskrit alone was offered ignoring Arabic and Persian, then it would not be secular education, so went the reasoning.

2. If they offered Sanskrit, they would also have to offer other languages like French and German and even Lepcha.

The Supreme Court in a landmark verdict rejected the accusation that teaching Sanskrit was against secularism. To make that judgment, the Court first defined secularism as neither pro-God or anti-God, but the ability to treat devout, agnostic and atheist alike and to be neutral in religious matters. To be a secular person you don’t have to reject your religious beliefs; you could deeply religious as well as secular. To illustrate the case, the Court cited two Indians – Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda – to “dispel the impression that if a person is devout Hindu or devout Muslim he ceases to be secular.”

Regarding the language, the Court wrote that Sanskrit was the language in which Indian minds expressed the noblest ideas. It was also the language in which our culture, which includes the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, the teachings of Sankaracharya to Vallabhacharya and classics of Kalidasa to Banabhatta were expressed. Without understanding Sanskrit, the Court wrote, you cannot understand Indian philosophy on which our culture is based

There were two other reasons (a) Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule, while French, German, Arabic, Persian and Lepcha are not and (b) Article 351 of the Indian Constitution.

Now Seema Chisthi is taking us two decades back, once again to imply that Sanskrit = Communal, thus giving a language such a narrow definition that it would disconnect an ancient nation from its rich cultural heritage. Soon Sanskrit speakers, students of history, and Indian philosophy will be branded communal and the volunteers of Samskrita Bharati will be compared to Mohammed Afzal.

Lets watch to see if our eminent journalists, defenders of secularism and guardians of enlightenment pick this up.

Related Links: The Supreme Court Verdict

(Source: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo)

Till recently it was believed that oil painting had its origins somewhere in Europe between 11^th and 13^th centuries when some unknown artist discovered that mixing linseed, walnut or safflower oil with pigments could produce a different feel than watercolour. Archaeologists looking into caves behind the destroyed Buddhas in Bamiyan found evidence that oil painting has a non-Eurocentric history. The artists who lived in the 7^th century, used besides oil, natural resins, proteins and gums to paint murals showing Buddha sitting cross-legged in vermilion robes.

The paintings in 12 of the 50 caves were created using oil paints, possibly from walnut or poppy, according to scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France. “This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world, although drying oils were already used by ancient Romans and Egyptians, but only as medicines and cosmetics,” says team leader Yoko Taniguchi.[Afghan oil paintings world’s oldest]

Now that the oldest oil painting has been found, it is time to look for the remains of the first oil painting critic.

(Image from the Hoysala trail by backpacker)

The Indian History Carnival, published on the 15th of every month, is a collection of posts related to Indian history and archaeology.

1. Sukumar finds a connection between Gonds and Australian aborgines. He says Gonds are one of the oldest people in India.

2. Dr. James F. McGrath wrote, “the Aryans were, most probably, well-established in India long before the purported Aryan invasion would allegedly have occurred.” Here at varnam we analyzed The Genetic Distance between Karunanidhi and Mallika Sherawat .

3. Dr. Arvind Sharma quotes Greek and Latin sources to write how Greeks perceived the Indians, and how the Indians perceived themselves, in or around the fourth century B.C.E. “The point which stands out clearly from these accounts is that the Indians are considered a diverse and polyglot people.”

4. Moda Sattva argues that Rastrakutas are of Kannadiga origin.

5. Manish Khamesra has Part 1 of his travel to Fatepur Sikri. “This magnificent fortified city, built between 1565-1585, was the capital of Mughal Empire for around 15 yrs during Akbar’s reign.” (via Desi Pundit)

6. Backpakker has images of the Holy Rosary Church built by French Missionaries around 1860. (via Desi Pundit). She also has images from the Hoysala trail (1,2,3)

7. Rohit finds a 29th December 1930 speech by Muhammad Iqbal in which he expresses the philosophical basis for Pakistan. Gaurav thinks, “that (dubious) honour goes to speech given in 1888 by Sir Syyed Ahmend Khan to a gathering of Muslim intellectuals”

8. Ratheesh has a short review of John Keay’s India Discovered. “I think India Discovered is also a must-read for every Indian to understand how our glorious past was discovered, studied and protected by foreigners, who didn’t always have great support from their Governments.”

9. Rohit also has a post which shows that Gandhi made Nehru India’s first Prime Minister.

10. Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta came across a paper on the partition of India written by a famous professional geographer, Oskar Spate who  served on the Punjab Boundary Commission. It explains how various parts of the country were divided between Indian and Pakistan.

11. Dr. Subrato Roy writes about the lessons from the 1962 war.

12. Delhi Assembly Deputy Speaker Shoaib Iqbal has demanded that Bharat Ratna be conferred on the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. B. Shantanu thinks it is more than a joke.

If you find any posts related to Indian history please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or use this form. The next carnival will be up on March 15th.

Previous Carnivals: 1

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Randy Cohen who writes the Ethicist column in New York Times got the following question

I’m a history professor — my period is 1500-1800 — with an M.A. student who wants to pursue a doctorate. While she is smart and capable, she is very religious, subscribing to the “young earth” theory that the world is only 6,000 years old. I am to work with her for a year and then recommend her to Ph.D. programs. Must I do so if I find her views incongruent with those of historians? [Randy Cohen – The Ethicist – New York Times]

It is shocking to see that in the year 2008, there are Ph.D students who believe in fairy tales, then if you have graduated from one of those schools where creationism is taught as science this is not surprising. Mr. Cohen advices the professor to teach her Sumerian history and is confident that the student will have a eureka moment when she discovers that the Sumerians could not have accomplished so much immediately after the earth was formed.

Randy, two words: Max Müller. He had a Ph.D on Spinoza‘s Ethics, was the founder of Indian studies in the western world and the creator of the discipline of comparative religion, but believed that all languages can be traced to the Tower of Babel, Indians were populated by the descendents of Japhet and Christianity was a true historical event. His  biblical beliefs resulted in dating the hymns of Rig-Veda being to 1000 B.C.E., and this 19^th century paradigm is still widely held.

If the professor, following Randy’s advice, tried to teach a student who believes that earth was created on the night preceding October 23, 4004 B.C.E, Sumerian history, the most likely outcome is that the student will rewrite history to fit in with the Biblical narrative.

Technorati Tags: Max Muller, Ethicist, New York Times