A 2,000 year old stone tablet has (once again) been making news headlines because of its possible reference to a Messiah who rises after 3 days. Of course, the truth of the matter is that there are numerous difficulties involved in reading and then interpreting the text.
Help for those trying to make an informed judgment about the text is provided by The Aramaic Blog, who have helpfully posted images of the transcribed text, as well as a link to an article about it. NT Wrong has short excerpts from Israel Knohl’s article.
I’ve yet to take a proper look at it, but it would make sense in the context of my current thinking about the rise of early Christianity if the motif of “in three days rise again” was already traditional, and the disciples who fled back to Galilee came to believe that Jesus had risen “on the third day” not because they knew a tomb had been found empty on that day, but because they believed that was what must have happened “according to the Scriptures”.
In other ancient Messianic news, Jim West continues his summaries of Antonio Lombatti’s Italian posts on the Talpiot tomb.
In connection with another of my current interests, I would also like to mention that a couple more classic translations of Mandaean texts into German by Mark Lidzbarski have been made available in Acrobat PDF and other formats at archive.org. In addition to the Ginza, there is the Book of John (in two parts) and the Mandaean Liturgy. What a fantastically helpful resource archive.org provides!
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