A month back a report from Jordan mentioned the discovery of the world’s first church. An inscription mentioned the date of completion of the structure as “one hundred and twenty-four” and since the Roman provinces used a calendar that starts on March 22, 106 C.E, the edifice was dated to 230 C.E. Then a cave was discovered below the pavement and it was dated to almost the first century,

If all these were true, then it would be evidence of early Christian worship and practices. It would also give clues on how various Christian communities spread out of Jerusalem.

The Greek inscription found in the edifice was translated as follows by scholars from the University of Toronto:

(1) In the name of the Holy Trinity, (2) from the offerings of Thomas son of Gaianus, (3) the sole founder. (4) The oratory of Saint George was completed in (5) the month of Apellaios at the time of the eighth indiction of the year four hundred and twenty-four (6) through the zeal of Sergius the watchman. [The Oratory of St. George in Rihab]

Initially the date was read as one hundred and twenty four, but it was incorrect. The correct translation was four hundred and twenty four and adding it to 106 C.E, gave a date of 530 C.E. Supporting this date is the fact that the Holy Trinity, which came after the councils of Nicea and Constantinople, is mentioned. Also it was after the fifth century that St. George cult gained popularity.

Besides this, the basilica plan of the St. George church is similar to the ones dating to sixth and seventh centuries, than to the third century. Regarding the cave beneath the church – there is no evidence that caves were used for worship in the first century and if the cave was indeed a place of worship, it would the first such discovery.

The authors of the paper conclude that this is not the oldest church, but just another church belonging to the Byzanthine period. The researchers left out one little thing. On the floor of the church was an inscription which read, “the 70 beloved by God and the divine.” The theory was that this 70 referred to the seventy disciples who fled Jerusalem fearing Roman persecution. For this they have no explanation.

Reference: The Oratory of St. George in Rihab: The Oldest Extant Christian Building or Just Another Byzantine Church?

When I learned history in school, my teachers taught it in such a way that watching paint dry was more exciting. For Engineering, we had one subject – The History of Science and Technology – which was so boring that students often locked the classroom and went for matinees.

Chris Heard, Associate Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University, recently found a technique to make history classes interesting.

This course, called “Reacting to the Past,” involves students in complex live-action role-playing games to help them experience dramatic historical moments. Now, students don’t have to stat out characters or dress up (though I suppose they are allowed to dress up) or anything like that; basically, they spend a lot of time making speeches and politicking with each other. For example, one game casts students as Parisians during the French Revolution; another game I played in a conference at the University of Kansas cast us in the roles of Athenians debating democracy and other topics right around the time of Socrates’s trial and death. I got so excited about this pedagogical method—which is not all fun and games, but requires a lot of reading and writing as well as public speaking from students—and resolved to employ it as a pilot project in my Religion 101 class this fall.[Convergence of geekdoms: Reacting to the Biblical Past]

There was a historical debate in the Kerala State Assembly last week. CPI (M) MLA Babu M Palissery pontificated that a Caliph had ordered the burning of books in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt about 1500 years ago. When it appeared in the papers the next day, it said that Caliph Umar had ordered the burning of the books. This obviously upset various secular parties like Congress (I) and Muslim League and they demanded an explanation.

Founded in third century B.C.E by Ptolemy, the library was destroyed by Roman emperors and a Pope. The final destruction happened during the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642 C.E. According to A Short Account of the History of Mathematics By Walter William Rouse Ball, the following happened:

The same story, with minor variations, is repeated across many books, but historian Bernard Lewis thinks it is a myth.

To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.[The Vanished Library]

Back in the Kerala Assembly, the MLA apologized and reaffirmed that he intended the word Caliph to mean “a Caliph” and not Caliph Umar. He also stated that Caliph Umar was a book lover and would have never ordered the destruction of the library. Thus peace was restored to the galaxy.

People in other states might be wondering if Kerala is free of all problems that the Assembly debates historical events just to spend time. The answer is: yes, we have no other issues to debate. Kerala is God’s own country and the honourable Amartya Sen wants this model, where a literate society would spend time reading Herodotus and Josephus, to spread all over the world.

Now that the Caliph’s name has been cleared, next item on the agenda would be to make it official that St. Thomas actually arrived in Kerala in 52 C.E.

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]