The Dead Sea Stele
8 July 2008 - 6 תמוז 5768 by Huw
s you will, no doubt, have heard, they have recently discovered a stone that indicates someone - a generation or so before Jesus - thought Messiah should die and rise again after three days.
Some scholars - liberal, Christian and otherwise are having the damnedest time deciding what to make of this. My comment, posted at Street Prophets (and in an email for a reader of these pages) is below:
I thought one of the Jewish (and scholarly) objections to the Christian stories was that no one before Jesus told stories about Messiah being killed and rising again. I’ve read over and over that the whole death and rising motif is borrowed from elsewhere.
Klinghoffer’s “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus” hinges, in part, on the idea that Messiah Couldn’t Die. Many liberal objections to the traditional Christian reading of OT prophecies, and many higher critical understandings of NT Texts are based on the idea that Death-and-Resurrection was unique to Christians. Unique not among pagans who had it all over the place, but rather among Jews. Clearly the NT stories are Gentile Stories. Jews would never say such things!
This would seem to knock all that down - it doesn’t pull any strings out of the gospel tapestry: in fact, if it is proven valid, it makes that tapestry even richer and more Jewish.
Jesus self-understanding needn’t be identical to this earlier messiah. There were scores of earlier messiahs - and later ones. But this one seems to indicate that the stories told about Jesus after that first Easter are possibly 100% kosher.
If this stele is real (not a forgery) it is a blow not to Traditional Christianity, but to modernist and post-modernist version
Ditto that. There is a secondary theme here as well. Both modernist liberals and modernist conservatives agreed that if the story were shown to be false, then the doctrines would be brought into question. The neo-orthodox simply played mind games by speaking of the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. I am convinced that much of the scholarship over “myth” and “mythology” was an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. That is, underpinning neo-orthodoxy was a modernist liberal assesment that the stories were not historically true. However, mystically that was a non-starter.
So, take a bit of cultural studies and stretch it past the breaking point and come up with this whole theory of “myth” that allows you to have your warm fuzzies without worrying about history. That is, as long as inconvenient truths do not turn up, like what you said was not historical turning out to possibly be historical.
So, I opine that much of the fight over the “relics” that are found in archeology is a leftover modernist fight over history. Both the post-modernist and emergent approaches to history are somewhat different. It will be interesting to see how philosophy of history develops eventually in a more mature post-modernist / emergent setting. Both post-modernism and emergent thinking are not yet in their mature form. It will do interesting things to theology, that’s for sure!