Saint Peter still seems enigmatic.  There is a great deal in his career that appears evanescent and obscure, and it was this that tempted me to the subject.  I can only hope that I have helped to clean some of the mysteries up, or at least to present them in the terms that they deserve.

Let me say that I enjoyed the historical parts of the book, but Peter still seems enigmatic to me.  At times, Grant talked more of Jesus and Paul than Peter.  While these two people are important to discuss when talking about Peter, it just seems to me that I still don’t really understand Peter.  Bishop Rick previously made the claim that Paul founded Christianity.  Michael Grant seems to dispute that notion quite clearly.  From the Epilogue, page 176, Grant says

Peter was significant for two reasons, both of which I have discussed in some detail, and both of which remain firmly fixed in the historical picture.  In the first place Jesus chose him as his principal helper; the man who was assigned that remarkable honour and responsibility must have been very far from negligible.  Second, after the appalling event of Jesus’ Crucifixion, it was Peter who collected his disheartened followers together and formed them into a Christian community.  This was a tremendously difficult task, and the person who was able to do it must have exercised an extraordinary influence.  Moreover, unless Peter had done this, Jesus’s endeavors would never have survived.  Paul could not have achieved this without Peter’s work immediately after the Crucifixion; and so, without Peter, there would have been no Christian Church either in the subsequent centuries to today.

I’ve heard a few scholars make the case that James, Jesus brother was the leader of the early Christian church rather than Peter, but I didn’t understand the reasoning behind that.  Grant seems to believe that Peter got demoted following his well-known conflict with Paul regarding whether Gentiles would be circumcised.  Grant says that James came out of Peter and Paul’s dispute the winner.

Before I get into this triangle between Peter, Paul, and James, let me first discuss Grant’s point of view.  Grant died in 2004.  During his life, he was a professor of Humanity at Edinburgh University, and was vice-chancellor at Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Khartoum.  As a historian, he “must” discount all miracles in the Bible.  On pages 4-5 he discusses miracles as says that,

most students of history, therefore, are not able to take these miraculous happenings into consideration.  They can believe in such stories, if they wish, but they do so as a matter of faith and not as historians.  Or they can disbelieve them, if they prefer.  In either case, it is their duty to attempt to find out what happened, within the realms of historical fact and possibility.  (italics in original)

…

Biographers of Jesus have sometimes excised this miraculous material from their narrative, in order to make it sound more credible to modern ears.  But any such attempts conflict strongly with the ancient accounts that have come down to us.  In the four Gospels, no fewer than 232 miracles are reported.  Take Mark, for example.  Out of that Gospel’s 661 verses, as many as 209 deal with miraculous doings.  And Matthew and Luke carry the same tendency still further.  Matthew, in particular, emphasizes the theme to an extraordinary extent.  ’It is hard to find a non-maraculous kernel of the Gospel.’⁴ And that is why Peter, too, was credited with miracles after Jesus’s death.  He was believed to have been following his great predecessor’s tradition.

So, as a believer and not a historian, it took me a bit of getting used to completely discounting all these miracles.  Chapter 10 is titled “The Clash with Paul.”  Grant talked about problems in chronology, and questions if an Apostolic Council in Jerusalem even occurred.  In Paul’s letter to the Galations, Paul dates this visit to 3 years after his conversion, so some scholars date the event to 35-37 AD (depending on the date of Jesus’ death.)  However, Acts 15 seems to place the event in 48 AD at Passover.  Grant says that “Acts 15 paints a picture of single-minded unanimity (homothumadon)³ — an idealized and inaccurate picture as most now believe.  Admittedly there was quite a long debate.^4″ From page 132,

But what actually happened at the Apostolic Council?  We shall assume for a moment that there was one, ignoring, however, the unsatisfactory nature of such a name, which is likely to produce anachronistic ideas.¹⁰ The Council has been the subject of a host of varying modern interpretations.  Probably the predominant view, for which there is a lot to be said–and it leaves open, perhaps uncomfortably open, the question of whether the council actually took place–is that Acts created the story from two fundamental traditions or memories which had been handed down to its writer.  The first tradition was that at Jerusalem the Christian leadership, including Paul, Peter, and James the brother of Jesus, came to an agreement that, although Pharisee missionaries to the Gentiles would argue to the contrary, Gentiles could be accepted into the ranks of Christians without having been circumcised.  This was a tradition that seems to be confirmed by Paul.  The second tradition was that nevertheless, in certain communities where Jewish and Gentile Christians were mixed, Gentiles were obliged, in order to maintain this association, to fall with certain other Jewish regulations regarding impurity, and rules relating to food.

As to circumcision, even Acts, determined though its writer is to record harmony, admits that there had been ‘fierce dissension’ on the subject,¹¹ which it probably does not differentiate sufficiently from the food problems.  The book does record what looks like a compromise between Paul and Barnabus, on the one hand, who were against imposing Jewish restrictions on Gentile converts, and Christians such as James who espoused orthodox Jewish practices.  In due course this decision was incorporated, we are told, in what is known as the Apostolic Decree, issued allegedly to ‘our brothers of Gentile origin’ in Antioch, the rest of Syria, and Cilicia.¹²

…page 134

Others try to get away from the problem by suggesting that Acts 15 is a conflation of two Jerusalem meetings.  The first of these peacefully aligned Peter with Paul, whose insistence on the Gentiles’ freedom from circumcision prevailed, whereas the second confirmed the Four Regulations (which may be fictitious) in the absence of Paul.  According to this second hypothesis, Paul never enforced the Decree, either because he did not know about it or because the churches in the other provinces were, or could be assumed as being, outside the area to which the Decree was meant to apply.  That is possible.  But in any case, even if the Apostolic Council did take place, which is more than doubtful, its decisions failed to have any effect, as will shortly become clear.

Grant discusses further details on whether the meeting may have occurred (and concludes it either didn’t occur, or was a small, private meeting between Peter, Paul, and James).  He then notes something of a schism.  From pages 136-7,

Two separate Christian missionary areas were now in existence (although Acts does not seem willing to accept the division), one for Jews and one for Christians.  The former was in the hands of Peter, which again casts doubt on his alleged activity among the Gentiles.  But this division, and the agreement to maintain it, was not likely to be workable in practice because of the inevitable clash of personalities, and, in addition because in most places the population was mixed, consisting of both Jews and of Gentiles, so that any clear-cut division into two  missionary areas was unattainable.

Furthermore, on page 140, Grant says that “there were at least two rival groups, or possibly four”.²⁹ He references Paul’s letter,

I have been told, my brothers, by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you.  What I mean is this: each of you is saying, “I am Paul’s man,’ or “I am for Apollos’; ‘I follow Cephas [Peter],’ or ‘I am Christ’s.’

Surely Christ has not been divided among you!

Grant discusses Paul chastising Peter in Antioch in Galations, attributing the event to 49 AD.  On page 138,

It is manifest that the period immediately after the Crucifixion of Jesus did not witness the harmony among his followers in which Acts has tried to induce us to believe, but was instead characterized by sharp rivalry between two mutually hostile groups.  One of the groups was that of James the brother of Jesus and his fellow-Jews born in Palestine, who believed in Jesus but were also convinced that this belief entailed all the maintenance of traditional Jewish institutions such as circumcision.  The other group was led by Paul, and consisted of men whose education had been partly Greek and who were of Gentile origin.  They, too, believed in Jesus, and although they may well have respected confirmity with many aspects of Jewish Law, they were certain this this faith in him, with all its power and intensity, completely superseded some of the other old regulations of Judaism.

There us little doubt about what happened.  James, leader of the faction which believed that Gentile Christians must obey Jewish customs, had not, after all, been prepared to abide by the Jerusalem agreement–if there was one–and had sent men, or a man, to persuade or compel Peter to cease from having meals with Gentile Christians.  Peter might have felt relatively liberal about this before–although, as we have seen, his actual conversion of Gentiles is doubtful–but now he gave in to James because, Paul said, he was ‘afraid’.  This is perhaps an unduly harsh condemnation of the dilemma in which Peter found himself, since what he was really trying to do was to mediate between two extreme positions.  And so he paid the penalty which flexible, diplomatic, careful, moderate mediators, compromisers and bridge-men pay.  He was said to be frightened (perhaps for the future of his own mission, but not, surely, of freedom fighters, as has been suggested.)²⁵ Can he be accused of wavering?  Yes, he certainly abandoned a position he believed in, but no doubt because he hoped to bridge the gap which had widened between James and Paul.

And one thing is clear.  First we had heard of Peter as the Christian leader.  Then we heard of a joint leadership of Peter, James, and John.  Now we learn that Peter has bowed to the wished of James.  The man who will henceforward take the lead among Jewish Christians of Jerusalem is not Peter; it is James.  The leadership of Christianity in its central Palestinian city has passed back to the family of Jesus himself, with whom it will remain for a  good many years.  That is another penalty that mediators and compromisers pay.  They do not manage to retain leadership.

There are several James’s mentioned in the New Testament, and James “the brother of Jesus” is not one of the original 12 Apostles.  There is James the Just, James the Great, and James the Less.  Grant describes these 3 James’s on page 150.

Although inadequately described in the New Testament, and accorded especially little justice in Acts, James is of importance in this story, because it was he who supplanted Peter as the leader of the Christians after the Crucifixion of Jesus.

The James (Jacob) to whom reference is made, neither the son of Zebedee (James ‘the Great’, executed by King Agrippa I) nor the son of Alphaeus (James ‘the Less’), was ‘the Lord’s brother’ according to Paul in his Letter to the Galatians.¹² The Gospels record brothers of Jesus, including James, and the contexts seem to show that these writers have a blood relationship between Jesus and his brothers in mind.  Tertullian (c.AD 160-240) and Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-211/216), too, confirm that this was what was believed in the first two centuries AD.  Origen (c. 184/6-254/5) and others, however, bearing in mind that ‘brother’ (adelphos) can cover a wider range of meanings, suggested that James was a stepbrother of Jesus: in other words, that Joseph had been married to another wife before he was married to Mary.  A rival theory, sponsored by Jerome (c. 348-420), held that Jesus and James were really cousins.¹⁴ These views, contradicting the simple brotherly relationship, came into being because it was increasingly stressed, from the second century onwards, that Mary, the wife of Joseph, was not only a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, but remained a virgin all her life.

James, it appears, was not very keen on the preaching of Jesus, and may indeed have been positively opposed to it, as long as Jesus was alive.¹⁵ After the Crucifixion, however, he became converted.  This according to Paul, was because he was vouchsafed an Appearance of the risen Christ.¹⁶ Probably this Appearance was needed, and invented, by the tradition, because James’s kinship with Jesus (accompanied, as it had been, but a measure of scepticism) was not help to be sufficient to justify the prominent position which James now came to occupy.

For within a short time after Paul’s conversion James was a significant leader in the Christian Church, and he became even more important after Agrippa I had the apostle James ‘the Great’ (the son of Zebedee) executed in AD 44 and Peter fled from Jerusalem.  It was then that James ‘the brother of Jesus’ came to power in Peter’s place.  He had not been one of the original Twelve, but Paul seems to have regarded him as an apostle all the same.¹⁷

Although Acts does not, on the whole, do justice to James, the book does make him the chief spokesman for the Jerusalem church at the probably non-existent Apostolic Council, in which he was alleged to have intervened in favour of a measure of Jewish orthodoxy, indicating that Gentile converts should comply with the Four Regulations.¹⁸

…

Later tradition maintained that James was called ‘the Just’ (Zaddik, like the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness), and was noted for his pious fulfillment of Jewish Law.  He may have possessed priestly privileges, and it was perhaps because of his influence that he Pharisee Gamaliel urged leniency to Peter and the Christians.¹⁹

Grant says there are many mysteries surrounding James.  From page 153,

why are we given so little information about him?  Why has he been pushed into the position of a shadowy, background figure?²¹ The answer seems to be this.  Whether he was Jesus brother or not, James had known him personally, and had been close to him, in a way with which Paul could not hope to compete.  This meant that James was nearer to the source of the faith than Paul could ever expect to be.  Moreover, James’s aims and interests were by no means those of Paul.  On occasion, indeed, they held exactly opposite views.

For Paul, then, James must have been a continual source of disapproval and irritation.  And with the subsequent triumph of Pauline Christianity, his significance, even if it could not be expunged from the record completely, was at any rate retroactively lessened.  This made James an ambiguous figure, about whom Acts, in consequence, is curiously reticent.  In fact, however, James had been someone who could even overrule Peter.  Some have gone further still and have asserted that, despite the popular position that Peter was the first head of the Church, the neglected James had really been its first leader.  This seems to go too far.  Peter was the first leader of the Christians after Jesus’s death.  But the fact that he was later superseded by James is indicative of the significant setback his career had suffered.

So, what do you think about Peter, Paul, and James as “the” early leader of Christianity?

What I found interesting was the fact that there were many similarities.  The same experts and evidence often appeared in multiple videos, yet often different conclusions were provided.  It reminds me of the debate concerning Book of Mormon evidence.

During Passover celebrations in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe created international headlines in Israel by proclaiming to his Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

For more than 1700 years, Christians have been looking for Mount Sinai, the place where Moses received the 10 Commandments.  Constantine’s mother, Helena was probably the first Christian in search of Christian artifacts in the 4^th century.  When Christians came across a strange-looking bush at the base of a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula, they erected a monastery claiming that they had found Mount Sinai.  The monastery still exists today, and you can walk the steps that these early Christians have claimed as the real Mount Sinai.

Prof Philip Davies, University of Sheffield, “When it comes to the Exodus, we have no evidence that it happened, and a good deal of evidence that it didn’t.  They made it up.”

Professor Eric Cline, George Washington University, “We do not have a single shred of evidence to date.  There is nothing archeologically to attest to anything from the biblical story: no plagues, no parting of the Red Sea, no manna from heaven, no wandering for 40 years.”

Dr. Kathlyn M. Cooney, Egyptologist, Stanford University,, “the most likely reason that we’re not finding any evidence for the Exodus in Egypt is that it didn’t happen the way that the Bible said it did, or that it didn’t happen at all.”

Since that famous (infamous) sermon in 2001, Wolpe has gone on to soften his words a bit.  In March 2010, he said it was possible that a small group of people left Egypt, came to Canaan, and influenced the native Canaanites.  Even skeptics admit there could be something to the story.

Cline, “I think there’s a very good chance that what actually took place was a series of migrations waves or migrations if you will, over three or 400 years of people leaving Egypt and making their way up to Egypt in ones, twos, threes, maybe even tens, hundreds at the most.”

So, let’s talk about some of the biggest questions concerning the Exodus.

The Burning Bush.

The Bible says that God spoke to Moses in the form of a burning bush that was not consumed.  As mentioned previously, a strange bush was found at the base of the traditional Mount Sinai.  Is there another explanation for this burning bush?  Colin Humphreys has an explanation for a burning bush, involving real fire.  As we all know, oil and natural gas are prevalent in the Middle East.  Humphreys believes the Acacia Bush is an ideal candidate for the Burning Bush.

“The most common bush in the desert is the acacia bush, and we know that if you burn an acacia bush you get charcoal.”

The Acacia Bush maintains it’s shape and turns to charcoal.  He gives a demonstration using a natural gas barbecue grill and an acacia bush.  The bush maintains it’s shape, even though flames shoot through the bush.

When did the Exodus Happen?

There are two main theories:  the Early Exodus Period, and the Late Exodus Period.  Supporters of the Early Period point to 1 Kings 6:1, ““Now it came about in the four hundred and eightieth year after the sons of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel…that he began to build the house of the Lord.”  Most historians put the Temple of Solomon at 965 BC.  This would put the Exodus at approximately 1445 BC.

Pharoah Thutmoses I reigned from 1525-1512 BC.  Scholars have speculated that his daughter Hatshepsut may have rescued Moses from the Nile.  She served as Pharoah from 1503-1482 BC, and battled with her stepson Thutmoses III (1504-1450 BC) for control of Egypt.  Thutmoses III eventually removed nearly all traces of Hatshepsut’s monuments.  Thutmoses III death in 1450 coincides well with the date of this Early Exodus time period.

Supporters of the late period refer to Exodus 1:11, “And they built for Pharoah store cities, Pithom and Ramses.”  Ramses II seems to be the most likely Pharaoh.  He lived 1290-1224 BC.  He moved the capital from Thebes to the Nile Delta, and built a new city called Pi-Ramses.  Some archaeologists have linked this city built on top of an ancient Israelite city.

Simcha Jacobovici believes the date of Exodus may be earlier.  He believes the eruption of the Santorini Volcano in 1500 BC may explain many of the Biblical plagues.  The Egyptian name Ahmose means “brother of Moses” in Hebrew—an interesting play on words.    At this time, Egypt was ruled by a Semitic people called the Hyksos, people who were hated by the Egyptians.  Since Joseph was of Semitic origins, this may have helped him join the ranks of the Hyksos ruling class.  The Bible refers to a pharaoh that “knew not Joseph.”

Egyptians have recorded and event called “the Hyksos Expulsion” around 1500 BC.  Could it be the Israelites were expelled, rather than left freely?  Perhaps it depends on who writes the history.

Is there an Israelite presence in Egypt?

In 1967 Professor Manfred Bietak, Chair of Egyptology at the University of Vienna, discovered the ancient Egyptian capital of Avaris.  It was the home to many ancient Egyptian pharaohs.  Some believe the architecture of this city bears resemblance to later Israelite/Canaanite architecture.

Jacobovici attributes Avaris to the Hyksos, while Dr Bryant Wood refers to the ruins as “Asiatic”, similar to later Canaanite   Let me quote from the Exodus Revealed video.

Dr Bryant G Wood, Director of the Associates for Biblical Research, “In this small village, there is stratum D2 dating to the time of Joseph.  All the remains are Asiatic in nature, material culture is Asiatic—there is nothing Egyptian.”

A map of the excavation site confirms its distinctive Israelite origins.  Archaeologists immediately recognized that the design of this horseshoe shaped dwelling was identical to structures built in Israel centuries later.  It was a prototype of Hebrew architecture constructed near the time Joseph was believed to have lived in Egypt.

…

There should be evidence of Israel’s arrival in Canaan, the Promised Land sometime between the 14^th and 12^th centuries BC.  Such evidence does exist.  More than 3200 years ago, the Pharaoh Mernepteh, ventured out of Egypt on a military campaign to the Land of Canaan.  Later, in a poem proclaiming his victory, he boasted that “…Israel is laid waste.”  This inscription dates from about 1210 BC, and establishes that the Israelites had arrived and settled in Canaan, well before the Mernepteh’s conquest at the end of the 13th century.

Additionally at Telamarna in Egypt, archaeologists have uncovered a series of letters on cuneiform plates.  Many were authored by Canaanite rulers early in the 14^th century BC.  These letters contain desperate pleas to the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten for military assistance to defend Canaan from nomadic invaders.  One of them warned that if pharaoh does not act, “…all Canaan will be lost.”  The invaders were identified by the term “apiru”.

Wood, “This is kind of a generic term for stateless individuals who weren’t connected with any particular urban center and so the Israelites undoubtedly would have been referred to as either Apiru, or Asiatics by the Egyptians.”

Dr Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University, “I do think that the term Apiru is the origin of the term Hebrew.”

If the name Apiru referred to the name of the Hebrew people, then the Telhermana inscriptions provide strong evidence for the presence of Israel in Canaan.  They also suggest Israel may have entered the country earlier than scholars had previously thought, at the beginning of the 14^th century BC.  Recent excavations of the Canaanite city of Hazor also support a 14^th century Israelite invasion.  Evidence has been uncovered that the city was destroyed at least twice during the period described in the biblical books of Joshua and Judges.

Scattered among the remains of a large palace were Egyptian and Canaanite idols—their heads and hands intentionally chiseled off.  Archaeologist Amnen ben Tour, has concluded by process of elimination that the invading Israelite army must have ravaged Hazor.  For neither the Egyptians, nor the indigenous Canaanite would have purposely destroyed their own gods.

How can we explain the Plagues?

I presented Jacobovici’s position on the plagues in my previous post.  National Geographic (NG) had similar explanations for plagues 2-6 dealing with insects and frogs.  NG even interviewed several entomologists and epidemiologists to further pin down the actual types of bugs most likely in these infestations.

The first plague, turning the Nile to blood has a few different explanations.  Jacobovici believes an underground natural gas into the Nile may have caused caused the waters to turn red and kill all the fish.  Two lakes in Cameroon turned blood red in 1984 and 1986.  Epidemiologist John Marr believes microscopic algae may have turned the Nile blood red.  In 1995, a coastal river in North Carolina turned bright red due to an algae bloom.

Marr, “Wisteria was labeled the cell from hell because it killed millions if not billions of fish.  If that occurred in North Carolina in the 1990’s, why couldn’t it have occurred in Egypt 3000 years ago?”

The last plague has some interesting interpretations too.  Moses prophesied that the firstborn of Egypt would all die, and the Israelites would be spared if they put lamb’s blood on their doorposts.  The Destroying Angel would “pass over” homes with lamb’s blood.  So, how can scientists explain such a selective mode of death?  Some believe the Firstborn is metaphorical.

Epidemiologist Martin Blaser of NYU, “There is no disease that we know of that just affects the firstborns, so I take that it’s a metaphor for a disease that kills one out of every 3 or 4 people.”

Blaser thinks bubonic plague may have been the culprit, because it affects both animals and humans.  Eric Cline of George Washington believes the plagues could refer to a “Sea People” that attacked Egypt.

Cline, “The attack of the Sea Peoples was probably the Egyptians worst nightmare.  They are the fiercest warriors that the Egyptians have faced, and the Egyptians tell us that everybody went down in the face of these sea peoples.  Only the Egyptians were able to stand, and even that was a Pyrrhic victory because the Egyptians were so weakened that they were never the same again.”

Although the Egyptians never mentioned the plagues, they did document these attacks in pictographs on the mortuary Temple of Ramses III.  Archaeological finds match these writings.

Cline, “I see no need to use divine intervention when human intervention can explain it just as well, if not better.”

Others believe the death of the firstborn may have been more literal.  Epidemiologist John Marr recently investigated the mysterious death of children that was due to a mold.  He postulated that following the plagues of locusts and hail, much of the grain in Egypt would have been moist and in short supply.

Rare molds can wreak havoc on human health, and can even cause internal hemorrhaging.  With little else to eat, the Egyptians may have resorted to moldy toxin laced grain.  Death would come suddenly, with no visible cause, as if the victims were touched by an angel of death.  Still, why the first born?  Marr found his answer, the final piece to the puzzle in an Egyptian tradition.

Marr, “During the times of famine, the eldest, the oldest Egyptian child would be given a double portion of food in order to stave off starvation.  Instead of saving them, it killed them.”

Jacobovici has another theory for the selective deaths during this final plague.

SJ, “The final plague took place at midnight, after Moses ordered the Israelites to sit down to what became known as the first Passover meal.  While the Israelites were involved in the Passover ritual, the Egyptians slept, and then it happened: every firstborn male Egyptian died.  Every house was affected.  No one has ever been able to offer up a plausible scientific explanation for the death of the firstborn until now.  According to our scenario, at this point in the sequence of events that began some 6 months earlier, the gas leaks that set the chain of plates in motion would have finally erupted.  Carbon dioxide would have seeped to the surface, and being heavier than air, would have killed animals and sleeping people before it dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere.

In case you think all this is conjecture, consider this.  It happened in exactly the same way in 1986 at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.  On the fateful night of August 21, the villagers at Nyos went to sleep.  They couldn’t have known that the carbon dioxide gas which had turned the lake blood red, was now reaching a critical point.  As the people of Lake Nyos slept, the top of the lake was keeping the carbon down like a cap in a pop bottle.  But then the earth rumbled, and a landslide took place sending rock into the water, disturbing the surface pressure and releasing the gas.  The gas then rose to the surface, and like some alien monster, emerged from the water, droplets forming on it, turning the invisible gas into a visible fog.  The fog then rolled across the water, and across the land, suffocating everything in its path.  And as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared, dissolving harmlessly into the atmosphere.

The next day those who had been sleeping on higher ground woke up to find some 1800 people dead, hundreds of cattle and small animals also dead, all around there was deadly silence.

SJ, “After the death of the First born, Pharaoh finally relented, letting Moses take his people out of Egypt.  According to the Bible, what made pharaoh give up was the selectivity of the deaths: the fact that it was only male, firstborn who died.  It was this selectivity that demonstrated to him that God himself was involved.  How can we account for this?

Well, Egyptian firstborn males had the privileged position.  They were the heirs to the throne, to property, title, and more.  They slept on Egyptian beds low to the ground, while their brothers and sisters slept on rooftops, sheds, and wagons.  The Israelites sitting up at their first Passover meal did not feel a thing, while the low traveling gas suffocated the privileged Egyptian males sleeping in their beds.

How many people participated in the Exodus?

The Bible says that 600,000 men left Egypt.  Adding women and children would have increased the total number to 2.5 million people, the size of modern-day Brooklyn, NY.  If the group were that large, there should be some evidence somewhere in the wilderness.

Cline, “if the Biblical numbers are correct, and you’ve got two and a half million people wandering around for 40 years, I would want to find entire landscapes denuded.  I’d want to find hundreds of sheep and goat carcasses, the bones.  Even if they didn’t ask for directions wandering for 40 years, there would be something.”

However, archaeologist Jim Hoffmeier of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School says the number is probably far fewer, due to a mistranslation dating thousands of years.  The original Hebrew says there were 600 elith.

Hoffmeier, “The word elith can be translated 3 different ways:  it can be translated thousand.  Elith can also be translated to the clan.  The third option is that it’s a military unit, which I think is a more plausible scenario.”

According to Hoffmeier’s interpretation, instead of 600,000 men and their families, there were as few as 5000.

Hoffmeier, “we’re talking about a few tens of thousands, certainly not hundreds of thousands, adding women and children making it millions.”

How did the Red Sea part?  Where did the Israelites cross?

There are 3 main theories for the crossing of the Red Sea: a northern, central, and southern route.  Those supporting a northern route point to volcanic activity to explain the parting of the Red Sea.

Geo-archaeologist Floyd McCoy researches tsunamis at the University of Hawaii.  He says a tsunami might have created a land passage for the Israelites across a lagoon.  Although we think of a tsunami as a lot of water, what comes before is the disappearance of water.

Floyd, “Sometimes you get a warning that a tsunami is coming.  Sometimes that ocean disappears, and that’s called draw down.  Remember what a wave looks like; it’s sinusoidal:  bottom, top; trough, crest.  If the trough comes in first, that’s draw down; the ocean disappears.

The Israelites would have crossed on the northern edge of the Mediterranean ocean according to this theory.  However, several Egyptian military outposts have been found along a northern route into Israel dating to the Exodus period.  Many believe the Israelites would have avoided these military outposts when trying to leave Egypt.

In addition to the Biblical mistranslation of elith, Hoffmeier believes the Red Sea is a mistranslation, and the parting of the sea may have occurred closer to home.

Hoffmeier, “The Hebrew Yam Suf literally means sea of reeds.  When the Greek translators took the Hebrew Yam Suf and translated it into Greek, they translated it as Red Sea instead of Reed Sea.  So we’ve been stuck with a faulty translation for over 2000 years.”

Hoffmeier has been working with Prof Stephen O. Moshier, Geologist of Wheaton College.  Together they have pieces together satellite photos and ancient maps to identify a sea of reeds.  They’ve come up with Lake El Balah, on the eastern border of Egypt.  Jacobovici paints another picture of this scenario.

Hoffmeier, “It’s an ancient lake that survived until the 1850’s.  When the Suez Canal was put in, this ancient lake finally died.  Professor Manfred Biatek after conducting a thorough study of this area, proposed that this lake was known to the Egyptians as Ha Tufi, meaning the marshland, the marshy sea.  And the word tuf, the Egyptian word for reeds is the same word as suf in Hebrew.  So Yam Suf, he suggested, was a name derived from this body of water.  Now it is called the El Balah Lake.”  [In Hebrew it means the lake where God devoured.]

…

SJ, “Identifying the precise location of Yam Suf means that we can finally explain the miracle of the parting of the sea. This satellite photo clearly demonstrates that Lake El Balah is close to the edge of the Nile Delta, where soil accumulates and collapses from time to time.  As Pharaoh chased the Israelites to the shores Lake El Balah, the extreme seismic activity that caused the two plates and the Santorini eruption would have now caused the delta to start sliding into the eastern Mediterranean.  As this millions of tons of soil moved forward, the edge of the African plate, which had now released from its burden must have risen between one to one and a half meters.  In other words, the sea parted.

Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground and drained from pools and sinkholes creating dry land for the Israelites to cross.  At this point, further seismic activity, or another collapse of the delta would have sent a major tsunami crashing against the coasts.

Pellegrino, “We get some glimpse of these tidal waves in Turkey where they carved out channel scablands 30 miles inland.  In order to do that at the shore, these waves would have had to have been more than half as high as the Empire State Building, and that’s exactly the description that we do have in the Bible.”

SJ, “If the tsunami went a mere 12 km inland, it would have reached Lake El Balah and engulfed the Egyptian army.  By this point, according to the Bible, the Israelites had advanced beyond the reach of the waves.

Those who support a central route believe Moses and his followers crossed an ancient frankincense trail across the central Sinai Peninsula.  In his younger days, Moses killed an Egyptian while defending a Hebrew slave.  The Bible says he fled to the land of Midian, in Modern Day Saudi Arabia.  It is likely that Moses would have followed the frankincense trail to Midian.  It is the shortest, most direct route to Midian.  If Moses had made the trek before, it is likely he would have followed it again.  Dr Lennart Moller of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden notes that the Bible says that

In the Book of First Kings, In approximately 950 BC, King Solomon’s is said to have built his navy at Ezion Geber near Elath, an ancient city on the northern coast of the Gulf of Aqaba.  According to the Hebrew text, this gulf where Solomon’s ships were said to harbor, was call yam suf.

He believes Newieva Beach is large enough to hold a large Israelite party, and it has some unusual features that make crossing there more likely than other places.

The geography of the Gulf of Aqaba also resembles descriptions of the Yam Suf God once parted for Israel.  Aqaba is extremely deep, plunging more than a mile in some spots.  It is adjacent to a dense wilderness of rugged mountains.  It is located clearly outside the borders of ancient Egypt, as recognized during the time of Moses.  These similarities to the scriptures have led Lennart Moller and others to theorize the Gulf of Aqaba is the Red Sea of the Exodus story.  If they are correct, then 2 distinct possibilities for a crossing point exist:  the first is located on the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula, on the Straits of Tyron.  This channel 5 miles across is one of the most popular recreation areas on earth, as spectacular reefs and marine life attract divers from throughout the world, but the topography of the sea floor here would have made crossing highly unlikely.

For less than a mile offshore, a subterranean canyon plunges nearly 1000 feet at a grade so steep, passage on foot through jagged coral beds would have been virtually impossible, even if the waters were miraculously removed.  70 miles north of the straits, near the center o the Aqaba coast, another potential crossing site extends into the sea.  It is called the Newieva Peninsula.

Moller was attracted to Newieva Beach because of some interesting coral formations.

Moller, “The first time I was diving there, of course we were then looking for possible artifacts, and I had seen some pictures of what we could look for.  I was skeptical and excited because if this is the place for the crossing, then of course, that’s a big thing, so I was excited about that.  But I was also skeptical because 3500 years—that’s a long time.  But if Newieva is the crossing site, then of course you would expect to find remains of the Egyptian army.”

Like others who had explored Newiva before him, Moller immediately recognized the difficulty of this search.

Moller, “If we assume a number of artifacts were spread out on the sea bed, sooner or later corals would start to grow on them, and of course if you have an array of some coral all growing on something, it’s very hard to distinguish the structure that was there in the very beginning.”

Though the coral complicates any search here, it may have been instrumental in preserving the shapes of artifacts, for coral is a living organism that will not begin to grow on a foundation of sand or silt.  Instead, it must first attach itself to a solid object where it will sometimes conform to the shape of its host.

Moller, “So for instance if it were to grow on a wooden artifact, the wood would normally disappear in the sea waters after a time.  But if you have corals growing on the wooden artifact, the corals could have the shape of the wooden artifact and then the coral would consume the wood and material over a periods of time, but still keep the shape of the wooden artifacts.”

During the course of his exploration, Moller observed the pattern of coral growth at Neweiva differed from other parts of the gulf.  Unlike the coral at the northern and southern ends of Aqaba which often forms large dense reefs, sometimes covering acres, the formations at Nuweiva beach are generally smaller, and scattered randomly across the bottom of the sea floor.  Divers familiar with the area have compared the distribution of coral here to a junkyard, and the aftermath of a disaster.  This description is fitting, and among the strange formations in these waters, many display features indicative of human engineering.

Moller, “When we dive, and when we film, at the Neweiva location, we look for certain structures, and you try to look for 90 degree angles, or circular objects, wheel like structures, so that is what you scan for when you dive.  There are situations where you see something that looks like an axle, a hub, some that looks like a wheel, and you say to yourself, this is a coral reef.  This coral grew on an artifact, and that is what’s different to me when I compare corals at other locations around the world.”

Since the earliest explorations at Newieva, one distinctive type of formation has often been identified on the sea floor, a slender table-like structure, sometimes standing on end with a coral encrusted base, a straight shaft, and a circular top.

Moller, “It’s a 90 degree angle, and right angle between something that looks like an axle and a wheel.  You can see this in different varieties, and it looks very different from normal coral.  It is like a man-made structure with a coral roof on it.

While most of the possible artifacts found on the coast of Newieva are covered with coral, one significant discovery was not.

Moller, “There is one find at the Neweiva location that is of great interest, and this is the gilded wheel.  It is a wooden basic structure of the wheel, and it is covered with gold or electrum, a mixture of silver gold, and corals have not been able to grow on it.  It’s been fairly well preserved, although it’s very fragile.  It seems the wooden content has been dissolved.  You could break it if you try to remove it.”

After its discovery, the fragile wheel-shaped veneer was photographed and left in place on the sea floor.

Later analysis revealed that its dimensions and design resembled four-spoked chariot wheels painted on a 18^th Dynasty tomb wall near the Biblical date of the Exodus.

Moller referenced a southern crossing point as well, but dismissed it because of the steep cliffs and jagged coral.  Proponents of a southern route believe a volcanic land bridge may have appeared at this area.

Stephen J. O’Meara, Volcanologist, Volcano Watch International flies over an active volcano.  “Imagine the Jews, reaching this massive land bridge, formed by lava.  Here we have earth being created before our eyes.  You can see the lava flow going into the ocean on a new bench of land.  This is a very highly unstable platform of land.  The bench will not last for long.  This whole area can fall in just a matter of minutes.  Massive collapses have occurred here in Hawaii almost in the blink of an eye.”

The Red Sea forms part of the Great African Rift System.  The entire region has an explosive volcanic history.

O’Meara, “Although we see a very small lava flow, you have to in your mind scale this up to a massive volcanic eruption 3200 years ago.  It enters the water, the water boils, it disappears.  It’s enough to choke valleys and cause land bridges.”

In O’Meara’s scenario, an underwater eruption could have created a temporary unstable lava bridge.  The surface layer of lava cools quickly when it hits the water.  The Israelites could have crossed over this new land.

O’Meara walking on lava, near bright red lava flow, “But what’s amazing about this lava, even though it’s so hot that I have to keep walking right at this moment, that if I had to, to save my life, I could wait, walk over this lava in 10 minutes.”

This new unsupported land could have quickly disintegrated.

O’Meera, “and then when the Egyptians were on their chariots, [hops around because of the heat] and they tried to cross this same bed, the lava gave way.”

The collapse of this land bridge would have plunged pharaoh’s army into the sea.

O’Meara, “It makes sense.  Volcanoes are the only thing that makes sense.  The Bible is just filled with volcanic references and especially in Exodus out from the plagues to the parting of the Red Sea, and seeing pillars of fire, and mountains quaking, and burning bushes, all of them just in Exodus.  You imagine, you come up here and see this and you are not a scientist.  There were no scientists back then.  Listen to it!  [lava crackling]  It’s talking to you!  It’s written in the Bible, God says, ‘I am the rock.’  There you are!”

Where is Mount Sinai?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are several proposed locations for Mount Sinai.  The traditional location is at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula.  Tradition for this site goes back to the 4^th Century.  After Moses escaped to Midian, he found the Burning Bush.

Many scholars believe that Mount Sinai is in the Land of Midian in modern day Saudi Arabia.

Separated by the Red Sea and the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula, Moses married a Midianite woman, tended the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro, and lived in obscurity for years, until the day he wandered to the base of Mount Sinai.  There God spoke through a burning bush and revealed his plan to free Israel from bondage.  Given the Biblical record, some believe that Mount Sinai must be in Midian, but is there any other evidence to support this theory?

Several Jewish documents, some written several hundred years before Christian traditions, locate the mountain of God in Midianite territory.  In 250 BC, a council of 70 Hebrew scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek for the first time.  Their translation of the Exodus account presupposed that Mount Sinai stood in the Arabian Peninsula.  Three centuries later, the Jewish philosopher Philo placed the mountain “east of the Sinai Peninsula” and south of Palestine.  At the same time, the apostle Paul, who was educated under the Rabbi Gamaliel, also located Mount Sinai in Arabia (Galatians 4:25).

Kerkeslager, “So Paul and Philo, when they used the word Arabia, they’re not thinking of the Sinai Peninsula.  Once again, I think that point needs to be emphasized very clearly.  In terminology, Arabia in the 1^st century, Greek geographers usually had in mind the Arabian Peninsula.  That’s how that term is used.”

Perhaps that most specific description of Mount Sinai’s location can be traced to the first century historian Josephus, who wrote “it was the highest of mountains…” near “…the city of Madian.”  Shortly after this account, Madian was identified in the Arabian Peninsula by the Greek geographer Ptolemy.  1900 years later, archaeologists excavated this city that according to ancient records had once stood near Mount Sinai.  The ruins of Madian lie just outside the modern day town of El-bod near Saudi Arabia’s northwest coast.

…

Viveka Ponten of Stockholm, Sweden said, “I have always been interested in archaeological finds that could confirm the truths of the Bible.  I have wanted come to Saudi Arabia to see for myself—I want to be able to say ‘I have seen this place’.”

In 1996, Vivika Ponten entered Saudi Arabia on a work permit.  During the following years, she made several trips to Jebel Elboz.

Ponten, “It was very difficult to find the mountain.  I think I had been there for 7 months before I came to the mountain the first time.  We went around looking for it in the desert.  I did 5 long day trips—5 different locations, just looking and looking for this place.”

Throughout her search, Ponten encountered a strong local tradition that Moses had once lived in Arabia.

Ponten, “It seems to be a tradition among the locals there that this mountain range is called Jebel-Musa.  They call it that, and many places have the name of Moses, like their wells, that they call Adien-Musa, or Bijan-Musa, which means ‘the well of Moses’.”

When Ponten finally reached Jebel Alboz, her attention was drawn to specific features of the mountain that resembled the Biblical description.  Most prominent was a jagged peak, more than 8000 feet in elevation, and blackened, as if scorched by fire.  [Deuteronomy 9:18, the Lord descended on it in fire.)

At its base, an enormous pile of boulders, at least 15 feet high and 60 feet across (Exodus 32:5, he built an altar in front of the calf.)  The flattened top of this structure had the appearance of being man-made, and etched into its rock faces were petro glyphs of bovine creatures, cattle and bulls.  The distinctive horns and some of the inscriptions resemble pictures of ancient Egyptian Apis bulls.  Could these stones be the remains of an Israelite altar, once built at the base of a holy mountain?  Conclusive investigation is not possible at this time, for Saudi law severely limits all foreign research.

Ponten, “They have put up archaeological signs that tell this is an archaeological area, and you’re not supposed to trespass here.  It’s evident that the Arabs themselves consider this to be some old site of archaeological interest.

Satellite photos of the area have revealed another geographical feature that parallels the Biblical account: a sprawling plain more than 10,000 acres.  Flat, surrounded by mountains, and adjacent to the dried bed of an ancient river, it could have provided an ideal place for the Israelite encampment 3500 years ago.

Just west of the mountain stands another link to the possible Exodus account: a towering rock, 60 feet high.  It is split from top to bottom, and evidence of water erosion is etched into its base.  Many features of Jebel Alboz reflect the Biblical account of Mount Sinai.  As the highest mountain of northwest Arabia, it matches ancient Jewish historical records.

Kerkeslager, “Based on the textual evidence, Jebel Alboz is as good of a guess as any; it might even be the best guess.  It’s definitely better than anything in the Sinai Peninsula, and probably better than any other guess that we have.  It would be nice to have some excavation, and that’s really [why] we need excavations.  We need somebody who is competent, trained archeologist to go in and record the material carefully, submit it for dispute and debate among other scholars, because there are too many gaps in our knowledge.”

The intriguing similarities between Jebel Alboz, and the Biblical record may indeed stimulate new investigation here. Yet whether or not future excavations confirm this site as the actual mountain of God, a considerable body of documentary evidence indicates that Mount Sinai is located somewhere in northwestern Arabia.

Others believe Mount Sinai is somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula.  Jacobovici discusses another possible location discovered by Prof Uzi Avner.

Holy mountains in the desert are marked by ancient, open-air, rock sanctuaries.  In this area there is only 1 mountain surrounded by sanctuaries.  Today that mountain is called Jebel-Hashem el-Tarif.

Although this entire are is in the middle of a military zone, we got to it.  This mountain perfectly fits all the criteria for Mount Sinai.  It is surrounded by a huge plateau that could have accommodated hundreds of thousands of Israelites.  It is easily accessible.  It literally sits on the main trans-Sinai highway, which follows the topography of the ancient route.

Prof. Uzi Avner, Arava Environmental Institute, Israel, “The Mountain is not very high, only about 200 meters above the plateau, but it is very conspicuous.  You can see it from a distance.  The unique point is that it is surrounded by actually the largest concentration of open air sanctuaries that we now today in the desert.”

Conclusions?

So, do we need to believe that any of these scenarios?  Both skeptics and believers seem to agree that faith and science are two different animals.

Hoffmeier, “For people that have religious convictions, they don’t need proof.”

Cornuke, “it all boils down to, this is a supernatural event, and you can’t explain it in any other way.”

Ultimately, the power of Exodus lies more in faith than in science.

Cooney, “There’s no real scientific proof that the Exodus took place, but as a Christian or as a Jew, you shouldn’t need scientific proof to be a person of faith.  Faith doesn’t need to be scientifically proven, nor should it be; it’s faith.”

Cameron, “It seems that the Bible, geology, and archaeology, are all telling the same story.  But skeptics, who would like to regard the Exodus as myth, might resist the idea that it actually happened, because this would imply that God does indeed exist.  Believers on the other hand may feel that a scientific explanation of the Biblical story takes God out of the equation. “

SJ, “But in the Book of Exodus, God does not suspend nature, he manipulates it.  In other words, according to the Bible, we should be able to understand the science behind the miracles.  The greatest miracle of them all was the parting of the sea.

Rabbi David Wolpe believes that the historicity of the events in the Bible should not matter; faith is not determined by the same criteria as empirical truth.

So, what do you think?  Does any of this convince you of the historicity of the Exodus?  Do you think the Exodus is myth?

Palm Sunday

It is always celebrated exactly one week prior to Easter.  The celebration refers to Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey.  It is one event captured in all 4 gospels, but only The Gospel of John talks about people waving Palm fronds in front of Jesus.  The palm branch was a symbol of triumph and of victory in Jewish tradition, and it is evident that many Jews believed Jesus was more of a political/military king than a spiritual king.  There’s some interesting information at this Wikipedia Entry.  MSNBC has a nice photo of Pope Benedict the 16th celebrating Palm Sunday Mass earlier today.

I have often wondered why Palm Sunday is completely ignored by Mormons.  Palm Sunday is the beginning of the last week in the life of Jesus, and I just can’t figure out why Mormons wouldn’t want to celebrate with the rest of Christendom.  Do you have any ideas?

Passover

I didn’t realize that Passover is an eight-day celebration.  I remember attending a Passover meal and celebration with a college friend–it was a lot of fun!  I must say that Jews really know how to celebrate, and I think Mormons could learn some celebration techniques from them.  Passover is one of the most important Jewish holidays, which is also known as Pesach,  Chag he-Aviv, Chag ha-Matzoth and Z’man Cherutenu.

As you’re probably aware, the Passover celebration commemorates Moses leading the Jewish liberation from Egyptian slavery approximately 1500 years ago.  ABC annually broadcasts Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The 10 Commandments on Easter Sunday.  Moses told the Egyptian pharaoh that if he did not let the Israelites go, God would issue 10 plagues to afflict Egypt.  The term ‘Passover’ specifically refers to the 10th plague.  Moses told pharaoh that God would kill all the firstborn sons of Egypt.  Moses instructed the Israelites to spread the blood of a lamb on their doorposts so the destroying angel would “pass-over” their homes, leaving the firstborn Israelite sons alive.  This last plague finally caused pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery, and the Exodus story follows.  I plan another post specifically devoted to the Exodus theories, but I want to talk specifically about the Passover and these 10 plagues in this post.

A 2-time Emmy award winner for investigative journalism named Simcha Jacobicivi (pronounced Sim-ka Yah-cob-oh-vitch) teamed up with Titanic Director James Cameron to put together a documentary titled The Exodus Decoded.  It aired on the History Channel in 2006; you can rent it via Netflix.  Jacobovici is not a stranger to controversy.  You may be familiar with another documentary of his titled The Lost Tomb of Jesus in which he claims to have discovered the bones of Jesus and his family in Jerusalem.  He has another documentary titled Quest for the Lost Tribes in which he believes he has discovered the Lost tribes in areas such as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, China, Burma, and Africa.  Here is a website questioning Jacobovici’s Exodus claims, and another website questioning the Lost Tomb of Jesus DVD.

Jacobovici makes a very interesting case for the 10 plagues of Egypt; he believes they were the result of the Santorini Volcano eruption of 1500 BC.  He notes similarities between the Passover narrative and a volcanic eruption in 1986 in Cameroon.  I must say that there are some startling similarities, and Jacobovici seems to have some very interesting parallels.  Let’s talk about the actual 10 plagues of Egypt.

1.  The Nile will be turned to blood. Jacobovici notes that in 1984 and 1986, separate volcanic eruptions turned Lake Monoun and Lake Nyos in Cameroon blood red.  Dr George King of the University of Michigan explained that both of these lakes contained high levels of iron.  An underwater natural gas leak created a disturbance, turning the lake red in color.  Jacobovici notes that the Nile is near a fault line.  An underground gas leak could have turned the river blood red as mentioned in the Bible.

2.  A frog infestation.  Jacobovici says that all living things in the Nile would have died due to lack of oxygen in the water resulting from the gas leak and subsequent iron stirred up in the water.  However, frogs would have been able hop out of the water, explaining the frog infestation.

3.  Lice.  With all the dead fish, lice would have been a problem.

4.  Flies.  Once again, dead fish would have attracted flies

5.  An epidemic.  Disease would have spread to everyone following the death of so many fish in the Nile.

6.  Boils.  Jacobovici notes that many people developed Boils following the 1986 eruption at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, and shows several photos of these awful boils.  Jocobovici explains that “It turns out that carbon dioxide mixed with air put people into a kind of coma, reducing circulation to the skin and causing the kind of boils described in the Bible as plague #6.”

7.  An Unusual Hail storm.  I’ll abbreviate Jacobovici as SJ in the quotes below; I want to quote directly from the DVD here.

Rabbi Chaim Sacknovitz, “The seventh plague was the plague of hail, but the Bible describes hail in a very unique manner.  The hail was together with ice with fire, the idea being that the fire and the ice mixed together, that they coexisted together.  The Bible then describes God as making a miracle within a miracle, taking opposites in nature, and having them coexist together.”

SJ, “Incredibly, there is an Egyptian papyrus that tells the exact same story.  It’s called the Ipuwer Papyrus and is dated by many scholars to the Hyksos period.  The Ipuwer Papyrus specifically states that Egypt was struck by a strange hail, made of ice and fire mingled together.  Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.  It now seems clear that the biblical and Egyptian texts are describing what scientists call ‘accretionary lapilli”, volcanic hail, and could have only come from earthquake induced Santorini volcano.

Dr. Catherine Hickson, Geological Survey of Canada, “When the ash cloud goes up into great distances in the stratosphere, essentially what happens is that you have moisture in the atmosphere, you also have a lot of water vapor in the cloud itself, so small fragments of ash and crystal actually form the nucleus, very similar to a hail stone.”

8.  Plague of Locusts. Jacobovici says the volcano causing weather changes, and this hail storm would have excited the locusts.  He says,

Cold weather produces a drop in their body temperature and makes them land en masse.  The Volcanic hail and weather disruptions caused by the Santorini eruption would have forced great clouds of locusts which are common in this part of the world to suddenly land in Egypt.  As the hail storm cleared, and the temperature rose, so did the locusts, exactly as the Biblical account describes.

9.  Darkness. Following the Mount Saint Helens eruption, ash blocked out the sun and made it appear very dark.  Jacobovici quotes scientists as saying the cloud of ash from the Santorini eruption could have been 40 km from top to bottom, 200 km across–that would be approximately 25 miles high, and 122 miles across.  He quotes Prof Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution saying that ash was found at the ancient Egyptian capital of Avaris:  “We had to look through 10 to 20,000 grains to find one ash grain.  So, we found a total of 40 ash grains.  Not all ash looks the same.  Ash has an imprint aspect.  The ash particles that we find in the northern and northeastern Nile Delta are individual grains that came in from Santorini.”

10.  The Firstborn of Egypt die, and Israelite children are spared.  Jacobovici has an explanation for this phenomenon as well.  Once again, he cites the Cameroon eruption at Lake Nyos in 1986.

SJ, “The final plague took place at midnight, after Moses ordered the Israelites to sit down to what became known as the first Passover meal.  While the Israelites were involved in the Passover ritual, the Egyptians slept, and then it happened: every firstborn male Egyptian died.  Every house was affected.  No one has ever been able to offer up a plausible scientific explanation for the death of the firstborn until now.  According to our scenario, at this point in the sequence of events that began some 6 months earlier, the gas leaks that set the chain of plates in motion would have finally erupted.  Carbon dioxide would have seeped to the surface, and being heavier than air, would have killed animals and sleeping people before it dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere.

In case you think all this is conjecture, consider this.  It happened in exactly the same way in 1986 at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.  On the fateful night of August 21, the villagers at Nyos went to sleep.  They couldn’t have known that the carbon dioxide gas which had turned the lake blood red, was now reaching a critical point.  As the people of Lake Nyos slept, the top of the lake was keeping the carbon down like a cap in a pop bottle.  But then the earth rumbled, and a landslide took place sending rock into the water, disturbing the surface pressure and releasing the gas.  The gas then rose to the surface, and like some alien monster, emerged from the water, droplets forming on it, turning the invisible gas  into a visible fog.  The fog then rolled across the water, and across the land, suffocating everything in its path.  And as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared, dissolving harmlessly into the atmosphere.

The next day those who had been sleeping on higher ground woke up to find some 1800 people dead, hundreds of cattle and small animals also dead, all around there was deadly silence.

Villager, “I was sleeping among the dead people, inside the house, some of them were outside.  Animals every where lying cows, dogs, everything.  All the family, we were 56 but 53 died.”

SJ, “After the death of the first born, Pharaoh finally relented, letting Moses take his people out of Egypt.  According to the Bible, what made pharaoh give up was the selectivity of the deaths: the fact that it was only male, firstborn who died.  It was this selectivity that demonstrated to him that God himself was involved.  How can we account for this?

Well, Egyptian firstborn males had the privileged position.  They were the heirs to the throne, to property, title, and more.  They slept on Egyptian beds low to the ground, while their brothers and sisters slept on rooftops, sheds, and wagons.  The Israelites sitting up at their first Passover meal did not feel a thing, while the low traveling gas suffocated the privileged Egyptian males sleeping in their beds.  This conclusion is backed by the archaeology.  At Avaris, Professor Manfred Biatek has found mass graves dating to before and during our date for the Exodus.  The earlier graves are classic examples of ancient epidemics and killed men, women, and children.  But at the time of the Exodus, the mass grave he found has only males in it.

Biatek, “Here you see bones of burials in the early 18^th Dynasty.  They are all male victims. By the size of the graves, and the number of individuals in the graves, we think people died in rapid succession and the individuals were just thrown into the pit, some of them lying on their stomach, some lying on their side.  Some of the people were just 20 cm deep and just some dust put on top of them.  The bible says that pharaoh’s son also died during the plagues of the firstborn.  Since we claim that Ahmose is the pharaoh of the Exodus, we should be able to prove that Ahmose son died young.

Searching the Cairo museum, we found Ahmose’ son, the prince had died young, he was only 12.  For the first time ever, we have a face and a name to a victim of the biblical plagues.

So, I found this to be a really interesting scientific explanation for the plagues.  What do you think?  I found James Cameron and Simcha’s final words regarding these plagues interesting.  They discuss how these explanations will bother both skeptics and believers.

Cameron, “It seems that the Bible, geology, and archaeology, are all telling the same story.  But skeptics, who would like to regard the Exodus as myth, might resist the idea that it actually happened, because this would imply that God does indeed exist.  Believers on the other hand may feel that a scientific explanation of the Biblical story takes God out of the equation.“

SJ, “But in the book of Exodus, God does not suspend nature, he manipulates it.  In other words, according to the Bible, we should be able to understand the science behind the miracles.

Easter

You’ll notice that date of Easter varies considerably from year to year.  The reason for this is because of it’s relationship to the Passover.  Christ died during the Passover festival, and rose on the first day of the week (Sunday.)  There’s a Jewish joke that goes like this.

“When is Chanukkah this year?”

The other man smiled slyly and replied, “Same as always: the 25th of Kislev.”

There is a really interesting article on the Jewish calendar at Judaism 101.  (It’s a fantastic website.)  The Jewish calendar tries to correlate

the rotation of the Earth about its axis (a day); the revolution of the moon about the Earth (a month); and the revolution of the Earth about the sun (a year).

…

Months are either 29 or 30 days, corresponding to the 29½-day lunar cycle. Years are either 12 or 13 months, corresponding to the 12.4 month solar cycle.The lunar month on the Jewish calendar begins when the first sliver of moon becomes visible after the dark of the moon. In ancient times, the new months used to be determined by observation. When people observed the new moon, they would notify the Sanhedrin. When the Sanhedrin heard testimony from two independent, reliable eyewitnesses that the new moon occurred on a certain date, they would declare the rosh chodesh (first of the month) and send out messengers to tell people when the month began.

So, you can see that a 12 or 13 month year (they have leap months instead of leap days) can wreak havoc on knowing when holidays will be as we try to correlate the Jewish calendar with our Gregorian Calendar.  As Christians were debating when to celebrate Easter, the consensus was to keep Easter near the Passover festival.  As a result, the date of Easter changes with the changes in celebration of the Passover Festival.  Another Jewish joke says that every Jewish holiday can be boiled down to “They tried to kill us.  Let’s eat.”

I wish Mormons celebrated, rather than simply observed, the Easter holiday.  It would be nice to have more of a celebration of Easter; I really like Easter gets the short shrift for celebrations, but I think that Christmas celebrations in our church are lacking as well.  Two years ago, I posted the question, Why don’t Mormons celebrate Easter? It is my #2 post over the past 2 years. I always receive a spike in hits for that post around Easter.  If you do a Google search asking “do Mormons celebrate Easter”, my post comes up on the #2 position.  I expect that as Easter approaches this week, my 2 year old post will get another spike in views, and will probably be #1 by the end of the month.

So to answer my own question is, yes, we observe Easter, but we don’t celebrate Easter.  Do you wish there was a greater emphasis on Easter?

This quote comes from an episode of History’s Mysteries: Sodom and Gomorrah.  It was originally aired in 2000 on the History Channel.  (If you have Netflix, you can download it to your computer or television free with your subscription.  Here is the link.)  I’ve really enjoyed learning about archaeology evidence concerning these two Biblical cities.  I’m going to reference 2 videos here, and I’ll color-code quotes from each.  In addition to History’s Mysteries (highlighted in red), I’m also going to reference the 2006 series called Digging for the Truth: The Real Sin City: Sodom and Gomorrah (highlighted in purple.)

The Bible mentions 5 cities of the plain:  Zoar, Sodom, Gomorrah, Adman, and Zeboiim.  These cities date from the Early Bronze Age, approximately 3300-2050 BC.  William F. Albright, the “Father of Modern Biblical Archaeology” (from Johns Hopkins University), led a a team of archaeologists in 1924 into Jordan along the eastern side of the Dead Sea specifically to find evidence of Sodom and Gomorrah.  During the expedition, they discovered massive amounts of pottery dating to the Bronze Age.  They started digging, and discovered a site which is known today as Bab Edh-dhra.

Following the discovery of the site, Albright wrote an editorial indicating this could be a possible site for one of the infamous Biblical cities.  Strangely, Dr Walter Rast of Valparaiso University (Indiana) says that Albright decided to walk away from the site.  According to Rast, Albright decided

“That it probably would have been best if these sites are never found because of the evil that is associated with these sites, in the Biblical tradition.  Don’t undo God’s work.  Let it be left under the earth.”

Due to political instability in Jordan, the site was not studied again until the 1960’s.  Paul Lapp, director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem began picked up where Albright left off, and soon found a massive cemetery.  At first it was believed that this massive cemetery might be the result of the massive destruction and loss of life associated with the Bible story.  However, carbon dating revealed that the cemetery held citizens over a 1300 year period from 3300 BC on down to 2000 BC, nullifying the idea that this large group of people died in a single catastrophe. Unfortunately, Lapp died in a swimming accident in 1970, and was not able to shed further light on the site.

In 1973, Walter Rast (of Valparaiso University) and Thomas Schaub, (a doctoral student at the Jerusalem University) discovered a second city just 8 miles from Bab Edh-dhra, which has been named Numeira.  Pottery remains were similar to Bab Edh-dhra, and this city had a more interesting demise.  There is evidence that the entire city was burned.  Was it arson from a conquering army, or fire and brimstone as it says in the Bible?  Archaeologists can’t tell, but it was definitely burned.  Quoting Schaub from the video,

“At Bab Edh-dhra, we have several things that indicate that the town had a violent interruption in its life.  There are walls severely tilted, almost to a 50 degree angle, walls that have collapsed and slid down.”

The scarred ruins discovered at Numeira, paint even a more shocking portrait of a fiery end.

Schaub, “We find the remains of that destruction right on the surface.  That’s the striking thing about this site of Numiera.  It’s so well-preserved.”

Rast, “When Schaub and I were walking around Numeira, we were able to see already evidence of a tremendous depth of destruction for this site.  Everywhere we have excavated, whether at the East end, or the West end, or the south side, we have found a deep level of destruction and debris.”

Schaub, “There is also along with fire, the collapse of a tower, and under that tower, we found skeletons of individuals—very dramatic exposure.”

Rast, “But they were not buried there, they were caught in some sort of destruction. They had a kind of character that was similar to what we have found much more extensively in Pompei.”

These 2 cities of the plains met their fates together, as in the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Brimstone means literally “burning stone.”  In the Dead Sea region, highly flammable sulfur deposits are easily found in this region.  Josh Bernstein, host of Digging for the Truth, demonstrates how easy sulfur is to find and burn in the area.  If there was an earthquake releasing oil, natural gas, sulfur, and/or tar, it’s easy to imagine fire and brimstone raining down on Numeira.  There have been 17 earthquakes in the past 100 years—it is a well-known area of earthquakes.  National Geographic has a very dramatic simulation of what might have happened in this short 3 minute video.

But that’s not all.  Remember, there are 5 “cities of the plain” mentioned in the Bible, not just the infamous twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Greek Orthodox Church of St George in Madaba, Jordan dates from the 6^th century AD.  The church was restored in the 19^th century.  The stone floor inside the church has mosaic from the Byzantine era containing a map.  The map is not complete, but Zoar, one of the 5 cities of the plan, is shown on the map.  Zoar is significant in the Biblical story, because Lot passed nearby as he escaped from Sodom and Gomorrah.

The map had intrigued Konstantinos Politis, director of the British Museum for years.  When superimposed on a modern map of the area, it seems to be quite accurate.  Zoar is shown to be on the southeastern edge of the Dead Sea, along with the image of another church in the area.

Armed with this map, Politis began looking for Zoar.   In 1987, Politis discovered an ancient monastery in a mountainous region southeast of the Dead Sea.  At the monastery, Politis found a Greek inscription: “St Lot, please bless these servants, April 605 AD.”

Politis, “It’s not a small chapel, it’s quite a large church built in the slopes, so there was quite a lot of effort and money that went into the effort.  The people who built this church were people of the Byzantine period, roughly from the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th centuries AD.  These are the early Christians.”

While an impressive discovery in its own right, a chance accident brings it to the forefront of Biblical archaeology.

Politis, “On September 15, 1991, two workmen were digging in the mountainside on the site and they came across this hall and it turned out to be a cave, and almost immediately I thought of the Old Testament: Genesis.  This can’t possibly be Lot’s cave? [He chuckles]”

As Politis searched the cave, he discovered a discovered pottery dating from 2500-1700 BC.  Apparently the cave was occupied by someone dating to the Early Bronze Age.

According to the Bible, Lot and his 2 daughters flee Sodom in the wake of its destruction.  They pass through the city of Zoar on their way to a cave.  This passage provides a clue to Politis’ discovery.

Politis, “The site is located about 2 km away from ancient Zoar, where Lot escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which some people have associated with Bab Edh-dhra and Numeira.”

Here’s another archaeological site in the right place and from the right time.  Could this really be Lot’s cave, the place where Lot’s daughters seduce him in order to repopulate the world?”

Wolpe, “If you claim that you found a cave where somebody commit incest 2000 years ago, [this] is a claim which could not possibly by any stretch of the imagination be proved.  It makes no more sense than pointing to any other cave and saying that’s Lot’s Cave because there is no evidence remaining of what happened, or if it happened, or how it happened, or where it happened.”

Politis, “Archaeological, scientifically, I am quite convinced that we have the church and the cave which the early Christians believed was Lot’s cave.  Whether Lot himself lived there and stayed with his daughters, I don’t know.  But to actually prove that this was Lot himself is impossible.”

I have to say, I find it really odd that these early Christians would build a monument where incest occurred.  David Wolpe rabbi of Sinai Temple (Los Angeles, California) explained the mind-set of Lot’s daughters, and why they would try to get pregnant by their father.

Wolpe, “What seems to have happened after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is that Lot’s daughters believed they were the last human beings left on earth.”

Intent on preserving their own lineage and all of humanity, Lot’s daughters devise a plan.  They come to him with great quantities of wine.

Wolpe, “They got their father drunk and had incestuous relationships with him in order to repopulate the world.  It says something very human about the desire to see life proliferate, even after a terrible catastrophe.

This is such an odd idea to me.  I can’t imagine believing what it would be like to think you’re the only human beings left on the planet.  Does it really seem the situation is so desperate that they needed to have incestuous relations?  They really odd thing to me is the idea that the sin of Sodom was sexual relations.  Isn’t this a bit of irony?  Is there any evidence of Sodom’s sinful sexual nature from these sites?

Rast, “You do have a couple of cases of syphilis as evidence in the bone material, but that would be natural for a community back at this time.  Sexually transmitted diseases would have been the case everywhere as a possibility in ancient society.”

Schaub, “But it would take a real stretch of the imagination to relate what we find in the ground to the decadence that seems to be associated with the Biblical story.”

Fontaine, “We sometimes find when we look at Bible stories, that people think they know what they say, but when we look more closely, we sometimes find the text is ambivalent.”

After close study of the Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis, many scholars have come to doubt its true intent was to condemn sexual deviance.

Fontaine, “The sin of the Sodomites is one of the biggest mysteries about this whole story.  The Bible deliberately makes it ambiguous in the book of Genesis as to what that sin might be.”

Schaub, “It’s just the one incident where people come and demand that, say in the story about Sodom in chapter 19, that Lot gives these men out to them so that they may know them—a sexual term, or has sexual intercourse with them.  That one incident really has to be tied into the larger picture of the few chapters which is really about hospitality.

Fontaine, “In the Jewish legendary material, again and again when we hear stories of Sodom, it’s not about sexual deviance; it’s about the people’s unwillingness to give charity to their poor, and their wretched treatment of strangers.”

Given the seeming primitive beliefs concerning adultery, taking the name of God in vain, is the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah really the idea that they didn’t take care of strangers very well?

Let’s turn to Lot’s wife, and the story of her turning into a pillar of salt.  Josh Bernstein talked with Rami G Khouri, Author of a book titled, Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley.

Khouri, “It’s a message.  It’s a moral message which is personified in these physical remains.”

This 20 foot tall salt-encrusted pillar is known as Lot’s Wife.  Bernstein refers to this pillar as a “Biblical scarecrow.”

Bernstein, “So if we’re looking at this metaphorically, and not literally, what’s the message?”

Khouri, “I think the message from the Biblical text certainly—and it goes throughout the whole Old Testament—is that people should obey God—they should be faithful, and trust God.  If you don’t obey God, you get zapped.   [This is] throughout the Bible.

Bernstein, “So the people could use this as a bogeyman.  They could say ‘you better listen to God when he speaks, because otherwise you’re going to turn into that pillar.’”

Khouri, “That’s right.  I think that’s the aim of the story.  Of course many stories of the Bible are like this.“

Wolpe has another perspective on the story.

“His wife was told not to look back, which has been symbolically taken as the idea that in some ways, when people leave evil practices, they pine for them; they still wish they could do what they used to do.”

So, what are we to make of these archaeological finds?  Is there enough evidence and explanation of Sodom and Gomorrah for you?  On the one hand, Rami Khouri says,

“These stories, these narratives, are based on facts that we can prove in many cases: geological facts, geographical facts, chronological facts, and historical facts…I think there were cities that were destroyed.  You will certainly find sites where the archaeological evidence synchronizes rather compellingly with the Biblical evidence.”

David Wolpe, “It would be remarkable if certain things in the Bible were proved to be archaeologically true, but it wouldn’t prove faith, because faith is by definition that which cannot be proven by empirical evidence.  You don’t use scientific criteria to prove faith.  I’m not looking to prove God through rocks and stones and ancient remains.”

….

Wolpe, “It is impossible to know if these cities are Sodom and Gomorrah even if you find evidence of destruction, because we don’t have in the Bible sufficient description of exactly what was in the cities to correspond to actual archaeological findings.  So, I remain a skeptic.”

Schaub, “Is there any possibility that these 2 sites could be the Biblical sites of Sodom and Gomorrah?  I’d say, ‘yes’, there is probably a connection.”

Dr Walter Rast, Valparaiso University, “But beyond circumstantial evidence, we don’t have much more to go on than the circumstantial evidence.  It cannot really stand by itself as really final proof.  You can set it forth as theory, and I wouldn’t mind setting it forth as theory.”

What do you make of all this?  Are the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah simply fables, or could there be some evidence to indicate some of these events actually transpired?

http://www.tonightshowwithconanobrien.com/video/clips/a-song-for-the-mormons-121409/1185331/

Here’s some other cool videos:

I don’t know about you, but I really like this Hannukah song by Sen. Hatch.  I love the quote at the end:  “All it is is a hip-hop Holiday song from the senior senator from Utah.  That’s all it is.”

Apparently Don Imus liked it.  (Yes, THAT Don Imus.)  Imus even said it’s one of the most downloaded songs on Amazon, right up there with Black Eyed Peas!

Here is Adam Sandler’s Original Hannukah Song.

BiV wrote some lyrics, and even included me in one of the verses!

I found this YouTube video on Famous Mormons that I liked.

Finally, Why can’t Mormons send flowers?

I know that’s a lot of videos, but what did you think of them?

I must say that Brown follows the same basic formula that he used in the 2 previous books I read.  The chapters are short, making you want to read another chapter, but I think the formula is getting a little old.  Robert Langdon must solve a symbolic riddle involving a strange, smart, psychotic killer, an attractive (almost romantic) woman, Langdon submerged in water, a new science discovery, and some sort of police agency that keeps trying to arrest Langdon but in the end realizes Langdon is onto something.  Of course the 500 pages cover just a 24 hour period.  While I liked the formula for the first 2 books, it is starting to get a bit predictable.

So, here are the only 2 overt Mormon references, and nobody will find anything unusual.  From page 79,

Langdon often reminded his students that most modern religions included stories that did not hold up to scientific scrutiny: everything from Moses parting the Red Sea … to Joseph Smith using magic eyeglasses to translate the Book of Mormon from a series of gold plates he found buried in upstate New York.

Joseph Smith and Moses in the same sentence–it’s been done before.  Miracles are not scientific–of course.  There is nothing enlightening in this statement.

The other reference comes from page 437-8,

…realizing that all spiritual rituals included aspects that would seem frightening if taken out of context–crucifixion reenactments, Jewish circumcision rites, Mormon baptisms of the dead, Catholic exorcisms, Islamic niquab, shamanic trance healing, the Jewish Kaparot ceremony; even the eating of the figurative body and blood of Christ.

Ok, I didn’t know what a niquab was.  Wikipedia spells it slightly different: Niqāb, and the short definition is:

a veil which covers the face, worn by some Muslim women as a part of sartorial hijāb. Originally part of aristocratic dress in Byzantine Empire and pre-Islamic Persia, it was adopted into Muslim culture during the Arab conquest of the Middle East.

…

Because of the wide variety of hijab worn in the Muslim world, it can be difficult to definitively distinguish between one type of veil and another. The terms niqab and burqa are often used interchangeably.^[1] Muslim girls are advised by some schools of Islam to wear the niqāb starting at puberty.

Ok, I don’t know what Kaparot is either.  According to Wikipedia, it refers to

“atonements”; a disputed ancient Jewish ritual to save oneself from a harsh Heavenly decree by it being effected on another object. Vegetables, fish, money, and other objects have been used throughout the centuries, and this is done on the eve of Yom Kippur. The service is performed by grasping the object and moving it around one’s head three times, symbolically transferring one’s sins to the object. The object is then slaughtered or donated to the poor, preferably eaten at the pre-Yom Kippur feast.^[1] If one is using a chicken, preferably, a man should use a rooster, and a woman should use a hen for the ritual.

In modern times, Kapparos is performed in the traditional form mostly in Haredi communities. Members of other communities perform it with charity money substituted for the chicken, swung over one’s head in similar fashion. There is an ancient and little known tradition of Egyptian Jewry to use plant life.^[2] Other Orthodox Jews simply prefer to not participate in the custom.

The ritual is preceded by the reading of Psalms 107:17-20 and Job 33:23-24

So, his point is that many religious rituals (such as baptism for the dead) seem strange to those who do not observe the religion.  Sure–I can see that point of view completely.

So that’s all the explicit Mormon references.  However, as I mentioned previously, the book is about a Masonic conspiracy.  Most of you are probably aware that Joseph Smith was a Mason, and there are similarities between the Masonic ceremonies and Mormon Temple ceremonies.  This should not be surprising information to most members, though I’m sure some will find it surprising. Masonry was practiced by many leaders of our country, including George Washington.  There are some who believe that the Masons organized the Boston Tea Party, which set off the Revolutionary War.  Brown doesn’t really delve deeply into Masonic ceremonies, but he does touch on some topics that Mormons will find interesting.

Brown discusses how the founding fathers utilized many religious symbols in buildings, including (page 82):

history’s great gods and goddesses–Apollo, Minerva, Venus, Helios, Vulcan, Jupiter.  In her center, as in many of the great classical cities, the founders had erected an enduring tribute to the ancients–the Egyptian obelisk.

(page 84)  Now centuries later, despite America’s separation of church and state, this state-sponsored Rotunda glistened with ancient religious symbolism.  There were over a dozen different gods in the Rotunda–more than the original Pantheon in Rome.

On page 84, he discusses apotheosis.  I wasn’t familiar with that term, and Brown explains it.  I’m going to cut out some of the dialogue so as not to give away too much plot, though I can’t resist quoting a character who discusses apotheosis:

This transformation of man into God is called apotheosis

….

The word apotheosis literally means ‘divine transformation’–that of man becoming God.  It’s from the ancient Greek: apo–’to become,’ theos–’god.’

…

“Ma’am”, Langdon said, “the largest painting in this building is called The Apotheosis of Washington.  And it clearly depicts George Washington being transformed into a god.”

Apotheosis is an interesting concept, and is similar to the Mormon idea of exaltation, or the Orthodox Christian concept of theosis or deification (which I blogged about previously.)  Brown’s introduction of apotheosis seems much more pagan as he introduces the idea from the Greek gods.  Apotheosis is an idea that is a significant part of the plot.  Yet Brown doesn’t view apotheosis as completely pagan, and illustrates some Biblical scriptures which I was already familiar with.  From page 194,

“I can see your dilemma, Professor.  However, both the Ancient Mysteries and Masonic philosophy celebrate the potentiality of God within each of us.  Symbolically speaking, one could claim that anything within reach of an enlightened man … is within reach of God.”

Langdon felt unswayed by the wordplay.

“Even the Bible concurs,” Bellamy said.  “If we accept, as Genesis tells us, that ‘God created man in his own image,’ then we also must accept what that implies–that mankind was not created inferior to God.  In Luke 17:20 we are told, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know any Christians who consider themselves God’s equal.”

“Of course not,” Bellamy said, his tone hardening.  “Because most Christians want it both ways.  They want to be able to proudly declare that they are believers in the Bible and yet simply ignore those parts they find too difficult or too inconvenient to believe.”

A Mormon is going to be pretty comfortable with Bellamy’s statements.  These aren’t the only Biblical references–I was hoping Brown would reference Psalm 82:6, and he didn’t disappoint.  From page 308,

The famous Hermetic aphorism–Know ye not that ye are gods?–was one of the pillars of the Ancient Mysteries.  As above, so below … Man created in God’s image … Apotheosis. This persistent message of man’s own divinity–of his hidden potential–was the recurring them in the ancient texts of countless traditions.  Even the Holy Bible cried out in Psalms 82:6: Ye are Gods!

I am sure that many Christians will find this kind of information about apotheosis as jarring.  But I expect that Mormons and Orthodox Christians will embrace these scriptures and ideas presented by Dan Brown.  Overall, I found Brown to be a bit more sympathetic to religion that he was in the other two books, though I expect Catholics and Protestants to take issue with this idea that apotheosis is truly a Biblical concept.  So, have any of you read the book?  If you haven’t, does this make you want to read it?

Balaam has to be one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible.  He is one of only 7 gentile prophets mentioned in the Bible.  The others are Beor (Balaam’s father), Job and his 4 friends.  My favorite part of the story of Balaam is the talking donkey–it is the only place where an animal speaks (unless you count the serpent in the Garden of Eden.)   Ascertaining Balaam’s character can be a bit of a challenge.  On the one hand, the story of Balaam in Numbers 22-24  says the he not only talked with God, but a destroying angel appears to prevent him from cursing Israel.  On the other hand, he is referred to as “the wicked one” in Revelations.  So which is he?

Let’s get some background and a brief synopsis of the story of Balaam.

Wikipedia tells of some Talmudic and Midrashic thought on Balaam.  To quote,

In rabbinic literature Balaam is represented as one of seven gentile prophets; the other six being Beor (Balaam’s father), Job, and Job’s four friends (Talmud, B. B. 15b). In this literature, Balaam gradually acquired a position among the non-Jews, which was exalted as much as that of Moses among the Jews (Midrash Numbers Rabbah 20); at first being a mere interpreter of dreams, but later becoming a magician, until finally the spirit of prophecy descended upon him (ib. 7).

The Book of Numbers Chapter 21 details the wandering of Moses and the children of Israel after their escape from Egypt.  This is the chapter where God sends fiery serpents among the complaining Israelites.  Moses fashions a brass serpent and promises them they’ll be healed from the serpents simply by looking at the brass serpent.

As the chapter finishes, Moses and the children of Israel wipe out the Ammonites and the Amorites, taking several cities.  Numbers 21:24-25 says,

24 And Israel smote him with the edge of the sword, and possessed his land from Arnon unto Jabbok, even unto the children of Ammon: for the border of the children of Ammon [was] strong.

25 So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land.

Chapter 22 begins with the story of Balaam.  As the chapter begins, the leaders of the cities of Moab and Midian are concerned about the Israelites.  Apparently Balaam has quite a reputation among non-Israelites.  Some Bible commenters have even compared Balaam to a gentile version of Moses.  The King of the Moabites (Balak) believes Balaam has a special gift of cursing.  He tries to strike up a deal with Balaam to get him to curse Israel in Numbers 22:6, “I wot [know] that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed. ”

Curiously, in verse 9, “And God came unto Balaam, and said, What men [are] these with thee?”  I say curiously, because Moses was the prophet of the God of Israel.  Why would he be speaking to Balaam–a non-Israelite–at this time, if the God of Israel is the only true god, Moses is the living prophet, and Balak and his friends wanted to offer sacrifice to other gods to defeat Moses and Israel?  For in verse 7, “the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian departed with the rewards of divination in their hand;”  Divination was a wicked practice according to the Law of Moses.

In verse 12, God tells Balaam not to go with Balak, and further instructions Balaam,

“thou shalt not curse the people: for they [are] blessed.”

This leads some to believe Balaam might be a true prophet, who believes in the true God.  So far, so good, right?  Well, let’s continue with the story.  Balak entreats Balaam to come again.  This time, Balaam gets a different answer.  God tells him to go.  Dutifully, Balaam obeys the Lord.

20 And God came unto Balaam at night, and said unto him, If the men come to call thee, rise up, and go with them; but yet the word which I shall say unto thee, that shalt thou do.

21 And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab.

But strangely, a destroying angel stops Balaam’s donkey, but Balaam can’t see the angel yet, and begins to beat his stubborn donkey.  The donkey begins to talk to Balaam, and asks why Balaam is beating him.  For me, this is the best part of the story,

Num 22:29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.

Num 22:30 And the ass said unto Balaam, [Am] not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since [I was] thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.

Num 22:31 Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.

Num 22:32 And the angel of the LORD said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times?  Behold, I went out to withstand thee, because [thy] way is perverse before me:

Num 22:33 And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.

Num 22:34 And Balaam said unto the angel of the LORD, I have sinned; for I knew not that thou stoodest in the way against me: now therefore, if it displease thee, I will get me back again.

Num 22:35 And the angel of the LORD said unto Balaam, Go with the men: but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou shalt speak. So Balaam went with the princes of Balak.

Ok, apparently Balaam is having a hard time understanding God.  Don’t go, go, Don’t go, go.  Frankly, I’d be confused too.  But God tells him to go, and speak his words.  But instead of offering sacrifice to Yahweh, the God of Moses and the children of Israel, Balaam and Balak offer sacrifice to Baal, the notorious idol god that Moses, Joshua, and other prophets tell the children of Israel to avoid.  They build alters to Baal, but God answers instead.

39 And Balaam went with Balak, and they came unto Kirjath-huzoth.

40 And Balak offered oxen and sheep, and sent to Balaam, and to the princes that were with him.

41 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Balak took Balaam, and brought him up into the high places of Baal, that thence he might see the utmost part of the people.

Num. 23

1 And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, and prepare me here seven oxen and seven rams.

2 And Balak did as Balaam had spoken; and Balak and Balaam offered on every altar a bullock and a ram.

3 And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand by thy burnt offering, and I will go: peradventure the Lord will come to meet me: and whatsoever he sheweth me I will tell thee. And he went to an high place.

4 And God met Balaam: and he said unto him, I have prepared seven altars, and I have offered upon every altar a bullock and a ram.

Balaam blessed Israel.  Balak is not pleased.

11 And Balak said unto Balaam, What hast thou done unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast blessed them altogether.

The story continues, and Balaam blesses Israel two more times.  It is curious, because Balak clearly worships Baal, and they offer sacrifice to Baal, yet God answers.  Some might perceive that Balaam is like Rahab the prostitute who hides Joshua and Israeli spies who later tried to take Jericho.  However, Balaam is not spared, because curiously, he tells Balak how to defeat Israel:  get Israel to sin by introducing beautiful Midianites.  Now, why would a true prophet encourage sin?

Moses and his army did not spare Balaam.  In chapter 31 we learn,

Num. 31: 8, 16

8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.

The ancient historian Josephus explains this “counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord “at this website.

I’ve changed formatting for readability, but according to Josephus, Balaam told Balak to send beautiful women and induce Israel to break the law of chastity.  Balaam said,

O Balak, and you Midianites that are here present, (for I am obliged even without the will of God to gratify you,) it is true no entire destruction can seize upon the nation of the Hebrews, neither by war, nor by plague, nor by scarcity of the fruits of the earth, nor can any other unexpected accident be their entire ruin; for the providence of God is concerned to preserve them from such a misfortune; nor will it permit any such calamity to come upon them whereby they may all perish;

but some small misfortunes, and those for a short time, whereby they may appear to be brought low, may still befall them; but after that they will flourish again, to the terror of those that brought those mischiefs upon them. So that if you have a mind to gain a victory over them for a short space of time, you will obtain it by following my directions: Do you therefore set out the handsomest of such of your daughters as are most eminent for beauty, (10) and proper to force and conquer the modesty of those that behold them, and these decked and trimmed to the highest degree able.

Then do you send them to be near camp, and give them in charge, that the young men of the Hebrews desire their allow it them; and when they see they are enamored of them, let them take leaves; and if they entreat them to stay, let give their consent till they have persuaded leave off their obedience to their own laws, the worship of that God who established them to worship the gods of the Midianites and for by this means God will be angry at them (11). Accordingly, when Balaam had suggested counsel to them, he went his way.

…

9. Now the young men were induced by the fondness they had for these women to think they spake very well; so they gave themselves up to what they persuaded them, and transgressed their own laws, and supposing there were many gods, and resolving that they would sacrifice to them according to the laws of that country which ordained them, they both were delighted with their strange food, and went on to do every thing that the women would have them do, though in contradiction to their own laws; so far indeed that this transgression was already gone through the whole army of the young men, and they fell into a sedition that was much worse than the former, and into danger of the entire abolition of their own institutions; for when once the youth had tasted of these strange customs, they went with insatiable inclinations into them; and even where some of the principal men were illustrious on account of the virtues of their fathers, they also were corrupted together with the rest.

The Bible continues to condemn Balaam.

• 2 Peter 2:15 “Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; “
• Jude 1:11 “they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.”
• Rev 2:14 “the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.

There is an interesting discovery which references Balaam.  More information can be found here.  It tells of a discovery in 1967 of an ancient text found at Deir Alla, Jordan, in 1967 tells about the activities of a prophet named Balaam.  The text references “Balaam son of Beor,” exactly as in the Bible.  The website says,

The remarkable text found at Deir Alla consists of 119 fragments of plaster inscribed with black and red ink. It was among the rubble of a building destroyed in an earthquake. It seems to have been one long column with at least 50 lines, displayed on a plastered wall. According to the excavators’ dating, the disaster was most likely the severe earthquake which occurred in the time of King Uzziah (Azariah) and the prophet Amos in about 760 BC (Amos 1:1; Zec 14:5). The lower part of the text shows signs of wear, indicating that it had been on the wall for some time prior to the earthquake.

Written in Aramaic, the text begins with the title “Warnings from the Book of Balaam the son of Beor. He was a seer of the gods.” It is in red ink, as are other portions of the text where emphasis is desired. The reference to the “Book of Balaam” indicates that the text was part of a pre-existing document and therefore the original date of the material is much earlier than the plaster text itself. Balaam goes on to relate a vision concerning impending judgment from the gods, and enters into a dispute with his listeners.

There are a number of similarities between the text and the account of Balaam in the book of Numbers. To begin with, the events described in Numbers 22-24 took place in the same general area where the text was found. At the time of the Numbers 22-24 incident, the Israelites were camped on the Plains of Moab, across the Jordan river from Jericho. Deir Alla is located about 25 miles north of this area, where the Jabbok river flows into the Jordan valley. Balaam was from Pethor, near “the river” (Num 22:5), in “Aram” (Num 23:7; Dt 23:4).

The reference to Aram has led most scholars to conclude that Balaam was from northern Syria, in the vicinity of the Euphrates river. That does not fit well with the Biblical account, however, since Balaam’s home seems to have been close to where the Israelites were camped (Num 22:1-22; 31:7-8).

In view of Balaam being revered at Deir Alla, one would expect that Deir Alla was his home. This is exactly what William Shea has proposed, based on his reading of the name Pethor in an inscribed clay tablet found at Deir Alla (1989:108-11). In this case, the river of Numbers 22:5 would be the Jabbok river and the naharaim (two rivers) of Deuteronomy 23:4 would be the Jabbok and Jordan rivers.

With regard to the references to Aram, Shea suggests that the original place name was Adam, with the “d” being miscopied as “r,” since the two letters are nearly identical in ancient Hebrew. Adam was a town about eight miles southwest of Deir Alla, on the east bank of the Jordan river, where the Jabbok meets the Jordan.

Here are some interesting websites you might like to reference.

• http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?search=balaam&do=Search
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaam
• http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a014.html
• http://www.lds.org/gospellibrary/materials/OT/Start_Here.pdf#search=%22gospel%20doctrine%22   page 73 lesson 16

With all this background, I don’t believe Balaam can ever be considered a legitimate prophet.  Respectful disagreement is welcome, and I ask what you think of Balaam and this unusual story?

Here’s the original Press Release.

In his book, Wright demonstrates that the Ten Commandments and related covenants in Exodus 20-23 were plagiarized from the Laws of Hammurabi, an ancient Babylonian text, and were copied much later than the time of Moses–rather from the time of the Babylonian exile in 740-640 BCE. “The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. … This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history … and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.”

Now, here is the corrected release,

In his book, Wright demonstrates that the Covenant Code of Exodus 20-23, which is part of the revelation of Mt. Sinai , was in effect borrowed from the Laws of Hammurabi, an ancient Babylonian text. From literary clues, Wright has been able to determine that the code was copied into Israelite records during the Babylonian exile of 740-640 BCE, long after the time of Moses. “The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. … This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history … and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.”

So some of you may dismiss Wright–certainly he doesn’t represent Mormon thought, right?  Well, let’s check his credentials.

1. Wright formerly taught at Brigham Young University.  He was an Assistant Professor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages.
2. Wright is a Professor of Bible and Ancient Near East Studies at Brandeis University.
3. Wright is also a contributor to American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon and New Approaches to the Book of Mormon .

I haven’t read the book, but what are your initials reactions?

8 We believe the ^aBible to be the ^bword of God as far as it is translated ^ccorrectly;

This has to be one of the most oft-quoted articles of faith by members of the LDS church.  In one of my previous posts on Scripture Literalism, the comments referred to Biblical inerrancy and literalism.  Some evangelicals believe that the Bible is both inerrant and literal, and take great issue with the Mormon stance on the Bible.  They don’t believe there are any mistranslations, and that every word in the Bible was spoken by God.  Many of these people discount any contradictions in the Bible.

The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory that seems to identify at least four different authors/editors of the first five books in the Bible (also called the Torah in Judaism, or the Pentateuch.)  I think many Mormons would find great agreement with the Documentary Hypothesis, though they might not agree with every part of the theory.

Tradition has it that Moses authored the first 5 books of the Bible.  This is somewhat problematic, because Deuteronomy records Moses death in Deuteronomy 34:5, so Moses certainly couldn’t have finished writing that book.  Obviously someone else recorded his death (though there is a Jewish tradition that Moses did actually write the words of his death, and cried while he did it.)

There is an old A&E series called Mysteries of the Bible, and one of their episodes is called “Who wrote the Bible?”  I’d like to quote some of the information referencing the Documentary Hypothesis.  I downloaded the episode from Amazon, but apparently it is no longer available for download.  The documentary starts by looking at some of the stories which are told twice in the Bible, with different (and sometimes contradictory) tellings of the story.

There are numerous examples of the same story told twice, sometimes with conflicting details.  Scholars have long referred to these as doublets.  There are two separate accounts of the creation of the world, two versions of the covenant made between God and the Patriarch Abraham, and even two distinct versions of Moses obtaining water from a rock at a place called Mirabar, during the Exodus.

In most instances of these so-called doublets, the two versions of the story each refer to God by a different name.  In the Hebrew text, sometimes the deity is referred to as Elohim, the usual Hebrew reference to God.  But in the alternative version, the term used is often used is Yahweh, or Lord.  For centuries, scholars have puzzled over the appearance of these distinct differences.

…

Richard Elliot Friedman, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego.  “The key piece of evidence in this is that different kinds of Jews converged with each other.  So that you have doublets of stories-that proves nothing.  You have different names of God-that proves nothing.  But when all the doublets of stories line up into two groups, one of which uses one name of God, and the other uses the other name of God, consistently, then that’s strong evidence that something is going on.”

…

By the early half of the 19^th century, many scholars were convinced that the five books of Moses were written by three different authors.  The writer of the version which referred to Yahweh, was named “J” because early European translators were ignorant of the correct pronunciation of Hebrew names.  Many inadvertently referred to the name of God as Jehovah instead of Yahweh, and ironically, the name has stuck.

The author of those texts referring to God as Elohim was named “E.”  A third writer was identified as “P”.  This author was thought to be a priest, and wrote in a different style than J and E.  His passages seemed to be especially concerned with the establishment of the priesthood, after the people of Israel left Egypt.

Friedman, “All these texts are written in Hebrew, but in a different stage of Hebrew that we can identify.  Each has its own favorite terms, words that occur 50 times in P, but never occur in E or J, that sort of thing.  Each has its own style.”

The differences are immediately obvious in Hebrew, the language in which the text was originally written.  The disparities virtually disappear in the English translation.  But this example comes from the book of Exodus.  The text relates how God appeared in a burning bush.  The passage was written by J, who in Hebrew refers to God as Yahweh, or Lord.  Exodus 3:2, “And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked and, behold, the bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed.”

When the E writer, discusses Moses and the burning bush, the name is now only Elohim, “God”.  Exodus 3:6, “Moreover, he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.”

Subtle, though the differences may be, the texts clearly seem to reflect a compilation of sources.  In 1807, the German theologian, Wilhelm DeWitt announced the discovery of a possible fourth author.  His examination of the text indicated that the language, tone, and content of the entire book of Deuteronomy were the work of a different person to J, E, or P.  Scholars have since come to this author as D, for Deuteronomist.  Over the years, the theory has come to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis.

Friedman, “Once you have identified a text and said, ‘I think this is J, I think this is E, I think this is P, I think this is D’, then you place it up against other texts in the Bible where we have some idea of the date, and see if there is any development in the language.  It’s not just that you can tell the difference between the way I speak and the way Shakespeare did.  It’s that if you heard someone who lived in the 18^th century, you could tell that that person was somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and me.  So you can see the stages of Biblical Hebrew in growth.”

In a stunning retraction of early church intolerance toward the hypothesis and the issue of biblical authorship in 1943, Pope Pius XII, surprises religious leaders and academics alike.  He issues an edict and encourages the scholars to fully investigate the question, ‘Who wrote the Bible?’  The directive was heralded as a magna carta for Biblical study, initiating unprecedented research into the origins into the holy book.  The quest would open up how the words of the divine have traversed the centuries.

The documentary goes back to the time of Moses, and states that there were no scriptures for the Hebrews at this time.

While the 10 commandments were always in the constant possession of the people, there may have been no other written words at the time, though the Bible indicates that the scrolls of Moses may have accompanied the Israelites.  Many scholars believe that the first 5 books of the Bible had not yet been written.

After the advent of the monarchy in about 1000 BCE,  King David eventually becomes ruler, and establishes his capital at Jerusalem.  It is then, that the matter of authorship enters the story.  The king breaks with tradition, by appointing two high priests, in charge of religious affairs, instead of one.

Friedman, “It’s not so strange to have two high priests; in Israel today, there are two chief rabbis.  The problem you have is that when you have two chief priests instead of one, each one spends more time of his day sitting there trying to get rid of the other one.  ”

Not only are there two high priests, but toward the end of his reign, two of King David’s sons are vying for the throne.  It is uncertain which of them will be appointed the royal successor.  A struggle for power ensues, and this embroils the high priests.  Each one supports a different royal candidate.  When David dies, it is Solomon who is chosen to wear the crown.

Now the question is, will Solomon retain the services of both priests, or return to the traditional practice of having only one man in charge of the religious affairs.  Not surprisingly, the priest who was loyal to Solomon and his candidacy was chosen.  At the same time, the second high priest is removed from power and banished from the kingdom.  “And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth, to thine own field, for thou art worthy of death.  So Solomon thrust out Abiathar from being priest unto the Lord.” 1 Kings 2:26

Thus the priest retained by Solomon retains an exclusive role.  He and his assistants would soon take on new responsibilities as the king begins constructing the first great temple in Jerusalem.  The deposed priest and his followers enviously watch from their place of banishment.  They are now cut off from any possible new duties in the temple.

Friedman, “They had no place in the royal kingdom in Jerusalem, and so a priest of that priestly house, initiated the rebellion that ultimately led to the formation of the kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.  They wanted their own place where they could get to be the priest as well.

Thus in 922 BCE, the ten northerly tribes sever their ties from Jerusalem, and succession splinters the nation in two: Israel in the north, and Judah in the south.  So two kingdoms born of a nation, oppose one another in an uneasy truce.

Friedman, “Each had its own king, each had its on traditions, its own places of worship.  At the same time, we’re talking about a region that’s the same size as a large American county, so people were close to each other, people had relatives north and south, they both spoke the same language, and they both had the same ancestors of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and events in Egypt, and events at Mount Sinai, and so it is thought that each kingdom produced its sacred text, or at least one person living in each kingdom produced his version of the sacred text.”

If this is so, is it possible that different versions of the Bible were taking place at the same time?

Friedman, “It’s as if in America during the Civil War, a historian in the north, and a historian in the south each wrote a history of North America.  They would cover a lot of the same events and some different events, and they would tell it from their own perspective.

Daniel Smith-Christopher, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Loyola Marymount University, “We think that the J material was first gathered together under King Solomon.  It represents Solomon’s attempt to gather up the stories of a people, to knit them together in a coherent narrative, to tell the story about how the people of Israel came to be a people.  So it became a kind of national epic.  Now here’s one of the interesting mysteries:  was it an official national epic?  Some scholars say, the majority I think, would say that Solomon commissioned this document to be written.”

In answer to Solomon and his history of the people of Judah, the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel, now begin to amass their own collection of historical stories.

Christopher, “What they want to do is they want to add to this material that is more northern in orientation.  So they add material, and we think that this material is what we call E, because they tend to use the word Elohim for God.  Now we have somewhat more sophisticated theological stories.  But interestingly enough, we also have stories that tend to emphasize the significance of the second son.  Many people who read Genesis ask, ‘how come it’s always the second son that comes out better?’  Isaac was after Ishmael, Jacob, Cain and Abel, I mean all of these stories seem to emphasize the second son as the important one, or the preferred son.  It very well could be that the northern kingdom, after their break, wanted to emphasize the second son because in a sense they were the second son.   They were the breakaway kingdom.  So, they wanted to portray themselves as the preferred of the two.

Unlike the Bible’s favored second son, however, the Kingdom of Israel slips into the grip of paganism.  As time passes, people begin to worship Canaanite gods.  They would suffer a long and difficult history under 19 kings, eight of whom would die violently.  Despite the warnings of prophets, moral decay and corruption continue to enslave the people.

Then seven and a half centuries before the birth of Christ, the prophecies come true.  An invading Assyrian army sweeps in from the north and conquers Israel.  Forever scattering the 10 tribes to the winds, never to be seen or heard from again.

….

But an unremitting spiritual downfall has now gripped Judah too.  Without any consolidated religious precepts, no laws, no sacred texts, Paganism becomes rife throughout the land, until King Josiah takes the throne.  He tries to usher in change, by outlawing idol worship, and by a return to the holy covenant made with God at Mount Sinai.

Christopher, “Josiah was the young king who, as soon as he comes to the throne, decides that he wants to reform the religion of the people towards a more spiritual attachment to Yahweh, the national god.  So Josiah starts this campaign:  he even cleans up the temple, he wants to re-employ the people in reconstructing the temple and making it more glorious, and making it more spiritual.  Well, along the way, they discover a book.”

While cleaning out the buildings, the king’s high priests find a temple scroll deep within the temple vaults.  “And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan, the scribe, I have found a book of the Law, in the house of the Lord.  And Hilkiah gave the book to the scribe, and he read it” 2 Kings 22:8

Friedman, “The document that Hilkiah is understood to have read to Josiah on that date is thought by many of us to be the laws of Deuteronomy.  They are laws that say that you should worship God in only one place.  So Josiah destroys all the other places.  These are laws that say that you should not have pagan worship, so he destroys idols, and removes pagan worship from his country.  He is the king that follows that law code, it’s an extraordinary group of laws from ritual matters down to sacrifice to moral matters of how you should treat one another, that you should be just, that you shouldn’t oppress a widow, or an orphan.  They should take care of the poor-it’s an extraordinary body of laws.

Some contemporary Biblical scholars regard the supposed discovery of the Book of Deutoronomy with skepticism.

Christopher, “Was Josiah genuinely shocked at finding the Book of Deutronomy in the temple or was this perhaps the first Academy Award performance recorded in history?  Did Josiah in fact know that that book was in the temple, and that if he assigned his people to begin cleaning it up, that they would find it.  Many scholars suggest that Josiah was in on planting the book in the first place.  What better way to push forward his reform campaign, than to plant a book that suggests that his campaign is based on the very laws of Moses themselves?”

The laws reveal that the people had deviated from their faith.  The author of the book was clearly writing from that perspective, and was concerned with where society may be heading.

Friedman, “He writes in a very definite, observable, style that you can see in Deuteronomy, and see in 2 Kings, and you see it in one other place in the Bible, it’s in the prose of the prophet Jeremiah.  So, I have suggested the likelihood that the same person is the author of the prose parts of the Book of Jeremiah and the history that runs from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. ”

The Bible tells us that the person responsible for writing much of Jeremiah’s work was his trusty scribe, Baruch.  “Then took Jeremiah another scroll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Naraiah.” Jeremiah 36:32

Could Baruch, the son of Nariah, have been more than a mere scribe?  Could he also have written the Book of Deuteronomy?  His work probably speaks for itself.  Many passages of text he wrote for Jeremiah are strikingly similar to words used in Deuteronomy.  Perhaps the same author may have had a hand in the writing of both books.

Deut. 10:16 “And it will be, if you really listen to Yahweh’s voice…”	Jer. 17:24 “And it will be, if you really listen to me says Yahweh…”
Deut. 4:19, 17:3 “…to all the host of the heavens…”	Jer. 8:2, 19:13 “…to all the host of the heavens…”
Deut. 4:20 “…and he brought you ought of the iron furnace, from Egypt…”	Jer 11:4 “…in the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace…”

If so, archaeology has uncovered an artifact that has finally brought us into direct contact with one of the earliest authors of the Bible.

Friedman, “We in recent years, recovered a clay seal that is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem which is stamped in a script that we do identify as seventh century Hebrew script, late 7^th, early 6^th century Hebrew script, and the name on that seal is Baruch, son of Nariah, the scribe.  If it’s true that Baruch is our Deuteronomistic historian, what that means is when you look at that seal, you are looking at nothing less than the autograph of one of the authors of the Bible.

Could this tiny, clay seal be the personal signature of the writer of the Book of Deuteronomy?  If it is, it is a unique object that reaches out to us beyond 26 centuries of history, the only link ever found connected to an actual author of the Bible.

…

Act V

The tangled web of history surrounding the writing of the five books of Moses may one day be completely untwined.  But a loose thread remains:  who was it who gathered the original manuscripts together?  In the course of writing a book, any book, a lengthy process of editing, and alteration is involved.  In our search, it may not be a question of who wrote the Bible, but of who re-wrote it?

Friedman, “People usually talk simply about this as if there’s four sources and as if there were only four writers and that’s misleading because even if we count those as only four writers, there’s still key editors in the stages of this.  Editors are as important as authors in the process.”

If there was an editor, who was he?  To pick up the strands we must return to the Kingdom of Judah, to the days when under a new king, Jehoiakim, the people had retrogressed once again to worshipping idols.  A prophet by the name of Jeremiah has now become one of the most outspoken critics of the weakening moral fiber of the people and he foretells their fate.  “Ye have done worse than your fathers.  Behold, ye walk everyone after the imagination of his evil heart.  Wherefore I will cast you out of this land, into a land that ye know not, neither ye, nor your fathers.” Jeremiah 16:11.

A daunting prophecy, in 586 BCE it comes true.  From Babylon, King Nebudchadnezzer’s army surged down into Judah, and lay siege to Jerusalem.  So begins more than a century of bitter exile for the people of Israel in Babylon.  But eventually, even mighty Babylon falls to a mightier power, the powerful armies of Cyrus the Great absorbed Babylon into the Persian Empire.  But Cyrus is conciliatory towards the exiled Jews.  He issues his now legendary edict of restoration, allowing the people of Israel to return to Jerusalem, and restore their temple, and their faith.

This stone cylinder, dating back to the event five and a half centuries before Christ, bears the text of Cyrus’ edict.  “The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, King of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and put it also in writing, saying, ‘Thus saith Cyrus, King of Persia, the Lord God of Heaven, hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.” Ezra 1:1

It is a derelict homeland to which the people return.  Much of their religious tradition has been eroded during the long years of exile.  Their faith is it a threateningly low ebb.  According to some scholars, it is time for the great redactor, the final editor of the books of Moses to enter the scene, and leave his mark.

…

In Jerusalem, a party of exiled Jews returns under the leadership of a man called Ezra, a scribe.  He sees the spiritual weakness of the people, and he resolves to reintroduce them to the ancient religion of Moses.  They have not been exposed to the Hebrew laws for almost a century.  So Ezra calls for a mass public gathering in the city.  “And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation, and he read therein from the morning until mid-day before the men and the women, and those who could understand.  And the ears of all people were attentive to all the words of the law.” Nehemiah 8:2

Was Ezra history’s elusive editor?  Perhaps under his guidance, various religious texts were combined and read together for the first time, forevermore to be consolidated as the five books of Moses.

Friedman, “These were laws that had not been publicly read in any way like this before.  The laws of Deuteronomy had been publicly read at least from Josiah’s time, but now we’re talking about the full five books of Moses.  We’re not talking about P or J or E.  We’re talking about the five books of Moses as people read it today.

The compilation of the texts more than 2,500 years ago was one of the most significant events in a long history of persecution and conflict for the Jews.  In the ensuing centuries, they would suffer occupation, defeat, and destruction on an unprecedented scale.  But, the essence of their religious identity would forever be enshrined in the anthology enshrined, known as the Torah, the five books of Moses.  We may never know all the mysteries of the earliest writings of the Bible, but the study of the texts, the so-called Documentary Hypothesis has provided some insights into its origins.  However, the matter is far from resolved.

The hypothesis is only one possible answer.  It is merely a concept.  There is as yet no consensus on the theory.

Christopher, “At this point, I would say that the Documentary Hypothesis is the best explanation for many of the difficulties that are presented to us by the first five books of Bible as we now have them.”

Lawrence Schiffman, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, “In my mind, the Documentary Hypothesis does not really solve the problem that it sets out to solve, in which case we simply get left with the question of faith.  One who wants to believe that the Torah is a divine document and given by God, can do so; one who wants to believe that it’s a human document subjected to documentary or other types of similar analysis can do so.  I think it’s a question, a mystery, to which we’ll never really know the answer.”

As Orthodox tradition has it, the five books of Moses contain the divine words of God, though were written in the hand of man.  The books that follow differ fundamentally from them.  The rest of the Hebrew Bible is generally perceived to be a series of historical documents, a chronology of people written by many authors.  So our search for authorship must now come from another perspective, posing a different set of questions.

At this point, I want to stop.  I’ll probably post again on authorship of other books of the Bible.  So what do you think of the Documentary Hypothesis?  Does it agree with the 8th Article of Faith?

For those who don’t know the origins of the Book of Abraham, Joseph claims to have translated the Book of Abraham from some Egyptian papyrus that he purchased from a person exhibiting Egyptian artifacts.  The papyrus were originally believed to have perished in a fire, though some of these scrolls were actually discovered in 1967, and translated by Egyptologists.  The translation has no resemblance to the Book of Abraham, and seems to be a sort of funeral scroll.  Therefore, some people charge that the Book of Abraham is really a fraud.  Even if this is a fraud, how does this explain the similarities to the Jewish Midrash, and the Koran?

To counter these claims,  Hugh Nibley notes that not all of the papyrus was found.  Perhaps there were some funeral scrolls mixed in with the Book of Abraham, and perhaps the real Book of Abraham that Joseph translated was not found.  Many critics scoff at this claim.

However, I have also been learning about the Gospel of Judas.  Scholars have known for centuries that a gospel attributed to Judas existed, because of a reference by an ancient Christian priest named Saint Ireneaus in 180.  The Christian canon did not exist in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, and St Ireneaus was of the first Christian leaders to try to create a canon of Christian writings.  He was one of the first to make the claim that there should be four gospels, and that many of the other gospels (at least 50 at the time) that were in existence at the time were false.  He specifically mentioned the Gospel of Judas as an especially dubious heresy.

Until recently nobody knew the Gospel of Judas existed.  Some Egyptian papyrus was discovered in 1978, and shopped on the black market for many years.  (It was actually advertised in the classified ads in the New York Times, and sold or stolen several times on the black market.)  There was even a National Geographic special announcing the discovery of the Gospel of Judas in 2006.

The discovery is very interesting, and the ancient document was written in an ancient form of Egyptian, called Coptic.  (Is this “reformed Egyptian”?)  The Coptic Christian Church still exists today, and dates from this early time period.  The copy discovered isn’t quite as old at Ireneaus, but dates to about the 1600 years ago.  It’s not quite as old as Ireneaus, but it certainly is ancient, and might be the same gospel he was referring to.  Ireneaus was talking about a Greek text, but he Gospel of Judas is probably a Coptic translation of the original Greek text.  (You may want to learn more about Gnosticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Library from my previous post on this.)

Prior to the National Geographic special, rumors that the Gospel of Judas had been found were rampant among the academic community.  The book was mixed up with several other books (apparently these ancient Egyptians were trying to conserve papyrus), many of which had nothing to do with spiritual subjects.  Someone apparently leaked a photograph of some of these papyri on the internet, and most scholars were of the opinion that the Gospel of Judas did not really exist.  The internet photograph claimed that the writings were the Gospel of Judas, but the translation was obviously of another book.  So, the Gospel of Judas find was deemed a hoax.

However, National Geographic obtained the papyrus, and had some modern scholars translate it.  Sure enough, the internet photographs were genuine, but only contained a portion of the entire papyrus.  The Gospel of Judas, was mixed in with some other writings, and it is an extremely important and interesting find in ancient Christian writings, because it shows a much greater diversity of Christian thought.  The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text, which was a competing form of Christianity, and was just as big or bigger in some parts of the Roman Empire.  When Constantine converted to Christianity, he converted to Orthodox Christianity, and then set about persecuting the Gnostics.  Eventually the persecution forced them out of existence.

So, I want to quote from Bart Ehrmann’s book called The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot.  Bart is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and participated in the translation of this lost gospel.  I just found some of the experiences with the Gospel of Judas as strikingly similar to Nibley’s theory about the Book of Abraham.  From page 67,

In chapter 1, I described my trip to Geneva in December 2004.  There I laid eyes on the Gospel of Judas for the first time.  I was obviously elated by the possibilities.  But as I returned from my trip I had more questions than answers.  I had looked over some pages of the Coptic text but had no opportunity to study and translate them.  What could be found on the pages I had seen?

…page 68

While still thrilled by the prospects, I found a discussion on the Internet that made my heart sink.

There is a Dutch blogger name Michel van Rijn who runs a very peculiar web site that specializes in debunking claims about modern art and ancient artifacts.  Van Rijn had gotten wind of the Gospel of Judas story, tracked down some leads, and learned that National Geographic was planning to spend considerable time and effort promoting the release of the document and its translation-and presumably would make a lot of money off it.  Van Rijn decided to explode the entire operation by publishing all the surviving materials before National Geographic itself had a chance to do so.

Van Rijn found an American scholar, Charlie Hedrick-a New Testament scholar I have known and liked for years-who claimed to have photographs of the Gospel of Judas and to have already made preliminary translations of them.  In order to squash any speculation about the Gospel, and to beat National Geographic to the punch, van Rijn published the photographs and the translations.  When I read them, I was massively disappointed.

The first text appeared to have nothing to do with Judas and Jesus.  It was a Gnostic document whose main figure was someone called Allogenes, who prays to God and hears God’s answer.  The text had Gnostic characteristics, and it would be of some limited interest to scholars of Gnosticism.  But as far as Judas and Jesus were concerned, it was a complete bust.

It is amazing how even those of us who teach for a living fail to practice what we preach.  Every semester in my undergraduate courses at Chapel Hill I have to tell my students not to trust everything they find on the Internet, since anyone can publish anything there, and there is often no way of knowing if the source is credible or bogus.  In this particular case, not having followed my own advice, I was completely taken in.

What I didn’t know at the time, but eventually came to realize, is that Hedrick had translated the wrong text.

My first indication that something was amiss came in July 1, 2005.  I was in New York on other business and had set up a lunch date at the Harvard Club with Herb Krosney, whom I mentioned earlier as the investigative journalist who had originally tracked down the Gospel of Judas, found that it was owned now by the Maecenas Foundation in Geneva, interested National Geographic in the story, and more or less single-handedly pushed the story forward-leading eventually to my hurried trip to Geneva six months before.  Over lunch in July I expressed my real frustration that the whole story was soon to collapse on itself, that there was not in fact much of a story at all, because I had read the Hedrick translation and frankly couldn’t understand why National Geographic was still interested in pursuing the matter.

Herb knew what was actually in the text, but he was not at liberty to give me all the details.  With a twinkle in his eye, he suggested that I not believe everything I read on the Internet (the advice I give students just about every week).  But I persisted; I had seen the photographs of the Coptic pages, they looked similar in quality to the pages I had seen in Geneva, I had seen Hedrick’s transcription of the pages, and I had checked his translation.  There just wasn’t much there.  All Herb could do was throw out a tantalizing hint: maybe Hedrick was translating a different part of the book.

It was only later that I realized what had happened.  As we will see in this chapter, when scholars first gained access to this manuscript and were able to determine its contents, they believed it contained fragmentary copies of three texts. Two of which were already known from earlier archaeological discoveries: the Letter of Peter to Philip and the First Apocalypse of James, copies of which had been discovered had been discovered among the writings of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945.  The third text was the gold mine: the Gospel of Judas.  But it was not until Florence Darbre, the expert in manuscript restoration, and Rodolphe Kasser, the eminent Coptologist responsible for editing and translation the text, had worked on the manuscript for three years that they realized what no one-including van Rijn and Hedrick-had before suspected.  The final part of the manuscript contained not just one document-the Gospel of Judas-but two.  The other one was a fragmentary copy of an otherwise unknown Gnostic treatise about this figure Allogenes.  Hedrick had assumed that his photographs were from the Gospel of Judas.  They weren’t.  They were from a different text.  This changed things drastically.

…page 70

One of the strangest facts about archaeological discoveries of early Jewish and Christian manuscripts is that the most spectacular finds are almost never made by trained archaeologists.  Most of them are the result of pure serendipity.  Moreover, they are typically discovered by people who have no idea what it is they have discovered and no sense of their real worth.

…page 71 [formatting slightly changed]

The limestone box contained four different manuscripts in codex form (that is, they were books, not scrolls).  Later scholars would identify these ancient codices as follows.  None of them, except the Gospel of Judas codes, has yet been published or otherwise made public:

1.       A mathematical treatise, written in Greek

2.       A fragmentary copy of the Old Testament book of Exodus, also in Greek

3.       A fragmentary copy of some of the New Testament letters of the apostle Paul, written in Coptic

4.       The codex containing the Gospel of Judas (as I will explain later, we have the complete beginning and end of the Gospel, and much of the middle, but some portions have not been lost because of the rough handling of the manuscript after its discovery; about 10-15 percent of the text is now unrecoverable), along with three other fragmentary texts, all of them Coptic:

a.       The Letter of Peter to Philip (in a version slightly different from the one discovered at Nag Hammadi),

b.      The First Apocalypse of James (also different from the Nag Hammadi version),

c.       And the Gnostic treatise on Allogenes (which is a different work from the Nag Hammadi tractate that is entitled “Allogenes”)

The discovery of the Gospel of Judas, with the initial skepticism of its existence lends credibility to Nibley’s contention that the Book of Abraham might still be still missing, and that they were combined with other non-religious texts.  Since I have been reviewing Rough Stone Rolling again, I decided to see what Bushman had to say on the topic.  From pages 285-6,

…Michael H. Chandler, who arrived in Kirtland on July 3, 1835, with four mummies and some rolls of papyrus.  Something of an opportunist and promoter, Chandler had exhibited the artifacts in Cleveland in March and come to Kirtland, he said, because of Joseph Smiths translating powers.  Chandler’s account of the mummies is full of contradictions.  He claimed he had inherited the artifacts from his uncle, Antonio Lebolo.  Lebolo had indeed obtained Egyptian artifacts around 1820 and distributed the finds to various European museums before he died in 1830, but no mention of Chandler or mummies were made in Lebolo’s probate papers.  He had earlier arranged for a Trieste merchant to sell eleven mummies that were forwarded to New York, and probably Chandler purchased the artifacts in New York, thinking to exhibit them and then sell them.  On inspecting the papyri, Joseph announced that one rolls contained the writings of Abraham of Ur and another the writings of Joseph of Egypt.  Excited by this discovery, he encouraged some of the Kirtland Saints to purchase four mummies and the papyri for $2,400, a huge sum when money was desperately needed for other projects.

…

Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham is best thought of as an apocryphal addition to the Genesis story of Abraham, in the same vein as the Enoch passages in the Book of Moses.  Characteristically, Joseph’s translated account did not repeat the familiar biblical stories, instead expanding on a few verses about Abraham’s origins in Ur of the Chaldees, adding material not mentioned in the Bible.  The published version contained two chapters giving an account of Abraham’s ordeal in Ur and his departure for Canaan and Egypt.

… page 290

The Abraham texts gave Joseph another chance to let his followers try translating.  While working on the Book of Mormon in 1829, Joseph invited Oliver Cowdery to translate: he tried and failed.  Now with the Egyptian papyri before them, Joseph again let the men with the greatest interest in such undertakings-Cowdery, William W. Phelps, Warren Parrish, and Frederick G. Williams-attempt translations.  Parrish was told he “shall see much of my ancient records, and shall know of hiden things, and shall be endowed with a knowledge of hiden languages.”

Through the fall of 1835, the little group made various attempts.  “This after noon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with [brothers] O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps,” Joseph’s journal notes.  They seem to have copied lines of Egyptian from the papyrus and worked out stories to go with the text.  Or they wrote down an Egyptian character and attempted various renditions.  Joseph apparently had translated the first two chapters of Abraham-through chapter 2, verse 18, in the current edition-and the would-be translators matched up hieroglyphs with some of his English sentences.  Their general method can be deduced from a revelation given to Oliver Cowdery after he failed to translate the gold plates:  “You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you.”  One can imagine these men staring at the characters, jotting down ideas that occurred to them, hoping for a burning confirmation.  They tried one approach after another.  Joseph probably threw in ideas of his own.  Eventually, they pulled their work together into a collection they called “Grammar & A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language,” written in the hands of Phelps and Parrish.

Of all the men working on the papyri, only Joseph produced a coherent text.  What was going on as he translated?  For many years, Mormon assumed that he sat down with the scrolls, looked at each Egyptian word, and by inspiration understood its meaning in English.  He must have been reading from a text, so Mormons thought, much as a conventional translator would do, except the words came by revelation rather than out of his own learning.  In 1967, that view of translation suffered a blow when eleven scraps of the Abraham papyri, long since lost and believed to have been burned, were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and given to Latter-day Saint leaders in Salt Lake City.  Color pictures were soon printed and scholars went to work.  The texts were thought to be papyri with his translation, and the same pictures appeared on the museum fragments.  Moreover, some of the characters from the Egyptian grammar appeared on the fragments.  The translation of these texts by expert Egyptologists would finally prove or disprove Joseph’s claims to miraculous translating powers.  Would any of the language correspond to  the text in his Book of Abraham?  Some Mormons were crushed when the fragments turned out to be rather conventional funerary texts placed with mummified bodies, in this case Hôr’, to assure continuing life as an immortal god.  According to Egyptologists, nothing on the fragments resembled Joseph’s account of Abraham.

Some Mormon scholars, notably Hugh Nibley, doubt that the actual texts for Abraham and Joseph have been found.  The scraps from the Metropolitan Museum do not fit the description Joseph Smith gave of long, beautiful scrolls.  At best the remnants are a small fraction of the originals, with no indication of what appears on the lost portions.  Nonetheless, the discovery prompted a reassessment of the Book of Abraham.  What was going on while Joseph “translated” the papyri and dictated text to a scribe?  Obviously, he was not interpreting the hieroglyphics like an ordinary scholar.  As Joseph saw it, he was working by inspiration-that had been clear from the beginning.  When he “translated” the Book of Mormon, he did not read from the gold plates; he looked into the crystals of the Urim and Thummim, or gazed at the seerstone.  The words came by inspiration, not by reading the characters on the plates.  By analogy, it seemed likely that the papyri had been an occasion for receiving a revelation rather than a word-for-word interpretation of the hieroglyphics as in ordinary translations.  Joseph translated Abraham as ne had the characters on the gold plates, by knowing the meaning without actually knowing the plates’ language.  Warren Parish, his clerk, said, “I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven.”  When Chandler arrived with the scrolls, Joseph saw the papyri and inspiration struck.  Not one to deny God’s promptings of Abraham and Joseph.  The whole thing was miraculous, and to reduce Joseph’s translation to some quasi-natural process, some concluded, was folly.

The peculiar fact is that the results were not entirely out of line with the huge apocryphal literature on Abraham.  His book of Abraham picked up themes found in texts like the Book of Jasher and Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.  In these extrabiblical stories, Abraham’s father worshiped idols, people tried to murder Abraham because of his resistance, and Abraham was learned in astronomy-all features of Joseph Smith’s narrative.  Josephus says, for example, that Abraham delivered “the science of astronomy” to the Egyptians, as does Joseph’s Abraham.  The parallels are not exact; the Book of Abraham was not a copy of any of the apocryphal texts.  In the Book of Jasher, Abraham destroys the idols of King Nimrod with a hatchet and is thrown into a furnace; Joseph’s Abraham is bound on a bedstead.  The similarities are far from complete, but the theme of resisting the king’s idolatry and an attempted execution followed by redemption by God are the same.  The parallels extend to numerous small details.

Joseph may have heard apocryphal stories of Abraham, although the Book of Jasher was not published in English until 1829 and not in the United States until 1840.  A Bible dictionary published by the American Sunday School Union summed up many of these apocryphal elements.  Whether Joseph knew of alternate accounts of Abraham or not, he created an original narrative that echoed apocryphal stories without imitating them.  Either by revelation, as his followers believed, or by some instinctive affinity for antiquity, Joseph made his own late-and unlikely-entry in the long tradition of extrabiblical narratives about the great patriarch.

…page 293

In light of Joseph’s language study, the Egyptian grammar appears as an awkward attempt to blend a scholarly approach to language with inspired translation.

So, what do you make of Nibley’s contention?  Is it plausible?