Posted by:
SL Cabbie
(
)
Date: September 28, 2012 02:53PM
Okay, I don't know if Denial C. Peterson was in the "believer" camp on this one, but I figure he'll appreciate knowing we haven't forgotten him.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/28/us-religion-jesuswife-idUSBRE88R0NT20120928>(Reuters) - An ancient papyrus fragment which a Harvard scholar says contains the first recorded mention that Jesus may have had a wife is a fake, the Vatican said on Friday.
>"Substantial reasons would lead one to conclude that the papyrus is indeed a clumsy forgery," the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said in an editorial by its editor, Gian Maria Vian. "In any case, it's a fake."
>Joining a highly charged academic debate over the authenticity of the text, written in ancient Egyptian Coptic, the newspaper published a lengthy analysis by expert Alberto Camplani of Rome's La Sapienza university, outlining doubts about the manuscript and urging extreme caution.
What boggled my mind was how it was a Harvard scholar who first brought the fragment to light. I am rapidly losing respect for that institution and its credibility (Barry Fell comes to mind), and that's troubling because another Harvard researcher recently put forth some claims about a "third migration" in the area of Native American migrations to the New World. I can't pass judgment on the science, but there was a very dubious tie to some linguistic claims that a third, very northern population of Old World admixture couldn't possibly have been relevant to. It seemed far more "politics and hyperbole than science" to me, at least as far as it was reported in the popular media.
On the same subject, here's a nice summary of the "James Ossuary Trial" (the alleged forger was acquitted, but the judge declined to rule on whether the artifact was authentic). This is admittedly a "scientific spin," and readers seeking another point of view can Google up what Hershel Shanks has to say.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/25/opinion/la-oe-burleigh-bible-ossuary-forgery-20120325>In Israel's James Ossuary Trial, science was the loser
Some noteworthy anlyses...
>Israeli prosecutors were badly underfunded (the nation has its eye on bigger problems than relic forgery), and its investigators never mounted the kind of international, follow-the-money detective work that would have bolstered their case by showing a pattern of criminality involving a number of lesser-known objects that were also part of the case — allegedly ancient lamps and Old Testament-era royal seal impressions that scientists said were fakes.
>And while the scientists for the state conducted their investigations and testified for free, the defense paid for-hire scientists, who were willing to say the objects at issue were entirely authentic.
>In the end, the judge explicitly declined to rule on the authenticity of the objects. "The prosecution failed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt what was stated in the indictment: that the ossuary is a forgery and that Mr. Golan or someone acting on his behalf forged it," the judge stated. "This is not to say that the inscription on the ossuary is true and authentic and was written 2,000 years ago.... [T]here is nothing in these findings which necessarily proves that the items were authentic."
Religion is definitely big business, or at least writing about it is...