Let’s pretend there’s not much news coming out of Washington, D.C and a reporter yearns to cover something different. And what if the press has missed “the biggest biblical discovery to date,” indeed, “arguably the most important religious discovery of all time”?
Sounds interesting. And if those lavish promotional claims turn out to be false, that’s a story, too.
A friend of The Religion Guy uses the News360.com app, whose algorithms scan 7,000 newspapers and magazines for articles keyed to the individual’s interests. This friend’s interests include Christian history, and he was alerted to a Jan. 29 article announcing the discovery of ancient documents that “could revolutionize our picture of Christianity.”
A seasoned journalist immediately recalls hoaxes of this sort.
Leave aside the deceptive history on Christian origins offered as fact in “The Da Vinci Code” novel, a huge 2003 seller that spawned a movie starring Tom Hanks. A claim of proof Jesus Christ was married that emanated from august Harvard Divinity School was debunked. Evangelicals swooned over spurious reports about finding a manuscript of the Gospel of Mark written in the 1st Century. In 2017, The Guy attempted to assess the Shroud of Turin dispute.
The Jan. 29 article wasn’t from a recognized scholarly journal or site but CoreSpirit.com, which informs practitioners, entrepreneurs and curiosity-seekers about magic, esoterica, life enhancement nostrums, transcendence and “ancient wisdom.”
By the way, this site is potentially useful for media. The Guy bets journalists know nothing about most of the 800-plus topics covered (e.g. global brain, isolation tank, medical intuition, superhuman agility, urine therapy, tongue cutting, wall crawling, you name it).
Core Spirit neglected to tell readers that its news is not new.
The mysterious “Jordanian Codices,” a collection of small, bound-together metal tablets, first won publicity in 2011 and mostly in Britain. Though scholars scoffed, there’s been lively chatter across the Internet ever since that reporters can plumb to assess story prospects. The history of where these items came from is confused, but they’re now being held by Jordan’s antiquities department.
In the final weeks of 2016, when the press was all agog trying to explain how Donald Trump won and what he’d do as president, a news break was largely ignored. Professors Roger Webb and Chris Jeynes at the University of Surrey’s Ion Beam Center reported that scientific tests on one tablet offered “very strong evidence” that suggests an age of “around 2,000 years.” That invites further inquiry.
There’s been no scholarly translation of writings on the tablets, but proponents tell us they reveal that Jesus and his disciples followed a secret sect, dating back a millennium to King Solomon’s temple, that worshipped a God that was both male and female. That contention would be no surprise if these tablets were writings from Gnostic and esoteric sects that broke with orthodox Christianity from the 2nd Century A.D. onward.
Enthusiasts even claim that human heads shown on the tablets were a “portrait” of Jesus. How could moderns know who this was supposed to be? (This aspect suggests these tablets were Gentile or pagan, not Jewish-Christian, since the faith forbade drawing human faces.)
For lack of any substantive mainstream scholarly work, the Codices’ chief promoter is “independent scholar” David Elkington, who when challenged has confirmed that he’s “largely self-taught” and “has never claimed to have had any formal qualifications” of the sort that get you published in peer-reviewed journals.
His most important scholarly sympathizers have been the late Philip Davies, a highly skeptical New Testament professor, and Margaret Barker, who’s also “independent” but a past president of the reputable Society of Old Testament Study. She contributed to Elkington’s 2014 anthology “The Case for the Jordan Lead Codices.” Barker decries the secrecy surrounding “this priceless treasure” and urges fellow scholars to undertake serious research. Elkington can be contacted via Watkins, his publisher, known for “mind-body-spirit books”: enquiries@watkinspublishing.com. For Barker: bkmargaret@hotmail.com,
News writers working these types of stories often turn first to Biblical Archaeology Review, where experts write up finds for non-specialists. It has scored many scoops in this field over the years.
With the Codices, Editor Robert Cargill counts among noted antagonists. He calls them “fake” and deems what’s known about the contents “nonsensical.” Cargill teaches at the University of Iowa: robert-cargill@uiowa.edu and 319-335-1996.
FIRST IMAGE: Screenshot from BBC coverage of the “Jordanian Codices.”
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