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Post by Admin on Apr 26, 2014 22:43:02 GMT
The document's current owner has insisted on remaining anonymous, and King has not disclosed the person's identity. However, in a recent Harvard Theological Review article, King published a contract provided by the current anonymous owner that King said indicates it was purchased, along with five other Coptic papyrus fragments, from a man named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp in November 1999 and that Laukamp had obtained it in 1963 from Potsdam in then-East Germany. In an effort to confirm the origins of the papyrus and discover its history, Live Science went searching for more information about Laukamp and his descendents, business partners or friends. Our findings indicate that Laukamp was a co-owner of the now-defunct ACMB-American Corporation for Milling and Boreworks in Venice, Fla. Documents filed in Sarasota County, Fla., show that Laukamp was based in Germany at the time of his death in 2002 and that a man named René Ernest was named as the representative of his estate in Sarasota County. In an exchange of emails in German, Ernest said that Laukamp did not collect antiquities, did not own this papyrus and, in fact, was living in West Berlin in 1963, so he couldn't have crossed the Berlin Wall into Potsdam. Laukamp, he said, was a toolmaker and had no interest in old things. In fact, Ernest was astonished to hear that Laukamp's name had been linked to this papyrus. While the documents name him as the representative of Laukamp's estate in Sarasota County, the two men are not related, and Ernest did not receive an inheritance, Ernest said, adding that, as far as he knows, Laukamp had no children and has no living relatives. Ernest did not respond to specific questions about how he and Laukamp came to know each other, but it is clear from documents naming Ernest as estate representative that Laukamp placed a great deal of trust in him; one dealing with Ernest and the estate dates to when Laukamp was still alive and has his signature. Another acquaintance of Laukamp — Axel Herzsprung, who was also a co-owner of ACMB-American Corporation for Milling and Boreworks — told Live Science (in German in an email) that while Laukamp collected souvenirs on trips, he never heard of him having a papyrus. To his knowledge, Laukamp did not collect antiquities, Herzsprung said. Live Science searched for other living relatives, checking for records in Sarasota County, and contacted a Laukamp family living in Florida, but they are unrelated. As far as we could tell, Ernest is correct, and Laukamp has no living relatives.
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Post by Admin on May 11, 2014 13:13:46 GMT
Two years after the academic world first learned of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” and less than one month after the note card-sized document was seemingly proved authentic, a Smithsonian documentary trumpeting the artifact will air tonight. “Damaged and fragile, a fragment of ancient papyrus has unleashed a new interpretation of a religious story we thought we knew,” Smithsonian says of the documentary. “In one of the most startling discoveries in recent memory, scholars confirm that a codex written in the ancient Coptic language refers to the wife of Jesus.” Karen King, the distinguished Harvard professor who first presented the papyrus fragment, intones into the cameras: “This new fragment actually has Jesus saying, ‘My wife.’” The documentary, which had been on hold for two years, got the green light after King published a blockbuster study in the Harvard Theological Review in April. “I’m hoping now that we can turn away from the question of forgery and talk much, much more about the historical significance of the fragment and precisely how it fit into the history of Christianity and questions about family and marriage and sexuality and Jesus,” King explained. She stated in the study: “I concluded this article by stating it would not be that last word on the subject.” Indeed, it would not be. Last week, an American researcher named Christian Askeland published findings that scholars say represent the most convincing evidence yet that the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ is a forgery. The conclusion hinges on two elements. First, an additional fragment provided to Harvard by its anonymous source was not only likely a forgery — but written by the same hand that had authored the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” Second, it was inked in a dialect that academics say didn’t exist at the time it was supposedly written. “To me, the odds that I’m going to be hit by lightning twice in the same day means [this fragment] is moving into the realm of the absurd,” Askeland, an assistant professor at Germany’s Protestant University Wuppertal, told The Washington Post. “And it goes on and it gets worse and worse from there.” A second fragment containing the gospel of John traveled with the Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment (GJW), and this Gospel of John fragment (GJohn) is clearly a forgery. Because both fragments share the same writing, the GJW must also be a forgery. I am grateful for the input that Alin Suciu, Mark Goodacre and many others have offered concerning the newly available Gospel of John fragment. I will use the present page to post photographs, a comparative transcription and relevant links. Please note, this will be a dynamic page, and I will no doubt update the transcriptions and main points. Over the course of the next week, I will write an article for the June 2014 Tyndale Bulletin discussing the paleography and text of this fragment. The following transcription represents in green the extant text of the forgery. Mark Goodacre offers an eloquent discussion of how this inauthenticates both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment which were created through the same scribal event (font). The fragment under discussion was carbon-dated twice by labs in Arizona and Massachusetts. The resultant rounded, callibrated two sigma dates are, respectively, 680–880 and 640–800 CE (fract.mod. results: 0.85680±0.0033 and 0.85030±0.00410). Along with the results for the GJW wife fragment, I have graphed the results using OxCal, here: The most recent discussion of codex Qau may be found in a recent award-winning contribution to the subject of the Coptic versions of John's gospel (esp. pp. 141–143, also 94–105, 195–208). Therein, one learns that the jar and linen cloth which protected this manuscript of John's gospel have recently been rediscovered in Cambridge. The manuscript was apparently buried in a cemetery used "in Predynastic, early Dynastic and Roman times" (Thompson, 1924, ix). According to the archeological publication, a group of coins was also found buried in a pot nearby, "No. 33 contained the papyrus of St. John's gospel (late fourth century), and 28, 29, contained the hoard of gold coins" (Brunton, Qau and Badari III, 26; cf. also 31). The coin hoard contains mint condition dated coins up to the year 361 CE (ibid., 29–30). The idea that an ancient scribe copied our current fragment from Qau is problematic, given the provenance. Whereas Qau had 33–37 lines per page, GJW-GJohn apparently would have had about 60 lines per page. In her primary GJW article (p. 154, fn. 107), Karen King has provided the following information: Unless compelling counter-arguments arise, both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment should now be considered forgeries beyond any doubt. Furthermore, the inauthenticity of the present fragment draws into question the broader group of documentation surrounding the Gospel of Jesus Wife which the owner provided to Karen King (contract of sale, typed note from Munro, handwritten note). This was already problematic, as the bill of sale is dated to 1999, three years before Grondin's GThomas PDF was available online.
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Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2014 15:25:01 GMT
Written on vellum — treated animal skin — it had been in the archives of the British Library for about 20 years, where it was put after the British Museum had originally bought it in 1847 from a dealer who said he had obtained it from the ancient St Macarius Monastery in Egypt. For the past 160 years, the document has been studied by a few scholars but has been considered pretty unremarkable. But then Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-Canadian film-maker, and Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies in Toronto, took a look. After six years of study, they are convinced they’ve uncovered a missing fifth gospel — to add to the four gospels, which tell the story of the life of Christ and are said to have been written by the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in the 1st century AD. Jacobovici decided to look more deeply into Joseph and Aseneth, when he compared their story with other Old Testament tales. In order to test the British Library documents, the researchers used hi-tech digital imaging to photograph them 13 times. They then got the manuscript translated for the first time from Syriac into English. There have been other, later, versions of the Joseph and Aseneth story, written in Latin and Greek, which have been preserved in monasteries. But by returning to the ancient Syriac, Wilson and Jacobovici say it was possible to read the text as it was intended and to decode the hidden story. Central to their claim is that Joseph was actually Jesus — and that Aseneth was actually Mary Magdalene. The new translation, according to Jacobovici and Wilson, records that the Pharaoh of Egypt officiated at the wedding between the couple, saying to Aseneth: ‘Blessed are you by the Lord God of Joseph, because he is the first-born of God, and you will be called the Daughter of God Most High and the bride of Joseph now and for ever.’ After a seven-day wedding feast, the text is said to read: ‘Joseph had intercourse with Aseneth . . . And Aseneth conceived from Joseph and gave birth to Manasseh and his brother Ephraim in Joseph’s house.’ And so, could centuries of Christian teaching be wrong and that Jesus was a husband and father? There are many, many more pieces of the jigsaw to be put together before this can be proved conclusively. The theory is based on the claims that this ‘lost’ gospel and the ‘encrypted’ story of Jesus’s marriage was the work of a group of persecuted Christians. It apparently disappeared from public view around 325 AD. It was at the time that the then Roman emperor Constantine — the first Christian emperor — was said to have ordered all other gospels to be destroyed, leaving only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to tell Jesus’s story because their version fitted with Constantine’s view of Christianity. ‘Since then, people have found bits and pieces of those other [destroyed] gospels,’ says Jacobovici. ‘They usually come up through the antiquities market and they’re attacked as forgeries. Or they’re just a few lines.’ But the British Library manuscript, he says, ‘is a full-blown gospel’. He and his colleague Wilson point to several clues that they say give away its true meaning. Principally, the story about Joseph has little connection with other Old Testament stories about a man who is best-known for the tale of his murderous brothers, which inspired the popular musical Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. What’s more, Joseph is often seen in early Syriac Christianity as a symbol of Jesus. The manuscript calls Joseph — like Jesus — the son of God. He and his colleague Wilson point to several clues that they say give away its true meaning. Principally, the story about Joseph has little connection with other Old Testament stories about a man who is best-known for the tale of his murderous brothers, which inspired the popular musical Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. What’s more, Joseph is often seen in early Syriac Christianity as a symbol of Jesus. The manuscript calls Joseph — like Jesus — the son of God. To emphasise his belief that Mary of Magdalene was Jesus’s wife, he describes her decision to visit his body on the Sunday after the Crucifixion. ‘The gospels told us why she went there — to wash and anoint his body. She’s just a follower and yet she’s going to unwrap his naked body? Women do not wash rabbis or male bodies. Only males do it — unless you are the man’s wife.’ Equally intriguingly, Jacobovici and Wilson claim there was a plot to kill Jesus by a love rival 13 years before the Crucifixion. They say that the manuscript says the Pharaoh’s son wanted to marry Aseneth and planned to kill Joseph and their children, but was foiled by Joseph’s brothers. Jacobovici identifies the man as Roman emperor Tiberius’s adopted son Germanicus, who was in Galilee when Jesus was there.
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Post by Admin on Jan 26, 2015 15:56:12 GMT
In 2008, scientists at Stanford University proposed that the presence of J1e throughout the Near East could be tied to the nomadic hunter-herders who have dotted the region for thousands of years. In the October 14 issue of the European Journal of Human Genetics, these same scientists – including 23andMe consultants Roy King and Peter Underhill and 23andMe scientist Brenna Henn – test this theory with a little help from the field of linguistics. The authors analyzed the DNA of more than 500 men from nearly 40 locations throughout the Near East. While many of these men belonged to haplogroup J1e, there were small genetic variations within J1e based on exactly where these men lived. For example, J1e samples from Turkey were slightly different from those in Oman. The boys on the right speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, Maaloula, Syria. When the authors examined differences among the ancient peoples of the Near East, they discovered that the languages spoken in different parts of the region were quite distinct. Until the Arabic swept across the Near East more than 1,000 years ago, there were dozens of languages spoken in the region: Aramaic in Syria, Babylonian in Iraq, and Canaanite from Lebanon to Jordan. The majority of these tongues are now extinct, but all belong to the same Semitic language family, to which Hebrew and Arabic also belong. The authors reasoned that the history of these ancient languages may be tied to that of the people who spoke them. The history of these ancient people could be deciphered further by examining their genetic ancestry via paternal haplogroup J1e. The researchers’ combined analysis of the J1e types and the ancient Semitic languages revealed some startling results. The authors found that J1e arose in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), expanding southward toward Arabia 10,000 years ago. Limited archaeological evidence supports such an expansion, when hunter-gatherer groups, using bow-and-arrow technology and with the help of domesticated dogs, headed south into the heart of the Near East. Soon after they began expanding, the hunter-gatherers took up herding, domesticating animals like cattle and goats. The linguistic evidence lends additional support. The common ancestor of all Semitic languages, called proto-Semitic, originated about 7,500 years ago, just as J1e was expanding. More importantly, the spread of proto-Semitic coincides with the spread of hunter-herders across the Near East. So what does all this mean? The expansion of haplogroup J1e is closely tied to the expansion of the Semitic languages. And they are both linked to the expansion of hunter-herders, who journeyed from Anatolia southward into Arabia thousands of years ago. We now know just a little bit more about the ancient history of this fascinating region.
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Post by Admin on Dec 28, 2015 7:14:22 GMT
From the first time Christian children settle into Sunday school classrooms, an image of Jesus Christ is etched into their minds. In North America he is most often depicted as being taller than his disciples, lean, with long, flowing, light brown hair, fair skin and light-colored eyes. Familiar though this image may be, it is inherently flawed. A person with these features and physical bearing would have looked very different from everyone else in the region where Jesus lived and ministered. Surely the authors of the Bible would have mentioned so stark a contrast. On the contrary, according to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion, Judas Iscariot had to indicate to the soldiers whom Jesus was because they could not tell him apart from his disciples. Further clouding the question of what Jesus looked like is the simple fact that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described, nor have any drawings of him ever been uncovered. There is the additional problem of having neither a skeleton nor other bodily remains to probe for DNA. In the absence of evidence, our images of Jesus have been left to the imagination of artists. The influences of the artists' cultures and traditions can be profound, observes Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. "While Western imagery is dominant, in other parts of the world he is often shown as black, Arab or Hispanic." And so the fundamental question remains: What did Jesus look like? An answer has emerged from an exciting new field of science: forensic anthropology. Using methods similar to those police have developed to solve crimes, British scientists, assisted by Israeli archeologists, have re-created what they believe is the most accurate image of the most famous face in human history. Matthew's description of the events in Gethsemane offers an obvious clue to the face of Jesus. It is clear that his features were typical of Galilean Semites of his era. And so the first step for Neave and his research team was to acquire skulls from near Jerusalem, the region where Jesus lived and preached. Semite skulls of this type had previously been found by Israeli archeology experts, who shared them with Neave. With three well-preserved specimens from the time of Jesus in hand, Neave used computerized tomography to create X-ray "slices" of the skulls, thus revealing minute details about each one's structure. Special computer programs then evaluated reams of information about known measurements of the thickness of soft tissue at key areas on human faces. This made it possible to re-create the muscles and skin overlying a representative Semite skull. For those accustomed to traditional Sunday school portraits of Jesus, the sculpture of the dark and swarthy Middle Eastern man that emerges from Neave's laboratory is a reminder of the roots of their faith. "The fact that he probably looked a great deal more like a darker-skinned Semite than westerners are used to seeing him pictured is a reminder of his universality," says Charles D. Hackett, director of Episcopal studies at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. "And [it is] a reminder of our tendency to sinfully appropriate him in the service of our cultural values." Neave emphasizes that his re-creation is simply that of an adult man who lived in the same place and at the same time as Jesus.
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