The first "Ask a Prof"
topic was introduced by Dr. Craig Evans.
The
Gabriel Stone and Jesus
By Craig Evans |
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In the last year a stone with 87 lines of Hebrew inked on it
has generated some excitement and, of course, some hype. The
text is called “Gabriel’s Vision.”
Ada Yardeni, a respected epigrapher, dates the stone and its
Hebrew script to the late first century B.C. or early first
century A.D. She has stated that if this text “were written
on leather (and smaller) I would say it was another Dead Sea
Scroll fragment.”1
Her initial transcription and translation make it very clear
that this text is important and deserves careful study.
Yardeni’s interpretation is cautious. She describes the text
as a vision, a string of prophecies, evidently by someone
named Gabriel, addressed to someone in the second person.
Several passages of Scripture are alluded to or quoted in
part. The focus of the vision seems to be Davidic and may be
messianic.
Contrasting Yardeni’s cautious interpretation is Israel
Knohl’s daring thesis that the Gabriel vision foretells the
appearance of a suffering Messiah son of Joseph, a concept
that served as a sort of template for Jesus. After all,
Jesus was a “son of Joseph” (Luke 4:22; John 6:42), so
surely he understood himself in this light. According to
Knohl, this explains why Jesus saw himself as a messiah who
would suffer and not as a conquering Messiah son of David.2
This seems to me a rather shaky line of reasoning.
Knohl has done a great deal of research into the tradition
of the suffering Messiah son of Joseph, but is this messiah
even present in the Gabriel text? That is far from certain.
Neither “Joseph” nor “son of Joseph” appear in the surviving
text, and it makes no mention of a suffering figure.
Even if we agree with Knohl’s interpretation of line 80 (“In
three days, live, I, Gabriel, command you”) as referring to
resurrection, who is being resurrected? The text says it is
the “prince of princes”; there is nothing here about a
Messiah son of Joseph. One should bear in mind that Knohl’s
reconstructions and interpretation lend significant support
to the thesis of his book The Messiah before Jesus,3
a thesis that has not escaped serious criticism.4
1 A. Yardeni, “A New Dead Sea Scroll
in Stone?” Biblical Archaeology Review 34/1 (2008) 60–61
(quotation from p. 60).
2 Israel Knohl, “The Messiah Son
of Joseph: ‘Gabriel’s Revelation’ and the Birth of a New
Messianic Model,” Biblical Archaeology Review 34/5 (2008)
58–62, 78.
3 Israel Knohl, The Messiah
before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls
(University of California Press, 2000).
4 See John J. Collins, “A Messiah
before Jesus?” in J. Collins and C. Evans (eds.), Christian
Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Baker Academic, 2006)
15–35.
And what can all this tell us about Jesus’ own
self-understanding as messiah? Very little, it seems to me.
In all probability the expression “in three days, live”
alludes to Hosea 6:2, where the prophet assures the
beleaguered nation “on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.” This passage later came to be
understood as a reference to the day of resurrection. I
believe Jesus also alluded to this passage from Hosea when
he spoke of being raised up “on the third day” (Matt 16:21;
Luke 9:22). It is indeed interesting that both Jesus and the
author of the Gabriel text used similar prophetic language,
perhaps referring to resurrection, but I see no reason to
link Jesus with the Messiah son of Joseph or the Gabriel
text on this basis.
No doubt this interesting debate will continue. The Gabriel
text may turn out to be truly significant and of great
interest to Jews and Christians alike. It could certainly
contribute to our understanding of early Judaism and
extra-Biblical prophetic texts around the turn of the era.
But we scholars owe it to ourselves and to the public to
make sure that careful study of the stone and its properties
is undertaken before we start propounding theories that may
go well beyond the evidence—particularly in connection to
Biblical figures. Priority should be given to further
analysis of the text, including the possibility of
recovering words and letters no longer visible to the naked
eye, locating the site from which it was taken (if
possible), and study of the site itself. Perhaps after
further study we will be better able to understand the
origins and context of this and other fascinating artifacts—without
resorting to sensational scholarship.
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