Regarding the recent “early-books-of-Christianity-discovered-by-a-bedouin-scam” reported here and elsewhere over the past week or so, information provided by Jim Davila’s always sensible and reliable Paleojudaica.com should put the whole thing to bed once and for all.
Ah, the Daily Mail. UFOs, celebrity gossip, and the earliest texts of Christianity. Photo: David Elkington/Rex Features (whatever that is)
Philip Davies should know better.
Margaret Baker should get her head out of the clouds.
The Director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, Ziad Al-Saad, should investigate an unprovenanced discovery on the antiquities market more thoroughly before he makes muscular official statements to the press about “treasures” and make claims for repatriation.
And David Elkington, whoever you are, should never try to pull a stunt like this again.
David Elkington is the author of “In the Name of the Gods” a book on “the resonance and acoustical origins of religion”.
He trained as an artist at the Bath Academy of Art “where an interest in the relationship between Christian myth and sacred sites was fuelled”. The publicity blurp for this opus “‘In the Name of the Gods”‘ states that he “walked through Europe and the Middle East on a quest to understand and appreciate the mind of Ancient Man and his relationship with particular sites upon the Earth. For 20 years David has been led on a revelatory trail through world mythology, linguistics and philology into geophysics, architecture, acoustics, music, neuro-physiology, theology and still further into the all-encompassing, resonant atmosphere of the planet. As his research continued, surprising results emerged. For several years, David has been working with Dr Keith Hearne, the ‘father of lucid dream research’, on a new area of psychology – Geolinguistics – which sees the development of language as a direct result of the Earth’s physical environment.”
In other words, he is just the man you want involved in the ideological minefield of biblical archaeology! Scientific rigour guaranteed!
By: Birgit Schoer on April 1, 2011
at 11:11 am
Is that some kind of April Fool’s testimonial? Read the report I link to… the inscription was clumsily copied from a tomb inscription in the Amman Museum. Elkington is either a dupe or a knave. Let’s give his acoustical theories the benefit of the doubt and assume his is just a dupe in this fake-for-money scheme…
By: Neil Silberman on April 1, 2011
at 11:23 am
[...] an Israeli Bedouin farmer, Hassan Saeeda.” As reported in a number of sources (including here), these are crude forgeries, whose symbols are fanciful and whose text clumsily and ignorantly [...]
By: Disgraceful! « Searching for Authenticity on April 20, 2011
at 9:28 am