The First Portrait of Jesus?

Christian readers of my blog are not complaining, but some of them have noted that Jewish and Muslim features are more common as we count down to  publication of Three Testaments, so, it being Easter and all, let me look at a possible phenomenon of special interest to Christians. It seems that every year around Easter the secular news magazines, especially Time and Newsweek, vie with each other for some sensational “revelation” about Jesus. In the twentieth century, much of that was based on scrolls, books and artefacts found in Egypt and the southern or Judean parts of Israel. Such finds are more likely to come from elsewhere in the twenty first century.

In our Book One (Torah), Marc Brettler makes the point that “We have a number of texts from Mesopotamia – from both Assyria (northern Mesopotamia) and Babylon (southern Mesopotamia).  Israel and Judah were often vassals of one or the other of these prestigious civilizations, and elites would have known, and been influenced by its literature.  In addition, the Judeans spent part of the sixth century in exile in Babylon, where many came into direct contact with Babylonian literature and traditions.  Surprisingly, given the tradition of Israel having been enslaved for many years in Egypt early in its history, the influence of Egyptian literature is much less evident.”

Likewise in Book Two we adduce evidence from Chapter Seven of Mark’s Gospel and elsewhere, that in addition to travels in Israel and possibly Egypt, Jesus did journey through areas now known as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, if not further. In Book Three we acknowledge how Islam began in Mecca and Medina, but how its centre of activity soon moves to Baghdad and Damascus, again in the areas north and east of Israel. On these bases, I predicted that future discoveries of interest to the extended family of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar are more likely to come from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan than the deserts south of Jerusalem and in Egypt. Well, the book is not even out yet and guess what?

Seventy small “books” were purportedly found five years ago by Bedouin tribesmen among the nomadic Arabs in Northern Jordan, and only now revealed after some analysis at British universities. The several “pages” of each book are made of lead. National Geographic says this may have been when writing was switching from scrolls to book style, and before materials were decided upon. Most of these books were bound and sealed with coils of wire, front and back.  

As we know, Jewish Christians in the early church were among the first to experiment with book style, and these metal books were purportedly found in a cave in an area of northern Jordan where Christians hid for a couple years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. A flash flood in 2005 revealed two niches which had been disguised by mud in the cave wall. Under each lid, decorated with religious symbolism, there was a stack of these “codices,” as scholars call such books. The contents appear to be Christian slogans and teachings, written in Hebrew and in code, much like the Book of Revelation.

The cover of one shows a face above the title, “The Saviour of Israel,” now claimed to be by far the earliest portrait of Jesus, crown of thorns and all, said to be before 70 CE, within the lifetime of those who knew him. Is this find a hoax, like the “discovery” of the burial bone box of James a few years ago, or is it genuine?  At first blush, the very idea of sacred text on such metal plates seems absurd, but a little research tells a different story. I found five examples:

·                     The engraved gold plate attached to the front of the head dress of the Jewish high priest dates to sometime well before 1000 BCE. In Exodus 28:36, Moses was commanded to “make a plate of pure gold, and engrave upon it as an engraved seal, ‘Holy to the Lord.’”

·                      Among the artifacts discovered in a 1970s excavation of tombs from the First Temple era at Ketef Hinnon (near Jerusalem) were two small silver plates dating to the seventh century BCE, containing the words of priestly benedictions from Numbers 6:24—26, regarded as the oldest portions of biblical text ever found.   

·                     In 161 BC, Judas Maccabaeus concluded a treaty with the Romans, which Josephus says was engraved by the Jews on bronze tablets and kept in Jerusalem as a record.  When Simon was proclaimed by the Jews as both high priest and prince some twenty years later, his responsibilities were exhibited on bronze tablets and set up in the temple in a conspicuous place to support his authority.  

·                     The best known example of Hebrew writing on metal plates is the Copper Scroll (3Q15) among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran from the first century CE, perhaps contemporary with the codices in question, likewise deliberately hidden. 

·                     Some of the early analysis suggest that the recently “discovered” codices are not of early Christian origin, but from the third century, associated with the beginnings of Cabala writings. As a matter of fact, the Hebrew ritual magic text Sefer ha-Razim of the late third century CE does contain several references to writing on metal plates or amulets.

This cursory research suggests that the Jews had a long history of producing sacred texts on metal plates as amulets, inscriptions and literary documents. If any of you would like to see more on this, you might like to google one of the British press articles using the words “Hidden Cave First Portrait Daily News.” The British and German media have been engaged on this through April. It would be ironic if, having been burned by one hoax after another, Time and Newsweek took a pass on a find which, if genuine, would rank with the Dead Sea Scrolls. If it does not pan out, I stick with my prediction in Three Testaments that the north of Israel and Jordan and the south of Lebanon and Syria as well as Iraq may produce the next generation of textual discoveries.

Meanwhile I hope the above image (of Jesus?) on one lead book cover will transport well on the internet, as Jewish and Muslim colleagues join me in wishing our Christian friends Happy Easter.

As both chapter author and volume editor of Three Testaments I am feeling a certain weight of responsibility to check facts right now, and do what is called “due diligence” at a couple levels at least. So last month in this blog space I put out a call for Islamic scholars and others to verify or correct a report given to me about the uniqueness of the last two chapters of the Quran and their relationship to a central thesis of the book. No need to go into detail again, but let me thank you for the many responses which prevented me from letting a flagrant error stand.

Perhaps related to that call for help, other things brewing in the Muslim side of our team then immediately tumbled forth as well. Firstly, Kazi Publications, the parent company that owns the rights to The Sublime Quran, has decided to bring out a revised edition to suit our typesetting and other needs. It will “premiere” in this book.

Secondly, Kazi has joined our negotiations with leading publishers as a proposed partner.

Thirdly, America’s famous Islamic calligrapher, Mohamed Zakariya, was invited by his friend, Amir Hussain, to allow us use images from his work as chapter headings for the Book Three section. He agreed and has joined our team. His agent, Suleyman Cooke is generously assisting us in accessing these works from their repository in the Linearis Institute. For those who are unfamiliar with this art form, Zakariya is the creator of the Eid stamp design for the US Postal Service, gifts for president Obama for presentation to visiting Islamic heads-of-state, and artworks now at the Smithsonian, the Vatican and elsewhere.

Fourthly, while an announcement would be slightly premature, we are now confident of a General Foreword from a Muslim figure of a certain stature that will assist in marketing the book.

Laleh Bakhtiar and Nevin Reda, the Islamic scholars who are contributing to the compendium, have always held up their end, but until recently the support from online collaborators and the responses from the surrounding community had been mainly Jewish and Christian in reference to artwork, publishing options and other matters. The work has come entirely into balance at this point and we are less than a year from lift-off.

Thank you to our Muslim friends and colleagues for this increasing level of engagement and support.

A few months ago I needed help to identify a linguistic marker in the Hebrew Torah and Jewish colleagues came to my rescue. None of our online colleagues knew the answer but they knew scholars who did, and I got input from all over the world. This time it is a test for Muslims who are collaborating with us. (My question may seem obtuse to others, but it will make sense when the book is finally in your hands.)

To footnote something in my final commentary chapter, I have a question about the “script” of Chapters 113 and 114 of the Quran. By script, perhaps I mean calligraphy.  Here is what I wrote so far in the commentary, and then my question.

What I am asking about, is whether the two gems of the Muawizatayn were originally or sometime written in a different calligraphy from the rest of the Quran, a practice that one Muslim colleague tells me continues today, especially among the Shia of Iran. That is the question. I am told that from earliest times, with little comment as to the roots of the practice, Chapters 113 and 114, the Muawizatayn, were written not in Arabic script but in Persian calligraphs using Persian Taliq script or Persian Nastaliq script. Even after Persians adopted the Arabic script, these verses continued to be written in Persian script and are occasionally written in Persian Shekasteh script like شکسته  still today. Could anyone verify that, and are there scholarly references regarding a calligraphy unique to these verses?

If you wish, you may reply directly to me at bbrown17@cogeco.ca or post a comment here.

 (It had been my intention to open this blog entry with examples of art as described in what follows, but they refuse to be edited in. The words are from the Illustrations page in the book, and under Acknowledgments we will express gratitude to Paul and Roy Kligfield, executors of their fathers estate, for the magnificent gift which is so appropriate to our project.)

  In the appearance of art from the Counsel Collection in Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran, the late publisher, art collector and philanthropist, Irving Kligfield, has bequeathed a treasure to us all. This collection of religious artwork from the Middle East, includes Jewish, Christian, Muslim and contextual materials appropriate for our study. The compilation of a lifetime, what became registered as the Counsel Collection has never been shared with the public except for a short-lived exposition in The Family Bible Encyclopedia published by Curtis Books in 1972, shortly before Curtis Publishing disappeared, along with the Saturday Evening Post. 

That twenty two volume encyclopedic work was intended to popularize the scholarly advances of Biblical studies in the previous hundred years, and included artistic material drawn primarily from two sources: the New York Public Library and the Counsel Collection, which, as the name indicates, was a legal repository. With the exceptions of scriptural charts, geographic maps and Islamic calligraphy, the extensive art exhibited in Three Testaments is limited to artworks verified by the counsel as being in the public domain, plus works both purchased and commissioned by Kligfield, for which the copyright resides in the name of the Counsel Collection.

Kligfield began this particular collection by acquiring woodcuts, etchings and metal engravings in the public domain from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These evocative black and white illustrations by Giovanni Battista Ferrari, William Blake, Horace Castelli, W. J. Linton, Gustav Doré and others include engravings associated with the invention of the printing press and other traditional pieces before the advent of photography and color reproduction. This initial collection was then augmented by an extensive series of scenes described in historical documents, which Kligfield commissioned various artists to produce in this same ancient and redolent style. The engravings were finally supplemented by selected scenes in drawings and photographs taken by a team he sponsored on site in the Middle East over a three year period. In particular, we exhibit one drawing in situ which illustrates a stele among the current ruins of Persepolis depicting the throne of Cyrus under the Zoroastrian symbol better than any photograph could portray. 

The art in the front matter of this volume and in Book One displays contextual materials and Torah related works. The art in Book Two features graphic scenes from the life of Jesus, many never before viewed except in the instance described above. Book Three contains a remarkable series of photos and drawings of ancient tombs of patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel in traditional sites accessible to visitors today, all of which have been maintained through the centuries by Muslim trusts and boards of trustee. The seemingly ironic reasons for their devoted service to this work are described at greater length in that part of the volume, an eye opener in respect to the intertwined relationships within the extended family of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah. While historical details of a few of these scenes may be open to question, their ethos reflects a traditional religiosity that may be closer to the spiritual animus of the ancient world than modern analysis and, particularly in the case of the traditional tombs, convey insights that lie behind the texts which are the subject of this entire exercise.

Both Christians and Jews in our online community sometimes seem more interested in the Quran than in each other’s Scriptures, with which we are so familiar. But Muslims have also recently been enthralled by positive insights into the Quran by Jewish and Christian commentators of humility and good will.

It that regard, in a forthcoming chapter in Three Testaments I suggest that just as Russian and American space crews can see outlines of Roman towns that British farmers cannot recognize under their feet, Jewish and Christian observers may be able to offer helpful views of the Quran that Muslims will appreciate for the first time.  After all, it was Muslim folk who stumbled over the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hamadi Library that have so revolutionized biblical studies for Jews and Christians.

As a Christian, I am indeed humbled to hear how some of my observations in Forensic Scriptures have been featured at recent conferences of Islamic scholars. A current YouTube item by Jewish agnostic Lesley Hazelton is similar to that Three Testaments chapter about British farms as viewed by Russians and Americans from space, or the view of the Quran by Christians and Jews.

A psychologist by training and Middle East reporter by experience, British-born Lesley Hazleton has spent the last ten years exploring the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion, past and present, intersect. She lived and worked in Jerusalem for thirteen years — a city where politics and religion are at their most incendiary — then moved to New York. She went to Seattle to get her pilot’s license in 1992, saw the perfect houseboat, and stayed. Her most recent book, After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN-USA nonfiction award.

Muslim collaborators on the Three Testament project have been circulating the Hazelton video among themselves, and have suggested that Jewish and Christian colleagues might like to see it – which should be possible with a simple click on the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7yaDlZfqrc

More than half of the book, Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran, is actually made up of those three Scriptures. In addition, there are six commentators who will have written something over 30,000 words, some of which I have shared on this blog site, and other samples are about ready for you to see. For the last few months I have been blogging about the current cultural context: aborted book burnings, Ground Zero projects, and the exhibition of scriptural texts at the New York Public Library. I mentioned that the first drafts of my contextual contributions are all complete and folks have emailed to request a sneak peek, since I have shared nothing of my own for about a year. Accordingly, to give you all a feel for how it turns out, this month I share a page from the epilogue with which the work concludes – about as much as anyone wants to read in a blog entry.

(From the Epilogue)

Oceans, Separate but Connected

We avoided any seeming syncretism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in this book by using the format of Parts One, Two and Three to appreciate both the links and the differences between these three related religions. We might now finally welcome some greater understanding of what they share with each other and with many others.

For example, the three are united in monotheism and in opposition to dualism, which gets a bad reputation in this book. Some may contend that Zoroastrianism did not “descend into dualism,” but rather “developed into balance,” suggesting that there is no difference between right and wrong, only “what is” or “reality,” but this is not what Jews, Christians and Muslims believe, and it was not what Zoroaster himself believed.  

Secondly, Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that their one God is both Creator and Redeemer. Since Second Isaiah, Jews have seen God specifically as Redeemer, Christians see the redemptive action of God in Jesus Christ, and in the Quran the redemption motif appears consistently in the “Basmala phrase,” which recurs in 113 of 114 chapters as “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, (b-ismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīmi), recited also in the daily prayers of Muslims.

Thirdly, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are united in acceptance and promotion of the seminal Zoroastrian concept that time is linear, rather than cyclical or meandering, and that it progresses toward a purpose or goal in paradise, the “kingdom,” city or community of God.

This is the origin of the western view of progress which eluded the orient until communism (with its Judeo-Christian overview) grafted it onto Chinese, Korean and other political and economic systems and Japan adopted a western constitutional and ideological frame of reference.

 The contextual commentaries included in this book premise that not only is Zoroastrianism a key link between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but that Zoroastrianism also links Western Monotheism with the main religions of the orient: Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain. Simply put, out of his revelatory experience, Zoroaster took the Aryan “aboriginal” understanding of the divine, as Brahmanic tradition had already begun to refine it, and made it personal in ways that could later be applied to the spectrum of religious communities within a thousand miles of Persian Bactria over the next hundred years. This phenomenon is now known as the Axial Age. Since his dates have recently been established as 628 – 558 BCE, we can also assume that Zoroaster also had personal experience, direct or indirect, with established monotheistic Judaism, making it the centrepiece of his reforms.

As Jews, Christians and Muslims learn from each other, they may also learn from their more distant cousins in the rich religious mosaic of our emerging world culture. Some of those, like Hinduism, carry forward the religious concepts that formed the context of Zoroaster’s reforms. Others, like Buddhism, were regional embodiments of those reforms. Accordingly, properly understood, religion may now be seen as one vast system of oceans around the world, each with different currents but all connected.

The illustrations for Three Testaments are mainly black and white “wood-cut” engravings of biblical material not covered in the Torah text, maps related to the context of Jesus’ ministry, and Islamic calligraphy, mostly positioned on the usual blank “verso” (left) pages at the end of chapters, or on the blank partial pages on the “recto” side. They will add charm as well as information to this volume.

In August and September I blogged some thoughts about the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy and the aborted threat to burn the Quran to reflect on the timeliness of our book, since timing is to publishing what location is to real estate. In reply, I heard from some of you about the current exhibition at the New York Public Library, illustrating our society’s current fascination with the texts about which we are writing. Jennifer Palin is a minister of my denomination in Toronto, and Ward Kaiser, the author who introduced the Peters Projection World Map to North America in A New View of the World, loves the New York scene. I thank them both for forwarding the information I want to share this month.  None of these particular images will appear in Three Testaments, but they testify to the importance of such art in our production, and the New York Public Library is also supplying the illustrations for our text. If the following excerp from a New York Times review intrigues you, you might want to visit the New York Public Library site (highlighted below) where you can scroll down to click on the article and see the stunning illustrations currently on exhibit.  I encourage you to do so. I hope to visit this exhibition at the library myself after Christmas when I am in New York to complete the permissions for illustrations in our book. Otherwise, negotiations with prospective publishers continues, as does the work of our various contributors.

I have just finished the first draft of my parts of Three Testaments – the prologue, twelve little chapters of Middle East contextual commentary (might yet appear as three essays) and epilogue.

Out east, Ellen Frankel finished her Preface to the Torah a couple months ago and Marc Brettler will complete his highly anticipated Introduction to the Torah in October.

In Toronto, David Bruce has just completed a solid initial draft of his Introduction to the Gospel and Nevin Reda is about to begin her Introduction to the Quran.

In Chicago, Henry Carrigan is now about to start work on his Preface to the Gospel and Laleh Bakhtiar’s Preface to the Quran will follow right on the heels of Nevin Reda’s work.

If you think this represents a picking up of the pace, you are right. Illustrations and other matters remain, but the next step is negotiations with publishers. Meanwhile everything to do with Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations has become hot: mosques, aborted book burnings, Middle East Peace negotiations, etc.

So in case our publisher wants to get this out by September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 tragic events in America, we hope to have the basic text ready by the end of this year. That  is about six months ahead of the previously proposed date for completion of the writing. We may be already too late to see publication by next September, but just in case someone wants a positive alternative to the aborted burning of the Quran on the ninth anniversary, we will offer this engaging of the Quran as a token of integration of Muslims into American life for possible publication and release on the tenth anniversary.

Hurray for Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center for his insightful blog on CNN, in which he led the Jewish support for the “Mosque” near Ground Zero. He wrote, “The Shalom Center, in consultation with dozens of rabbis and other Jewish leaders of a very wide spectrum of Jewish life, has issued a statement supporting Cordoba’s plans as an affirmation of the deepest commitments of Islam to live in peace and as a direct rebuke to the 9/11 terrorists who justified their murders in the name of Islam.” His point was sharpest when he connected with the history of prohibitions against Jews building synagogues at “sensitive” sites.

Arthur is part of this Three Testaments online community, as is Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, her partner in leadership of the Cordoba Institute. Arthur led our Shabbat service and contributed in other ways to our conference last year in New York, and Daisy assisted us in organizing the conference, both helping to insure fulsome Jewish and Muslim participation in an event which took place in a Christian Church.

The book, Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran may cause a similar storm in some quarters. I can imagine the review we will get from Pastor Terry Jones of the ironically named “Dove World Outreach Centre,” where they plan to burn Qurans on September 11 of this year. But our book is intended to engage these three communities and others in the pursuit of understanding, and the alternative is to turn everything over to the extremists on both sides.

Perhaps like President Obama, not all the members of this online community will agree with the wisdom of building the Islamic center near Ground Zero at this time, but I pause to salute the leadership, courage and intensions of people like Daisy and Arthur in our midst, and to wish them well as the work continues on our book. Like them, we do not intend to provoke controversy, but it may come and we should be wisely sensitive, going forward without compromise.

It took us a year to get this project up and running, and to complete Part One, The Torah. My four chapters of commentary got finished with help from several collaborators, the Jewish Publication Society has completed the license agreement for the copyright Torah material, you have seen the excellent Preface by Ellen Frankel, and Marc Brettler’s Introduction is in the works independently. The rest of us move on in year two to Part Two, The Gospel, and beyond.

My four Gospel chapters for Part Two are actually complete in draft form, the lawyer for the National Council of Churches has put the NRSV license agreement into place, and contributing writers are now at work. The person doing the heavy lifting this summer is David Bruce, who is writing the Introduction to the Gospel.  David is the author of the four volume Jesus 24/7 series, an appropriate writer for us since he brings both a proper respect for those branches of the family from whom Christians are learning, and a focus on Jesus as the core of the Christian message. 

This is essential, but needs to be explained. For Jews, the Hebrew community is the essence, a people “chosen” for revelation, for suffering, for holiness, for covenant, and for service; their Scripture cannot be understood apart from the community which created it.  For Muslims it is simply the opposite; their community cannot be understood apart from their Scripture because the Quran created the community and its religion. For Christians there is another dynamic entirely. Jesus is to Christians what the community is to Jews, and what the Quran is to Muslims. How this is to be understood intellectually is the challenge to which David is addressing himself.

One area worthy of examination is the attention to be given to a shadowy “document” called “Q,” a document that has never been found, but which may have been copied as a source by both Matthew and Luke in a manner similar to the use they both made of Mark’s Gospel. We initially thought of printing Q separately, reflecting the view that Q may have been the first and oldest Gospel prior to its absorption into the others. Q, as identified from the two gospels who share this block of materials, is complementary to Mark. Q emphasizes the salvation of the world and Mark has a focus on personal salvation. They are held in creative tension and amplified by both Matthew and Luke. Rather than simply offset Q and confuse the usual chapter and verse numbering system, we now plan to print Q in bold and to italicize Mark right in the texts of Matthew and Luke.  From a draft of notes on that subject, let me give you a sample of how David plans to address this issue and its potential insight into the creation of the Christian Scriptures as we know them:

Brown is certainly not alone in his support of this “two-document” hypothesis of how Mark and Q were combined in Matthew and Luke; it is held in some form by a majority of professors in major Protestant and Catholic seminaries. Even if we cannot be absolutely sure that Q was a single document, or that we know its full extent, or that Q was possibly produced by a single female editor from the household of James (as Brown argues), simply admitting that we can and should use this kind of source-criticism to further our understanding makes two things abundantly clear for scholars of the Christians Scriptures. First, all four of the canonical Gospels are undoubtedly indebted to prior oral and written collections of material. Second, once documents such as Mark and maybe even the lost Q take shape, they become streams of tradition in themselves. Once the four Gospels that we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John began circulating widely, they became the standard against which all other collections of material were judged. For most Christians, considerations like these give us a sense of how the Spirit of God was working in the first decades after Jesus, and does not pose any threat to Christian faith, so long as we assume that what survived, taken together, gives us reliable access to the meaning of Jesus’ life and ministry.

The entire body of Christian Scriptures will be presented in this volume in the New Revised Standard Version, except for The Book of Revelation, which will appear in the King James Version. This novel approach will help point to an important linkage that has not often been highlighted among Christians as yet, though it is widely appreciated in the Muslim world. The Old English and the imagery of the King James Version, together with certain other versions in other languages, is said to more accurately capture the apocalyptic mood for what comes next in the Quran, the final portion of this trilogy or family of Scriptures. 

These matters will become clearer as we work on the material together.  Thank you to all those, mainly in the Jewish community, who contributed directly to Part One. Part Two should come together in the next six months, led by Christian scholars with the rest of us looking on. Muslim friends, your turn is coming early in 2011, but Muslim scholars are getting organized meanwhile, and considering the formats established by our Jewish colleagues in particular. I have just had the pleasure of a visit in Niagara Falls from our respected Mawlana, Siddiq Nasir, from Trinidad, whose helpful advice and guidance I appreciate as I personally begin a draft of the chapters for Part Three.