Massive Burial Ground Unearthed at Medieval Monastery in Sudan

Four cemeteries, from which at least 123 individuals have been excavated so far, have been unearthed near the remains of a medieval Christian monastery in Sudan. A few of the burials contained individuals buried in unusual ways.

The cemeteries and remains, which have been excavated over the past two years, are located at a monastery called al-Ghazali near the Nile River. The people who were buried there lived about 1,000 years ago, during a time when a series of Christian kingdoms flourished in the area, according to Robert Stark, a doctoral student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who presented the findings this month in Toronto at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies.

The discoveries include well-preserved burial shrouds that in a few instances still cover the skulls of the deceased, Stark said. The archaeologists also found tombstones with engravings of prayers that were written in Greek or Coptic (an Egyptian language that uses the Greek alphabet). In one cemetery, some people were buried in mysterious ways: For example, two individuals were found with post-mortem cut marks incised in their bones.

Stark is part of an archaeological expedition of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, at the University of Warsaw, which is excavating al-Ghazali.

Massive burial ground

An archaeologist named Peter Shinnie first excavated the cemeteries at al-Ghazali in the 1950s, Stark said. While Shinnie believed al-Ghazali held more than 1,000 burials, he uncovered just a few during the course of his fieldwork. The Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology is the first organization to conduct large-scale excavations at al-Ghazali's cemeteries, he added.

An overhead view of cemetery two, which is located beside the Christian monastery, at al-Ghazali in Sudan.

One of the cemeteries consists almost entirely of adult males and was probably used by the monks from the monastery, Stark said. Two cemeteries contain a wider mix of individuals and appear to have been used by people who lived in nearby settlements. The fourth cemetery was discovered recently by archaeologists and contains only 15 burials — and some of those have features that are unusual.

In all four of the cemeteries the remains of stone structures were found on the surface, above the burials, Stark said, adding that some of these structures have the remains of tombstones.

The writing on the tombstones tended to follow a particular format. "To make it simple. The writing on tombstones can be divided into two parts," Artur Obluski, the director of the excavations at al-Ghazali, told Live Science in an email.

The first part consisted of prayers, which included "a prayer for the soul of the deceased, a prayer to the Providence of God, the God himself often described as merciful," Obluski said. These prayers ask "that the soul will be taken care of and can rest on the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or in the world of the Living."

The second part of the tombstone engravings "contains some individual information of the deceased: his name, age at the time of death, sometimes titles he bore during his life time — so-called cursus honorum — and professions he performed," said Obluski.

Read more at Discovery News

Bible Was Written Earlier, Ancient Notes Suggest

Many of the earliest texts of the Bible were written by at least 600 B.C. in the ancient Kingdom of Judah, located in what is now the Southern Levant, new high tech research on correspondence from the period suggests.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, help resolve a longstanding debate over whether the first major phase of biblical text compilation took place before or after the destruction of Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem, in 586 B.C.

The new research concludes that early sacred texts of the Torah, known in part to Christians as the Old Testament, were written shortly before that fateful event, when Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and forcibly exiled the people of Judah.

“Several (biblical) texts refer to events which best fit the reality in the years just before the fall of the Kingdom of Judah,” senior author Israel Finkelstein, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, told Discovery News.

For the study, Finkelstein, lead author Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and their team used novel image processing and computer analysis to investigate 16 inscriptions from the desert fortress of Arad, located west of the Dead Sea. The inscriptions, which are correspondence concerning military matters, date to 600 B.C. and were made by putting ink script on ceramic shards.

“This was a common practice at the time,” Finkelstein explained. “We know this from other Judahite forts, both in the Negev (the south) and the Shephelah (the west). Most of the inscriptions deal with mundane issues, such as orders to send commodities to or with army units.”

In this case, the inscribed shards -- known as ostraca -- contain military commands regarding the movement of troops and provision of wine, oil and flour among the men. One mentions “the king of Judah” and another “the house of YHWH,” in reference to the Temple in Jerusalem.

Faigenbaum-Golovin and colleagues Arie Shaus and Barak Sober focused their analysis on who wrote the correspondence. They determined that six individuals of varying military ranks created the ostraca.

The discovery provides evidence that literacy was widespread at the time, at least in religious and military circles. Evidence for a similar level of literary reemerges only in 200 B.C., narrowing the window of time that the earliest writings of the Bible likely happened. The writings include parts of Genesis and Deuteronomy, as well as the Books of Isaiah, Amos and Hosea.

In terms of who wrote these earliest biblical works, Finkelstein said, “The first Judahite biblical texts were most probably put in writing in Jerusalem by priests and officials in the entourage of the king, possibly King Josiah. The ideology and theology of Judah in his days was supported by two platforms of written texts: the law (Deuteronomy) and the history (the Book of Joshua to 2 Kings).”

Since the earliest biblical texts represent the political and theological ideologies of their authors, he said “it makes sense that at least the literati could read them. If a large number of people could read the text, it could have been easier to distribute the ideas of the authors among the Judahite population of the time.”

Christopher Rollston, an associate professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at George Washington University, agrees that the period around 600 B.C. was a time “of prolific literary activity, with large portions of books such as Joshua, Judges, and 1–2 Kings written during this period. This is also the same time frame as that of the Prophet Jeremiah (included in the Torah/Old Testament) and his famous scribe Baruch.”

Rollston, however, believes other inscriptional evidence from the region dates to the late 9th and 8th centuries B.C., and therefore thinks “that some portions of the Bible could have been written even earlier than the Tel Aviv study suggests.”

Even with this still existing debate, the new research at least helps to settle an important matter about the timing of the Bible’s first compilation phase.

Read more at Discovery News

Medieval Whip Used by Self-Flagellating Monks Found

British archaeologists have solved the mystery over some ancient pieces of woven copper-alloy wires that were unearthed at a Medieval monastery.

Found in 2014 at Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire, the braided-together length of copper wire, turned to be part of a whip or cat-o-nine-tail used by monks for self-flagellation.

According to Nottinghamshire County Council, the true meaning of the 14th century wire was realized after comparing it with a similar metal scourge found at another British monastery.

“This is a fascinating discovery which helps us to build a picture of what life could have been like for the monks living in the Abbey during the dark days of the Black Death and its aftermath,” Councillor John Knight, committee chairman for culture, said in a statement.

The Black Death plague ravaged the country between 1348 and 1350, causing the decline of Rufford Abbey which lost much of its income from the wool industry. Because of the Abbey's dire financial situation, various kings excused the Abbey from paying taxes during this time.

The whip is one of only four uncovered in the country. It would have been used in this period by the Cistercian monks in an attempt to ward off the Black Death, or as an act of penance to take the population’s sins upon themselves.

The monks lived in austerity — they would rise at 4.30 a.m. to take part in church services and then labor in the fields for long hours.

Despite the use of the self-flagellating whip, historical records reveal that some Rufford monks strayed from the monastic vows. They include Brother William, arrested for the murder of Brother Robert in 1280, and two monks who were charged with the £200 ($285) robbery of Thomas De Holme.

Read more at Discovery News

Was Jesus Really Nailed To The Cross?

Jesus’s crucifixion is probably one of the most familiar images to emerge from Christianity. Good Friday, one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, marks the event. But what was crucifixion? And why was Jesus killed that way?

Crucifixion was a Roman method of punishment. Suspended from a large cross, a victim would eventually die from asphyxiation or exhaustion – it was long, drawn-out, and painful. It was used to publicly humiliate slaves and criminals (not always to kill them), and as an execution method was usually reserved for individuals of very low status or those whose crime was against the state. This is the reason given in the Gospels for Jesus’s crucifixion: as King of the Jews, Jesus challenged Roman imperial supremacy (Matt 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38; John 19:19–22).

Crucifixion could be carried out in a number of ways. In Christian tradition, nailing the limbs to the wood of the cross is assumed, with debate centering on whether nails would pierce hands or the more structurally sound wrists. But Romans did not always nail crucifixion victims to their crosses, and instead sometimes tied them in place with rope. In fact, the only archaeological evidence for the practice of nailing crucifixion victims is an ankle bone from the tomb of Jehohanan, a man executed in the first century CE.

So was Jesus nailed to the cross?

Gospel Accounts

Some early Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, don’t include the narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion, choosing instead to focus on his teaching. But Jesus’s death by crucifixion is one of the things that all four canonical Gospels agree on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all include the crucifixion event in their own slightly different ways.

None of the Gospels in the New Testament mentions whether Jesus was nailed or tied to the cross. However, the Gospel of John reports wounds in the risen Jesus’s hands. It is this passage, perhaps, that has led to the overwhelming tradition that Jesus’s hands and feet were nailed to the cross, rather than tied to it.

The Gospel of Peter, a non-canonical gospel from the first or second century CE, specifically describes in verse 21 how after Jesus had died, the nails were removed from his hands. The Gospel of Peter also famously includes the cross itself as an active character in the Passion narrative. In verses 41-42 the cross speaks, responding with its own voice to God: “And they were hearing a voice from the heavens saying, ‘Have you made proclamation to the fallen-asleep?’ And an obeisance was heard from the cross, ‘Yes.’” Tradition is clearly of paramount importance to this text.

Over the past few years, several people have claimed to have found the actual nails with which Jesus was crucified. Each time, biblical scholars and archaeologists have rightly pointed out the assumptions and misinterpretations of evidence behind these claims. Curiously, this fixation on the nails persists, despite the fact that the earliest gospels make no mention of Jesus being nailed to the cross.

Depictions Of The Crucifixion

It isn’t surprising that Christians took a while to embrace the image of Christ on the cross, given that crucifixion was a humiliating way to die. What is surprising is what the earliest image of the crucifixion turns out to be. Rather than the devotional icons with which we are familiar – pictures that glorify Jesus’s death – this earliest image appears to be some late second-century graffiti mocking Christians.

Called the Alexamenos Graffito, artist Rodolfo Lanciani shows a figure with the head of a donkey on a cross with the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.”

Called the Alexamenos Graffito, the image shows a figure with the head of a donkey on a cross with the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.” This was apparently a common accusation in antiquity, as Minucius Felix(Octavius 9.3; 28.7) and Tertullian (Apology 16.12) both attest. Since the graffito was clearly not made by a Christian, this image suggests that non-Christians were familiar with some core elements of Christian belief as early as the second century.

Gemstones, some used for magical purposes, also provide some of our earliest depictions of the crucified Jesus. This second or third century piece of carved jasper depicts a man on a cross surrounded by magic words.

This second or third century piece of carved jasper depicts a man on a cross surrounded by magic words.

Another very early image of the crucifixion is found carved into the face of a carnelian gemstone made into a ring.

Constanza gemstone with the crucified Christ, surrounded by 12 apostles.

Scholars think that the Constanza gemstone, as it is known, dates from the fourth century CE. In this depiction, Jesus’s hands do not appear to be nailed to the cross, since they fall naturally, as if he is tied at the wrists.

Since the evidence from antiquity doesn’t provide a clear answer as to whether Jesus was nailed or tied to his cross, it’s tradition that dictates this common depiction. Those who have seen the film The Passion of the Christ will recall how much time the director, Mel Gibson, devoted just to the act of nailing Jesus onto the cross —- almost five whole minutes.

Read more at Discovery News

500-Year-Old Church Found in Slave Trade Settlement

Archaeologists have uncovered a 500-year-old church that may be the oldest known European Christian church in the tropics.

Deformed by floods and possibly visited by famed naturalist Charles Darwin, the church had been built by Portuguese colonizers in Cidade Velha, the former capital of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. The historic settlement was recently made a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There are upward of 1,000 bodies, many of them likely slaves, buried underneath the nave of the church. For hundreds of years, Cape Verde was a place where African slaves were held and sold before being sent to Portugal and the Americas. That ugly industry made Cidade Velha, at its peak, the second richest city in the Portuguese empire.

Darwin’s most famous stop during his long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle may have been the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. But his first port of call was a different volcanic archipelago that was uninhabited until the 15th century: Cape Verde.

Darwin was unimpressed with what he saw. However, among his disparaging remarks about Cape Verde and its people, he mentions visiting the ruins of a church:

"This little town, before its harbour was filled up, was the principal place in the island: it now presents a melancholy, but very picturesque appearance. Having procured a black Padre for a guide, and a Spaniard who had served in the Peninsular war as an interpreter, we visited a collection of buildings, of which an ancient church formed the principal part. It is here the governors and captain-generals of the islands have been buried. Some of the tombstones recorded dates of the sixteenth century. The heraldic ornaments were the only things in this retired place that reminded us of Europe. The church or chapel formed one side of a quadrangle, in the middle of which a large clump of bananas were growing. On another side was a hospital, containing about a dozen miserable-looking inmates."

Over the last year, archaeologists from Cambridge University have revealed a ruined church in what may be the first major excavations to take place at Cape Verde. Christopher Evans, director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, thinks the church is likely the same one that Darwin described.

For a city built on the slave trade, Cidade Velha had a lot of Christian churches. The newly revealed building, which probably could have fit about 75 people, was just one of about two dozen churches and chapels in the small river valley where Cidade Velha is located, Evans said.

"Religion was an integral part of early Portuguese colonialism," Evans told Live Science. "People were competitively building churches. You also have religious orders establishing themselves in the early 16th century, and Cidade Velha becomes the seat of the bishopric of Africa."

Slaves may not have been excluded from religious life in Cape Verde. Already, isotope analyses of teeth suggest that many of the people buried under the church were African, and likely slaves.

"The fact that they're getting a church burial could be evidence that converting the slaves to Christianity meant something," Evans said. Further investigation of the bones could reveal more about the work conditions and the diets of the slaves, shedding light on slavery in a late medieval context.

While the main church was built during the decade straddling 1500, there are some early stone foundations from a Gothic chapel that date back to around 1470, which would make it the earliest building on the Cape Verde islands, Evans said.

Since the colonizers were the first people to inhabit the island, they had no knowledge of the local environment, and they made some critical mistakes when building the church. First, they built it on top of a seasonal stream course. Second, the church was located at the bend of a river. These factors made the building vulnerable to flash floods, and the church had to be rebuilt twice in the 16th and 17th centuries, Evans said.

Read more at Discovery News

17th-Century Box's Contents Revealed by X-Rays

Powerful X-ray imaging techniques have allowed French archaeologists to see the inaccessible contents of a mysterious and badly damaged 17th century box.

Scientists were able to virtually reconstruct in astounding resolution the circular elements that could be seen through the broken lid of the very rusted box. Inside, the box contained a treasure of small clay medals and two pearls.

Measuring just 1.6 inches, the metal box was found during excavations at Grenoble’s Saint Laurent church. The artifact was buried alongside a corpse in one of the 195 graves dating from the 17th century.

The site has been at the center of archaeological investigations for the past 20 years, revealing more than 1,500 tombs and 2,000 objects dating as early as the 4th century AD.

The fragile box was first restored by the CREAM (Centre de Restoration et d’Etude Archaeologique Municipal) in Vienne, France. The work aimed to halt the oxidation process that was eating away the metal.

Despite their efforts, it was impossible to open the box. The archaeologists then brought the artifact to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), which houses one of the world’s most powerful X-ray machines.

The box was scanned using synchrotron X-ray phase contrast micro-tomography. The technique produced high resolution 3D images of the inside.

“It was only supposed to be a small feasibility study to produce an image for an exhibition. However, the results were so astounding that it turned into a full scale research project,” ESRF scientist Paul Tafforeau, who carried out the experiments and produced the 3D images of the box, said in a statement.

The scan allowed Tafforeau and his team to virtually extract the two pearls and three medals, which appeared in poor condition and stuck together.

After the medals were digitally separated, the scientists applied rendering and 3D virtual lighting techniques to make the three medals visible in fine detail.

“This non-destructive investigations produced astounding results,” Renée Colardelle, the archaeologist in charge of the Saint Laurent church excavation, said.

On one medal, Christ can be seen on the cross with two figures standing at the foot of the cross. An engraving on the other side of the medal shows Christ’s resurrection. The scene is symbolized by a figure bearing a crown of thorns, with one leg out of the tomb.

The two other medals turned to be identical and damaged in different places.

A combination of the images obtained from the two identical artifacts made it possible to reconstruct the illustrations and even the inscriptions on the medals.

On one side, the scene of Christ’s baptism by Saint John the Baptist is visible, with the inscription “And the word became flesh.”

The reverse side shows the three wise men bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus seated on Mary’s lap. Given the state of preservation of the medals, the presence of Joseph behind Mary can be only assumed, said the researchers.

Read more at Discovery News

Oldest Draft of King James Bible Discovered

The King James Bible, the most widely read book in the English language — from which phrases like “a man after his own heart” emerged — is as storied as it is elusive. Now, a historian claims to have found the oldest known draft of the Christian text, written in messy script, in an obscure archive at the University of Cambridge.

The manuscript was hidden among the papers of Samuel Ward, one of the men commissioned by King James I to translate a new version of the Christian text into English in the early 17th century.

Jeffrey Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, chanced upon the 400-year-old notebook while doing research on Ward for an essay he’s writing. The Eureka moment came when Miller realized that the notebook contained text from the very book that Ward had been commissioned to help translate. Miller recalled thinking, “Oh my gosh, he’s talking about a book that he had been asked to help translate,” he said. “Then I realized rather he was creating the King James Bible in that moment.”

Describing his discovery in the Times Literary Supplement, Miller said the notebook is not just the earliest draft ever found, but it is also the only surviving draft written in the hand of one of the original translators.

“Ward’s draft alone bears all the signs of having been a first draft, just as it alone can be definitively said to be in the hand of one of the King James translators themselves,” Miller wrote.

That hand was a messy one, it seems. “Ward’s handwriting is notoriously bad,” Miller told Live Science. “At least this is from earlier in his life,” he added.  Ward began his translation when he was just 32 years old, making him the youngest of the 54 or so men commissioned to translate the King James Bible; his handwriting only got worse with age, Miller noted. Luckily, Miller was familiar with Ward’s handwriting from his intense study of the translator’s texts.

Translating the Bible

The King James Bible, first published in 1611, is one of the most influential and popular books in English literature. It spawned a long list of common phrases and figures of speech, such as “out of the mouths of babes,” “at their wit’s end” and “eat, drink and be merry.” Even so, few documents survive from its translation.

“I think it is a fascinating discovery, and wholly credible,” Jason BeDuhn, a professor of comparative study of religions at Northern Arizona University, told Live Science. “The more we can learn about the process by which the King James Bible was produced, the more realistic our assessment of its merits becomes.”

King James tasked teams of translators in London, Cambridge and Oxford to write an English version of the Bible that would better reflect the principles of the Church of England. Ward was part of one those teams in Cambridge. He later became master of Sidney Sussex, one of the colleges within the University of Cambridge, and his scholarly papers ended up in the school’s archives. In the 1980s, the notebook in question, catalogued as MS Ward B, had been labeled as a “verse-by-verse biblical commentary” with “Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.” But when Miller revisited the text, he discovered that it actually contained notes and translations of parts of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is excluded from many versions today.

“This discovery helps us recapture the human side of the translation process,” BeDuhn said. “I especially like Prof. Miller’s description of Ward trying out phrasing, crossing it out and trying something else. This is the real work of translation caught in the act.”

According to Miller, Ward’s notes show that he indeed grappled with the language of certain verses in the Apocrypha, for example, 1 Esdras 6:32. In the 16th-century Bishops’ Bible, the previous version to be authorized by the English Church, 1 Esdras 6:32 describes a declaration of King Darius, which states that anyone found disobeying his decrees “of his own goods should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged.”

“Proposing a revision to the front half of the passage, Ward at first began, ‘A tre,’ but then crossed it out,” Miller explained. “No, ‘out of h,’ he started writing on second thought, but then crossed that out, too. At last, he reverted back to the more straightforward construction with which he had abortively begun, which also more closely mirrors the Greek of the passage: ‘a tree should be taken out of his possession.’”

It seems Ward’s suggestions were disregarded. The King James translation would ultimately read “out of his own house should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged.”

Window into the past

The newly discovered notebook is not only the earliest known draft of any part of the King James Bible, but it’s also the only known surviving draft of any part of the Apocrypha. Even so, Miller sees its legacy on a broader scale: “It points the way to a fuller, more complex understanding than ever before of the process by which the [King James Bible], the most widely read work in English of all time, came to be,” he wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Origins of 'Gospel of Jesus' Wife' Begin to Emerge

The truth may be finally emerging about the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” a highly controversial papyrus suggesting that some people, in ancient times, believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. New research on the papyrus’ ink points to the possibility that it is authentic, researchers say, while newly obtained documents may shed light on the origins of the business-card-sized fragment.

Debate about the credibility of the “gospel” began as soon as Harvard University professor Karen King reported her discovery of the papyrus in September 2012. Written in Coptic (an Egyptian language), the papyrus fragment contains a translated line that reads, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’” and also refers to a “Mary,” possibly Mary Magdalene.

King had tentatively dated the papyrus to the fourth century, saying it may be a copy of a gospel written in the second century in Greek.

Analysis of the papyrus, detailed last year in the Harvard Theological Review journal, suggested the papyrus dates back around 1,200 years (somewhere between the sixth and ninth centuries) while the ink is of a type that could have been created at that time. These findings have led King to support the text’s authenticity.

However over the past year many scholars have come to the conclusion that the papyrus is a modern-day forgery, though King and a few other researchers say they are not ready to concede this: “At this point, when discussions and research are ongoing, I think it is important, however difficult, to stay open regarding the possible dates of the inscription and other matters of interpretation,” wrote King in a letter recently published in the magazine Biblical Archaeological Review. King has not responded to several interview requests from Live Science.

Now, researchers at Columbia University are running new tests on the ink used on the papyrus. Initial tests published by the Columbia University team in 2014 indicated the ink could have been made in ancient times. Researchers are saying little until their report is published; however they did talk about one finding that could provide some support for its authenticity.

A gospel steeped in mystery

The current owner of the papyrus has insisted on remaining anonymous, claiming that he bought the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, along with other Coptic texts, in 1999 from a man named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp. This person, in turn, got it from Potsdam, in what was East Germany, in 1963, the owner said.

Laukamp died in 2002, and the claim that he owned the text has been strongly disputed: Rene Ernest, the man whom Laukamp and his wife Helga charged with representing their estate, said that Laukamp had no interest in antiquities, did not collect them and was living in West Berlin in 1963. Therefore, he couldn’t have crossed the Berlin Wall into Potsdam. Axel Herzsprung, a business partner of Laukamp’s, similarly said that Laukamp never had an interest in antiquities and never owned a papyrus. Laukamp has no children or living relatives who could verify these claims.

Over the past few months, new documents have been found that not only reconstruct Laukamp’s life in greater detail, but also provide a new way to check the anonymous owner’s story.

King reported in a 2014 Harvard Theological Review article that the anonymous owner “provided me with a photocopy of a contract for the sale of ’6 Coptic papyrus fragments, one believed to be a Gospel’ from Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, dated Nov. 12, 1999, and signed by both parties.” King also notes that “a handwritten comment on the contract states, ‘Seller surrenders photocopies of correspondence in German. Papyri were acquired in 1963 by the seller in Potsdam (East Germany).’”

After searching public databases in Florida a Live Science reporter uncovered seven signatures signed by Laukamp between 1997 and 2001 on five notarized documents. Anyone can search these databases and download these documents. These signatures can be compared with the signature recording the sale of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife — providing another way to verify or disprove the story of how the “gospel” made its way to Harvard.

While Harvard University would have to work with forensic handwriting experts to verify the signature, the fact that these notarized documents exist, and are publicly available, presents the opportunity to see if Laukamp really did own the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Forensic handwriting analysis, while not always conclusive, has been used to determine if signatures made on documents or works of art are authentic or forged.

If Laukamp did own the papyrus, authentic or not, then the origins of the enigmatic text lie with him. The new Laukamp documents allow the story of his life between 1995 and 2002 to be told in some detail. However if Laukamp didn’t own the papyrus and the anonymous owner has not been truthful, then further doubt would be cast on the papyrus’ authenticity, and information leading to the identity, motives and techniques of the forgers could be found.

Authentic or forged?

One important find, which indicates the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is a fake, was made last year by Christian Askeland, a research associate with the Institute for Septuagint and Biblical Research in Wuppertal, Germany. He examined a second Coptic papyrus containing part of the Gospel of John, which the anonymous owner of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife had also given to Harvard. This text was likewise supposedly purchased from Laukamp, and radiocarbon testing of that papyrus similarly found that it dates back around 1,200 years.

Askeland found that the text and line breaks— where one line of a text ends and another begins — are identical to those of another papyrus, published in a 1924 book. That second papyrus was written in a dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which went extinct around 1,500 years ago. Askeland concluded that the John papyrus is a forgery. Furthermore, it shares other features with the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, Askeland said, suggesting both are forgeries.

“The two Coptic fragments clearly shared the same ink, writing implement and scribal hand. The same artisan had created both essentially at the same time,” Askeland wrote in a paper recently published in the journal New Testament Studies.

King objected to this conclusion in her Biblical Archaeology Review letter, noting that the John fragment could have been copied in ancient times, long after Lycopolitan went extinct, from a text that had similar line breaks.

In addition, James Yardley, a senior research scientist at Columbia University, told Live Science that the new tests confirm that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife holds different ink than the John papyrus. This could undercut Askeland’s argument that the two papyri were written by the same person.

“In our first exploration, we did state that the inks used for the two documents of interest [the John papyrus and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife] were quite different. The more recent results do confirm this observation strongly,” Yardley told Live Science.

He added that until his new research is published in a peer-reviewed journal, he doesn’t want to say anything more publicly. And once it’s published, Askeland and other researchers will have a chance to respond.

Read more at Discovery News

Last Supper Menu: Stew, Lamb, Wine...More

A bean stew, lamb, olives, bitter herbs, a fish sauce, unleavened bread, dates and aromatized wine likely were on the menu at the Last Supper, says recent research into Palestinian cuisine during Jesus's time.

The food wasn't eaten during a formal seated gathering at a rectangular table, as shown in many religious art paintings, but with Jesus and his apostles reclining on floor cushions, as the Romans did at that time.

The study by two Italian archaeologists relied on Bible verses, Jewish writings, ancient Roman works and archaeological data to investigate the eating habits in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1st century A.D.

"The Bible discusses what happened during that dinner, but it doesn't detail what Jesus and his 12 dining companions ate," Generoso Urciuoli, archaeologist at Italy's Petrie center and author of the Archeoricette blog on ancient food, told Discovery News.

Urciuoli, who specializes on the history of early Christianity, and co-author Marta Berogno, archaeologist and Egyptologist at Turin Egypt's museum, will publish their findings next month in the book "Gerusalemme: l'Ultima Cena" (Jerusalem: the Last Supper).

"The starting point is the assumption that Jesus was a Jew. He and his disciples observed the traditions transmitted by the Torah and its food related bans," Urciuoli said.

Commemorated today by Christians, the Last Supper is the final meal that, according to the Gospel, Jesus shared with his closest disciples in Jerusalem hours before he was turned over by Judas to Roman soldiers and crucified.

The scene was immortalized by Leonardo Da Vinci, but the masterpiece, one of the world's most famous and powerful paintings, isn't historically accurate, according to Urciuoli.

"Leonardo's mural derives from centuries of iconographic codes. Embodying the sacrament of the eucharist, the Last Supper has a very strong symbolic meaning and this does not help the historical reconstruction," Urciuoli said.

Putting together historical data and clues from artworks such as third century A.D. catacombs paintings, the researchers were able to reconstruct food and eating habits in Palestine 2,000 years ago.

The picture that emerges is completely different from traditional renderings of the Last Supper. The dinner, which happened on the upper room of a house in Jerusalem, wasn't a seated gathering at a rectangular table.

"At that time in Palestine, food was placed on low tables and guests ate in reclining position on floor cushions and carpets," Urciuoli said.

Plates, bowls and jars were likely made of stone. Evidence for 1st century A.D. stone vessels has been found at numerous sites near Jerusalem and Galilee.

"Jews that observed the rules of purity used stone vessels because they were not susceptible to transmitting impurity," Urciuoli said.

"Another possibility is the use of fine red terra sigillata pottery, an international trend at that time," he added.

The position of the guests around the table followed a precise rule, and the the most important were those at the right and left of the main guest.

"Verses from the gospels of John indicate Judas was very close to Jesus, probably to his immediate left. Indeed, we are told that Judas dipped bread into Jesus's dish, following the practice of sharing food from a common bowl," Urciuoli said.

Urciuoli and Berogno narrowed the search for the food present at the Last Supper by reconstructing two other important meals mentioned in the New Testament, the wedding at Cana, which records the water to wine miracle, and Herod’s banquet, famous for the beheading of John the Baptist.

"The wedding at Cana allowed us to understand the Jewish religious dietary laws, known as kashrut, which established what foods can and cannot be eaten and how they must be prepared. On the other side, Herod's Banquet allowed us to analyze Roman culinary influences in Jerusalem," Urciuoli said.

Apart from wine and bread, tzir, a variant of the Roman fish sauce garum, was likely present both at the wedding of Cana and Herod’s banquet, as well as at the Last Supper, the authors said.

Detailing their research in the book, Urciuoli and Berogno also hypothesize the Last Supper might have occurred during the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles, an autumn feast commemorating the years the Israelites spent in the desert in fragile dwellings after the exodus.

But according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the "first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb."

Read more at Discovery News

The Science (and Non-Science) of the Ouija

The new supernatural horror film “Ouija” hits theaters soon, and is expected to scare up big numbers at the box office this weekend.

The Oujia board, also known as a witch board or spirit board, is simple and elegant. The board itself is printed with letters and numbers, while a roughly heart-shaped device called a planchette slides over the board. The game was created in the 1890s and sold to Hasbro in 1966. It began as a parlor game with no association with ghosts until much later, and today many people believe it can contact spirits.

“Ouija” is only the most recent in a long line of movies featuring the board. Since the Oujia board’s film debut in the 1920 Max Fleischer film “The Ouija Board,” it has appeared in hundreds of films including “The Uninvited” (1944);”The Changeling” (1980); “Witchboard” (1986); and “Paranormal Activity” (2007).

Speaking to the Dead

People in all cultures have long believed that communication with the dead is possible, and throughout the ages many people have claimed to speak to the dear departed. Ghosts and spirit communication shows up often in classic literature, including in mythology, the Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays.

In Victorian England it was fashionable in many circles to conduct séances; Ouija boards, three-legged tables, and candles were used to try to contact the dead. A century ago mediums “in touch with the spirit” during séances would write pages and pages of “automatic writing,” the psychic’s hands allegedly guided by ghosts to convey lengthy handwritten messages.

Since that time ghosts seem to have lost their will (or ability) to write—or even communicate effectively. These days the spirits (as channeled through mediums) seem to prefer a guessing game and instead offer only ambiguous, vague information: “I’m getting a presence with the letter M, or J in the name? A father, or father figure perhaps? Did he give you something special to remember him by, something small?” The Ouija board seems to cut out the middleman and let you communicate directly with the dead.

Fearing the Ouija

There’s a reason that scary movies are based on the Ouija game and not, for example, Monopoly or Scrabble. Many evangelical groups believe that playing with Ouija boards can lead to demonic possession. The Bible is pretty clear about its position on the occult (Exodus 22:18 commands that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”), and because witchcraft is seen as an abomination in the eyes of God, anything associated with it, like the Ouija board, is by association evil. Obviously not every person who buys, owns, or uses a Ouija board is thought to practice evil, but many believe it’s a clear invitation to demonic temptation and children are especially vulnerable.

As the mythology and folklore of the Ouija board evolved over time, so did its representation in entertainment. Horror films began to reflect the public’s belief and concern that Ouija boards could not only contact the dead, but invite possession by evil spirits. In the 1973 classic “The Exorcist,” for example, twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil is first contacted through a seemingly innocent encounter with a Ouija board. The entity she thought she was communicating with (and whom her mother chalked up to as an imaginary friend) called himself Captain Howdy but is later revealed as the demon Pazuzu that would soon possess her (and terrify millions).

Many supposedly haunted locations forbid the use of Ouija boards on the premises. For example at the St. James Hotel, said to be among New Mexico’s most haunted buildings and a very popular destination with ghost hunters features a sign from the hotel management explicitly prohibiting the spirit board.

Others fear the Ouija board not because they believe that there’s anything demonic about it, but instead because it seems so mysterious. After all, something moves the planchette around the board, giving answers and spelling out phrases. If it’s not the people touching the planchette—and they often swear it’s not—then what could possibly be doing it, if not some unknown and possibly supernatural force?

Psychology of the Ouija

There’s no real mystery to how the Ouija board works: it is a psychological process called the ideomotor effect. What happens is that the people touching the planchette unconsciously move it around the board without knowing they’re doing it. Since they don’t know that they’re moving it (and believe others aren’t either) they assume that some unknown force must be at work. So how does the planchette give accurate answers if it’s just being moved unconsciously by one or more of the participants?

It doesn’t. The problem is that little if any of the information from the board can be verified. For example let’s say that a group of college kids plays with a Ouija board one night and asks if there are any spirits around. The planchette slowly moves over to Yes; they then ask the spirit’s name and, after some stuttering, it spells out “Tom” (a more likely name to appear like than, say, “Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch”), and after someone asks how old Tom was at his death the board indicates 54.

Does that mean that the group truly contacted the dead spirit of a man named Tom who died at age 54? It might—if much more specific, detailed information was revealed and recorded, and then compared with historical records that confirmed the validity of the information. Otherwise it’s just a few random bits of information which may or may not have anything to do with anything; the board might have just as easily spelled out “Tim” and slid over to 183 when asked his name and age at death.

The fact that people must be touching the board for it to work offers an obvious clue: if ghosts or spirits (instead of people) are moving the planchette to spell out messages, there would be no reason anyone would need to touch it. Anyone can test the Ouija board to see whether the messages it spells out are real or not: Simply put blindfolds on the participants, or block their view of the board with a cloth or piece of cardboard. The results become gibberish.

Read more at Discovery News