Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons

SAN DIEGO — Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California chancellor, may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States. Dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old, the exceptionally preserved bones could potentially produce the oldest complete human genome from the continent.

But only if scientists aren’t barred from studying them.

Attempts to unlock the skeletons’ genetic secrets are stalled in a dispute pitting UC scientists against their own administration. Five of the scientists wrote with alarm in a letter published May 20 in the journal Science that UC administrators aren’t allowing studies on the skeletons, which were discovered on property owned by UC San Diegoin La Jolla, California.

Before samples can be extracted for genetic analysis, the scientists fear administrators will give the bones to politically powerful local Native Americans who could permanently block study.

“To give them away without study, would be like throwing the genetic crown jewels of the peopling of the Americas in the ocean,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who is among about a half dozen researchers who have unsuccessfully sought in recent months to sample or study the bones. “It would be a major loss for all, including Native Americans.”

A few studies were done years ago on the skeletons before UC withdrew access to them, but recent technological advances would allow scientists to do much more, including a digital skull calibration and possibly a full genome sequence.

“The potential loss of the La Jolla skeletons would have a profoundly negative impact on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas,” wrote the authors of the letter, led by Margaret Schoeninger, an anthropologist at UCSD.

Science letter co-author Tim White, a prominent paleoanthropologist at UC Berkeley, told Wired.com, “Administrators are doing everything they can to ignore the scientific value of the specimens. They are trying to illegally repatriate them to a lobbyist for a dozen San Diego County tribes.”

UC officials are seeking to provide the skeletons to the Kumeyaay Nation east of San Diego under a complex process guided by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). But critical scientists say NAGPRA requirements aren’t being followed properly, setting the stage for a potential legal battle over the bones.

“This is Kennewick Man II,” White said, referring to the long federal court battle in 2004 when scientists won the right to study bones found in Washington.

In a May 11 letter, Mark Yudof, president of the 10-campus UC system, authorized UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox to dispose of the bones — after clarifications are made to a report done under NAGPRA requirements, and other tribes that may be interested in the bones are consulted.

Steve Benegas, the repatriation spokesman for the Kumeyaay nation’s 12 tribes, said they are entitled to the bones and to decide about future analysis. Some Native Americans believe scientific research amounts to desecration of remains, and Benegas said he personally is against studies.

“The university has handled this poorly over the years,” he said. “We have no trust in them. They have treated the remains of our ancestors without respect.”

One of the previous analyses done years ago showed the bones have connective tissue and amino acids that are used in cell function. This means it is very likely ancient DNA can be extracted. And two skeletons buried together offers a rare opportunity to compare their genomes to see if they were related.

Read more at Wired Science

Ultimate Game of Chance: Tracking the Rapture

I predict within the next 2 to 3 minutes, an earthquake will strike somewhere on the planet. You can check how my prediction is doing using Google Earth files from the U.S. Geological Survey.

As the Day of Rapture, which is allegedly upon us on Saturday, is supposed to include a terrible earthquake, we can assume the magnitude of this event must be greater than 5.0. In which case, I need to revise my prediction. If I want to play it safe, I could say two earthquakes of this magnitude will strike before the day is out. But I won't be making any money on that bet, as the average number of earthquakes of magnitude 5 or higher is four a day.

**Get alerts of major earthquakes sent to you by email from the USGS and follow along as the day progresses.**

On average the number of earthquakes that will strike each year include: 1 earthquake of magnitude 8 or larger; 17 earthquakes of magnitudes ranging from 7 to 7.9; 134 earthquakes of magnitudes ranging from 6 to 6.9; and 1,319 earthquakes of magnitudes 5 to 5.9. But lower magnitude earthquakes are more common. For example, more than a million earthquakes in the magnitude 2 to 2.9 range strike each year.

With all these earthquakes rattling the lithosphere on a regular basis, saying an earthquake is coming is about as pointless as saying the wind will blow. The questions that need answering are where, when, and how strong. But currently only risk analysis -- based on stress accumulation, historical patterns, the geology of a region, the tectonics of the region, and so forth -- is possible. Perhaps in the future atmospheric analysis will be included in estimating risk. But currently, those looking at radon levels in the ionosphere, are making bold assertions of predictive possibilities that still need better data and, importantly, peer-review to back them up.

Growing up in Southern California, the common knowledge was that an earthquake was the physical release of pressure along the fault. Aftershocks were considered the latent release of the same pressure or neighboring pressure from shifts in the fault-line as a result of the original quake. As earthquakes and their aftershocks struck, the likelihood of a bigger quake to follow was reduced - or so the thinking went. Now we know that's not always the case.

As the events in Japan recently demonstrated, even big earthquakes of magnitude 7 or 8, as has occurred historically along Japan's offshore trench for centuries, are no indication that the stress is being relieved. In addition, even a large earthquake such as the 7.3 that struck on March 9, can be a foreshock of a larger one to come. The problem is there is currently no way to tell if the original quakes are foreshocks to a larger quake or not, unless and until a larger quake manifests.

In yesterday's Science Express, geophysicists with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) published a model of the estimated fault slip due to the 9.0 Tohoku‑Oki megathrust event. Their findings, coupled with two other reports with lead authors from the University of Tokyo and the Japan Coast Guard, are helping to identify the tectonic aspects that led to such a surprising event as well as clarifying what is beyond current knowledge. The Caltech researchers made a point of marking what is unknown in their map with a giant white question mark.

"Instead of saying a large earthquake probably wouldn't happen there, we should have said that we didn't know," said lead author Mark Simmons in a press release. The section of the fault that failed catastrophically on March 11, had remained stable while other sections around it had shifted over the years.

"The Pacific Plate and the Okhotsk Plate had been pinned together for a long time, probably 500 to 1000 years, and finally failed in this magnitude 9.0 event," explained seismologist Hiroo Kanamori also with Caltech.

Just south of the point where the Tohoku‑Oki earthquake ruptured, another area has displayed similar eerie quiet over the centuries. "The highest amounts of stress aren't found where the paper has just ripped, but rather right where the paper has not yet been torn," Simons says.

Calculating stress build-up is possible on land with GPS measurements, but underwater observations of shifts in the seafloor are still a remote and difficult operation to achieve. Early seafloor geodetic stations around Japan were first deployed in 2002.

Now it is clear that better monitoring of the seafloor will be critical in helping to obtain the information needed in terms of risk analysis. "It is important to note that we are not predicting an earthquake here," emphasizes Simons. "However, we do not have data on the area, and therefore should focus attention there, given its proximity to Tokyo."

Read more at Discovery News

Doomsdays: Dubious and Deferred

For thousands of years, thousands of people (and their followers) have predicted the imminent end of the world. They’ve all been wrong so far, but minister and broadcaster Harold Camping is sure that the world will end tomorrow.

Well, actually, the world will begin to end; the whole process will take about five months while the Rapture occurs, devout Christians ascend to heaven and Jesus appears. Camping and his followers spent much of the last year informing the world about its demise, through radio, billboards, and pamphlets.

Responses have ranged from ridicule to serious concern. Some enterprising atheists have even offered a pet rescue service assuring Christians who are taken up to heaven that they won’t need to worry about the pets they leave behind.

Religious Doomsday Predictions

Most prophecies of Armageddon, like those of Mr. Camping, are rooted in Bible passages. In the 1830s and 1840s, followers of a man named William Miller believed that the world would end in 1843 or 1844, based on his reading of the Bible. Miller had thousands of followers, many of whom abandoned their houses and personal property in preparation for their meeting with God. The Judgment Day came and went without noticeable global destruction, and some of Miller’s followers formed what would later become the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

Author Hal Lindsey was one of the highest-profile Christian doomsday prophets in modern times, with 1970s best-sellers like The Late Great Planet Earth. He is hardly alone; Pat Robertson claimed in 1980 that the End Times would be upon us by 1982.

Secular Doomsday Predictions

Though most doomsday predictions are based in religion, some (especially those that have emerged in the past century) have more to do with the natural world. The infamous Y2K scare, in which computer experts feared that a computer glitch might trigger global mass destruction, came and went without a problem. (Whether the threat was exaggerated in the first place, or the computer programmers averted a serious problem is debatable.) Others suggest that an asteroid impact, or special planetary alignments, will kill us all.

Those who don’t believe won’t be surprised if nothing happens, but what happens to believers when the promised Armageddon doesn’t materialize?

Psychologist Leon Festinger examined this in the book "When Prophecy Fails," and found that in some cases the fact that the prophet was wrong has little effect. To understand why, it’s important to realize that the high-profile prophecy that captures the public’s attention is only a small part of that group’s belief system. Anyone can make a mistake, and one mistake or misstatement by a religious authority doesn’t necessarily undermine belief in other religious precepts or prophecies. Religious texts are notoriously open to widely varied interpretation, and faith in a leader’s credibility does not necessarily hinge upon one prediction (even if it’s a big one).

Read more at Discovery News

Mummy Had Earliest Case of Heart Disease

An Egyptian princess who lived more than 3,500 years ago had the oldest known case of coronary artery disease, according to a new study which provides unique insights into the origins of atherosclerosis.

The mummified remains of the princess, who lived in Thebes (Luxor) between 1580 and 1550 B.C., were investigated by a team of Egyptian and U.S. researchers.

Using whole-body, multi-slice computed tomography scanning, the researchers found evidence of arterial calcification in the mummy, which is a marker for cardiovascular disease.

The analysis revealed that Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon, who died in her early 40s, had a casebook condition of atherosclerosis, a type of hardening of the arteries responsible for most heart diseases.

She showed signs of atherosclerosis in her aorta, carotids, coronaries, iliac and femoral arteries.

"Today she would have needed bypass surgery," said Gregory S. Thomas, director of Nuclear Cardiology Education at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of the study.

Ahmose-Meryet-Amon wasn't an isolated case. Commonly considered a result of our modern lifestyle, atherosclerosis was surprisingly widespread in ancient Egypt.

The researchers pointed out that 45 percent of the mummies they put through CT scans show signs of atherosclerosis. They presented their findings at the International Conference of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Imaging in Amsterdam last week.

They investigated 52 Egyptian mummies, mostly from the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, who lived between 1981 BC and 364 A.D.

The mummies included 33 males, 17 females and two individuals of unknown gender.

Recognizable arteries were present in 44 of the mummies, while an identifiable heart was present in 16.

Among the 44 mummies with hearts or identifiable blood vessels, 20 had definite or probable atherosclerosis.

Eight mummies showed carotid calcification, while severe atherosclerotic calcifications was seen in the arteries of the upper leg of a male scribe who lived during the 18th Dynasty.

"Overall, it was striking how much atherosclerosis we found," said Thomas.

It's not the first time that plaque build-up has been found in the arteries of Egyptian mummies.

Atherosclerosis in ancient Egyptians was first identified in 1852 when physiologist Johann Nepomuk Czermak found calcific aortic atherosclerosis during the autopsy of a mummy belonging to an elderly Egyptian woman.

Other autopsies found histologic evidence of atherosclerosis in the aorta as well as in other large arteries on several 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies.

However, the Horus study is the largest, non-invasive investigation on this disease. Spanning over two millennia, it detected evidence of atherosclerosis in almost all the dynastic eras of ancient Egypt, and  highlighted differences in the mummies’ socioeconomical status.

"Among the 25 mummies for whom social position could be determined, 10 were priests or priestesses. Atherosclerosis was less common in clergy than in non- clergy," wrote the researchers.

Cardiovascular diseases are now the world's leading killers, claiming more than 17 million lives in 2010.

Thomas and colleagues wondered how this "disease of modern life" could have affected the ancient Egyptians.

They appeared to eat a heart-healthy diet, including lots of vegetables, fruit and a limited amount of meat, bread and beer. Egyptians were active, and did not know tobacco or trans-fats.

Thomas and his co-principal investigator Dr. Adel Allam of Al Azhar University, Cairo, suggested that the cause for atherosclerosis could have been a genetic predisposition or an inflammatory response to frequent parasitic diseases.

Read more at Discovery News

Milky Way Has Rare Symmetry

A new study suggests the Milky Way doesn’t need a makeover: It’s already just about perfect.

Astronomers base that assertion on their discovery of a vast section of a spiral, star-forming arm at the Milky Way’s outskirts. The finding suggests that the galaxy is a rare beauty with an uncommon symmetry -- one half of the Milky Way is essentially the mirror image of the other half.

Thomas Dame and Patrick Thaddeus of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., say the structure they’ve discovered is most likely the outer extension of the Scutum-Centaurus arm from the inner galaxy. The finding suggests that Scutum-Centaurus wraps all the way around the Milky Way, making it a symmetric counterpart to the galaxy’s other major star-forming arm, Perseus.

The two arms appear to extend from opposite ends of the galaxy’s central, bar-shaped cluster of stars, each winding around the galaxy, the researchers note in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dame found evidence for the new structure while reviewing galactic data on atomic hydrogen gas, which radiates at a radio wavelength of 21 centimeters. After tracing the extension of the arm in the 21-centimeter radio emission, “I was in the unique position of being able to walk up two flights of stairs to the roof of my building [at Harvard] and search for carbon monoxide emissions from molecular clouds using the CfA 1.2-meter radio telescope,” says Dame. Molecular gas clouds contain the raw material for making stars.

“This is a major new discovery,” comments Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. “Dame and Thaddeus have found evidence for a large-scale coherent structure, spanning 60 degrees in the sky … which contains giant molecular gas clouds very far from the galactic center.” The newfound structure lies about 49,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, and one of the arm’s many large molecular clouds contains an amount of carbon monoxide equivalent to that of 50,000 suns.

Virtually every spiral arm in the Milky Way has been found in sections, Dame notes. When astronomers realized that the Sagittarius arm, found in the northern sky, and the Carina Arm, in the south, were part of a single, larger structure, they became known as the Sagittarius-Carina Arm. Similarly, since Dame and Thaddeus believe the new arm is an extension of Scutum-Centaurus, “we suggested ‘Outer Scutum-Centaurus’ as a more logical name,” Dame says. The structure is longer than the known parts of the Scutum-Centaurus arm, he adds.

The new feature was previously overlooked because it tilts out of the plane of the galaxy, following the outer galaxy’s warp. Most studies examining spiral arms focus on the galaxy’s plane, says Dame.

Read more at Discovery News

Amazonian tribe has no calendar and no concept of time

The Amondawa people who live deep in the Amazonian rainforests of Brazil have no watches or calendars and live their lives to the patterns of day and night and the rainy and dry seasons.

They also have no age – and mark the transition from childhood to adulthood to old age by changing their name.

The team of researchers, led by University of Portsmouth, said that it is the first time they have been able to prove time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.

Professor Chris Sinha said: 'We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract.

"This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are "people outside time", but they live in a world governed by events rather than the passing of time."

Only discovered in 1986, the Amondawa, about 150 strong, continue their traditional way of life, hunting, fishing and farming.

They also have their own language which have a number system but it only goes up to four.

Prof Sinha and his team, including a linguist and anthropologist, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like "next week" or "last year".

There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons.

They also found nobody in the community had an age.

Instead, they change their names to reflect their life-stage and position within their society.

A little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling and take on a new one.

Prof Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a 'thing' – we say 'the weekend is nearly gone', 'she's coming up to her exams', 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't.

"We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.

Read more at The Telegraph

Criminal-Profiling Trick Used to Combat Disease

A technique that helps crime fighters zoom in on a serial killer’s whereabouts may help scientists prevent deaths of a different sort — those caused by infectious diseases.

The widely used criminology technique, called geographic profiling, helps investigators narrow a search by pinpointing high-priority targets among thousands of potential locations. In an upcoming International Journal of Health Geographics, researchers demonstrated the technique’s usefulness by identifying the sources of a recent malaria outbreak in Cairo and reconstructing an infamous cholera outbreak in Victorian London. Applying the technique to infectious diseases could help focus interventions, perhaps preventing the spread of disease while saving time and money.

“I think this has a lot of promise,” says disease ecologist Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. “It’s a very interesting application of a criminological tool to epidemiology.”

When hunting criminals, geographic profiling uses the sites of connected crimes to figure out where a criminal might live. Pioneered by criminologist Kim Rossmo, a former Vancouver police officer now at Texas State University-San Marcos, the method is based on a criminal’s tendency to take a Goldilocks-like approach when selecting where to commit a crime — a location that’s not too close to home, not too far, but just right.

Rossmo, a coauthor of the new study, developed an algorithm that incorporates this notion in two parts. The crime is less likely to be committed in the criminal’s buffer zone — the immediate vicinity of his or her home or work — because detection is riskier and opportunities may be few. And the likelihood of a crime site decays with distance, because travel requires time, effort and money.

“I’m based in London,” says study coauthor Steven Le Comber of Queen Mary, University of London. “So I’m not going to pop up to Inverness [in the far reaches of Scotland] to murder someone. But, equally, I don’t want to commit crimes on my own doorstep.”

The math behind geographic profiling also incorporates the idea that all distances are not created equal — highways are easier to traverse than a congested downtown. All these measures then generate a map of places the offender is likely to live, which is overlaid on a map of a search area. Unlike geospatial techniques that designate a central point from which a search radiates equally outward, geographic profiling pinpoints highly probable locations, even if they are at opposite ends of the search area.

Le Comber and his colleagues applied geographic profiling to a recent malaria outbreak in Cairo. Of 59 water bodies where mosquito larvae were found, only eight contained those species that are the most dangerous carriers of the disease. Knowing only the locations of the outbreak’s 139 malaria cases, geographic profiling correctly put six of these eight sites in the most infectious 2 percent of the 59.

“I have to say, it impressed us,” says Le Comber. “We thought it would work, but it was a bit stunning.”

The team also used the technique on the 1854 London cholera outbreak, from which doctor John Snow famously created a map of cholera deaths. This led Snow to the Broad Street pump as a source of the disease, and launched the modern field of epidemiology. Based on 321 deaths, geographic profiling also ranked the Broad Street pump as the most likely origin of the outbreak, the researchers report.

In some instances, such as diseases that have secondary outbreaks, geographic profiling might not work as well, says Ostfeld. But it could help yield more accurate maps for ecological questions, he says, such as how species ranges might respond to climate change. Researchers are already using the method to study how sharks hunt and the movement of bats and bees.

Read more at Wired Science

Dark Energy Is Real: Claim

A new study says dark energy is real and it's causing spacetime and the universe to expand.

The paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has been put together by a team of 26 scientists including Dr Chris Blake from Melbourne's Swinburne University, and provides the first independent confirmation of both the existence of dark energy and its rate of expansion.

"It shows physicist Albert Einstein was right," says Blake. "Dark energy is a smooth cosmological constant throughout the universe, rather than a change in the laws of gravity."

A hundred years ago scientists believed the universe was steady and unchanging. Einstein invented the cosmological constant to expand the fabric of space-time after his own equations for general relativity wouldn't allow for the cosmos to remain static as expected in a steady state universe.

Soon afterwards, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was actually expanding, consistent with Einstein's original general relativity theory.

Einstein then removed his cosmological constant describing his failure to predict an expanding universe in theory before it was proven by observation, as his biggest blunder.

In 1998, astronomers studying distant exploding stars called a Type 1A supernovae discovered that not only was the universe expanding, but that the rate of expansion was accelerating due to some type of unknown force or dark energy. Einstein's cosmological constant was back.

"The acceleration was a shocking discovery, because it showed we have a lot more to learn about physics, "Blake says.

To verify the supernovae findings, Blake and colleagues spent four years using a powerful spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory to collect data on more than 240,000 galaxies going back over seven billion years to when the cosmos was less than half its current age.

"It showed the growth of structure in the universe, the development of galaxy clusters and super clusters has slowed down," Blake says. "This implies the most distant parts of the universe which are further back in space-time, have ordinary matter and hence gravity is dominating. But today this antigravity dark energy has taken hold."

The researchers then looked at the distances between pairs of galaxies.

"The average distance between galaxy pairs is about 500,000,000 light years," says Blake. "Galaxies tend to grow on compression waves called baryon acoustic oscillations, which spread through the universe. They can be detected as ripples in cosmic microwave background radiation."

According to Blake, "The average distance between these galaxy pairs has also been found to have grown because of the expansion of space-time, and that's further confirmation of an antigravity agent.'

Read more at Discovery News

Body reprogrammed to accept donor organ as its own

British-based researchers have discovered a way to reprogramme immune system cells so that they think the donated organ is a natural part of the recipient's body.

Not only will the development avoid patients having to take three different types of costly drugs every day of their life, it will also mean the donated organs lasts indefinitely.

Dr Pervinder Sagoo, co-author at King's College London, said: "We hope this is the holy grail that means that the recipient is completely tolerant to the transplanted organ for the rest of their life."

Currently patients must take around three immunosuppressant drugs a day to prevent a new organ from being rejected after transplantation.

However, these drugs suppress the entire immune system, leaving the patient susceptible to infections and tumours.

Transplanted organs are also put under pressure andoften do not last longer than 10 years.

The new approach involves re-educating the immune system so that the body sees the organ as a natural part of the body.

The immune system carries on working in exactly the same way but because it does not see the new tissue as alien, leaves it alone.

The technique works by mixing the immune cells of the donor and the recipient in the laboratory to produce a kind of hybrid which is then copied millions of times.

These new cells of then injected into the recipient – spreading around the body and re-educating the immune system for life.

Ultimately this approach could extend the life of a transplanted organ and in turn, could alleviate the organ shortage problem.

The technique has already been used in animals and clinical human trials start at the end of the year.

Scientists hope it could be used in earnest within a decade.

Professor Robert Lechler, Vice-Principal for Health at King's, said: "This study is a promising step forward that could lead to dramatic advances in preventing organ rejection and improving the quality of life of transplant patients."

Read more at The Telegraph

Forgeries in the Bible's New Testament?

Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a provocative new book which charges that the Apostle Paul authored only a fraction of letters attributed to him, and the Apostle Peter just wrote nothing.

Written by Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian and now agnostic professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the book claims to unveil "one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition:" the use of deception to promote the truth.

"The Bible not only contains untruths of accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies," Ehrman writes in "Forged: Writing in the Name of God -- Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are."

According to the biblical scholar, at least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries, while only seven of the 13 epistles attributed to Paul were probably written by him.

"Virtually all scholars agree that seven of the Pauline letters are authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon," said Ehrman.

Individuals claiming to be Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians and Colossians, he added.

Contradictory views, discrepancies in the language and the choice of words among the books attributed to Paul are all evidence of this forgery, the author asserts..

For example, Ehrman’s analysis of the book of Ephesians shows that the text, filled with long Greek sentences, doesn’t match with Paul’s peculiar Greek writing style, made of short sentences.

Moreover, the content of what the author says "stands at odds with Paul’s own thought, but is in line with the Ephesians," writes Ehrman.

The biblical scholar, who also challenges the authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, disputes the assumption that the Apostle Peter wrote the Epistles of Peter or anything else.

Unlike Paul, Peter, a fisherman raised in rural Palestine, was most certainly illiterate. So was the Apostle John, who could have not written the Gospel bearing his name, said Ehrman.

But why would an author claim to be an Apostle when he wasn’t? The answer is pretty obvious according to the scholar.

In the early centuries of the church, Christians felt under attack from all sides. "They were in conflict with Jews and pagans over the validity of their religion... but the hottest debates were with other Christians, as they argued over the right thing to believe and the rights ways to live," said Ehrman.

Thus Christians aiming at authorizing views they wanted others to accept, wrote in the name of the Apostles, "fabricating, falsifying, and forging documents," said Ehrman.

"If your name was Jehoshaphat and no one had any idea who you were, you could not very well sign your own name to the book," said Ehrman.

"No one would take the Gospel of Jehoshaphat seriously. If you wanted someone to read it, you called yourself Peter. Or Thomas. Or James. In other words, you lied about who you really were," Ehrman concluded.

According to the scholar, the idea that "writing in the name of another" was a common, accepted practice in antiquity is wrong. Forgery was just as deceitful, inappropriate, and wrong as it is today, he said.

Read more at Discovery News