Three days

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on the discovery of a tablet—or, rather, the interpretation of a tablet that was bought about a decade ago—that suggests that the Christian tradition of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah was neither as new nor as scandalous as previously thought.

Most likely discovered in the Dead Sea region, the tablet's authenticity is taken to be credible, and like the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which give us an idea of what a radical group of Jews called the Essenes were doing and thinking in the years around the birth of Jesus, it is thought to add to our understanding of the intellectual climate of the time.

The tablet, apparently written following the death of what a group of Jews thought as a candidate for their long-awaited Messiah, contains 87 lines of text, many of which are indecipherable or difficult to read. The English translation of the text (in Word) makes no effort to hide the difficulties in reading or in interpretation. The lines that are getting the most attention are the following:

19. In three days you shall know, that(?)\for(?) He said,
20. (namely,) yhwh the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Israel: The evil broke (down)
21. before justice.

as well as line 80:

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

The discovery and interpretation of the text is interesting, but the larger question is what these lines actually mean. Speaking conservatively, they suggest that the motif of a 3-day resurrection was part of the Jewish tradition, though how widespread this belief was is unclear. We shouldn't be surprised by this, since the Gospels draw heavily from the imagery of the Jewish prophets to show that Jesus was precisely who he said he was. (The Book of Jonah, for instance, also has the prophet in the belly of a whale for three days before he is spouted back on land.) As a result, this leads credence to the historical-political reading of the Gospels that many contemporary scholars support:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

But if the idea of a resurrection was part of the Jewish canon before Jesus arrived, what accounts for the hostility and violence of the Jews toward the early church? Something deeper must have been going on. The early church, perhaps, was more than just literary tropes or a political cause.