In Jordan, a ‘stunning’ discovery under Petra’s ancient stone
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, if you can do down in the evening, that's great too.
Jordan as a whole was a really interesting place to visit.
Also explore up the stairs carved in the rocks in Petra. They're somewhat hidden and most tourists do not venture up them. They lead to a sort of rock maze on top of the cliffs overlooking Petra with incredible views. I accidentally got lost up there at dusk and ended up hiking out the Al Siq canyon alone in the dark. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The stars and subtle desert night sounds felt like I had entered a time machine. One of those deeply transformative experiences that only occurs when venturing off the beaten path. Fortunately, the guards at the entrance were cool with my accidental trespassing.
When I was there, we went through the official entrance in Wadi Musa, with tickets and all (which I don't mind!). We went early to have the time to make quite a large tour around the whole area, and as far as I could tell it looked like the area was simply open for anyone to hike in or out freely, except through the front entrance. As I said, I don't have any problem with buying a ticket, I'm just wondering if my observations are correct.
As long as the main tourist entrances are taxed and enough money comes in this way, no one cares, if the back is open for the locals or occasional hikers/backpacker low on money.
The main site is large, and has strenuous climbs up to the High Altar, Treasury overlook, Acropolis and out to the Monastery. I recommend starting early when the site opens shortly after dawn, before the crowds of mid-morning, and the heat of the afternoon.
Here's the Monastery in the dawn with some poetic musings:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikhailfranco/8579438475/in/al...
From Aaron's Tomb, you can see the Monastery embedded in the side of the huge escarpment (sequence of zoom levels):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikhailfranco/8579748035/in/al...
Agree. I really liked Wadi Rum, which is where parts of 'The Martian' and 'Lawrence of Arabia' were filmed. Totally spectacular. When I went, years ago, the capital Amman was also a friendly city to walk around, even for an obvious westerner like myself.
Angkor Wat is the main attraction but it also has interesting nearby ruins as well. Rent a motorbike and get lost on the farming backroads, google maps works pretty well.
I'm truly not trying to create conspiracy theories, it's just the coincidence of this being found on a tv show seems unbelievable lucky.
The article plays it straight, but I'm pretty sure this = Holy Grail confirmed.
If the 12 apostles existed, it seems unlikely that they'd all be buried in the same place, in what may have been a "prestigious" tomb. Jesus isn't exactly described as a particularly popular figure in his time when it came to the authorities, and I would expect the 12 apostles would have died at different times, in different places, and wouldn't have been buried together.
The time range is pushing it, too: between 400 BCE and 106 CE, though that's just the roughest of estimates based on when the city was founded and when it was annexed by the Romans, not based on any inspection of the remains. It feels more likely that this tomb was built, used, and sealed up well before Jesus and the disciples/apostles supposedly lived.
Even if we assume the religious fairy tales are true, this doesn't pass the smell test: it's vanishingly unlikely that these are the remains of those men, or that any of this is related to the Holy Grail mythology.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/where-are-the-12-apostles-no...
Christianity is India's third-largest religion with about 26 million adherents, making up 2.3 percent of the population as of the 2011 census.[1] The written records of St Thomas Christians mention that Christianity was introduced to the Indian subcontinent by Thomas the Apostle, who sailed to the Malabar region (present-day Kerala) in 52 AD.
Any christian community needs to boost is credibility, and hype up their own history.
It was always a point made from very early times that Rome was the church of Peter. As opposed to places like Alexandria for example whose status came from it being the see of a disciple of Peter.
Something else I seem to recall is that one of the leg bones was different -- what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman always putting one leg on the side of a boat to haul in a fishing net.
The final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known -- Ss Simon and Jude are in Saint Peter's, Saint Paul is buried in Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Saint James the Greater is at Compostella in Spain, Saint Bartholomew is in a church on an island in the Tiber in Rome, Saints Philip and James the Lesser have their own church in Rome I think.
And things like 'Peter is here' is also far from conclusive. As figures like Peter were venerated by the later church. Just as 'Jesus is here' wouldn't mean its the grave of Jesus.
> what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman
The evidence that that the apostles even were fisherman isn't actually very good. Acting like its confirmed that we know Peter was a Galilean fisherman is ridiculous.
Also a fact like that can have 100s of explanations.
> final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known
Mostly based on church internal story (known to be completely incorrect in many cases) and association combined with later finds. Almost none of them have solid historical bases even by standards of the first century.
The problem is that Christian scholarship for 2000 years was utterly dominated by Christians and Christian institutions with a huge amount of believe in Church history. Independent study outside of those institution is 1:100 less resourced and for every issue they have to first fight this Christian status quo. Many 'scholars' of these topics have 'faith requirements' meaning they are not actually allowed to publish anything that would go against core doctrines. How much these are enforced depends on the institution but there are known cases where people got fired. This is still bad now but it was way, way worse 30-40 years ago.
People get their careers ruined over things like this, one professor was harassed at being gay (before that was accepted) and claimed that his research was 'gay propaganda' because it vaguely talks about Jesus sleeping with another dude.
So any claims about this soft of stuff, specially if not done in the last couple decades are highly questionable at best. So I take all of these claims with a huge grain of salt.
Other Christian circles, and a large swathe of historians, disagree on this front. However, it is one of the founding points of the Petrine Primacy, or the reason that Saint Peter is seen as the First Pope of the Catholic Church.
So much of supposed 'Christian history' is myth making based on incredibly unreliable evidence just extrapolated from other unreliable evidence.
Doubting the existence of the twelve apostles is about the height of obstinate prejudice and special pleading. No serious historian does.
> it seems unlikely that they'd all be buried in the same place [...] I would expect the 12 apostles would have died at different times, in different places, and wouldn't have been buried together.
It is common knowledge that they weren't buried in the same place. They were on an evangelical mission and traveled to different places[0]. All of them were martyred, except for John.
> Even if we assume the religious fairy tales are true
Sad and unnecessary snark.
[0] https://aleteia.org/2017/07/21/whatever-happened-to-the-twel...
And there are plenty of historians that disagree that there is any solid bases for the claim that there were exactly 12 apostles. Even assuming that term had a specific meaning in the first century.
There is plenty of evidence that the very term apostles no is different then historically. Paul himself, literally the oldest source on Christianity we have, disagrees with the classic 12 apostles theory, as Paul claims he is an apostle.
So pretty much every serious historian disagrees that there is a clear cut '12 apostle' that were consistent and named since the time of Jesus. In the oldest document we have of the time period no '12 apostles' are mentioned.
There are so many serious issue with the whole idea of '12 apostles'.
> [0]
That's not a source. The majority of that 'history' is church internal history that has very, very thin bases that actual historians would accept.
The fact is we almost nothing first century sources that talk about this (and even what we have is heavily bias and unreliable). Pretty much all of this history is 2nd century at best (most of it later). And we have plenty of evidence that this is by far a long enough within religions to evolve a mythology.
The ending of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade used Petra as the outside shot for the ancient temple where the story ended.
It says "between 400 B.C. and A.D. 106". That encompasses all relevant dates.
It's a pretty safe assumption that they were buried there before the Roman annexation. My guess would be they were buried much closer to 400 BC than to AD 106.
A cup that looks a _lot_ like the grail prop from the film.
We have absolutely no idea what Jesus said.
If we have any evidence at all of what Jesus said it would be 'Romans GTFO' because that's what gets you actually curlicued (ignore the nonsense in the gospels).
In fact that whole speech from the gospel was most likely simple something 'Matthew' (not actual Matthew the character from the bible, but some random author who's script was later titled 'Mathew' by the church) inserted into Mark. And funny enough in these speeches Jesus just happen to say some stuff that overrides a number of points from 'Mark'. Its almost as if 'Matthew' used Jesus to voice his own opinions.
When you have A and B that look pretty much the same. Then its much more likely that B simply copied from A, or A from B.
If you want to introduce a new source C (or in this case Q), then you need to have good evidence for why the other options were not picked. In case of the 'Q' source this isn't really the case.
The are multiple things that the Q source can't really explain. The modern reference book on this topic is 'The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem' if you are interested in that. There are just really big problems with the concept.
And even if 'Q' existed, its not really good evidence for it being the word of Jesus. We know for a fact that 'sayings of X famous person' were a common thing back then. We have 'Gospel of Thomas' that is likely a later version of that. We have this today with Quotes from people like Theodore Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Any interesting sounding saying is simply attributed to whoever person.
So we have a potential source that we have 0 evidence of and no text that even references such a source. And then we have plenty of evidence that if it existed, it likely wouldn't say what people want it to say, because so maybe an earlier source existed but its a huge stretch to then say 'therefore this source was written by somebody who heard these things first hand'.
The idea that it is 'quotes' is simply because the majority of the things 'Matthew'/'Luke' insert into 'Mark' was speeches. I do think for sure earlier sources existed, maybe even earlier gospels. But we just don't have them (as far as we can tell).
I also think the actual reality is more complex then all the simple solution to the 'Synoptic Problem'. Reality all these scripts were revised over and over. And I think good recent work is being done on properly attributing the Gospels from Marcion original 'New Testament'. Marcion is critical in 'New Testament' development but very much understudied because he is a 'heritic'. The Gospel of 'Luke' is likely a strongly revised version of the gospel that was in Marcion. And potentially that version predates even 'Mark' but that is up for debate. Markus Vinzent is really great on this topic if you are interested.
If year 0 is correct, these people were buried long after Petra was a bustling city then?
It seems much more likely that these 12 skeletons date back to the earlier days of the city.
(Nitpick: there was no year 0; 1 BC goes right into AD 1. And Jesus' supposed death was around AD 33, not AD 1. Sometimes people think "AD" means "After his Death", but it's really "Anno Domini", or "the year of the/our Lord", when he was supposedly born.)