History Forum / General / Archaeology / April 2007

    Everyone but you and the high school scholars on Wikipedia has agreed Thiering
is an idiot. You keep claiming otherwise without presenting any evidence. Your
juvenile fixation on her does not speak well of you.

Let me say at the outset, that academic archaeology got the funding
from Christians wanting to verify scripture. If it had not been for
that, the techniques of excavation would not have been worked out for
decades.

But the Europeans, in particular, have moved away from Biblical
archaeology, in part because of all the violence in the Levant. The
kind of iconoclasm scripture describes against what it regards as
paganism is still common in the Levant and all across the Moslem
world. But what the Gospel regards as idolatry, modern archaeologists
regard as art, worthy of preservation because of the allegorical
insights into the cultures which produced it.

I can understand the sensibilities of the Essenes, disgusted with what
they regard as idolatry, and some of the Jewish altarware that has
been found suggests it was made by Greek artists because of the images
of human figures. But that is also sour grapes. From Jim Jones & David
Koresh, all the way up to Pat Robertson and Billy Graham, we see
leaders who were given special priveleges, and even expensive luxury
goods not at all in the ascetic tradition of Jesus.

Clearly, Jesus got that ascetic tradition from the Essenes and Qumran,
but it had existed long before the Hebrews. EW Barber, "The Mummies of
Urumchi" shows two ashrams found at Gonor & Togoluk, way the f.ck out
in the Kara Kum desert in what is now Uzbekistan. They were both
erected in the same spartan style, devoid of iconography with plain
white plastered sets of monk cells, a sacred apocathery, and ashram
meditation hall. But done with far more skill than seen at Qumran, and
a couple *thousand* years older.

You know in the scripture where it says the Magi came from the East?
Well, this is *that* East. 4000-5000 years ago, it wasnt desert but
fertile grassland with irrigation of grain in the valleys. We can see
how scripture was granted authenticty by being old, but now they've
found *documents* out in the Kara Kum and Taklamakhan deserts which
are as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi, but from a
whole different, ie *Aryan*, not Semitic tradition, that themselves
are copies of texts that predate anything in the Bible. The cold dry
alkaline desert soils preserved documents.

Carl, its like a whole new world opened up when China opened up. 100
years ago, British, French, & German expeditions to Central Asia found
abandoned temples and Silk Road inns, and even whole cities like Niya
and Loulan. Blows my mind. You know the ghost towns out in the
American West that have lain out there for a hundred years. Well Niya
has lain there for *1500* years. And the Chinese just found another
town that was abandoned 2500 years ago. With the furniture still in
the houses. At Niya, they found personal letters that had been
received, and some not yet sent.

And scrolls, codexes, even documents on birchbark. The Chinese are
cooperating with the European archives, which laid buried in museum
cellars because of WWI, WWII, and then the Cold War. I think the canon
is something in excess of 100,000 documents. I mean everything from
Qumran and Nag Haddi would fit in a foot locker, but the canon from
Cental Asia would require an 18 wheeler to haul away.

Naturally, this is where the young graduate students are going. It is
unplowed ground. They dont havta take a position on the derivative
works of Thiering, theologeons, or even Matt Giwer. Biblical
archaeology is increasingly passe. They dont *care* whether the Jews
and Palestinians work it out. They dont go there.

Its a whole different sensibility Carl. I have a copy of the
Maitreyasamiti Texts that Chinese Taoist monks found behind a false
wall while cleaning out a *Buddhist* temple. Whether from Qumran, or
any of the later cults on up to Christianity and Islam, if clerics
find the work of an earlier religion, they regard it as heresy and
burn them. The Taoist monks brought them to be restored and
conserved.

The text is a dialogue between the Living Buddha and the Gautamid
Queen of Kucha. The copy dates from the 5th century, but it is written
in a Brahmi Sanskrit font (found in NW CHINA!) in Tocharian, a
language that is just one step away from the original Proto-Indo-
European. Like finding the Aryan ancestor of Greek. And in stark
contrast the Levantine scriptural tradition where some authority comes
down off the mountain or out of the desert to tell everyone what to
do, here we see the Buddha and the Queen seek a *consensus* on the
proper way for her to perform ancient pre-Buddhist rituals.

There is a respect for the traditions of others and ancestors that is
completely contrary to the Biblical Essene tradition of claiming a
monopoly of truth. Kucha had the shrines for 22 religions, and
everyone got along. The "Holy Land" where people claim a monopoly of
truth, never did figure out how to live peacefully with itself much
less its neighbors. The people in Kucha didnt preach about peace. They
just *lived* peacefully.

It says actual schlars consider her a fringe theorust.
That is overly polite.
Her "teeories have not been disproven because you canot disprove delusions.