Ancient World Review

The Library Of St. Catherine's Monastery In Egypt

"Saint Catherine's Monastery ... officially 'Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai'  lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai, near the town of Saint Catherine, Egypt. The monastery is named after Catherine of Alexandria" (Wikipedia) "

Note: Catherine of Alexandria probably never existed:

"Donald Attwater (English Catholic author, 1892-1977) dismisses what he calls the 'legend' of Saint Catherine, arguing for a lack of any 'positive evidence that she ever existed outside the mind of some Greek writer who first composed what he intended to be simply an edifying romance.' Harold Davis writes that 'assiduous research has failed to identify Catherine with any historical personage' and has theorized that Catherine was an invention inspired to provide a counterpart to the story of the slightly later pagan philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350–370 – 415 CE)." (Wikipedia)

According to the UNESCO World Heritage List, "The [Greek Orthodox] monastery of St Catherine stands at the foot of Mount Horeb where, the Old Testament records, Moses received the Tablets of the Law. The mountain is known and revered by Muslims as Jebel Musa. The entire area is sacred to three world religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism." The monastery is controlled by "the autonomous Church of Sinai."

Even though St. Catherine's was named after a (probably) fictitious saint, this is still a remarkable and very old institution:

^"Built between 548 and 565, the monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world. The site contains the world's oldest continually operating library [next video], possessing many unique books including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus."

The incredible library filmed on a potato.

Note: The manuscript shown in the video above is the Ashtiname of Muhammed, "also known as the Covenant or Testament (Testamentum) of Muhammad (the Islamic Prophet) ... a document which is a charter or writ ratified by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad granting protection and other privileges to the followers of Jesus the Nazarene, given to the Christian monks of Saint Catherine's Monastery. It is sealed with an imprint representing Muhammad's hand."

The manuscript may be inauthentic. According to Wikipedia, "Since the 19th century, several aspects of the Ashtiname, notably the list of witnesses, have been questioned by scholars. There are similarities to other documents granted to other religious communities in the Near East. One example is Muhammad's alleged letter to the Christians of Najran, which first came to light in 878 in a monastery in Iraq and whose text is preserved in the Chronicle of Seert." It doesn't really matter, though, because even if the Ashtiname is a forgery -- something I don't think anyone is claiming -- it's still a priceless artifact from the period.

Recently renovated, the library at St. Catherine's was re-opened in 2017.

The manuscripts and books in the monastery's library go way back:

"When Egeria visited the Sinai in 383-384, she wrote approvingly of the way the monks read to her the scriptural accounts concerning the various events that had taken place there. Thus we can speak of manuscripts at Sinai in the fourth century. It is written of Saint John Climacus that, while living as a hermit, he spent much time in prayer and in the copying of books. This is evidence of manuscript production at Sinai in the sixth century. The library at the Holy Monastery of Sinai is thus the inheritor of texts and of traditions that date to the earliest years of a monastic presence in the Sinai. In earlier times, manuscripts were kept in three different places: in the north wall of the monastery, in the vicinity of the church, and in a central location where the texts were accessible." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.

Research has also revealed that some of the manuscripts in the library contain "hidden manuscripts" which were erased in order to reuse the parchment they were written on.

"The Sinai manuscripts comprise the oldest and most important Christian monastic library collection. Of its 3,300 manuscripts, two-thirds are in Greek. The rest are principally in Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, and Slavonic, through there are other manuscripts in Polish, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Latin, and Persian. The New Finds correspond to these languages, and are stored adjacent to the library. The library also contains an important archive, containing letters, account books, charters, and other documents." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.

"...The most famous manuscript is the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, of which the monastery retains twelve pages and some twenty-four fragments."

Comment: I'm not a Christian, but St. Catherine's and its library are priceless historical treasures which must be protected at all costs. The monastery has already been the target of at least one attempted terrorist attack back in 2015 and as far as I can tell the Islamic State vermin are still waging a sporadic insurgency in the Sinai. I hate to say it, but if the situation deteriorates the Church of Sinai (which controls the monastery) should consider moving the library to a safer location, preferably somewhere out of the country.

Related: St. Catherine's Monastery, its Library and its Palimpsests.

Bart Ehrman: Christian Forgery & Counter-Forgery

"'Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature,' writes Bart Ehrman, 'is the degree to which it was forged.' The Homilies and Recognitions of Clement; Paul's letters to and from Seneca; Gospels by Peter, Thomas, and Philip; Jesus' correspondence with Abgar, letters by Peter and Paul in the New Testament--all forgeries. To cite just a few examples." Source: Oxford University Press (OUP).

Comment: I haven't read the particular book reviewed in this OUP article, but I did read Forged, another book by Ehrman which covers a lot of the same ground, and it's excellent. Highly recommended. My only problem with Ehrman is his common assertion that Jesus existed despite the fact that almost everything else about the New Testament is unreliable -- as shown by his own research. I have to admit, however, that I haven't read his book on the subject -- Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth -- so I don't really know why he's so convinced that there was a real historical figure behind the myths.

The amount of forgery that took place in the early history of Christianity is really mind-boggling. Another excellent history of the subject is Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion, by Joseph Wheless, who did a huge amount of research into what he calls "The Christian Forgery Mill." If you study this history together with the proliferation of Christian "heresies" at the time as well as the methods that were used to suppress them, you'll get a good idea of how the new religion actually evolved in the real world.

Related: Jesus Never Existed (Ken Humphreys)

Did Jesus Exist? (Bart Ehrman interview)

How To Fake The Shroud Of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is probably a medieval forgery. Radiocarbon 14 tests performed back in 1988 dated the shroud to AD 1260–1390, but as usual these results have been called into question. For example, in 2013 USA Today announced that "new scientific tests on the Shroud of Turin, which went on display Saturday in a special TV appearance introduced by the Pope, dates the cloth to ancient times, challenging earlier experiments dating it only to the Middle Ages."

Video from 2009. Closed-captions helpful.

When it comes to the dating of the shroud, all I can say is good luck trying to sort all this stuff out. If you aren't an expert on radiocarbon dating, you don't have a prayer of figuring out which tests, if any, were accurate, and the fact that the experts themselves can't agree would seem to call into question the value of radiocarbon dating in this particular case.

There are other ways to test the shroud's authenticity. For instance, if it could be shown that the "body of Jesus" had been painted on the fabric, that would prove that the shroud is a forgery. Some experts have argued that this could be the case, but to my knowledge no traces of pigment have been discovered so far. As pointed out in the top video, the fabric itself has been darkened through some unknown process.

The people who believe that the shroud is authentic think that the image was created by exposure to Jesus's body and/or blood. These believers can be divided into two general camps:

"A 'strong-authenticity' view holds that the body image was produced by supernatural means involving Jesus' body, while a 'weak-authenticity' view holds that the body image was produced by Jesus' body via unusual natural processes. In both the strong- and weak-authenticity views, the 'blood' images arose via contact of the cloth with a bloody Jesus."  Source: The Shroud of Turin's "Blood" Images: Blood or Paint? A History of Science Inquiry," David Ford, University of Maryland (PDF)

As far as I know, the Catholic Church hasn't actually come out and said that the shroud is authentic. But they haven't said that it's inauthentic, either. If you ask me, they're trying to cover themselves with their true believers while distancing themselves enough so that they won't lose credibility if somebody does manage to prove that the shroud is a fake.

The news anchor in the next video (2009) claims that the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin has been called into question because the shroud material doesn't match the material used in another shroud discovered in a Jerusalem tomb. This is an obviously spurious argument. After all, there's no reason why different fabrics couldn't have been used for burial shrouds back then.

Fortunately for those of us who want to get to the truth of the matter, it doesn't make any difference when or how the image on the shroud was created. Even if it's "authentic," i.e., even if the shroud dates back to the first century AD and the image was left on the fabric by contact with a human body, there's absolutely no way that anyone could ever prove that it was Jesus's body. After all, we don't know what he looked like. There are no written descriptions and nobody had cameras back then. The truth is that the image on the shroud, if it's for real, could have been left there by almost anyone.

It's a fake though. You can take that to the bank.

Related: How Did The Turin Shroud Get Its Image?

One Of The Largest Prehistoric Sites In Britain Discovered Next To Stonehenge

"What could be one of the largest prehistoric sites in the UK has been discovered near Stonehenge by a consortium of archaeologists led by the University of Bradford." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"A massive 2km-wide ring of prehistoric ‘shafts’ up to 10m across and 5m deep has been discovered around the ‘super henge’ at Durrington Walls [next video] and the famous site at Woodhenge. The structures have been carbon dated to about 2500BC."

"Archaeologists believe the circle of shaft marks a boundary around the massive henge at Durrington. It is thought the features, along with an internal post line, could have guided people towards the religious sites and warned others not to cross the boundary."

The Kali Yuga

The Hindus believe that we're living in the Kali Yuga, an apocalyptic Dark Age ruled by the demon Kali, the source of all evil and destruction. The Kali Yuga, also known as the "Age of Vice," is a period of warfare, chaos, social decline and spiritual decadence brought about by Man's separation from the gods. Kali himself is frequently pictured as a deranged figure dancing on corpses and wearing human heads as jewelry. I don't believe in demons, but this bloodthirsty lunatic with ten arms is the perfect symbol of human history.

Most writers use the term Kali Yuga to mean "end times" or the "last days," but technically this isn't accurate. The Hindus see Time as a cycle of four ages or Yugas known as the Yuga Cycle. The other three periods are called the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga and the Dvapara Yuga, and they all go spinning around like a cosmic ferris wheel. So the Kali Yuga isn't the end of the world. It's just the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next.

The Yuga Cycle describes a fall from grace--a loss of enlightenment. The first age, the Satya Yuga, is a golden age of supreme goodness when the gods rule and the average human lifespan is thousands of years long, but, like the Garden of Eden, it's all downhill from there. The other Yugas follow in order, the gods withdraw, the situation deteriorates and bottoms out with the Kali Yuga, then the whole thing starts all over again. Time is a circle--an infinite, recurring progression of Yugas in which the gods advance and retreat like the tides or the phases of the moon.

Now, this is good stuff and very ancient, but is it an accurate description of reality? That probably sounds like a strange question to ask. The Yuga Cycle is a symbolic, mythical cosmology based on the Hindu concepts of samsara, karmic cycles, rebirth, reincarnation and cyclic change. Taking it literally misses the point, but is it possible that Time is actually circular? Does the Yuga Cycle or at least its concept of Time have some basis in fact? Personally, I think the idea of circular Time is more interesting than the linear Christian view of history as moving in a straight line from Creation to Apocalypse, but I don't see any evidence that the universe actually runs in cycles like this.

Time is a one-way thing. The future changes into the present which changes into the past in an infinite stream of Becoming. There are cycles in nature, but they're more like recurring patterns with thousands of variations and they never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. The fossil evidence shows a gradual evolution from the simple to the complex punctuated by catastrophes, mass extinctions and sudden bursts of new life forms like the Cambrian Explosion. If there are cycles in nature, they are cycles of chaos in the mathematical sense. The gods of this world are fractals and strange attractors.

Human history repeats itself, but only in the sense that high cultures are subject to universal laws of growth and decay as described, for instance, by Oswald Spengler. Personally, I think there's a good argument that civilization in general has deteriorated over the last two thousand years, but I'm more inclined to blame it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics than the Yuga Cycle. Entropy and chaos are the natural state of things and organized systems tend to deteriorate over time. It takes energy and intelligence to keep a civilization going and both are in short supply.

The Yuga Cycle is appealing because it explains the decay and turmoil we see around us and because it suggests that things will change for the better as the cycle turns once again. Unfortunately, these cycles are so long that they don't really have any meaning for the human race in general, never mind individuals. The Kali Yuga is supposed to have started around 3000 BC and they say it will last for 432,000 years, almost half a million years. Considering the fact that only 5000 years or so have passed since the Kali Yuga started, we've got a long way to go.

Note: Many cultures have legends about a mythical Golden Age and a subsequent fall from grace. For instance, "Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. In the two accounts that survive from ancient Greece and Rome, this degradation of the human condition over time is indicated symbolically with metals of successively decreasing value." (Wikipedia)

Temple Discovered In Ancient Roman City Using Ground-penetrating Radar

"A hidden temple was recently discovered in an ancient Roman city that's mostly still underground." Source: Live Science.

"The temple was once part of the city of Falerii Novi, which was abandoned more than 1,000 years ago and buried by time. Archaeologists recently mapped the entire town in remarkable detail with ground-penetrating radar (GPR) revealing previously unknown structures, including the temple and a bathing complex."

Views of Falerii Novi begin at 1:34.

Archaeologists Unearth Galilee Christian Town Sacked By Persians In 7th Century

"Israeli archaeologists have published a 360-degree analysis of a rural, affluent Christian town in the Galilee that was most likely destroyed by Persian invaders in 613 CE." Source: Times of Israel.

"Unearthed in 2007 in a salvage excavation before roadworks near Shlomi and Kibbutz Hanita, the remains of the Byzantine settlement at Pi Mazuva are located in modern Israel’s northwest corner on the border with Lebanon. The finds include Christian iconography, a large house and a colorful, high-quality, partially preserved mosaic floor."

Note: "According to the researchers, there were about 140 Christian settlements in the region during this era, including 63 churches or monasteries. Another 13 settlements had a mixed population. Many of these Christian sites in the Galilee were destroyed in the Persian invasion."

Next video shows the remains of a 5th-century Byzantine church discovered near Jerusalem (in 2015?).

A Brief History Of Hell (Updated)

The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.

Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:

"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue ^'a shadowy version of life on earth^'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.

Closed-captions helpful. Sort of.

The Old Testament Sheol, also known as Hades, is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."

The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.

The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."

The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.

Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:

"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocutions as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).

The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church. 

Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.

(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their garbage. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."

The valley is said to be cursed before some of the early kings of Judah sacrificed children to Moloch there.

These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in the theory of evolution. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

The full text of this sermon is a classic well worth reading.

Back in 2018, Pope Francis created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican announced in the same year that it would hold a "training course for priests in exorcism ... amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."

The Decline Of Religion In The West (Updated)

Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I can see the generational change he talks about in my own family. My grandparents were highly religious, my parents less so -- though still churchgoers -- and I'm probably the first outright atheist to come along in my family in a very long time. I might even be the first one, for all I know. Some of my relatives still pay lip-service to going to church, but the churches they belong to are of the Unitarian variety which don't really have any shared creed at all. None of my friends are religious in any way whatsoever. It's not something relevant in our lives.

In the United States, various forms of fundamentalist Protestantism are still thriving, religions like Islam are growing, and there's a fairly large New Age movement which has turned away from traditional Christianity altogether, but things have changed radically over the last century and for all practical purposes we live in an almost entirely secular society. The situation is even more dismal for religion in Europe, where Christianity is basically dead and the remaining churches are little more than Liberal/Socialist community organizations preaching the usual "progressive" gospel of self-destructive Cultural Marxism.

The same liberal disease has infected the more moderate Protestant denominations in the US, which seem to have turned into cults of social work and have been losing members for decades. As for the Catholic Church, it's been shaken repeatedly by corruption and pederasty scandals and the current Pope is just another Social Justice Warrior demanding that Europe open its borders to the immigrant invasion. Christianity is expanding into the Third World, but collapsing in the developed West, and the historical rise and fall of the religion is becoming very clear now.

Once it was established as the official state religion of the West, the Catholic church became so corrupt that it led to the first schisms as well as the rise of dozens of different "heresies." These heretical movements were a direct reaction to the orthodox church's worldliness and hypocrisy and had to be suppressed with torture and executions. For more information on the church's really incredible level of corruption back then, read the first chapter in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, by Henry Charles Lea. Highly recommended.

Plagues, corruption and social decay undermined faith in the orthodox church, leading to the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. The schisms within the church continued over the centuries, setting off a chain-reaction of schisms within schisms which led to a proliferation of different denominations -- a process of institutional disintegration that was concealed for a while by the continued religiosity of the masses. But Christianity and religion in general couldn't survive the rise of science and the spread of secularism and rationalism that created the modern western world.

Religion is an archaic survival from thousands of years ago. Like the belief in magic, it's what we would now call a Third World or primitive way of interpreting reality. Spengler predicted that the final decline of the West would see a religious revival that he called the Second Religiousness. Many Spenglerians argue that the rise of Christian Fundamentalism fits the definition. If so, the surge in Fundamentalism with its gigantic megachurches is a sign of the West's terminal decline rather than its rejuvenation.

Spengler identified the West with Christianity in many ways -- he saw the great Gothic cathedrals as symbols of the spirit of western culture in its youth -- and he would have said that pre-Christian paganism was a feature of a completely different Classical world culture. Seen from a purely Spenglerian perspective, the New Age movement is yet another symptom of decline. Too muddled to be described as a real religion, too culturally alien to be a revival of an ancient tradition, the movement is a resurgence of the irrationality common to the masses of drifting Fellahin existing outside of history.

Whatever the case, religion has very little future here, at least for the time being. That could change, though. If these Third World invasions continue, I wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback, just as various diseases thought to have been eradicated are making a comeback. This is where the lecturer in the first video gets it wrong, I think. Religion can make a comeback in the West, but if it does -- if these statistics regarding generational change and secularization reverse themselves -- it will be a sign that the demographics of the West have changed completely.

If that happens -- if religion makes a big comeback -- it will mean that the West no longer exists.

Related:

In US, Decline of Christianity Continues At Rapid Pace (Pew Research Center, 2019)

The Decline of Religion in American Family Life (American Enterprise Institute, 2019)

Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why? (The Atlantic, 2019)

The Decline of the Church in Europe (Catholic Standard, 2019)

The Holy Island Of Lindisfarne

Video from 2013.

"The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, also known simply as Holy Island, is a tidal island off the northeast coast of England, which constitutes the civil parish of Holy Island in Northumberland. Holy Island has a recorded history from the 6th century AD; it was an important centre of Celtic Christianity under Saints Aidan of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert, Eadfrith of Lindisfarne and Eadberht of Lindisfarne. After the Viking invasions and the Norman conquest of England, a priory was reestablished. A small castle was built on the island in 1550." (Wikipedia)

"The ruined church and monastic buildings that still stand on the island today are not Anglo-Saxon; they are the remains of the new priory built on the island in the late 11th century by the monks of Durham. So where is the original monastery? And what happened to it after the attack?" Source: DigVentures.

"All that is known to survive are some carved stone monuments of Anglo-Saxon date, which were found by archaeologists clearing away some of the collapsed rubble from the priory ruins in the late 19th and early 20th century."

Good times at Lindisfarne, 793 AD. From Vikings, Season 1.

Note: "... a major ... geophysical survey funded by National Geographic was carried out by Durham University in September 2012. This has shown that there is limited archaeological evidence for the monastic boundary that had previously been postulated, but an alternative boundary has been identified, which is associated with an area of possible industrial activity. It also identified a probably infirmary cloister associated with the later priory and a possible structure aligned on the two standing churches." Source: Durham University.