Gabriel Stone

April DeConick writes for us a report on the Gabriel Stone seminar recently held at Rice University. The Gabriel Stone is a recently discovered stone tablet, dating to near the time of Christ that seems to be a sort of apocalypse, reflecting one mode of first century Jewish messianic thinking. The ink on the stone is badly eroded, and not too much can be made out on it. Some suggest one particularly incomplete section means that someone (a messiah?) is called upon by Gabriel to be resurrected from the dead after “three days”. This report isn’t particularly helpful on that score (“Then Gabriel enters the conversation, but what he says is too fragmentary for me to comment.”), but from what I’ve seen elsewhere this suggestion is pretty tendentious. Approximate English translation of the discernible text here (pdf).