The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals has a fascinating article on their website. It has to do with some recent manuscript discoveries near the ancient site of Bethel, about 12 miles north of Jerusalem.
One of the texts has been dubbed the “purplehat” scroll. Here is a short excerpt. I commend the entire article to you.
As I said, as soon as we left Herod and set out in the direction of Bethlehem there was the star again, ‘the glory’ as we called it. And with the help of ‘the glory’ we finally arrived in Bethlehem. It was weird. ‘The glory’ had led us to a place that was far from glorious. What a let down! We began to think we’d been deliberately duped by Herod, and that ‘the glory’ had lost the scent. When this star brought us to a filthy barn behind an inn in Bethlehem, we seriously thought we’d been fooled, that this was some kind of sad, Jewish joke. Who wouldn’t? But we quickly came to realize how stupid that was!
‘The glory’ went ahead of us and then stopped, hovering. When it came to rest suddenly things began to fall into place.
When you read the introduction to purplehat I believe you will see the significance. Click here to read.
December 13, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I found the article very exciting, and to even consider that this could be authentic opens a very powerful door for me (and others for sure).
But (there’s always a but), After searching for a half-hour on the web, I found nothing; nothing that even remotely links third-party verification of the find. Now, Paul Helm has solid credentials, and the Reformation 21 site is a respectable collection of writers and thinkers. I suppose I may just need to accept Paul’s own set-up of the text which seems to cast an unspoken secrecy about the text, but I have a hard time with that.
I wish Paul had referenced something, anything to reference as a validation of even the general excavation site. Nothing.
So I will follow this in the future, but struggle to swallow this pill right now.