About fourteen years ago, well over 2000 years after the date in which it was written, archaeologists found a (roughly) three-foot high limestone tablet upon which was written, in ink, a prophesy about the death and resurrection of the Messiah. This was the "Gabriel Stone," also called the "Jeselsohn Stone," because it is currently owned by David Jeselsohn. But the hero of this Messianic tale is not Jesus of Nazareth, but Simon bar Yosef of Peraea, who, according to the story, was told by the Archangel Gabriel that he would be crucified and would die, and then would be resurrected after three days.
I won't go into the religious implications of this. Suffice it to say that, since it predates Jesus' death and resurrection, the Gabriel Stone has the potential to totally upend Christianity today. But then again, so would the realization that there were four failed Messiahs before Jesus and probably many more in the two thousand years, since. And I am talking "Messiahs" in the Jewish sense: A warrior-king and wise administrator who will rebuild the Temple, gather the people of Israel back to the Promised Land, restore Jerusalem as the center of the political and religious universe, and restore all of the treasures, including the lost Ark of the Covenant. Judaism already has mechanisms in place for the forgiveness of sins and admission into Paradise, and has had said mechanisms for over five thousand years. Only Christianity makes belief in Christ a condition for salvation. The Jews are much more open-minded.
But why was the story about Simon bar Yosef of Peraea written in ink on a piece of stone? Most stones that have come down to us were painted or carved, not written on in ink. Ink was used on paper or parchment. On the other hand, paper and parchment are relatively hard to manufacture, tend to rot, and are expensive compared to a relatively permanent slab of marble, limestone, sandstone or some other stone made by God. So why was the story of Simon bar Yosef written in ink on a piece of stone?
To answer that, we first have to travel back in time to First Century Israel. It is a bogus claim based on antisemitism and Gentile conceit that Jesus and the other Jewish people of First Century Israel were illiterate. Hebrew Schools, or Yeshivas, began some thirty years before Jesus was born, and those are just the public schools. The Jews as a people had been able to read the Torah and write in Hebrew for hundreds if not thousands of years before that. Jesus would have been no exception.
Furthermore, the Torah was not the only book around at the time. There were plenty of other books, most of which have probably been lost to Time. Nonetheless, we know about, and may have even read, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Metamorphosis by Ovid, and books by Seneca and Pythagoras and hundreds of other Greek and Roman authors. And what were the original books of the Old Testament, like Esther and Job and the Song of Songs, if not books?
So, let us mentally wander through the marketplaces of First Century Israel. There is a produce stand with baskets of oranges and apples and dates and strawberries. There is the stand with barrels of olives and bins of spices. There is the booth with bolts of fabric in vibrant colors. There is the Importer's booth with goods from Syria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon and Cyprus. And then there is the Book-Seller's booth with a wide selection of books, both new and used, both scrolls and a new type of book, the codex, which has pages of paper or parchment with words written on them that people can read.
But how do you know what book to read? It's possible that the book-seller has read them all and can tell you all about them, but this would take time and this is a busy and very crowded marketplace.
The answer is advertising.
Now, I have in my possession posters of my books. I don't know what to do with them, but they are advertising. They look like the shiny and colorful covers of my books, but they are made of paper. If I wanted to make my posters more permanent, I would back them with cardboard or put them in a frame. But First Century Israel didn't have cardboard or wooden frames, at least as far as we know. If one wanted permanence in the First Century, one could use stone, which could be adorned with paint or words written in ink and then leaned up against a wall as advertising. This actually makes good sense because wind doesn't usually blow away stone tablets, they're too large for a thief to slip them into his pocket, and stone tablets don't bend or tear apart.
What is more, according to Wikipedia, the Gabriel Stone contains a "series of short prophesies written in the first person," for a total of 87 lines. Most of the words are missing- ink is by no means a permanent medium. A translation of it can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4471612/Messiah-Stone-Translation. The first person, the speaker, is the Archangel Gabriel, and he is speaking to Simon bar Yosef of Peraea. Interestingly, it was written in Hebrew, not Aramaic, the mother-language of that time. And according to some of the rabbinic sages, Gabriel was the only one of the archangels who spoke Aramaic. If he had written it, which is highly unlikely, then why wouldn't he have written it in Aramaic instead of Hebrew? Obviously, it was written by a person to be read by all Jewish folk, not just the Aramaic-speaking ones, but the Greek ones, the Roman ones, the Egyptian ones and whoever else happened to be milling around the marketplace.
It would make sense to me that the Gabriel Stone is an advertised excerpt of a much larger book, a fictional account written by someone who knew Hebrew and about angels and archangels and resurrection and the spirit, the way that portions of a modern novel might be printed on a poster, in order to entice a potential customer into buying the entire book. I think that the actual book, of which the excerpt was only a part, was written by an Essene or Pharisee, since both of these sects believed in angels, resurrection and the spirit, and that it was written to be part propaganda and part novel, much like many Christian books nowadays predict Armageddon and the End of the World. And since Simon bar Yosef did not actually rise from the dead and fulfill his destiny as the Messiah, this book, which, in my book, I call Gabriel's Prophesy, was written before the crucifixion of Simon bar Yosef in roughly 4 BCE, perhaps as a way to drum up support for his cause.
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