Oxford ancient historian, Peter Thonemann, pours cold water on the story about the ‘priceless’ Christian codices discovered in Jordon, which – according to reports – could change everything we know about the first century of Christianity.
He saw one of the ‘books’ a year ago, and fairly quickly realised that the apparently encoded lines inscribed on it were copied from a tombstone currently on display in the Archeological Museum of Amman. ‘The mystical kabbalistic inscriptions on Elkington’s copper codex turned out to be mechanical copies of a line from an ancient tombstone,’ he writes in the current TLS.
From the images in the press, he presumes that the lead codices are the product of the same Amman workshop.