Grace & Knowledge Blog

The Copper Scroll contains plenty of material for writers of adventure stories.  It lists 64 stashes of hidden treasure that include large amounts of gold and silver.  But the locations given for the treasures are vague enough that no one knows exactly where they are. 

Then there are those mysterious sequences of Greek letters after a few of the entries in the list--e.g., Kappa Epsilon Nu after the first entry.  Is this treasure the property of the Kappa Epsilon Nu fraternity on some college campus?  (Perhaps at Marshall University, where Indiana Jones was a faculty member. )   The 17 talents of silver in that batch of treasure could finance a few keg parties.

It's no wonder that the Copper Scroll is showing up in novels--like Gold of Kings by Davis Bunn, a new thriller published by Simon and Schuster.  

In this story, an antiquities dealer named Sean Syrrell is murdered at the beginning of the book.  It turns out that he has found clues to the possible location of some of the Copper Scroll treasure.  He bequeaths the clues to his granddaughter, who along with a treasure hunter and a federal agent set out in search of  Sean's killer and the treasure.   

It's an entertaining story.  It includes enough action--e.g., car crashes--to...

Tags: archaeology, books

Recently, while  my wife was watching "The Bourne Supremacy" on TV, it occurred  to me that any four-syllable noun could potentially  generate a title for another book/movie in this series.  For example:

• The Bourne Prosperity---Bourne finally remembers where he put his wallet.
• The Bourne Ventriloquy---Bourne throws his voice around.
• The Bourne Spectroscopy---the plot of this one includes a range of elements too numerous to mention here.
• The Bourne Philately---enemy operations stamped out.
• The Bourne Monotony---a marathon of these movies shown one after another.
• The Bourne Lobotomy---the end result of watching The Bourne Monotony.

Tags: books, humor

Kenneth Westby recently sent me a link to a wonderful article by Dr. John Byl of Trinity Western University. The article is called "Theism and Mathematical Realism". The article's premise is that the existence of mathematical truth points to the existence of God.

When mathematicians do research, they are generally trying to discover patterns. Such an endeavor presupposes that

1. there are patterns to be found;
2. it is possible for humans to discover them.

Byl maintains that beliefs 1. and 2. are best explained by the existence of a Creator who has built patterns into the universe and makes the knowledge of them available to humans, whom he has created in his image. He argues for the "classical Christian view" proposed by Augustine that mathematical truths exist in the mind of God. 

Byl's article covers a lot of ground in a clear and effective fashion. I highly recommend it.

Tags: apologetics, mathematics

A few years ago I wrote a review of A Skeleton in God's Closet, a novel by Prof. Paul Maier, a history professor at Western Michigan University. This 1991 novel is one of the first examples of the genre of "archaeological thrillers."

Now there are a growing number of books in this category, including:

• Cross Bones (2005), one of the Temperance Brennan novels by Kathy Reichs (the books on which the TV series "Bones" is very loosely based). James Tabor, a colleague of Reichs at UNC Charlotte, was a consultant for this one.
• The Lazarus Effect (2008) by biblical scholar Ben Witherington III and his wife Ann.

I was at the public library yesterday and found a copy of Bunn's book on the shelf of new fiction. I'll see if it lives up to its hype.

Tags: archaeology, books