Evidence for God from Science

The oldest known OT scripture which was burnt in a fire has now been unrolled digitally so that it can be read.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-22/e ... re/7866948

"Much of the text is as readable, or close to as readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls [the oldest scrolls ever found] or high resolution photographs of them."

"We were immediately struck by the fact that in these passages, the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll is identical in all of its details both regarding its letter and section division to what we call the Masoretic text, the authoritative Jewish text until today," Dr Segal said.

This makes it the earliest Pentateuchal book — relating to the first five books of the Jewish or Christian scriptures — ever found.
The developments are described in the journal as a "significant discovery in biblical archaeology".

Fascinating story and topic. Infra-red photography is the pinnacle of tech in the forensic photo arena, but it is cumbersome, touchy and very time consuming. It is so fascinating to bring "hidden" details to light.
When our lab got a digital Ricoh IR SLR camera I thought we'd leaped ahead by centuries!! What used to take hours or even days would take minutes plus produce a far superior product.

The story reinforces what we know, that the scribes copying process really did work to preserve the ancient Jewish texts.

One area this high tech would be a great help is those funerary masks in Egypt from the late Roman period. The death masks were made like paper mache except they used papyrus sheets for the base material. There has been an archeologist who's been recovering parts of NT manuscripts from these masks. But its a painstaking process with the very real possibility of ruining the papyrus. If this new tech could uncover text withing those masks it would be awesome, but probably irritating to those who don't want further evidence of early NT scripture.

All this is in the realm of what's called the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum. What the human eye can see is roughly in the middle of the spectrum.
There is so much that exists, right in front of our faces, that the human eye cannot visualize. So when people say "I don't believe what I can't see", they are really saying I can't see what is right in front of my face.
There's spiritual lesson and/or a sermon in that statement.

So what you are saying is that we need to have eyes like the Aussie wedge tailed eagle.



Seriously though thanks for sharing that insight, I had never heard of the burial masks, what a place to find NT writings!!

And I didn't know about the Australian eagle either! To see in IR and UV is incredible. Will have to research it as the Bald Eagle is pretty impressive bird.

On the mask story I'd forgotten about it until now. So a little searching and picked a couple links. Was curious if Dr. Evans had published any more news but I didn't see anything fresh.

http://www.livescience.com/49489-oldest ... -mask.html

A short presentation by Dr. Craig Evans the archeologist. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01 ... spel-ever/

Since I first heard about it in 2013, I have been extremely interested in any news regarding the potential first century Mark fragment.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any recent news.