Take this Tablet and call me in the morning

The New York Times thinks it's discovered another nail in the coffin of Christianity. A stone tablet that appears to be from the late 1st century B.C. tells the story of the Archangel Gabriel speaking of a messiah who would suffer and die, but then live again after three days. This story, according to the Times, turns Christianity on its head.

All it does is undermine what liberal scholars have thought. Somehow the balanced journalists at the Grey Lady didn't catch that.

The liberal theory that's in the docket is that the idea of a suffering messiah who would rise from the dead after three days was a creation of the early Christians and that Jesus had no concept of such thing. If this new stone tablet proves to be authentic, it would severely undermine this theory.

Fortunately for the practicioners of the Scientific Method of Studying the Bible, there theories are very flexible. So in the face of contrary evidence, they hold on to the one thing they believe, the early Church's portrayal of Jesus was a fraud. And they shift gears to saying that the early Church co-opted this pre-existing expectation and applied it to the non-messiah Jesus.

Those dirty Christians.

But neither the scholars nor the Times bothers to examine the New Testament. There they'd discover that the many references to a suffering messiah who would die and rise on the third day, is frequently referred to as the prophetic expectation for the Messiah. Not an expecatation everyone shared equally to be sure, but Jesus frequently frames his statements about his upcoming death and resurrection as a fulfillment of the prophecies.

There are many Old Testament passages that the early Church recognized to be signs of what was to come in the resurrection (e.g., Jonah's 3 days in the whale, Isaac's release from the sacrifice after the 3 day journey to Mt. Moriah, etc.). There weren't many passages that stated things plainly, but the discovery of a pre-Christian writing that confirms the prophetic expecatation is hardly evidence that the New Testament was written with a shovel.