I'm spending this whole week at the British Museum. Any Questions?

[JW Insider]

I have been in contact with a couple research coordinators at the British Museum and one has already met with me twice in person this week. I meet another one tomorrow. I have been working from a list of questions, some of which are common questions from religious circles, and some of which are a little more specific to the interest of JWs. It's not that any one person can answer the questions but I can get good leads on recent, ongoing and upcoming research projects. I have found that when I want to contact someone who is working on a project that being able to say I spoke to so-and-so at the BM (or similar place) is an excellent way to start out.

My list of questions have included the following topics and research areas. In some of the topics I have dozens of specific questions already on my list. The general topics below might remind anyone of their own questions they might have always wanted to ask someone.

• The earliest evidence of the use of a cross among Christians.
• Any Christian and Christian-related iconography prior to 200 C.E.
• Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, Greek research on chronology from about 750 to 400-ish B.C.E.
• Habitation/Population evidence of Israel/Judea/Palestine from 740 to 605 to 589 to 539 to 518 B.C.E. etc.
• Questions related to identities of rulers mentioned in Daniel
• Questions about the date of the death of Herod the Great
• Questions about the identification of the Pharaohs who interacted with Israelites
• Linguistic "crossover" from Egyptian, Phoenician, Hebrew in religious subjects (priesthood, circumcision, temple-related artifacts)
• Religion of the Canaanite-related people before and during the Israelite conquest
• Dead Sea Scrolls as they relate to Second Temple period, and Essene, early Pharisee, and early Christian traditions

 

(I am here for more than a week, staying across from Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park -- also here for a wedding.)

 

[TrueTomHarley]

Do they have Milk Duds in the vending machines?

[Evacuated]

On 10/15/2017 at 10:56 AM, JW Insider said:

I am here for more than a week

You will cross paths with some of my cong then as they are on Bible related exhibit tours there this week also. Small world indeed!

Any pre-1st Century ancient references to the Tetragrammaton would be interesting, Hebrew or otherwise, secular or sacred.

Look forward to hearing about any other interesting findings.

[JW Insider]

On 10/16/2017 at 7:39 AM, Gone Fishing said:

You will cross paths with some of my cong then as they are on Bible related exhibit tours there this week also. Small world indeed!

I met a group of Witnesses from Paris in a tour group - tagged along for a bit and enjoyed their company. Also a Japanese group of Witnesses, but without enough language in common to communicate. I'm sure there were other Witness tours that I missed. This was my fourth time here in 40 years, and I have been on a Witness-sponsored tour here before, too.

This was the first time I ever got to meet with some staff and get a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look. This was not because of anything I had done or researched, I was just taking advantage of an opportunity. (A BM project leader was meeting with the non-Witness roommate of a relative of mine at his college in 2015 and I got to meet the same person at the university at that time.) The roommate's project was not religious: it was related to restoring pigmentation and original color to old statues and paintings. But I found that this project leader had been in archaeological digs in Sudan and had studied the Kushites. I asked him what he knew of the claim that the Bible's mention of Tirhakah of "Cush/Ethiopia" had been doubted by authorities until the discovery of statues of him (or rather, the correct translation of inscriptions on previously discovered statues.) It had supposedly been doubted because the Sennacherib Prism (and Taylor's Prism) along with the mural pictorials at Nineveh had mentioned many of the same points from 2 Kings 19, but it never mentioned the diversion from Tirhakah's intended attack on Sennacherib when he was threatening Hezekiah. The prisms mention Hezekiah and some of his actions.

The British Museum houses the Taylor Prism mentioning his first and second incursion to Hezekiah without success, a mural from Nineveh that includes the battle of Lachish, a statue of Tirhakah and, of course, the Rosetta Stone that held the key to the correct translation of the inscriptions. So this particular instance of Bible corroboration is often pointed out in tours.

At any rate, many Bible tours are given by many different religious groups, as the British Museum was set up in such a way that it encourages (and intrigues) persons with Biblical interest. Various items are still labeled with Bible stories in mind:

• Gilgamesh and the Flood.
• Abraham's home of Ur and Ur's "Ram in a Thicket" motif.
• What did the Tower of Babel look like?
• What Pharaoh was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?

If Jehu, or Hezekiah, or another Bible personage is mentioned or alluded to, it's often mentioned in the descriptions of items. The British Museum is one of the best places to give a tour of Bible related items.

Several of the museum staff are very happy to accommodate well-meaning researchers whose only goal is to provide more accurate information when giving tours, for example. Apparently, a few people take advantage. And of course, there are those who go through and give outlandishly wrong information in their tours, just to push an agenda about UFO's or racial issues. I am uncomfortable with the way a lot of the tour guides claim that this or that artifact "proves" that the Bible is right. They often support the Bible's historical narratives perfectly, but no material item "proves" the Bible is right, just as the Bible doesn't "prove" that the artifact is right.

Still, there is a lot of wonderment and even a kind of thrill at finding corroborating evidences carved in stone, almost contemporaneous with Biblical events. I am always amazed and appreciative of the experience that such a museum can provide to a Bible believer.

[Queen Esther]

Enjoy  your  wonderful  tour...  @JW Insider

[Anna]

So how was it? @JW Insider Did you get answers to any of those questions?

I still can't believe I missed several chances to go to the Museum. I went and toured the Mill Hill Bethel when our congregation organised a trip to London, and then instead of the museum I went to Kew gardens! I guess my excuse was I was 14 at the time...Then the last time I stayed in London was when I was invited to a Witness ball..and again no museum...This seems to be a kind of pattern with me. I stayed at a friends villa just 30 minutes from Pompeii,  (5 times!) and never once went to that ancient city....instead I went to the beach......

Face palm..

[JW Insider]

@Anna It was really quite amazing. I always wanted to go back when I was retired and do this, but the opportunity never came up. For my work, I had visited Paris 8+ times (and worked there for up to two weeks at a time) even though my office was in NYC, but had only seen the Louvre once with a group of Bethelites 40 years ago, and one other short visit after work, made even shorter due to long lines that day. Finally, just two years ago, I was able to get a 3-day pass and spend more time over two leisurely visits. I shared a couple of pictures on the jw-archive forum from that Louvre visit. I took about 3,000 pictures. Didn't take as many at the British Museum, but still got nearly 1,000. I was finally able to go in through the Staff entrance once, escorted, but the vast majority of staff are there to help manage the huge gift shop (and restock things like Milk Duds in the vending machines).

I didn't get (or expect) answers to most of my questions, but could have gotten closer to an answer on a couple of topics. Naturally, a lot of new topics came up, too.

• Since you can easily create your own tour with respect to the major empires of Bible history (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) I was interested in whether any of the beast imagery in Daniel had more correlation with motifs and iconography of those nations. (Lions, bears, eagles, goats, leopards, etc.)
• Another topic that came up with one of the research assistants was the Flood evidence (which we like to say is known in every ancient culture), and the related issue with respect to the JEPD theory of the redaction of Genesis and "OT" texts.
• A research coordinator was very well-versed in the topic of early Christian history, and wanted to spend considerable time on the parallels between Christianity and contemporary popular religions of the first century. He showed me that this was an important topic for even the earliest "Church Fathers" to explain (which I had somehow missed in any cursory readings of Tertullian, etc.).
• A topic that came up here recently about just how early Trinity had reared its ugly head (heads?) also came up in the discussion of iconography of early Christianity, and I was given a lot of information on some very recent presentations on this topic.

If any of these topics seem worthwhile on this forum, I will be happy to include them in discussions that come up, or topics that I start myself. I have a lot of information to sort through, and believe that a lot of my own assumptions were likely wrong. So I also need to get better grounding on most of these topics myself. 

[TrueTomHarley]

8 hours ago, Anna said:

I still can't believe I missed several chances to go to the Museum. I went and toured the Mill Hill Bethel when our congregation organised a trip to London, and then instead of the museum I went to Kew gardens! I guess my excuse was I was 14 at the time...Then the last time I stayed in London was when I was invited to a Witness ball..and again no museum...This seems to be a kind of pattern with me. I stayed at a friends villa just 30 minutes from Pompeii,  (5 times!) and never once went to that ancient city....instead I went to the beach......

This reminds me of brothers ribbing each other years ago. One, a new parent, went on a child-development conference, something called (ready for this? The Better Baby Institute). On returning, he was quizzed by another.

Did you go in service while you were there? .... No

Did you go to meetings.... No

Well, did you pray?

4 hours ago, JW Insider said:

but the vast majority of staff are there to help manage the huge gift shop (and restock things like Milk Duds in the vending machines).

THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!!!

 

4 hours ago, JW Insider said:

If any of these topics seem worthwhile on this forum, I will be happy to include them in discussions that come up, or topics that I start myself.

Yes....

4 hours ago, JW Insider said:

and restock things like Milk Duds in the vending machines

Actually, despite some flippancy, I used to be obnoxious at museums - slowing everyone down so I could read each exhibit. Someday I'd like to get to London and the Louvre