FROM YAHOO NEWS:
The lead codices: As we told you last month, some biblical scholars believe a trove of 70 lead codices that turned up five years ago in a remote cave in eastern Jordan may date from the 1st Century C.E. They say that references to the Messiah in the codices--which are made up of wirebound individual pages, roughly the size of a credit card--could bear invaluable testimony to the last days of Jesus' life. Much of the media ate the story up. "Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history," reported the BBC. But it's looking more and more like the codices are fakes. The "expert" who helped convince the media of that the codices might be authentic turns out to be a fringe figure at best. Meanwhile, Peter Thonemann, a prominent scholar of ancient history at Oxford University, found that two phrases of text in the codices came from an ordinary Roman tombstone on display in a museum in Jordan, suggesting that a forger had simply copied the lines from the tombstone. Thonemann pronounced the codices "a modern forgery, produced by a resident of Amman within the last fifty years or so." Other scholars have also cast serious doubt on the codices' authenticity.
In short, we can't say with absolute certainty that the codices are forgeries--but that's certainly what the balance of evidence suggests. So we've assigned the claim that the codices are an important new archaeological find to the second lowest level on our gauge--one step above flat-out bogus.
Lead Codices Fake????Could Beeeee....
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