gmx wrote:Peter Kirby wrote:First century? Not necessarily. That's the end of the radiocarbon dating range. It's only likely to be first century if we assume the remains are of a Christian (and, ofc, that Christians are 1st century in origin).
What seems reasonably certain is that these remains have been venerated by "the Christian Church" for a very long time. I raise this because you suggested the other day that other than the documentary artifacts, our earliest Christian relic is the late 2nd century inscription by Abercius. I wondered if these human remains would qualify as an earlier Christian relic, based on the radiocarbon dating?
And that's why I'm commenting on it...
gmx wrote:That they have long been venerated as those of the evangelist, and have "proven" to be of Syrian extraction and from roughly the right epoch, is curious to say the least.
Roughly the right epoch, yes. Syrian extraction, not necessarily. That's not what the professor actually said; he said it matches samples of
modern individual's DNA (from modern Syria in Aleppo)
more than samples of
modern individual's DNA (from modern Greece around Athens and Crete).
article wrote:Since the present population of Antioch includes many Kurds, Prof Barbujani sampled the DNA of Syrians from Aleppo. In place of the inhabitants of ancient Constantinople, now Istanbul, he tested Greeks from Attica and Crete.
(They are modern samples, and the statement is a relative one.)
gmx wrote:As this "discovery" is some 15 years old, I thought there might be more of a scholarly consensus on their significance, and I was somewhat surprised to find only scant references in the mainstream media.
You'll find that the gears work slowly, even more slowly than that, in this 'scholarly field.'
Part of the lack of interest may be that the find can tell us absolutely nothing. The body doesn't speak. It doesn't have anything about it that could possibly tie it to the third Gospel or to Acts. That's the only thing that grabs headlines for this body, and it's impossible to provide evidence for, short of finding a copy tucked away with the corpse that is also dated to the same era. Because of this, even if the find were proved to be the oldest body that actually can be dated and that was venerated by Christians later on, it still wouldn't be as useful as the Abercius inscription (despite its antiquity).
If you believe the New Testament story, in any case, nearly all of the earliest people -- apostles, the seventy, the seven, etc. -- were of Syrian or Galilean origin. This body could be any one of them or could be anyone unnamed from the same era. And that's if it's the remains of a Christian person. If it isn't, it could be a "pagan relic" stemming from the Hellenistic era (sometime BC) that got co-opted by the Christian religion.
It should also be remembered that this kind of argument is entirely reversible. If the remains were more Greek than Syrian, a professor could (and probably would) argue that this coheres with the scholarly opinions according to which St. Luke was a Greek, perhaps from Philippi.
A quick search on google seems to show a consensus of sorts in the scientific community that it is 'fairly' accurate up to 20-50,000 years, but some examples exist that show that it could be completely inaccurate at times!..so I'm not sure what to think. A couple of related links: