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Discovering the Lead Codices: The Book of Seven Seals and the Secret Teachings of Jesus, by David Elkington, Jennifer Elkington
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In March 2011, The Sunday Times ran an article on the discovery of a mysterious cache of palm-sized, ring-bound books made of lead. These lead codices, as they have become known, contain mysterious symbols and inscriptions. One tablet in particular features a portrait of Jesus and has preserved the seven seals that would have bound it together along its left-hand side. �
David and Jennifer Elkington photographed the books, brought samples to the UK for analysis, and assembled a team of eminent scholars to study them. At the same time, the books were quickly becoming an international phenomenon, the Israelis and Jordanians began a very public dispute over the location of the site where they were discovered. Convinced that the codices are the earliest Christian documents ever found, the Elkingtons put their reputations on the line as they raced to authenticate the find amidst an array of vested interests which sought to suppress them. �
In their quest to crack the code, the Elkingtons have been subjected to personal threat but they have continued the fight to ensure the world understands the importance of the codices, which may well pre-date the New Testament. Their significance in our understanding of early Christianity cannot be underestimated.
- Sales Rank: #1842770 in Books
- Published on: 2014-05-20
- Released on: 2014-05-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.41" h x 1.07" w x 6.27" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
"They could prove to be immensely important, both to Christianity and Judaism." � FATHER JEROME MURPHY O'CONNOR, Former Head of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem
'This is a very exciting discovery of a large number of hitherto unknown documents from the 1st or 2nd century CE. The idiosyncratic Old Hebrew script in which the texts are written is hard to decipher, but preliminary indications suggest they contain ethical teaching derived in part from the Hebrew Bible. ��Prof Emeritus John FA Sawyer, Honorary post, Durham University, Former President of the Society for Old Testament Study
'I have been following the story of the lead codices with interest and look forward to the results of future research.'
����� Prof CTR Hayward of the University of Durham
�
According to the Department of Antiquities, initial carbon tests to determine the authenticity of lead-sealed metal books billed as the greatest find in biblical archaeology since the Dead Sea scrolls have been "encouraging". The tests, carried out at the Royal Scientific Society labs, indicate that the texts may date back to the early first century AD, at a time when Christians took refuge from persecution on the east bank of the Jordan River. Taylor Luck, Jordan Times
We really believe that we have evidence from this analysis to prove that these materials are authentic.� Prof Ziad Saad, Former Direct General of the Department of Antiquities in Amman, told to The Jordan Times
From the Inside Flap
One day in Oxfordshire, England, in 2007, husband and wife academics David and Jennifer Elkington viewed a set of photographs that would change their lives. �The objects in the pictures appeared to be antiquated books, made of metal and replete with inconography and inscribed with ancient script.The couple travelled to Jordan where the codices were found, brought samples to the UK for analysis and assembled a team of eminent scholars t study them. �At the same time, the books were quickly becoming an international phenomenon - the Israelis and Jordanians began a very public dispute over the location of the site where they were discovered. �Convinced that the codices are the earliest Christian artefacts ever found, the Elkingtons put their reputations on the line as they raced to authenticate the find amidst an array of vested interests which sought to suppress them.This is the journey that takes them from the sleepy shires of England to harrowing trips to the Middle East, involving Bedouin dealers and expeditions to unexplored caverns dating from the dawn of Christianity."Although I heard, I did not understand. �So I said, 'My Lord, what shall be the end of these things?' He replied, 'Go your way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed until the end of time.'" � DANIEL 12:8-9
From the Back Cover
Part detective story, part historical analysis, this thrilling account of the search for the truth behind the Jordan codices challenges our understanding of biblical history and archaeology, and reveals how these incredible artefacts that belonged to Jesus' followers in Jerusalem may be the only Hebrew-Christian texts in existence.In 2007 David and Jennifer Elkington were shown images of a hoard of lead books covered in mysterious symbols and inscriptions, found in a cave in a remote valley in northern Jordan - one of them containing a portrait of Jesus and with seven seals along its side.Experts believe these lead codices are the most significant find since the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed 60 years ago, forcing scholars to completely rewrite our view of Jesus and the early Church. �In their quest to crack the code of the biggest biblical discovery to date, the Elkingtons had their emails hacked, received death threats and feared for their lives.�
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
but it was an interesting read and I would like to see more on the history of what happened ...
By Amazon Customer
Was looking for history, theology and more photos of the lead codices ... but it was an interesting read and I would like to see more on the history of what happened between the days of the Temple, the creation of the Essenes, Ebionites, Nazarenes and Mandaeans. Seems it was of zero interest to the Pharisees or the the Roman Church to reveal the early days of Christianity with its Coptic and puritanical roots. As to whether the notion of the Jordan Codices being made of lead is plausible, I am reminded of a paragraph by Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley regarding the occasion of her meeting Sheikh Abdullah Khaffagi, leader of the Mandaeans in Iran: "Then he began to tug at something under his cushion. We helped him pull out a large cloth bag ... but this one was heavy as a rock. It was an archetypal book, The Book of John, made entirely of lead, inscribed with a stylus on lead pages bound together like a regular book. ... Its edges were frayed and worn. ... There is probably not its like in the world. Sheikh Abdullah told us the book was 2,053 years old and written by John the Baptist himself."
14 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
A sometimes entertaining--yet misguided--attempt to manufacture an historical and ideological provenance for fake antiquities
By Daniel McClellan
David and Jennifer Elkington's more popularly oriented publication on the Lead Codices, Discovering the Lead Codices: The Book of Seven Seals and the Secret Teachings, weaves together a narrative of early Jewish and Christian history (composed by David) with a contemporary account of the Elkington's introduction to, and involvement with, the Lead Codices (composed by Jennifer). The two narratives, unevenly spliced together, combine an at-times-well-crafted Indiana Jones-type adventure story--complete with "But the codices belong in a museum" quotes--with an eccentric, sprawling, and pseudo-academic theory of early Christianity's early history. The points of contact between the codices described by the Elkingtons and that early history are numerous and difficult to keep track of, but in short, the codices reify a secret temple-oriented conceptualization of God's messiah that reaches back to the time of Solomon's Temple, was safeguarded by the original Hebrew-Christian followers of Jesus, and culminated in the persecution and ultimate death of James, the brother of Jesus and overseer of those codices.
This review will address the two divisions of the book separately.
Early Christianity
In the Elkingtons' reconstruction of early Christianity, every academic consensus and accepted reading is set aside without argument to make way for the arbitrary stitching together of a Frankenstein's monster of Christian history and ideology. In assembling this monster, David Elkington asserts assumption upon assumption, arriving at conclusions based on as little as intuition and mystical communication between his body and his environment.
Margaret Barker's niche field of Temple Theology provides the conceptual framework for the sewing together of the ideological core of the monster, but most of it is sheer invention. Every possible conceptual link between an early Jewish or Christian text and the codices--no matter how tenuous, flimsy, or downright imaginary--is not only posited, but asserted, with oblique references to the opinions and theories of "some scholars" (fringe or outdated scholars where they are named, but usually unnamed) sprinkled in where it might lend some air of credibility.
As an example, Elkington shares the story in 2 Esdras of the composition of ninety-four books, of which only twenty-four--the current Hebrew Bible according to the Jewish division--are permitted to be released to the masses. Rather than merely a prophetic literary motif, the reference to seventy secret books are asserted to have been very real--in fact, they are Elkington's codices themselves. No argument is given. The reader is evidently supposed to accept the connection based entirely on the sheer possibility of it.
Arguments or explanations are nowhere forwarded for accepting the historicity of any texts introduced to the discussion, no matter how fantastical the story. One of the central pericopae of the book's thesis is drawn in large part from a section of the Pseudo-Clementine Reognitions involving Paul's pursuit of James and a culminating battle between their respective contingencies of 5,000 men each. The vision that catalyzed Paul's conversion occurred at this point, but it was no vision of Christ himself, rather one of the codices that Elkington claims bears a low relief representing Jesus' face:
"Somewhere, on the road to Damascus, 10,000 people met in combat in one of the most important, but little-known, episodes in Christian history. Important, because during this encounter, as we shall see, Paul was shown an object no bigger than the palm of his hand. It was so surprising: it shook him to the core of his soul. Paul's response was to fall from his horse, blinded. The object he had seen transformed him into the saint of legend - and changed the course of history."
Elsewhere the most ludicrous and laughable associations are made in the sole and exclusive service of linking every aspect of the codices to ancient Israel and Christianity. For instance:
"In the Book of Judges, Samson, the great Old Testament hero, emerges from out of a cave. Samson was a Nazirite, so the implication is that Nazarenes (Nazoreans/Nazirites) are associated with caves. Samson was also semidivine and shone like the sun: in other words, he was full of the Glory of God."
The codices were putatively found in a cave, so the notion that the appearance of a cave in the Samson tradition links Nazarenes/Nazoreans/Nazarites (all the same!) with caves is simply asserted. And again:
"However, in 2 Esdras 14.42 specific mention is made of scribes using characters and a script that they did not know. This can only have been Palaeo-Hebrew."
No reason is given for this perplexing assertion that an unnamed script the author of 2 Esdras did not know can only have been paleo-Hebrew.
Where the Elkingtons do actually address questions of historicity, it is usually just to dismiss something in the Bible that complicates their narrative, and their case often betrays a shocking lack of basic knowledge of the biblical narrative and biblical scholarship in general. For instance:
"While Moses was encamped atop Sinai, the people down below became restless and decided to make a golden calf. Given that the Children of Israel were believed to be former slaves and therefore poor, where did they get the gold from?"
See Exodus 11:35 for the the answer to the Elkingtons' rhetorical question. See also the following claim:
"There is another telling echo of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the letters of Paul. In his second letter to the Thessalonians (Thessalonians 2.7- 8) Paul states: `... the Lord Jesus will slay him [the deceiver] with the breath of his mouth.' This closely echoes an expression to be found in another of the scrolls: `He shall slay the wicked with the breath of his lips.' (The Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsa). Given that the Dead Sea texts existed in Paul's day, he must have been well aware of their existence, or at least of the sect that produced them."
But this isn't an echo of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's an echo of the Hebrew Bible, and specifically Isaiah 11:4. The Great Isaiah Scroll is just a version of Isaiah used by the Qumran community. This seems to have escaped the Elkingtons. More bizarrely:
"The last of the canonical Gospels, written by St John, is deemed to be the most reliable in terms of historical detail and first-hand knowledge: it reveals a surprising level of topographical information about Jerusalem in the 1st century. It contains incidents and names that do not occur in the other Gospels. St John's is the only Gospel most likely to have been written by an actual disciple of Jesus."
This isn't true at all. John is the latest gospel and the most theological and least historical. Additionally, the text itself explicitly identifies its authors as a group of writers who are explicitly distinguished from John. Next, their etymology of Israel is entertaining:
". . . Jacob, also known as Israel (Ish-Ra-El, a probable translation being `The Man Who Saw God')."
And most bizarrely of all:
"By this stage Pauline thought had taken over the Church of Rome and was never in any danger of being toppled; except at the Council of Nicaea, when Arianism and its view of the human Jesus almost became the sole religion of the empire."
Anyone with even a modicum of a background in early Christian history knows this is an utterly ludicrous misrepresentation of what occurred at the Council of Nicea and what was believed by those involved. I won't even discuss the Elkingtons blithe acceptance of the early Christian claim that Jewish scribes had been removing important doctrines from their Hebrew Bibles (and that they had the Septuagint to prove it), or their outdated and uncritical assertion that the Jewish canon was formalized at Jamnia.
Throughout this reconstruction of early Christianity, the Elkingtons simply draw what they want from the texts of antiquity and ignore what they don't want. Every concept that could possibly be linked with the codices is presupposed to be accurate and concrete, and what's more, to refer directly and clearly to the codices! This is all forced into the service of Elkington's overarching need to turn these codices into something not only ancient, but of indescribable importance. These codices don't merely show Jesus' face, they date back to the first temple, they were the original New Testament, they were the hidden and secret books mentioned all over the Bible and the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature of antiquity, they converted Paul to Christianity, they were suppressed by the authorities of the day, and they reify the very resurrection of Jesus. It would be a difficult exercise indeed to overinflate their significance any more than the Elkingtons have already done.
The Contemporary Narrative
Jennifer Elkington's narrative of her and her husband's involvement with the codices appears to serve a number of functions. Not only does it provide the Indiana Jones-esque story that they have been promising since 2011, but it acts as an apologetic for their activity, smooths over inconsistencies in the tellings of the story (by attributing them to the Bedouins involved), and makes them out to be unwavering and courageous heroes in a sea of manipulative and dishonest profiteers.
Interest in the codices is first stoked among the Elkingtons after a chance encounter in Oxfordshire in 2007, and after numerous mysterious phone calls and visitors and trips around the Near East and close brushes with slight danger and angry Bedouins, the couple becomes committed to ensuring the codices become enshrined in a museum for the whole world to appreciate and enjoy. Throughout these adventures, the full weight and significance of the codices only slowly dawns on David Elkington as his indeterminate background in biblical studies helps him to immediately and fully understand the meaning of each new piece of imagery or symbolism. What is left is only for him to find out how that meaning is to be fit into the ideological framework of early Judeo-Christian history:
"Another thing I noted was that almost all of the books were covered in eight-pointed stars (see plate 2) - so many of them that it was impossible to ignore their implied importance. To the people of ancient Judah and those who followed after, these motifs were not simple ornamentation: every depiction had meaning and was placed upon the page with purpose and intent, mere decoration being potentially blasphemous.
It was the stars that prompted my first insight: they were symbolic of kingship. The six-pointed star is familiar to us today as a symbol of black magic and of Israel: it is derived from the famous King, Solomon. The seven-pointed star denoted Solomon's father, King David. However, of particular interest to me at the time was the fact that the eight-pointed star was indicative of the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek, the figure to whom Abraham showed obeisance. Melchizedek appears in Genesis 14 as the King of Salem. Moreover, his role is that of High Priest, and a cursory inspection of the codices showed definite High Priestly and regal references. Could the codices possibly be early Christian documents? It was an intriguing thought."
None of these "insights" come from study or trial and error, but from intuition and assumption:
"This is where I began to make a bit of headway in my interpretation. The palm tree was symbolic of the House of David, King of Israel. Furthermore, on the codices they are in fruit, which implies that an offshoot of David will arise to claim the throne. Palm fronds, as is well known, were used to usher Jesus into the Holy City of Jerusalem on what is now called Palm Sunday (John 12.12-19; Mark 11.1-11). There are separate representations of palm branches (that is, as single details rather than on the whole tree) throughout the codices, and they immediately struck me as indicative that what was being celebrated here was something to do with kingship."
The only deviation from this pattern of argument by intuition is when one of the named or unnamed scholars enlisted for aid provides their own eccentric interpretations. Margaret Barker is the primary subject here, as when she insists the gnostic text, The Gospel of Truth, refers to a sealed book that must be the very book mentioned in Revelation and now bequeathed to the world by the Elkingtons:
"That said, the Gospel of Truth says that the book is the face of the Father, and the mysterious book is a deposit of truth that is not read as consonants and vowels but as letters that convey the truth. The GofT says this book was also taken and opened by Jesus after he had been put to death, which means that it is the little sealed book depicted in Revelation 4-5 and then as an opened little book in Revelation 10."
This leads the Elkingtons to the "insight" that the nonsensical and repetitive nature of the text on the codices is actually encrypted text. It was so encrypted, in fact, that not even the scribes knew what they were writing(!):
"We now have a perfect description of the random nature of the lettering: they reflect the situation of scribes who were transmitting the most sacred secrets, beyond their own understanding."
With all the difficult questions of meaning and historical significance ostensibly answered, and the problems of the Elkingtons' inconsistencies reallocated to the narrative's antagonists, the authors move the story along to their attempts to get official recognition of the codices and release the information about them publicly. Despite the unpredictable and often harsh attitudes and behaviors of the facilitators of the codices, everything seems to fall into place for the Elkingtons' narrative to crescendo with a visit to the BBC and a press release announcing the discovery of the codices to the world. The volume is bedded back down with the concluding section, entitled "The Origins of Yesterday," which waxes sermonic on the meaning of myth, the eschatological import of the codices, and the true nature of Jesus' messianism and God's desires for the world.
In the end, I cannot recommend Discovering the Lead Codices to serious students or scholars of religion or history. It reads like an eccentric and bumbling historical fiction that takes itself far too seriously. The narrative told by Jennifer Elkington is at times engaging and interesting, but is in general convoluted and contrived, moving from creative prose and character descriptions in the early segments to defensive and self-serving blame-shifting in the later segments. David Elkingtons' reconstruction of early Christian history and ideology is na�ve, uncritical, and mostly imaginary. That the Jordan Codices are demonstrable forgeries was firmly established immediately after their 2011 press release. Despite Discovering the Lead Codices' attempts to manufacture a historical and ideological backdrop for the codices and obliquely dismiss criticisms as uninformed, unqualified, and uninitiated, this attempt to capitalize on the Elkingtons' discovery will only find serious circulation among the less informed and less critical of those who distrust organized religion. Others need not waste their time.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Wow ! Thank you David & Jennifer for your courage and perseverance in bringing forth the truth of the Elohim !
By Kindle Customer
As is stated in the Book of Daniel; "The wise will understand & shine like the Sun". The Lord (Yahashua) has opened many doors @ this time that no man or devil can close. I await more of the Elohim's divine revelatory knowledge to help guide us through the tribulations that are surely lying ahead.
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