Friday, November 9, 2018

Jesus May Have Been History's First Tweeter

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Newly Discovered Ancient Tweets May Reveal the Personal Side of the Son of God

by Jeff Briskin


CAMBRIDGE, MA. Jesus may have invented social media, if the authenticity of a newly discovered collection of 57 ancient tweets attributed to him is proven. The collection, written on fragments of papyrus, was found last December in a newly excavated vault in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Images of the fragments were sent to Dr. Karen King, a professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School, best known for her research into the controversial “Jesus was married” Coptic gospel.
The age of the fragments is currently being tested in independent laboratories in Geneva, Rome and New York. But Dr. King believes that they are authentic because they are written in Aramaic, the language of Judea during the first century A.D., and “because they look really, really old.”
None of these sayings are longer than 140 characters, and largely communicate personal observations and summaries of Jesus’s daily activities, many of which can be corroborated with events mentioned in the New Testament. Professor King has released translations of a small sample of these tweets:
Had a great talk with Dad today. I’m literally walking on water!
Today’s cured: 6 cripples, 3 lepers, 8 blind people. A good day!
Just back from 40 hellish days in the desert. Looking forward to chilling with little bro +James.
A special shout out to +MaryMagdalene, the best foot anointer in Judea!
Going to the mount tomorrow to deliver some really killer +GoodNews!
Totally bombed in +Nazareth yesterday. Won’t be working my home town again anytime soon.
Mom keeps bugging me to meet a girl and settle down. Who has the time, LOL!
Memo to me: Get extra matzoh & wine for +Pesach next week. Judas is bringing special guests.
Some scholars have expressed skepticism about these ancient tweets. Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Misquoting Jesus, believes that these fragments were written by a counterfeiter hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
“These so-called tweets portray the man Christians believe to be the Son of God as a shallow, self-absorbed millennial,” said Ehrman. “And using crosses as hashtags? Only an amateur medieval forger would resort to something so patently obvious.”
Dr. King dismisses such criticism as the “nitpicking of jealous humbugs.”
“Why couldn’t Jesus have invented tweeting? He was clearly an expert communicator, miracle worker and prophet. For all we know, Jesus Himself may have come down from Heaven to plant the idea of short, innocuous text messages into the mind of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s inventor,” said King.
A spokesman for Dorsey declined to comment.