Dec 13, 2015 06:14 AM
What did Jesus look like?
EXCERPT: This dark skinned, coarse, vacant-eyed, curly-haired man is the closest possible likeness of the historical Jesus, according to the latest forensic techniques. A far cry from the fair-skinned, blue-eyed and blond-haired man widely shown in sacred art, the image first appeared in a 2001 Discovery Channel/BBC co-production called "Jesus: The Complete Story." The reconstruction, created with a 2,000-year-old Jewish skull, ancient documents, advanced software and forensic techniques, simply shows a 1st-century Jewish man who would have lived in the harsh conditions of the time. "Jesus certainly looked far more like that person than me and other males who live in the West," James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament languages at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the experts consulted in the documentary, said at that time. "We in the West have for about 2000 years been wrongly influenced by an Aryan Jesus., who looks like us. Nothing is more unfaithful to Jesus," he added....
Sci revolution: A law-making God & the triumph of mathematicians over philosophers
EXCERPT: [...] Wootton describes it, in terrifically rich detail, as a revolt of mathematicians, wielding numbers and experiments, against philosophers, who assumed that Aristotle had been right about everything. [...]
The early-modern Scientific Revolution is still in some populist quarters described as a triumph of experimental reason over religious superstition. It is one of the many virtues of David Wootton’s fascinating history that this canard barely merits a mention, let alone a tedious refutation. For, as he shows, many in the vanguard of the emerging order of the 16th and 17th centuries were religious; they took the new science to be a bulwark against atheism; and, as Wootton plausibly argues, Newtonianism would have been inconceivable without the tradition of belief in a creator God.
[...] Other concepts, Wootton points out, could and did exist before their words were coined. Scientific experiments were performed (by Ptolemy, Galen, Alhazen, and so on) before the term “experiment” became commonplace; but what was new in the 17th century, he suggests, was a new respect for experimentation as a path to knowledge and a new “experimental network” for knowledge-sharing. On the other hand, as Wootton shows, the idea of “laws of nature” really was new and depended on the idea of a law-making God. Scientific notions of facts and evidence are shown to have emerged from the law courts. Overall, Wootton justifies nicely his argument that we “tend to overestimate the importance of new technology and underestimate the rate of production and the impact of new intellectual tools”....
EXCERPT: This dark skinned, coarse, vacant-eyed, curly-haired man is the closest possible likeness of the historical Jesus, according to the latest forensic techniques. A far cry from the fair-skinned, blue-eyed and blond-haired man widely shown in sacred art, the image first appeared in a 2001 Discovery Channel/BBC co-production called "Jesus: The Complete Story." The reconstruction, created with a 2,000-year-old Jewish skull, ancient documents, advanced software and forensic techniques, simply shows a 1st-century Jewish man who would have lived in the harsh conditions of the time. "Jesus certainly looked far more like that person than me and other males who live in the West," James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament languages at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the experts consulted in the documentary, said at that time. "We in the West have for about 2000 years been wrongly influenced by an Aryan Jesus., who looks like us. Nothing is more unfaithful to Jesus," he added....
Sci revolution: A law-making God & the triumph of mathematicians over philosophers
EXCERPT: [...] Wootton describes it, in terrifically rich detail, as a revolt of mathematicians, wielding numbers and experiments, against philosophers, who assumed that Aristotle had been right about everything. [...]
The early-modern Scientific Revolution is still in some populist quarters described as a triumph of experimental reason over religious superstition. It is one of the many virtues of David Wootton’s fascinating history that this canard barely merits a mention, let alone a tedious refutation. For, as he shows, many in the vanguard of the emerging order of the 16th and 17th centuries were religious; they took the new science to be a bulwark against atheism; and, as Wootton plausibly argues, Newtonianism would have been inconceivable without the tradition of belief in a creator God.
[...] Other concepts, Wootton points out, could and did exist before their words were coined. Scientific experiments were performed (by Ptolemy, Galen, Alhazen, and so on) before the term “experiment” became commonplace; but what was new in the 17th century, he suggests, was a new respect for experimentation as a path to knowledge and a new “experimental network” for knowledge-sharing. On the other hand, as Wootton shows, the idea of “laws of nature” really was new and depended on the idea of a law-making God. Scientific notions of facts and evidence are shown to have emerged from the law courts. Overall, Wootton justifies nicely his argument that we “tend to overestimate the importance of new technology and underestimate the rate of production and the impact of new intellectual tools”....
![[Image: black-jesus.jpg]](http://dl9fvu4r30qs1.cloudfront.net/11/5e/8a3230834efb9d474860cd5fe477/black-jesus.jpg)