Flood News
September, 2019
The Great Isaiah Scroll​
One of the most significant discoveries in biblical archaeology occurred in a remote valley in Israel nearly 75 years ago. In the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, an ancient repository of religious documents was discovered in 1946 by Bedouin shepherds.
Among the first scrolls discovered was the most complete record of the writings of the Biblical prophet Isaiah. This scroll stunned the world, both for its age and its completeness. It pushed back the manuscript history of the Bible over 1,000 years in an instant. The content of the scroll is consistent with much younger copies, such as the Aleppo Codex (also included in Museum’s collection). Around twenty copies of the Book of Isaiah have been discovered in Qumran, but the Great Isaiah Scroll stands above them all.
Bethesda Located
Archaeologists believe Julias, the home of Jesus' apostles Peter, Andrew and Philip, was located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
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Archaeologists think they may have found the lost Roman city of Julias, the home of three apostles of Jesus: Peter, Andrew and Philip (John 1:44; 12:21). A multi-layered site discovered on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, in the Bethsaida Valley Nature Reserve, is the spot, the team believes.
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The key discovery is of an advanced Roman-style bathhouse. That in and of itself indicates that there had been a city there, not just a fishing village, Dr. Mordechai Aviam of Kinneret College told Haaretz.
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the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that the Jewish monarch King Philip Herod, son of the great vassal King Herod, transformed Bethsaida, which had been a Jewish fishing village, into a real Roman polis,
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"Josephus reported that the king had upgraded Bethsaida from a village into a polis, a proper city," Aviam says meticulously. "He didn't say it had been built on or beside or underneath it. And indeed, all this time, we have not known where it was. But the bathhouse attests to the existence of urban culture."
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(Haaretz, Augusut 8, 2017)
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Human "Evolution" Faces a New Challenge
A trail of footprints discovered in Crete could upend the widely accepted theories on early human evolution. The new prints have a distinctly human-like form, with a similar big toe to our own and a ‘ball’ in the sole that’s not found in apes.
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‘What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,’ says Professor Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University, one of the authors on the new study. Using the standard battery of tests, and utilizing their regular assumptions, they claim these fossils are 5.7 million years old.
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At that point in time, they thought that human ancestors were in Africa, with ape-like feet. According to the new study, however, the new footprints discovered in Trachilos have an ‘unmistakably human-like form.’
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These scientists thought that human ancestors of the last few million years directly derived from a genus known as Ardipithecus. And, as a set of ‘reasonably complete’ 4.4 million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus fossils discovered in Ethiopia was found to have an ape-like foot, it was thought that the human-like foot had not yet evolved by that time.
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The new fossil footprints drive a wedge in the timeline of evolution. The researchers say both the location and the age of the prints are controversial. Evidence for human evolution continues to elude searchers, because it did not happen.
Chemistry Creates a Crisis For Evolution
The idea of an unguided origin of the first life has been “sold to us,” but its assumptions are “insane … many, many times impossible” says Brazilian organic chemist Marcos Eberlin.
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From three essential cell features: the cell membrane, protein folding, and molecular chaperones. We’re “further away than ever” from making life in the lab, he says, and it’s time now to “surrender to the data,” which he argues, points to the works of foresight and planning in the origin of the first life.
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