Lombatti on Charlesworth’s ‘Reading’ of the Ossuary

Ok I said I wasn’t going to mention the vampire (ossuary) anymore but I can’t let pass Antonio’s sage albeit brief observation:

James Charlesworth’s interpretation of the lines and scratches at the bottom of the vase on the “Jonah ossuary” is arbitrary: he connects and/or disconnects them to obtain the desired result. As you can see above, the lines are a decorative motif and there is no inscription. Not a single Jewish ossuary has ever been found with a name inscribed in/near an image. This reminds me how people say they can read Greek and Aramaic inscriptions on the Turin Shroud, but obviously they see something that isn’t there.

See his post for the image to which he refers.  Here’s what Charlesworth says…

“Most likely,” says Princeton Theological Seminary scholar James Charlesworth, director of a project on the Dead Sea Scrolls, “we may comprehend the inscription as reading ‘Jonah.’ And I have no doubt it is a fish.”

That’s beyond comprehensible.  The only way to comprehend the ‘inscription’ as saying Jonah is to see it Rorschach style.  ‘What does this look like to you Prof. Charlesworth?’  ‘It looks like Yonah’.    Good grief.

If Prof. Charlesworth is right, then a consensus may form that the ossuary depicts Jonah being vomited out of the mouth of the fish. Because Jesus mentions “the sign of Jonah” in the Gospel of Matthew, the saga is traditionally used as a metaphor for his resurrection.

The problem is that Charlesworth isn’t right.  What on earth is going on with him these days?