Still looking for the Garden of Eden

  • castout.jpg

    This Sun­day com­mem­o­rates the expul­sion from Par­adise, and so at Orthros we heard:

    Ver­ily, Adam cried moan­ing, and said, “Woe is me. … I who was for a time robed with the glory of immor­tal­ity, have become like one dead, wrapped in the rags of death… But Thou, Lover of mankind, man­tled in com­pas­sion, who didst cre­ate me from the earth, recall and save me from the bondage of the enemy.”

    And inter­est­ingly enough, the Gar­den of Eden is in the news today. The head­line in the UK Daily Mail is ‘Do these mys­te­ri­ous stones mark the Gar­den of Eden?’

    The stones, which are mega­liths sim­i­lar to those found at Stone­henge but smaller, were first dis­cov­ered in Gebekli Tepe in east­ern Turkey in 1994. “To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out – they are arranged in cir­cles from five to ten yards across – but there are indi­ca­tions that much more is to come. Geo­mag­netic sur­veys imply that there are hun­dreds more stand­ing stones, just wait­ing to be exca­vated.”
    They are carved with ani­mals (boars, cray­fish, ducks, lions, ser­pents) and car­bon dat­ing puts their age at 12,000–13,000 years old. That’s 10,000 years older than Stone­henge, 10,500 years older than the pyramids.

    It’s the age of them that blew everyone’s mind. No one had thought any civ­i­liza­tion that old could’ve been that sophis­ti­cated, and so the excavation’s arche­ol­o­gist, Klaus Schmidt, is reach­ing for the big guns: “Gob­ekli Tepe is a tem­ple in Eden.”

    His ratio­nale is, alas, a sec­u­lar­iz­ing attempt to bring the Gar­den into the realm of ethnog­ra­phy and myth, hav­ing to do with the indige­nous people’s dif­fi­cul­ties in adjust­ing to the change from hunter-gatherer to agrar­ian lifestyles.

    What­ever. They are from Eden, they aren’t from Eden — who knows? I sup­pose the fact that a 21st cen­tury archae­ol­o­gist would even jump to a con­clu­sion like that, and that a news­pa­per would hurry to get the news out, shows that the Gen­e­sis account still has power over us.

    But now we only have 40 short days to make the trip from Eden to Gol­go­tha, so I’ll con­cen­trate on that. Will some­one drop me an e-mail if sci­en­tists find For­bid­den Fruit peel­ings or anything?


    Related posts:

    1. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    2. The fate of Chris­tians in Iraq
    3. Pub­li­can or Pharisee?
    4. Yes, Vir­ginia, there is a St. Nicholas
    5. No gay mar­riage in gay Paree

    March 1st, 2009 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Kyra­lessa 03.01.2009

    Well, I was skep­ti­cal, but if it’s in as august a source as the Daily Mail…
    :)

  • Mimi

    Wow, that is amaz­ing.
    I for­give, as God for­gives.
    For­give me, my sister.

  • s-p

    ummmm… the peel­ings are in my kitchen garbage can. sigh.

  • Grace

    Bad s-p! Well, at least you’re stay­ing fast-compliant.

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