Matthew’s magi weren’t three, weren’t kings, and had no names

Matthew 2:1-2King James Version1Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,2Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. introduces them as magoi, astrologers out of the Persian east. The text gives no number, no crowns and no names. Three comes from counting the gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh, and handing one to each man. Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar were attached to them by a sixth-century text, five hundred years after the fact. Matthew has them arrive at a house rather than a stable, and late: Herod works out from what they tell him about the star that the child could be as much as two years old.

Scholarly consensus Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah. Doubleday, 1993.

Scholarly consensus Ehrman, Bart D. A Brief Introduction to the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Michelangelo’s Moses has horns because of a mistranslated verb

In Exodus 34:29King James Version29And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him., Moses comes down from Sinai with his face changed by the encounter. The Hebrew verb qaran has his skin sending out rays. It shares a root with qeren, the word for horn, and the picture behind it is light projecting the way horns do. Jerome’s Latin, around 400 CE, took that literally: his face was horned. The Vulgate was western Europe’s Bible for a thousand years, so Moses grew horns in manuscripts, in stained glass, and in the marble Michelangelo cut for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Greek translators had gone the other way centuries earlier, and modern Bibles agree with them. His face shone.

Scholarly consensus Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses. W.W. Norton, 2004.

A scroll burnt to a lump was read without being opened

A synagogue at En-Gedi, on the Dead Sea, burned around 600 CE. Excavators lifted a blackened lump out of its ark in 1970, about the size of a fist and too brittle to unroll. It sat unread for forty-five years. Then a team at the University of Kentucky scanned it with micro-CT, which maps density in three dimensions, and the ink held enough metal to stand out from the parchment. Software traced each wrapped layer, pulled the layers apart and flattened them into a page. Thirty-five lines of Hebrew came off it, the opening of Leviticus, Leviticus 1:1King James Version1And the LORD called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying,, and letter for letter it matches the text Hebrew Bibles are printed from today.

Scholarly consensus Seales, William Brent, et al. “From damage to discovery via virtual unwrapping.” Science Advances 2, no. 9 (2016).

Scholarly consensus Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament. 4th ed. Oxford University Press, 2005.