Free Republic

A huge marble cross discovered high in the mountains of Baltistan is thought to be up to 1,200 years old A Christian cross believed to be up to 1,200 years old and weighing more than three tons has been discovered in Skardu in northern Pakistan. A three-member expedition team from the University of Baltistan, Skardu, discovered the huge marble cross high in the mountain range of Kavardo in Baltistan. The team — led by vice-chancellor Muhammad Naeem Khan together with director of academics Zakir Hussain Zakir and director of external links Ishtiaq Hussain Maqpoon — visited the site to study...

Reason #10: LITERATURE What is literature, and what is it for anyway? Have you ever wondered that? It’s not practical like science and math, so what is its purpose? Why do we include literature in our curriculum, how do we choose it, and what do we hope to achieve by reading literature? These are some of the questions that puzzled me most in my own education. The ancients thought about all of these questions too. Plato brings up the question of poetry, by which the ancients meant literature, and he famously bans the poets from his ideal Republic. Because, he...

Reason #9: HUMAN CONDITION When it comes to the human condition, we may think that Scripture is all we need. After all, Scripture does show us our true human condition in a way that the Greeks did not and could not: our relationship to God, that we are sinners, that we are a fallen race in need of redemption, that sin separates us from God, that God loves us and offers us grace and salvation. This is the good news that has been revealed by God in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ and nowhere else. Indeed, the...

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

American government and political science will come alive when you read the Greeks and Romans, the same way that words come alive when you study Latin and Greek. There were many influences on the Founding Fathers, and certainly the modern philosophers—Locke and Hume—were important along with the tradition of English liberty. But separation of powers, mixed government, and checks and balances are the principles that first come to my mind when I think of the genius of the American political system; and where did these concepts come from? Plato in the Republic describes five types of government and says they...

REASON #5: NATURAL LAW What did the first Continental Congress mean when it appealed to “the immutable laws of nature,” or Thomas Jefferson when he referred to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the unalienable rights of man”? Natural law. The principle of natural law is embedded in Western civilization, the Declaration of Independence, and our whole history as a nation. The concept of natural law was first articulated by Aristotle in Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common” law that is...

Reason #7: RELIGION Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did not make it to the modern world and thus is probably the most famous lost treatise in world literature. Wouldn’t we all love to read this work that St. Augustine praises so highly? Well, I have read a lot of Cicero and, like most writers,...

REASON 4: EDUCATION A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special about the Greeks and Romans and why should Christians study them? After all they were not Christians, they were pagans. Some have objected to the word pagan and misunderstood its meaning. Pagan is a word Christians coined in the later Roman Empire to refer to...

Reason #3: SCIENCE Because we live in the aftermath of what has been called the “scientific revolution,” we modern people consider ourselves quite superior to the ancients in regard to the study of the natural world. We are polished practitioners of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” We think ancient people were ignorant of the natural world and that we, with all our advanced scientitic knowledge, have little to learn from them. But one of the problems with having your nose so high in the air is that you can miss the thing right in front of you. Science, as...

REASON #2: VIRTUE In the last article, we learned that the Greeks established the first principles of architecture by studying nature. The proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye are those of nature’s greatest work of art—the human body. We learned that God gave man reason and the desire to know, but he did not leave us without guides. He gave us the Greeks, the world’s first systematic, abstract thinkers. And so we study and honor the Greeks because they teach us how to use reason to explore and understand our world, a world that is material and...

REASON #1: ARCHITECTURE Of all of the points that I will make, this is the easiest to understand because it is so visible: we see its evidence every day. The power and beauty of classical architecture is everywhere, from grand buildings like our Supreme Court to our humble everyday homes. The Greeks discovered the proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye which, they tell us, are based on nature’s greatest work of art: the human body. Scale, mass, proportion, and symmetry—the principles of classical architecture—were worked out by the Greeks in great detail and built upon in succeeding...

The power of the word classic cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the idea of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. The word “classic” brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time, and by virtue of this fact, participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. And what is the only thing we know of with these attributes but God and His Eternal Word? When looked at this way, every Christian should want a classical education for their children: It has everything we instinctively want. But when we examine this word “classic,” we find...

Tertullian, the toughest and most uncompromising of early church fathers, once asked a question that is still with us today: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? That is to say, is there— indeed, should there be—a meeting ground between the Judeo-Christian strain that proceeds out of Jerusalem and the Greco-Roman (humanist) strain that proceeds out of Athens? As far as Tertullian was concerned, the answer to his question was simple: nothing. Nevertheless, despite Tertullian’s rejection of the link between Athens and Jerusalem, Christian thinkers for the past two millennia have continued to ponder his question. Can the basic tenets...

They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born. A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007. A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol. A Jordanian Bedouin opened these...

After 2,000 years buried within a cave in the Holy Land, the features are barely distinct as that of a human face. But Bible historians are trying to determine whether this is the first ever portrait of Jesus Christ. They are investigating whether the picture, which can still just about be seen to depict a man wearing a crown of thorns, was created in Jesus’s lifetime by those who knew him. The portrait was found on a lead booklet, slightly smaller than a credit card, which lay undiscovered in a cave in a remote village in Jordan overlooking the Sea...

The incredible story of 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns. The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoard of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea...

Is this the first ever portrait of Jesus? The incredible story of 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 yearsBy Nick Pryer Last updated at 12:15 PM on 3rd April 2011 The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns. The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoard...

CONCLUSIONS From its first recorded exhibition in France in 1357, this cloth has been the object of mass veneration on the one hand, and scorn on the other. Appearing as it did in an age of unparalleled relic-mongering and forgery and, if genuine, lacking documentation of its whereabouts for 1,300 years, the Shroud would certainly have long ago been consigned to the ranks of spurious relics (along with several other shrouds with similar claims) were it not for the extraordinary image it bears. The Shroud of Turin has a double image—that is, a superficial discoloration on the front surface of...

[...]ConclusionSo, here’s the evidence I have presented for why the Shroud of Turin is clearly a hoax: The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession.The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John.The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium...

Wall Street Journal praises book about Islam’s glorious past, whitewashes its brutality and inhumanity FEB 18, 2020 2:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER In this enthusiastic, adulatory review of Justin Marozzi’s book Islamic Empires, Tunku Varadarajan, executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and thus someone who should know better if our academic environment were not so corrupt and compromised, retails present-day academic fictions about Islamic history that outrage the historical record, and that no one who was remotely honest and even glancingly familiar with that record could repeat with a straight face. “His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and...