There have been a lot of podcasts I've wanted to write and deliver since I podfaded in July of last year. The last couple of months I've been haunted by the desire to predict the short-term future of Biblical Archeology.
The discovery of what we now call the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 upper Egypt, and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 in the caves near Qumran, started a gold rush in the mideast for ancient documents. At the same time, it caused mid-eastern governments to try and protect their treasures from plunder by western collectors and museums. We don't know how many documents got caught in the crossfire, but we've known about one for a long time.
I'm talking about what we now know is "The Gospel of Judas," a Coptec codex that sat decaying in a Hicksville, New York safe deposit box for twenty years until the National Geographic Society (and a motivated collector) stepped forward to underwrite its translation and repatriation to Egypt. Many respected institutions wouldn't touch the manuscript, even though they'd be the first with a groundbreaking discovery. They were worried about the provenance of the document, and maybe a little scared of its contents.
A lot of forces are at work here; people with "unclean hands" who once might have been prosecuted by mideastern countries for spiriting off national treasures, are dying or finding ways in their last days to find pathways for these documents to come to light. And there's The Da Vinci Code, which popularized the work of people like Michael Baigent (who himself has popularized the work of people like Robert Eisenmen). Though Da Vinci is fiction, it is uncannily allegorical to the way the church, scholars and governments have conspired to keep the questions raised by these newly-discovered documents from becoming public questions.
The premiere of The Da Vinci Code movie will only fuel the fire and make the questions more pointed and the potential answers more interesting to main stream media. It is the final realization of Martin Luther: the common man able, not only to read the text in his own language, and to interpret it for himself, but now to see it in context alongside other apocryphal texts that have been hidden, then suppressed, for millennia.
Other movies and media, too, are asking pointed questions. The God Who Wasn't There is being pitched on liberal websites like Daily Kos. And there's always the Internet itself which may be the ultimate deconstruction of organized religion as we know it; and could also serve as the cradle for a new form of spiritual thought.
It would have made a great podcast. I wish I'd had the time to write and deliver it, but my mind and body have been on a project that we're just about ready to finally roll out. We started on it last July, figured it would take a few months. Boy, were we ever wrong!
My partner and I have always been believers that video overpowers audio whenever and wherever they're in combat. When the Irivers and Archos and rumors of Video Ipods started to swarm early last year, we wanted to be first with a site designed to feed original snack-size material, created and customized for portable, personal video devices.
While we haven't seen anything emerge quite like what we're building, the web video revolution has raged all around us as we've sat, chained to our desks like scriptorium monks, reworking our plans, producing and postproducing our features, building our networks and compressing and then compressing some more.
We're just about ready to roll out our portable video site. We're calling it Walkie-Lookie (we hope to be fully functional sometime in May--almost a year from when we started). In the past, we would have raced to be first at any cost, but if age brings any wisdom, its if you can't be first and right, its far better just to be right.
