I’m aware of how to date granite. I’m also aware YECs will bullshit their way around laymen, especially kids. You tell me which is more likely.
They don’t really have any control over where they land. It seems they just land somewhere in the mountains of Ararat, a region that is now northeast Turkiye and right next to Georgia.
They probably were not envisioned to be on the actual peaks, seeing as they have no trouble getting out.
One idea is that the location was actually based on a rock formation there. But it can just be what you describe: they’re high mountains so they’d wind up there, but then they can’t be on top or it’d be hard to get out.
For a literal reading, they’d need to be reasonably close to an altitude (ha, above normal sea level) where the second dove sent off to find land could locate an olive branch.
Ararat is 16,945 feet (5,165m), but I assume they did not ground themselves cartoon-style on the peak. It seems olives can grow at similar altitude, though there has been little research into their submarine cultivation.
They would have had a little control with sails, as they were first introduced on ships around 3300 BCE.
Actual “verified” bits of the True Cross would fit in a small box- (That Cross that Saint Helena found, anyway)
And even if they found bits of old (Cypress?) wood, it is possible that some early Christians built a ark like shrine.
I was quoting Erasmus. Take it up with him.
Or John Calvin:
Now let us consider how many relics of the true cross there are in the world. An account of those merely with which I am acquainted would fill a whole volume, for there is not a church, from a cathedral to the most miserable abbey or parish church, that does not contain a piece. Large splinters of it are preserved in various places, as for instance in the Holy Chapel at Paris, whilst at Rome they show a crucifix of considerable size made entirely, they say, from this wood. In short, if we were to collect all these pieces of the true cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship’s cargo.
…or an ark?
I would make some sort of lame joke querying the carrying capacity of a Mesopotamian dove but I’m not that tragic.
A bit later, but Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, said something close to their being enough pieces of the true cross to build a barn door.
I can’t remember where I read it, but it was expressed as “if you put together all the splinters of the True Cross, you’ll get a whole forest of crosses”.
Although sometimes overstated, these are all accurate statements about the unreasonably unquestioned provenance of church relics. When my wife and I submitted our DNA to 23andMe, years ago, we were each given the name of a famous person in our haplogroup. My wife got Jimmy Buffet. I got the gospel writer, John the Evangelist - a person whose identity even Christian scholars can’t agree on. Someone obviously got some DNA from a bone in a random reliquary thus labeled and shared the information with 23andMe. I more likely share a haplogroup with a poor schmuck whose bones were dug up by some enterprising monk’s dog
He wrote about the True Cross several times in the book. Chapter 53 is about a legend of finding the three crosses of Jesus and the two thieves.
We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to His mother after the Resurrection. Here, also, a marble slab marks the place where St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the crosses about three hundred years after the Crucifixion. According to the legend, this great discovery elicited extravagant demonstrations of joy. But they were of short duration. The question intruded itself: “Which bore the blessed Saviour, and which the thieves?” To be in doubt, in so mighty a matter as this – to be uncertain which one to adore – was a grievous misfortune. It turned the public joy to sorrow. But when lived there a holy priest who could not set to simple a trouble as this at rest? One of these soon hit upon a plan that would be a certain test. A noble lady lay very ill in Jerusalem. The wise priests ordered that the three crosses be taken to her bedside one at a time. It was done. When her eyes fell upon the first one, she uttered a scream that was heard beyond the Damascus Gate, and even upon the Mount of Olives, it was said, and then fell back in a deadly swoon. They recovered her and brought the second cross. Instantly she went into fearful convulsions, and it was with the greatest difficulty that six strong men could hold her. They were afraid, now, to bring in the third cross. They began to fear that possibly they had fallen upon the wrong crosses, and that the true cross was not with this number at all. However, as the woman seemed likely to die with the convulsions that were tearing her, they concluded that the third could do no more than put her out of her misery with a happy dispatch. So they brought it, and behold, a miracle! The woman sprang from her bed, smiling and joyful, and perfectly restored to health. When we listen to evidence like this, we cannot but believe. We would be ashamed to doubt, and properly, too. Even the very part of Jerusalem where this all occurred is there yet. So there is really no room for doubt.
But I think the closest quote is in Chapter 17.
But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.
We don’t think of Twain as a master of deadpan understatement, but there is really no room for doubt.
Plenty of room. Of course, just like any relic, there are plenty of fake copies. But all the relics of the True Cross recognized by the Catholic Church would fit in a small box.
But you can likely buy a piece from some shady dealers in the Holy Land.
No, it’s an example of a creation myth describing events that did not happen long before people existed. That’s trivially easy, not difficult at all.
What is hard is constructing a creation myth describing events that actually happened a long time before people existed.
If someone’s creation myth started with a correctly reconstructed description of a tyrannosaurs eating a triceratops, I’d be impressed.
It would seem that you are not getting the subtleties of Twain’s humor.
But I’m not understating when I say there are no authentic pieces of the True Cross. Not now, not ever. Reality doesn’t give one tiny shit about what the Catholic Church says.
What churches have claimed over the years is not reality either. If someone wants to utterly waste their time by calculating a volume of claims and comparing them to an imaginary piece of wood whose size has no biblical authority - even Noah’s Imaginary Ark has an imaginary size - then let them. Compare that effort to writing about the insane number and types of relics that are claimed and recognize which is historically, societally, and psychologically the most valuable.
There are pieces of the Cross that that Saint Helena found. Which makes them pretty ancient, being from 326AD, and “only” 300 years after the Crucifixion. That might have been the True Cross, but I have doubts. But the pieces of the Cross that that Saint Helena found are considered by the Church to be true relics, and there are not a lot of them. And they are certainly ancient relics found by a Saint.
One could also claim that no relics are real, not even relics of fairly recent extremely well documented Saints- if one wants to claim there is no such thing as a “saint”.
Didn’t you read the quote from Twain about that?
There are real life people who were sainted. There are also names who were declared saints who were not real life people. The Venn diagram of the two categories is not simply a circle.
Yes, in fact I have pretty much all his works. But IMHO he was being a but sarcastic there. Hard to tell sometimes.
St Helena was a real person.
Which just goes to show that after you have tried and failed to determine which is the true religious relic, and your initial joy has turned to sorrow, it pays to have an ill noble lady do a cross check.
How would they possibly have known that they are pieces of the true cross in 326 AD? Forensics was not exactly an established science at that time?
Note that the vertical post part of a cross was typically permenantly embedded in the ground and reused. And the nails would have almost certainly been recycled, to.