Faith Works 9-12-20

Faith Works 9-12-20

Jeff Gill

 

Foreign countries right nearby

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"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

L.P. Hartley's line in "The Go-Between" has been reused in many forms since he wrote that in 1953.

 

Today, February 2020 feels like a foreign country.

 

So much has changed, and is still changing, that we all have to take into account, faith communities included. Schools and shopping are perhaps more common experiences of dislocation, but church life is right behind them.

 

I had intended to write about that this week, but another distant yet nearby circumstance has nudged its way into my present thoughts. Brad Lepper wrote a column about a subject he and I have been researching, discussing (even debating at times!), and publishing on for decades now. We have done presentations together at Denison University and at Sunwatch Village in Dayton, separately in various historical museums and archaeological societies all over Ohio and occasionally beyond. We've met bus tours and camera crews, all the while still adding to our store of data and length of a timeline whose length is itself nearly bookish in print.

 

The Newark Holy Stones are a mystery even to how many there are, since the various pieces and parts are a matter of some dispute even among those who still argue for their authenticity. The one clear point agreed to by all is that there are two primary artifacts, found in the ground with Hebrew letters carved into stone, both found in 1860 if months and miles apart, but both in Licking County.

 

Some supporters of Hebrew language users in a prehistoric period of central Ohio are willing to cast aside the first found, the so-called "Keystone" which was the only Holy Stone actually found in Newark (and outside of the city limits at that time). The contemporary nature of the typeface style characters inscribed on a sort of over-sized plumb-bob has led quite a few to agree that it is relatively modern in manufacture, but the later "Decalogue" stone, found in the fall of 1860 at the bottom of a stone mound that once towered over Somerset Road east of Buckeye Lake, is the one most often cited as proof of Israelite involvement in the construction of the Newark Earthworks.

 

With the profile of Moses on one side, and the Ten Commandments carved in a snaking path weaving around all sides of the round-topped stone object, the "Decalogue" object has a certain mystical appeal. For reasons of typography and paleography and patterns of error, it's as clear that the second Holy Stone has a modern origin as the Keystone. They are bound by qualities of discovery and manufacture that make them one, so that a flaw in either discredits both.

 

But as Brad pointed out last week, some sincere questioners have asked "if these are hoaxes, why would someone put so much effort into them?" The two-piece stone box for the latter Holy Stone, and other carved objects likely found with them, all indicate a serious amount of work. "Why?" is a fair question.

 

This is where a minister and an archaeologist have a common interest, in asking questions about "why" human beings do something, but not on our own commonly accepted terms. "Why" today is not always the "why" of a previous century or era. The question of the human quest for "why" has certain common features through time, but you miss the deeper issues if you assume people have always thought pretty much the way you would.

 

One aspect of the adventure Brad and I have taken on, along with occasionally scrambling through multifloral rose vines on hilltops, or sifting archives from Harvard to that foreign land of Michigan, is to try to put ourselves into the distant country of 1859. It's the Licking County of 1859, so many names and locations are the same, but the thinking is just similar enough to trip you up.

 

And the painful realization we came to was that the essential humanity of all racial and ethnic communities was denied, even here where slavery held no sway. Whether Caucasian or African or Native American Indian, there were and are those who would affirm we are one in origin, in rights, in hopes; and there still are, though less than there were, those who see sharp divides between peoples, and a lower origin, fewer rights, no hopes.

 

To erase that divide, if you thought you could do it with a fabricated artifact, would be worth a great deal of effort. They were wrong to do it, but we have come to understand better the "why" that drove them on the verge of civil warfare to do so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he owes Brad more writing than this short column. Tell him how the past looks to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.