Aramaic Herald: June

On-line Aramaic Gospel readings

Global Recordings Network also known as "Gospel Recordings" has Bible reading available in many of the worlds languages-including modern Aramaic. Go to their site and search "Assyrian" or "Aramaic" to hear the language of Jesus. (www.grnusa.net).

Adopt a Terrorist?

On a website (www.atfp.org) it is possible to adopt a terrorist for prayer. I think this is a very naïve approach. I think this is a type of Lord Chamberland response to terrorism. (Lord Chamberland, the Prime Minister of England, and other liberals of his day, attempted to defend and appease Adolph Hitler and avoid war at all costs. This allowed Hitler to strengthen his position and actually prolonged the inevitable war.) What if this was World War II and we had "Adopt a Nazi for prayer"? I am primarily concerned about the Assyrian and Coptic victims of terror rather than the Muslims who are the perpetrators of the violence against them. I believe what we need to do is to pray for the Christians of the Middle East and try to create awareness of the situation. Why don't we adopt a Middle Eastern Christians for prayer? Let us look at the example of the Apostles. Paul didn't pray for Bar-Jesus the Sorcerer. He rebuked him to his face and removed all his perceived legitimacy.

The Dangerous Concept of Freedom of Speech and Religion

The Constitution allows for freedom of speech and religion. This is a radical idea. In an attempt to take away our rights, the Johnson Amendment was passed in 1954. This amendment allows the government to monitor the content of sermons and to threaten punitive action against those who address certain social and moral issues in their sermons. The IRS threatens to revoke the tax exempt status of churches who do engage in free speech and freedom of religion. The un-Constitutional "Johnson" amendment needs to be revoked. It is not the role of the government or the IRS to review and censor sermons.

Bones of John the Baptist found? A small handful of bones found in an ancient church in Bulgaria may belong to John the Baptist, the biblical figure said to have baptized Jesus. There's no way to be sure, of course, as there are no confirmed pieces of John the Baptist to compare to the fragments of bone. But the sarcophagus holding the bones was found near a second box bearing the name of St. John and his feast date (also called a holy day) of June 24. Now, new radiocarbon dating of the collagen in one of the bones pegs its age to the early first century, consistent with the New Testament and Jewish histories of John the Baptist's life. "We got some dates that are very interesting indeed," study researcher Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford told LiveScience. "They suggest that the human bone is all from the same person, it's from a male, and it has a very high likelihood of an origin in the Near East," or Middle East where John the Baptist would have lived. The bones were found in 2010 by Romanian archaeologists Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Rossina Kostova while excavating an old church site on the island of Sveti Ivan, which translates to St. John. The church was constructed in two periods in the fifth and sixth centuries. Beneath the altar, the archaeologists found a small marble sarcophagus, about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Inside were six human bones and three animal bones. The next day, the researchers found a second box just 20 inches (50 cm) away. This one was made of volcanic rock called tuff. On it, an inscription read, "Dear Lord, please help your servant Thomas" along with St. John the Baptist's name and official church feast day. The findings paint a story of a man named Thomas charged with bringing relics, or body parts, of St. John to the island to consecrate a new church there. It was common in the fourth and fifth centuries for wealthy patrons to pay for new churches and to gift saintly relics to the monks who staffed them, Higham told LiveScience. "We can imagine that the construction of this church was predicated on the basis of this very important gift, perhaps from the patron to the monastery," Higham said. The human bones in the box included a knucklebone, a tooth, part of a cranium, a rib and an ulna, or arm bone. The researchers could only date the knucklebone, because radiocarbon dating relies on organic material, and only that bone had enough collagen for a good analysis. The researchers were able to reconstruct DNA sequences from three of the bones, however, showing them to be from the same person, likely a Middle Eastern man. "Our worry was that the remains might have been contaminated with modern DNA," study researcher Hannes Schroeder, formerly of Oxford, said in a statement. "However, the DNA we found in the samples showed damage patterns that are characteristic of ancient DNA, which gave us confidence in the results. Further, it seems somewhat unlikely that all three samples would yield the same sequence considering that they had probably been handled by different people." Schroeder added that "both of these facts suggest that the DNA we sequenced was actually authentic." Strangely, the three animal bones (one from a sheep, one from a cow, and one from a horse), were all about 400 years older than the human bones in the reliquary. Those three bones all seem to come from the same time and location, Higham said. They may have been placed there as a way to desecrate the human bones, he said. Or someone may have just been trying to make the bone box look a little more impressive. "It is very curious," Higham said. istorical research by Oxford professor Georges Kazan suggests that relics supposedly from John the Baptist were on the move out of Jerusalem by the fourth century. Many of these artifacts were shuttled through the ancient city of Constantinople and may well have been gifted to the Sveti Ivan monastery from there. None of this proves that the bones belonged to a historical figure named John the Baptist, but researchers haven't been able to rule out the possibility, Higham said. Their study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but a program detailing the research will be aired on the United Kingdom National Geographic Channel on Sunday (June 17). National Geographic funded the research. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/15/mysterious-bones-may-belong-to-john-baptist/?intcmp=features#ixzz1xu0O3chC