FAKE METAL CODICES WATCH: Boo to Chuck Colson at Crosswalk.com, who falls unreservedly for the fake codices story in Relics of Christianity: All the Middle East Has Left? The really sad part is that the point of the essay is to highlight the problem of Islamist persecution of Christians in the Middle East, an issue I too have raised frequently in this blog (e.g., recently, here, here, and here). You would think that he could at least Google the subject of the codices a little before making them the chief hook in an otherwise worthy essay. Heck, if he had done his research he could have made his point even more poignantly and said that fake relics of ancient Christianity are more important today in the Middle East than protecting the Christians living there now. But no.
While we're still on the subject of preposterous claims about old bits of metal, the story of Simcha Jacobovici's supposed conveniently-just-before-Easter discovery of the nails of the True Cross is now propagating at full speed through the media. I note with particular disappointment that Beliefnet includes a credulous Religious News Service article (Archaeologist Claims to Find Nails from Jesus’ Cross) which piles on Jacobovici's bogosity even more than the Reuters piece noted yesterday. The RNS article does at least note the reservations of a couple of respectable scholars, but I would have thought Beliefnet might have taken more interest in whether such a story had any chance of actually being true. Silly me.
UPDATE: Regarding the nails story, Mark Goodacre invokes Blackadder.
UPDATE: Philip Davies suggests that a drawing on one of the fake metal codices is based on a seventh-century depiction of Jerusalem. It doesn't look very similar to me, but have a look yourself.