A Florida State University oceanographer named Doron Nof is the lead author of a new scholarly study which suggests Jesus Christ may not have walked on water at the Sea of Galilee, but on "springs ice," instead. The paper is titled, "Is There A Paelolimnological Explanation For 'Walking On Water' In The Sea Of Galilee?," and it is published in the April issue of the Journal of Paleolimnology.

Here's an article about it from today's news, and here's the online abstract of the journal article. Nof, et al write:

Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) is a small freshwater lake (148 km2 and a mean depth of 20 m) situated in northern Israel....there are dense (warm and salty) springs along its western shore....because the water directly above the plume created by the salty springs does not convect when it is cooled down to 4 °C, freezing of the region directly above the salty springs was possible during periods when the climate in the region was somewhat cooler than it is today. We refer to this localized freezing situation as ‘springs ice’.

....During the cold events 1500 and 2500 years ago (when the atmospheric temperature was 3 °C or more lower than today) springs ice occurred about once in 160 years or less. Since the duration of these cold events is of the same order as the springs ice recurrence time, there is a substantial chance that at least one springs ice occurred during these cooler periods....One set of those springs associated with the freezing is situated in Tabgha, an area where many archeological features associated with Jesus Christ have been found. On this basis, it is proposed that the unusual local freezing process might have provided an origin to the story that Christ walked on water. Since the springs ice is relatively small, a person standing or walking on it may appear to an observer situated some distance away to be ‘walking on water’. This is particularly true if it rained after the ice was formed (because rain smoothes out the ice’s surface).

Whether this happened or not is an issue for religion scholars, archeologists, anthropologists, and believers to decide on. As natural scientists, we merely point out that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region several times during the last 12,000 years.

Jesus was corporeal, so for rational-minded skeptics, it's fair enough to look for corporeal explanations of miracles attributed to him. The bible employed no fact-checkers, after all.

As for God, well, I do believe He exists, and that He may even, probably does, have agents upon our earth. But that does not mean to me that any may have ever possessed miraculous powers.

I do believe that spirits may pass from a dead creature's body to the soul of a newly-born. My son's first word, at about six months, clear as a bell, was "curlew," which is a type of bird (left); also the name of one of my favorite art-damaged jazz-rock bands; and a forlorn town in Northeastern Washington state.

I suspect he was a curlew in a previous life.

When it comes to supernaturalism, the clearly unknowable premise (my son was a curlew in a previous life) seems somehow more plausible than a conceivably disprovable claim that a known historical figure actually walked on water.

We are wandering dangerously close to epistemology here.

And as you know, I'd really rather be writing about People In Search Of Safe Restrooms (PISSR), and the like.

I think I will take an aspirin, and maybe go take some pictures of herons now.

TECHNORATI TAGS: JESUS CHRIST, WALKING ON WATER, WALKING ON ICE, SEA OF GALILEE, ISRAEL, EPISTEMOLOGY, CURLEW, WASHINGTON

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 6, 2006 11:39 AM

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