Rome, Day 5, Departing

On our last day, we both slept as late as we could without missing the breakfast we came to love here, and made it just before they closed up shop.  We spent the morning thereafter getting packed up and I tried to get one more of these posts published.  I got it saved at least (the Hong Kong post),but the pictures were uploading slowly, and we ran out of time.  We caught our car to the airport, and now as I write this, we are on our flight with Royal Jordanian airways to Amman.  We will spend one night there, and then on to Tel Aviv.  This schedule was necessary again due to numerous constraints of the journey, but we turned it into a special feature in fact.  God willing, we will make it to the museum in Amman tomorrow for a very quick visit, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the earliest known copies of several books in the Bible, particularly of interest to me, Isaiah.  The scrolls, as you may know, are particularly of historic importance because they are dated to the period from which the books are purported to have originated, and match very exactly to the modern texts (of course, the Hebrew versions, not the translations).  This is important because it dispels the notion put forward by some in recent centuries and decades that the books were written later, in an attempt to validate those very specific prophetic passages, which have since occurred.  As a Christian, Isaiah is a powerful confirmation that Jesus was indeed the Messiah hoped for by Jews for so long, as there were many details of his life, death and resurrection which later occurred.  Such was the correspondence between the predicted events and the historically recorded details of Jesus’ life that people who did not believe supposed it must have been fabricated after the fact, in order to appear to be prophetic.  The discovery and dating of the scrolls confirms this is impossible.  And ironically, in the end, the original doubts of those people serve to further indicate the accuracy of the events, for if the prophecies were not in fact quite accurate, they would never have been compelled to suggest that the original book had been fabricated to appear so exactly related to the subsequent events.  Obviously, this will be a priceless artifact to see with my own eyes, then! 

Now it is time to land, so I must halt my torrent of words!  Until the next post then…

Very stark landscape flying into Jordan

Amman at night from hotel