" If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time."

Unfortunately, the stone is reported as being broken and some words are reported as difficult to read. Surely this will lead to heated argumentation as to what the writing really reveals. The stones authenticity however has so far not been challenged.

"The stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector.

David Jeselsohn, the stones owner said,  "I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me."

"Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

"Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology",said Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley.

" It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, dubbed "Gabriel’s Revelation" . Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus by  using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls." His theory however did not shake the world of Christology then, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus to support it.

"To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words "L’shloshet yamin," meaning "in three days." The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and a Mr. Elitzur, also an expert on Hebrew script of the relevant era, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is "hayeh," or "live" in the imperative.
Mr. Knohl says further that "such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David."

"This should shake our basic view of Christianity," he said as he sat in his office at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University.

"Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed BEFORE Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

Mr. Knohl indicated that "  the major importance of the stone is the fact that it strongly suggests that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus, in the N.T. writings, makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day".  But there it  was, Mr. Knohl claimed , and "Gabriel’s Revelation" shows it.

A number of books have been published in the past (  such as " The Greatest Story Ever Sold" ) which allude to the Jesus story as just being a rehash of God  stories of heroically
depicted characters of  various cultures of the before  first century common era.

Unlike a view that is apparently held by some Christians however, the tale  ( myth ?) of their messiah may simply not be unique at all, after
all.