Hmm....had they established that the relic had been circumcised?
I believe that Luke was the only Gentile writer in the Bible, with the
possible exception of Job...
Have there been other relics, besides, of course, the shroud of Turin, that
has been recently tested for authenticity, of note?
Norm
-----Original Message-----
From: Marcio Pie [mailto:pie@bu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 7:25 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Genetic characterization of the evangelist Luke
I thought this could be of interest. It seems that these methods based on
evolutionary biology are not so useless after all :^).
Marcio
________________________________
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 23, 13460-13463, November 6, 2001
Genetic characterization of the body attributed to the evangelist Luke
Cristiano Vernesi*, Giulietta Di Benedetto*, David Caramelli, Erica
Secchieri*,
Lucia Simoni, Emile Katti*, Patrizia Malaspina§, Andrea Novelletto¶, Vito
Terribile Wiel Marin, and Guido Barbujani*,**
* Department of Biology, University of Ferrara, Via Borsari 46, 44100
Ferrara, Italy;
Institute of Anthropology, University of Florence, 50125 Florence,
Italy; Genetics
and Biometry Laboratory, Department of Anthropology, University of Geneva,
1227 Geneva, Switzerland; § Department of
Biology, University of Rome 2, Tor Vergata, 00133 Rome, Italy; ¶ Department
of Biology, University of Calabria,
87030 Arcavacata di Rende, Italy; and Institute of Pathological Anatomy,
University of Padua, 35121 Padua, Italy
Historical sources indicate that the evangelist Luke was born in Syria,
died in Greece, and then his body was transferred to Constantinople, and
from there to Padua, Italy. To understand whether there is any biological
evidence supporting a Syrian origin of the Padua body traditionally
attributed to Luke, or a replacement in Greece or Turkey, the mtDNA was
extracted from two teeth and its control region was cloned and typed. The
sequence determined in multiple clones is an uncommon variant of a set of
alleles that are common in the Mediterranean region. We also collected and
typed modern samples from Syria and Greece. By comparison with these
population samples, and with samples from Anatolia that were already
available in the literature, we could reject the hypothesis that the body
belonged to a Greek, rather than a Syrian, individual. However, the
probability of an origin in the area of modern Turkey was only
insignificantly lower than the probability of a Syrian origin. The genetic
evidence is therefore compatible with the possibility that the body comes
from Syria, but also with its replacement in Constantinople.
** To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: bjg@unife.it.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.211540498
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marcio R. Pie
Department of Biology
Boston University
5 Cummington St.
Boston, MA 02215
Phone: (617) 353-6974
FAX: (617) 353-6340
http://people.bu.edu/pie/
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