Vardaman's Magic "Coin"
Dr. Jerry Vardaman, an archaeologist at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University, claims to have discovered microscopic letters covering ancient coins and inscriptions conveying all sorts of strange data that he then uses matter-of-factly to assert the wildest chronology I have ever heard for Jesus. He claims these "microletters" confirm that Jesus was born in 12 B.C., Pilate actually governed Judaea between 15 and 26 A.D., Jesus was crucified in 21 and Paul was converted on the road to Damascus in 25 A.D. This is certainly the strangest claim I have ever personally encountered in the entire field of ancient Roman history. His evidence is so incredibly bizarre that the only conclusion one can draw after examining it is that he has gone insane. Certainly, his "evidence" is unaccepted by any other scholar to my knowledge. It has never been presented in any peer reviewed venue [8.1], and was totally unknown to members of the America Numismatic Society until I brought it to their attention, and several experts there concurred with me that it was patently ridiculous.
Nevertheless, his "conclusions" are cited without a single sign of skepticism by Biblical apologist John McRay, who says "Jerry Vardaman has discovered the name of Quirinius on a coin in micrographic letters, placing him as proconsul of Syria and Cilicia from 11 B.C. until after the death of Herod."[8.2] This actual claim has never been published in any form, but I will address a related published claim by Vardaman, and some background is necessary. I will devote some space to this since, as far as I know, I am the only one who has taken the trouble to debunk this obscure and bizarre claim.
What Vardaman means by "micrographic letters" (he usually calls them "microletters") are tiny letters so small that they cannot be seen or made without a magnifying glass and could only have been written with some sort of special diamond-tipped inscribers. He finds enormous amounts of this writing on various coins supporting numerous theses of his. Vardaman claims that he and Oxford scholar Nikos Kokkinos discovered microletters on coins in 1984 at the British Museum, but Kokkinos has not published anything on the matter. Nevertheless, Vardaman tells us that some coins "are literally covered with microletters...through the Hellenistic and Roman periods"[8.3] and that "whatever their original purpose(s), the use of microletters was spread over so many civilizations for so many centuries that their presence cannot be denied or ignored."[8.4] Such fanatical assertions for an extremely radical and controversial theory that only he advocates, and that has not been proven to the satisfaction of anyone else in the academic community, gives the impression of a serious loss of objectivity. Supporting this conclusion is the fact that he cites one authority in support of his thesis that does not in fact support him, yet he does not qualify this citation for his readers but acts as if this makes his theory mainstream.[8.5]
Apart from the fact that it is totally unattested as a practice in any ancient source and none of the relevant tools have been recovered or ever heard of as existing in ancient times, and it has never been subjected to a professional peer review much less accepted by any expert but Vardaman himself, there are several other reasons to regard this as insanity. First, it is extremely rare to find any specimen of ancient coin that is not heavily worn from use and the passage of literally thousands of years, in which time the loss of surface from oxidation is inevitable and significant. Even if such microscopic lettering were added to these coins as Vardaman says, hardly any of it could have survived or remained legible, yet Vardaman has no trouble finding hundreds of perfectly legible words on every coin he examines. Second, to prove his thesis, Vardaman would at the very least be expected to publish enlarged photographs of the reputed microscopic etchings. Yet he has never done this. Instead, all he offers are his own drawings. Both of these facts are extremely suspicious to say the least. Finally, the sorts of things Vardaman finds are profoundly absurd, and rank right up there with Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods.
Here is a typical example:
Notice that this is merely a drawing, not a photograph, and that he gives no indication of scale.[8.6] He never even properly identifies the coin type, and though he quotes the British Museum catalogue regarding it, he gives no catalogue number or citation, so I am unable to hunt down a photograph of it or to estimate its size. But even if among the largest of coins it would not be more than an inch in diameter. Most coins were much smaller. Yet his drawing (left) has a diameter of 4.75" for a scale of at least 5:1 or more, and his blow-up (right) is a little over three-times that, for at least 15:1. That means that his letters, drawn at around a quarter inch in size, represent marks on the original coin smaller than 1/50th an inch, less than half a millimeter.[8.6.5] It would be nearly impossible to have made these marks, much less hundreds of them, and on numerous coins, at minting or afterward (indeed, even the number of men and hours this would require would be vast beyond reckoning), and it would be entirely impossible for them to have survived the wear of time. Yet Vardaman sees them clear as day.
But this is merely the beginning of the madness. Vardaman's quotation of the coin catalogue establishes this as minted by the city of Damascus in the reign of Tiberius, and the coin itself says "LHKT DAMASKWN" or "328th [year] of the Damascenes," referring to its re-establishment as a Greek city by the first Seleucus, in the last years of the 4th century B.C. However, coins minted in Eastern Greek cities did not use Latin letters or words, they used Greek--one can see even from his drawing that the real letters on this coin are Greek, spelling Greek words--yet almost all of Vardaman's "microletters" for some strange reason appear in Latin. Second, and most humorously, all the Latin letters for "J" appear, as Vardaman reproduces them, as modern J's, yet that letter was not even invented until the Middle Ages! If his J's were genuine, they should be the letter I. This alone makes it clear his claims are bogus.
But in case there is any doubt: Vardaman claims to find in these tiny letters the clear statement that the coin was minted in the first year of king Aretas IV in 16 A.D. But Damascus was not a part of the kingdom of Aretas until after the death of Tiberius in 37 A.D. when it was briefly granted to him by Caligula, so Vardaman uses the microletters as evidence that refutes the accepted history. Yet it is a plain contradiction for the minters to boldly date this coin according to their independent Seleucid heritage, and then microscopically reverse that fact and date it by the reign of a recent king. Yet Vardaman doesn't stop there. The microletters tell him all sorts of new facts about the ancient world, like that the full name of the king was Gaius Julius Aretas, and so on. But even more bizarre still:
The most important references on this coin are to "Jesus of Nazareth." He is mentioned frequently, often in titles and phrases found in the New Testament, for example, "Jesus, King of the Jews," "King," "the Righteous One," and "Messiah." Reference to the first year of his "reign" is repeated often...for example, "Year one of Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee [sic]." [8.7]
The absurdity of all this, officially and microscopically inscribed on every coin by the royal mint of the King of the Nabataeans in 16 A.D., stands without need of comment.
Vardaman also "sees" microscopic letters on inscriptions, even though stone, by its roughness and its exposure to weathering, would be even less likely to preserve such markings, even if they had ever been made. Indeed, stones of the day were not polished, making it literally impossible for microscopic letters to be inscribed on them in any visible way. Yet he finds these tiny letters on the very Lapis Venetus inscription (above) showing "that the text dates to 10 B.C., that the fortress Secundus took on Mount Lebanon was Baitokiki, and that the colony mentioned was Beirut."[8.8] All but the last point would be a valuable addition to our historical knowledge, yet he has never published any papers on these claims. More bizarre still, despite several pages of confused text in his later work on how he arrives at this date, he never even says how he gets the date from the microletters. He merely asserts it over and over again,[8.9] and then appends an unnumbered page with some rough remarks about how his microletters date every office of Secundus by the years from the founding of the Beirut colony in 15 B.C. One could write volumes on the weirdness he finds in his microletters (like the name of the Jewish rebel Theudas on the Lapis Venetus, calling him the king of the Scythians![8.95]). But I think it is clear enough that this is all nonsense on stilts.
Now for the punch line. There is no Quirinius coin. McRay's reference is to an unpublished paper that no doubt comes up with more complete nonsense about Quirinius in the reading of random scratches on some coin or other, twisted into letters by what must be a chronic mental illness. But Vardaman hasn't even published this claim. Instead, almost a decade later, when he did present a lecture on the matter, his paper on the date of Quirinius, though over 20 pages in length, never mentions this coin that apparently McRay was told about. Instead, a date of 12 B.C. is arrived at using nonexistent microletters on an inscription. So we can dismiss this claim of Vardaman's and McRay's without hesitation.
