The Newark Holy Stones
In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.
The Bleeding Cross of Vile Parle
In March 2012 water began dripping from the feet of a crucifix outside the church of Our Lady of Velankanni in the Mumbai district of Vile Parle; thousands came, collecting the water in bottles and drinking it. The rationalist Sanal Edamaruku arrived with a television crew, followed the damp patch on the wall behind the cross and found a blocked washbasin drain in the room behind it: the water was rising by capillary action through porous concrete and coming out through the figure's foot. He demonstrated it live on air. The Catholic archdiocese of Mumbai filed a complaint against him for outraging religious feelings, and Edamaruku, facing arrest without bail, left for Finland.
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