The so-called “Vision of Gabriel,” an 87-line, three-foot-tall stone tablet written on in faded ink that has been dated to the late first century B.C.E. and is said to shed dramatic new light on Christianity’s origins in Judaism, has at last, so to speak, come out of the closet.

Although the tablet was found, apparently on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, eight years ago and has been known of in scholarly circles for some time, it was only this week, at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, that its existence was brought to the attention of the wider public. The subject of a paper delivered by a Hebrew University professor, Israel Knohl, it was reported on prominently in the New York Times and other newspapers around the world.

The “Vision of Gabriel,” from what I have been able to gather from these reports — I was not at the Jerusalem conference and have not read Mr. Knohl’s paper — would seem to be in many ways a typical late-Second-Temple-period eschatological text, a cryptically couched prediction of the messianic End of Days in the form of a revelation granted to the anonymous author by the archangel Gabriel.

There are many such pre-Christian compositions in the biblical Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and presumably they were many more that — like the “Vision of Gabriel” until its recent discovery — were lost to posterity. Not a few have been connected in the past with early Christianity, most noteworthily, perhaps, the scroll known as Pesher Habakkuk with its martyred “Teacher of Righteousness” who has been compared by some scholars to Jesus.

What, then, is so dramatic about the “Vision of Gabriel”? Mainly, it would seem, a possible pronouncement by the archangel that the future Messiah will die and rise from the dead in three days’ time, just as Jesus is said to have done by the New Testament. This, in any case, is Mr. Knohl’s interpretation of the none too legible text, although a number of leading scholars have backed him up or at least consider his reading plausible.

Let us suppose that Mr. Knohl is right, and that the New Testament story of a messiah who is killed and rises from the dead on the third day represents a borrowing of a motif current in the same Jewish circles in Palestine that produced the “Vision of Gabriel” a generation or two before Jesus’s time.

There is no doubt that this is interesting. But does it tell us anything sensationally new about Christianity’s Jewish antecedents? I doubt it — not because these antecedents were not real, but on the contrary, because we already know so much about their reality that one more instance of it, however remarkable, will not add a great deal to the overall picture.

After all, that the historical Jesus, whatever the exact nature of his beliefs and conception of his mission, was totally rooted in first century C.E. Palestinian Judaism has long been unquestioned by serious scholars. And that much of the account of his ministry in the Gospels reflects first century C.E. Palestinian Jewish thought, too, is also beyond question.

Indeed, in an upside-down way Christianity itself has always insisted on this, by dwelling on how Jesus’s ministry was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Turn this right-side-up and you get the admission that many of the supposed biographical facts about Jesus’s life and death were invented by his followers to make them conform to one or another passage in the Hebrew Bible or this or that Jewish tradition.

His rising on the third day would be just one more example of this — and even without the “Vision of Gabriel,” the biblical story of Jonah, who descended in the belly of a fish to “the bottoms of the mountains,” so that the “earth with her bars” was about him, only to be spat out on dry land after three days, was traditionally taken by Christian commentators to be a typological anticipation of Jesus’s burial and resurrection.

Did Jesus really rise from the grave on the third day? Well, not unless you happen to be a believing Christian — and if he didn’t, how much difference does it make if the first Christians who thought he did were influenced by the Book of Jonah or by the “Vision of Gabriel”? How much difference does it even make if he himself told his disciples that he would die and be resurrected on the third day, or if they made it up after his death? In either case, third-day resurrection was “in the air” of first-century Jewish Palestine, just like many other aspects of the Jesus story.

Indeed, so taken for granted by now is Jesus’ thorough Jewish background that the real scholarly danger is not of regarding him in detachment from it, but rather of reducing him to it, so that he is considered to be just another Jewish messiah-figure who was not very different from any other. But he was different — in the force of his personality, in his ability to inspire love and devotion in his disciples, and above all, in his views, which went far beyond those of any previous rabbi or Jewish visionary in stressing the importance of subjective experience as opposed to outward behavior.

This was the real original fault line between early rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, and though Jesus never thought of himself as anything but a Jew, and certainly didn’t intend to start a religious revolution, the religious revolution known as Christianity did start with him. The more he is seen to be an integral part of the world of first century Palestinian Judaism, the more original he seems to be at the same time. He could never have attracted the following he did if he hadn’t been.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.