In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus� life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God�s activity on humanity�s behalf, agents of God�s activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinterpretation of Christianity. Still, in the author�s view, there remains a major Jewish�Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.

SEPT. 5

The Order: Directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon, Mark Addy.

Ledger plays a New York priest investigating the death of the head of his order, whose body was covered in religious symbols and Aramaic writing. He heads off to Rome and discovers the murder may have been committed by a sect known as the Sin Eaters. Sossamon plays an artist whom he once helped by performing an exorcism on her, and Addy plays another priest who helps him out. Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay for L.A. Confidential, also directed A Knight's Tale.

Abstract: David Washburn's A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls is the latest example of an index or catalog of biblical passages found in early Jewish literature. It is compared with the earlier efforts by Scanlin, VanderKam/Flint, Abegg, and others. Despite its shortcomings, Washburn provides a useful tool for scholars, but future publications of a similar nature could be improved by considering the publications mentioned in the present article and by being more comprehensive in scope.

What would Jesus Speak? (Forward Magazine)

Probably no film in history has been written about as much before its public debut as Mel Gibson's new movie about the last days of Jesus. Many of the critics and scholars who have seen it screened in advance have accused it of both antisemitism and historical ignorance � an ignorance all the more appalling in light of its pretensions to be cinema verit�.

One commonly cited illustration of this is the movie's choice of Aramaic and Latin as the two languages spoken by its characters � the former by Jesus, his disciples and other Jews, and the latter by non-Jews. In fact, as has been pointed out, the language of most non-Jews in the Palestine of Jesus' time was Greek and not Latin, which would have been spoken only by Roman officials and soldiers conversing among themselves. And to Jews like Jesus, such men, too, would have spoken in Greek, since this was the lingua franca of the country.

In the early centuries C.E., Greek and Aramaic were indeed the two languages most widely spoken throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean world; Latin, though the official language of the Roman Empire, was rarely used east of Italy. It was a newcomer to the Levant, having arrived only with the Roman military occupation of the region in the first century B.C.E. Greek, on the other hand, had been around since the fourth century, when it was spread as far east as Persia and Afghanistan by Alexander the Great's conquering army, which left behind ruling elites that Hellenized vast stretches of territory � especially along the Mediterranean littoral from Syria to Egypt, where it was, by the time of Jesus, the language of the educated and urbanized classes. Aramaic � a more ancient Middle-Eastern lingua franca originally disseminated by the expansion of the Assyrian Empire hundreds of years before Alexander � remained the tongue of the uneducated, the peasantry and minority groups like the Jews that refused to be Hellenized. (Apart, that is, from the large Jewish community of Egypt, which went over to Greek entirely, perhaps because the language of the Egyptian countryside was not Aramaic but Coptic.)

[�]

How did it all begin? Archeological findings prove that the Nabateans were not the first inhabitants of this region; they were preceded by groups of hunters and food gatherers who came in about 9,000 BCE. Then came the Orites, who were chased away by the Edomites, a people of Semitic origin.

But the creation of the magnificent Petra is attributed to the ancient Nabateans, one of the nomadic Arab tribes that migrated north from present-day Yemen as part of Babylonian expansionism. The year was around 600 BCE, and the Nabateans, who wandered the region's mountains, are known to have begun as highway robbers when the spice trade became the prominent activity of the day.

By the mid-fourth century BCE, the Nabateans had already settled Petra and taken control of the trade routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean, Egypt and Mesopotamia. With Petra located at the crossroads of these routes, prosperity came quickly. The Nabateans supplied the caravans with food and water, imposed a levy, and themselves traded spices, silk, silver, and frankincense.

In the first century BCE, the Nabatean capital was already an affluent city, and the nomadic mindset came to be replaced by refined tastes for lavish dwellings and public buildings, a great many of which still exist, and are the main draw of today's Petra.

[�]

The end of the kingdom's 700 years of existence came suddenly, and without much resistance. In 106 CE, when the city was home to 30,000 residents, it was conquered by Roman troops and annexed to the empire. And then the Romans rerouted trade through Arabia, thus throwing the city into a long decline.

Ultimately, Petra would capitulate, not to conquerors but to the forces of nature. In 551 CE, a series of powerful earthquakes convinced the last inhabitants that it was time to leave. The grand homes crumbled, and Beduin nomads used the tombs and temples carved in the rock as shelter.

Just which commandments are the 10 Commandments? (San Francisco Chronicle)

Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer

Let's say the Supreme Court of the United States allows the chief justice of the great state of Alabama to keep his 2-ton monument to the Ten Commandments in his office building in Montgomery.

Next question:

Which Ten Commandments?

You've got your Jewish Ten Commandments, your Catholic Ten Commandments, your Lutheran Ten Commandments, your Charlton Heston Ten Commandments, your King James Bible Ten Commandments, your New Revised Standard Version Ten Commandments, and they don't all agree as to which commandment is which -- or what they really mean.

Even the Bible contains two versions, one in Exodus 20:1-17 and a slightly different one in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.

There are, of course, various English translations of those ancient Hebrew texts.

Further complicating the commandments are the fact that neither Exodus nor Deuteronomy neatly number the no-nos from one to 10. . . .

"Burning �Passion�"

"Jews Horrified By Gibson�s Jesus Film"

"Gibson To Launch �Jewish Initiative�"

Egyptian Plans To Sue Jews Over Exodus Gold (Forward Magazine via Jim West on Ioudaios-L)
By MAX GROSS
FORWARD STAFF

A prominent Egyptian legal scholar is preparing a lawsuit against Jews around the world over gold allegedly stolen in biblical times during the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

Nabil Hilmy, dean of the faculty of law at Egypt's Zagazig University, announced his plan in the Egyptian government weekly, Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute � known as MEMRI � a group that specializes in translating articles in the Arab media. Hilmy reportedly told Al-Ahram that if the story of the exodus is to be believed, Jews fleeing Egypt "stole from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing, and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless."

Calling the alleged heist the "greatest fraud history has ever known," Hilmy said that he and a number of Egyptian jurists will sue "the Jews of the world" for these lost treasures, the value of which Hilmy estimates in the trillions of dollars.

"It is clear why they stole the gold, but why the cooking utensils?"

Question: "Is a compromise solution possible?"

Hilmi: "There may be a compromise solution. The debt can be rescheduled over 1,000 years, with the addition of the cumulative interest during that period."

"History" and "Writing" (Bible and Interpretation)


Did the authors and editors of Scripture ever intend to write what we define as "history?" If they did not, many of our arguments about the historicity of the Bible in modern terms become meaningless.


By Charles David Isbell [not "Isabell" - JRD]
Director of Jewish Studies
Louisiana State University
August 200

If one rules out the extremists in both Christianity and Judaism, fundamentalists and black-hat haredim, it is virtually impossible to find anyone who believes that there is such a thing as �objective� historical truth. All history is somebody�s opinion. Still in all, �history� is perhaps the one word most frequently misunderstood and misused by scholars and students of the Bible. Too often, the source of this misunderstanding is a presumption that the Bible should meet the standard of something called �history� in the modern sense of the word but that the authors and editors of the biblical narratives were simply not sophisticated enough to understand what is meant today by �history.� The sad fact is that this dismissal of the ancients is likely to be done by modern writers whose own grasp of �history� is itself seldom clearly enunciated.

Two of the questions posed by Professor Provan leap to the fore here. �What is the nature of our knowledge of the past? What are historical �facts�?� And Provan is correct that as a group pursuing this discussion, we have not produced answers that are plain enough to allow us to be sure that we are all talking about the same thing. The compelling �Minimalism� debate among biblical scholars unfolding on this site involves more than anything else a definition of �history� as found in biblical texts. Far too often, even this debate among scholars centers around modern theoretical models and personal ideologies. Often too, we read the conclusion that it is the lack of sophistication of the ancients that stands in the way of our ability to perceive the true meaning of their writings just because we are so modern. That is, in their simple and pre-modern state, they may have thought they were writing history, but of course we know that they were not.

But although Provan�s questions are compelling, I believe there is another question that should be answered first: Did the authors and editors of Scripture ever intend to write what we define as �history?� If they did not, many of our arguments about the historicity of the Bible in modern terms become meaningless. As we attempt to set ideology aside and as we inquire after the Bible�s own internal witness to its purposes, the evidence is surprising.

If the Bible is read only as a search for �facts,� then most of its message will be lost, for the authors of the Bible were not interested in �just the facts.� They looked at the ways in which �facts� which they assumed true influenced people to live. That is why the Bible is so difficult to read and understand. We want to know facts of a kind that the Bible most often does not give. But it does not follow that because their interest in �history� was different from ours we may pronounce them at fault, even less that we may accuse them of twisting the truth to create out of whole cloth a piece of writing they themselves knew to be false and did not believe. We may be so arrogant as to assume that we know better than they did what they should have put in their �Bible.� But I doubt that they were so arrogant as to presume readers would be so gullible that both their present and all later generations [including us] could be fooled by ideas they themselves knew fully well to be mere fiction.

Skeleton find points to huge mediaeval graveyard below St Andrews town centre (Sunday Herald)


Archaeologists expect to find remains of at least 60 under popular tourist area
By Jo Ewart


The discovery of more than 50 human skeletons in a shallow grave beneath a St Andrews public library has provided the strongest evidence yet that the town centre is built over an extensive mediaeval graveyard.

�Every building in the entire central region of St Andrews is built on top of a mediaeval cemetery,� said the senior archaeologist at Fife Council archaeology unit, Douglas Speirs. �If you were to lift the floors in any one of the buildings in this area you would find what we have found.�

[�]

Independent contractor Thomas Rees of Rathmell Archaeology Limited is in charge of the ongoing excavations at the St Andrews and Hay Fleming Library. �We�re discovering skeletons from a range of age groups including babies and children, although this isn�t surprising because infant mortality was quite high back then,� he explained. ��It�s unusual that the skeletons have survived this long, however, because they were likely to have been disturbed by later burials.�

[�]

The 19th century public library is located next to Trinity Church, which was gifted to St Andrews in 1410. At that time, it was surrounded by a graveyard where the residents of the St Andrews area were buried. Speirs explained that the increasing pressure to find land on which to build meant that over time buildings began to encroach on the Trinity Church cemetery.

�As mediaeval cemeteries only had temporary grave markers and in some cases no grave markers at all, it was an easy process for buildings to slowly invade the green space of the graveyard in the middle of the town,� said Speirs. �Through this process, the graveyard was slowly built upon and, by the 18th century, it was almost completely covered over and a new cemetery spot was found at the east end of the town.�

Speirs believes that the entire central square in the historic university town is in fact built over several layers of human remains. �When you visit the Trinity Church there is a lovely paved walkway all around it and shops and buildings surrounding this,� Speirs said. �But of course all of these pavements and shops, including the library, are built on top of a mediaeval graveyard.

[�]