"Da Vinci, slowed..."

"Heaven Can Wait"

198C ACADEMIC RESPONSIBILITY

Conference notes continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices. It recalls its motion of solidarity last year for the AUT resolution to exercise moral and professional responsibility.

Conference instructs the NEC to facilitate meetings in each university and college, and to circulate information to Branches, offering to fund the speakers' travel costs.

Conference invites members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals, and to consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies.

South East Region

1. New, permanent URL for the Project website: http://www.purl.org/net/ocp.

2. The Apocryphon of Ezekiel material has been updated.

3. The Aristobulus fragments have now been published.

'I will sing for Rashi'
By Rafael Benjamin Posen

"Rashi" by Avraham Grossman, The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 311 pages, NIS 76

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The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History came up with a worthy idea: publishing a 15-volume series of works by masters of Jewish thought. At the gathering held to celebrate the appearance of the first three volumes (the one discussed here, as well as Shmuel Feiner's book on Moses Mendelssohn and Joseph Dan's on Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid), series editor Prof. Avi Ravitzky described the deliberations of the editorial team over the choice of writers. To demonstrate the dilemma, he listed a number of illustrious figures who were included after many arguments, and others who were reluctantly left out despite their considerable renown.

Greatest figures

However, Rashi's uniqueness was above dispute; the claim made by the book's author, Prof. Avraham Grossman, that "in a historical perspective, Rashi is one of the greatest figures the Jewish nation has produced over the generations," is a matter of consensus. One need only mention his exegetical writing on the Torah: Rashi's commentary, the first Hebrew book to appear in print, has itself been the subject of hundreds of interpretive works, a labor that continues to this day.

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And still, Rashi - who lived a century before Maimonides (1040-1105) and owed his fame mainly to his two tremendous interpretive projects, his commentary on the Bible and on the Babylonian Talmud - has additional qualities to recommend him: his delightful and captivating personality, his exquisite style, his simplicity and humility. In my opinion, the achievement of the present monograph lies in its handling of this secondary aspect - Rashi's personality - of which the author has managed to provide a masterful portrait.

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Israel Museum gets biggest overhaul in its 40-year history
Foreign donors give the lion’s share of the $50m needed for renovation and remodelling

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger | Posted 25 May 2006

JERUSALEM. The 41-year-old Israel Museum, an encyclopedic national museum holding around 500,000 works from prehistory to contemporary art, will undergo a $50m redesign and expansion starting in mid-2007, officials announced last month.

The museum buildings, which sit on a 20 acre site, have grown from 5,000 to 50,000 sq. m since the museum opened in 1965. Plans are being drawn up to reorganise, expand and update the various museum buildings and create new buildings to improve entry, services and circulation for the visitors, which vary between 500,000 and one million a year.

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Second Temple Model moves to Israel Museum
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

On a crest of Jerusalem's Hill of Tranquility
overlooking the Valley of the Cross, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the National Library, a model of the Second Temple has been relocated adjacent to the Shrine of the Book on the campus of the Israel Museum, in a spot where history and archeology intersect.

The Second Temple Model, which was located for the
last four decades since its construction in the mid 1960's on the grounds of Jerusalem's Holyland Hotel, was moved to the Israel Museum this winter due to the construction of a new residential complex on the slopes of the city's Holyland hill.

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James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity

Ancient mysteries of 'Ink & Blood'
An exhibition probes Bible history and 'The Da Vinci Code.'

Ken Ma | [Orlando] Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted May 23, 2006

DAYTONA BEACH -- William Noah didn't set out to debunk the The Da Vinci Code.

The 45-year-old pulmonary physician from Tennessee wanted to put together an exhibition that would tell the story behind the story of the Bible -- how its history can be used to teach the history of much of Western civilization.

Along the way, though, there was no escaping Dan Brown's best-selling book, which hit store shelves the same year Noah's exhibition first opened in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Plagued by questions about the novel that claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene were man and wife, the Rollins College graduate added a section to his traveling exhibition -- which opens Friday in Daytona Beach -- to set the historical record straight.

"It's just a fiction story like Gone With the Wind," Noah said of the book, which has been turned into a box-office smash.

Officials with Daytona Beach's Museum of Arts and Sciences hope Noah's "Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible" can boost museum attendance by drawing on the interest in the movie, which made $77 million in the U.S. during its debut this weekend.

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'This city,' says he, 'is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.'" (Gibbon)

Wasn't the "visitor to Constantinople" to whom Gibbon adverted Gregory of Nyssa? My notes suggest that the quoted passage comes from "On the Deity of the Son and of the Spirit."

Footnote 25: See Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, vol. iv. p. 71. The thirty-third Oration of Gregory Nazianzen affords indeed some similar ideas, even some still more ridiculous; but I have not yet found the words of this remarkable passage, which I allege on the faith of a correct and liberal scholar.

'Da Vinci Code' breathes new life into old theories

By Douglas Belkin, [Boston] Globe Staff | May 21, 2006

SALEM, N.H. -- Dennis Stone looks at the 9-foot-long, 4 1/2-ton slab of granite on a hilltop here in southern New Hampshire, and sees a 4,000-year-old sacrificial altar built by the ancient Phoenicians to honor their gods. He sees an ancient locus of magic and mystery, birth and death.

Ken Feder, a professor of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University who has studied the 20-acre site, looks at the slab and sees a place to make soap.

''It's a lye stone," Feder said. ''About 300 years old."

After the bestseller ''The Da Vinci Code," Stone's version of history is finding a receptive audience. About 75 percent of people who come to ''America's Stonehenge" walk away believing that the rocks and caves are an ancient religious site.

''People were more skeptical in the '70s," Stone said. ''They're more open-minded now."

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Then to the point. Says Jesus to Judas: "[Y]ou will exceed all of [the disciples]. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." Mr. Krosney explains: "Jesus is asking Judas to hand him over and sacrifice him. The reasons become clearer. Jesus' life on Earth is only in the guise of a man. The man provides clothes for the spirit within. Jesus is an eternal figure; he is part of the higher God . . ."
Believe it if you like. Just don't confuse it with Christianity, notwithstanding Mr. Krosney's praise of this "fresh and authentic witness [to] an early era" of the faith. "Fresh" and "authentic" aren't the words that come most readily to mind. Wild and woolly or febrile and fraudulent are among the likelier possibilities for characterizing the contents of the Judas gospel.
There's also a word for this whole publishing project: Cynical or credulous, take your pick.

Show Decodes Early Years of 2 Religions

by Tom L. Freudenheim

Whether it's good luck or good planning, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in the Cleveland area has hit the exhibition jackpot with its current show, "Cradle of Christianity," which runs through Oct. 22. Because while the film version of "The Da Vinci Code" is generating buzz over a purported tale of Jesus, here's an exhibition with tantalizing real objects that provide an actual glimpse from the years of early Christianity.

The exhibit's revelations are more subtle than, say, an uncovering of a liaison between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but there is evidence of fascinating links between the older and newer religions: Judaism and Christianity.

That is especially evident in items used in liturgical contexts - two Byzantine oil lamps - one with a menorah and the other with a cross. The fact that both lamps are otherwise virtually identical is a useful reminder that, even in our own time, it's often the decorative motifs rather than the object's basic form that identifies the group using it - as, for example, in the case of drinking vessels or candlesticks.

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