MORE ON THE "ABSALOM'S TOMB" INSCRIPTIONS from the Christian Science Monitor.

New find, old tomb, and peeks at early Christians

Excerpt:

Scholars differ over how significant the findings at "Absalom's Tomb" are. Professor [Gideon] Foerster says, "It fills a gap and gives us one more detail of what we know about that historical site. The fact that the name Zacharias is mentioned there shows us that Christians in the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th century believed he was buried there. If you have a literary source, it's just a literary source. If you have an inscription this is real evidence."

Foerster discounts that Zacharias was buried at the site, saying that during the 1st century those monuments belonged to the Jewish priestly families of Jerusalem, and Zacharias did not belong to such a family.

Like [Emile] Puech and [Joe] Zias, he says the building is from the 1st century and the inscription is from the 4th century. But Jim Strange, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, says the recovery of the inscription is "quite amazing."

"Here you have something showing 4th-century Christians were trying to locate the traditional places of the gospels," he says. "We don't know if it actually is Zacharias's tomb ... but it is clear someone in the 4th century was convinced it was. This suggests that the Byzantine Christians had some piece of intelligence to make the identification. They spoke to locals who told them, 'We know where Zacharias and Simeon are buried.' "

He is calling for more searches for inscriptions nearby. "The Kidron Valley could be full of sites offering insights about what 4th-century Christians believed."

Zias says his discovery also tells us about the futility of disputes over sacred sites in the Holy Land. "If the Absalom Memorial is not Absalom's tomb, but rather Zacharias's Tomb, then we could ask, What about David's Tomb, or Rachel's Tomb, or Joseph's Tomb in Nablus? The question of whether we are killing each other over something authentic is highly relevant."

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre calls attention to the odd quote from Foerster to the effect that Zacharias was not of a Jewish priestly family in Jerusalem. I had vaguely noticed it but didn't take the time to follow it up when I made the posting. According to Luke 1:5 Zacharias was a priest of the division of Abijah and according to 1:8-23 he was actually serving in the Temple when he had the vision in which the angel Gabriel announced the coming birth of John. I don't know what Foerster was thinking � if, of course, he was quoted correctly.

UPDATE: More here.

UPDATE (19 December): I just noticed the following in this article:

Next to the Zacharias inscription, the two have also discerned the word Simeon, a reference, they say, to the old priest who recognized the infant Jesus as the Messiah.

The passage in Luke that mentions Simeon (2:25-35) never says he was a priest.

The Jerusalem Post article I linked to earlier also has lots of mistakes. It's always surprising to me how sloppy journalists are with anything I know about. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that they're pretty careless about everything.