NO BLOGGING FOR A WHILE. I'll be back when I can.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The Turkish delegation's report on the Mughrabi Gate excavation should be out in a few days, according to Today's Zaman.

Al-Aqsa report to be presented to PM Erdoğan within days
A report that is being drawn up by a group of technical experts, following an April visit to Jerusalem where they surveyed archeological work near the revered al-Aqsa Mosque, is expected to be finished and introduced to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a few days, Foreign Ministry spokesman Levent Bilman said Wednesday.

The Israeli archeological dig near the Muslim holy site sparked widespread protests amid fears that the work could damage the site. The Turkish delegation’s visit to Jerusalem, inspection of the site and eventual preparation of a report are all the result of an agreement reached in early February between Erdoğan and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Olmert, during the latter’s visit to the Turkish capital.

[...]

ARCHAEOLOGIST JODI MAGNESS is profiled by UNC Chapel Hill's Daily Tar Heel:

Students enraptured by Magness' teaching style
By: Deborah Neffa, Staff Writer

While some people have a hard time memorizing a five-minute speech, professor Jodi Magness can talk passionately about religious studies for more than an hour - without using so much as a note card.

About 200 students, some of whom resorted to sitting on the floor of Murphey 116, listened intently Tuesday as Magness narrated a tale about the Roman siege of Masada, a site of ancient palaces in Israel.

And although many typically consider history lectures dry and trite, Magness' unique teaching style of using vivid anecdotes kept students on the edge of their seats.

[...]

TALPIOT TOMB WATCH: The Jerusalem Post notes changes on the Discovery Channel's website.

Jesus tomb film scholars backtrack
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

Several prominent scholars who were interviewed in a bitterly contested documentary that suggests that Jesus and his family members were buried in a nondescript ancient Jerusalem burial cave have now revised their conclusions, including the statistician who claimed that the odds were 600:1 in favor of the tomb being the family burial cave of Jesus of Nazareth, a new study on the fallout from the popular documentary shows.

[...]

Pfann's paper reported that a statement on the Discovery Channel's Web site, which previously read "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters...concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family," in keeping with Feuerverger's statement, has been altered and now reads, "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters... concludes that the probability factor is in the order of 600 to 1 that an equally 'surprising' cluster of names would arise purely by chance under given assumptions."

Another sentence on the same Web site stating that Feuerverger had concluded it was highly probable that the tomb, located in the southeastern residential Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, was the Jesus family tomb - the central point of the film - has also been changed. It now reads: "It is unlikely that an equally surprising cluster of names would have arisen by chance under purely random sampling."

[...]

Readers of Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog will have known about this since the middle of March. Once again the mainstream media comes trailing in behind the Blogosphere.

SAMSON AS SUICIDE BOMBER?

Samson, the Jewish suicide bomber
By israelinsider staff April 10, 2007

This April the Canadian Victoria Philharmonic Choir is performing Handel's Samson, but with a different spin, thanks to Artistic Director Simon Capet. The Irishman managed to transform the biblical story of the Samson into the story of a Jewish suicide bomber in pre-state Palestine.

According to the biblical story, Samson has superhuman strength, but fails to follow God's instructions. After being captured and blinded by his enemy, the Philistines, he prays and repents to God and is able to bring down a Philistine temple, thus killing everyone inside, including himself.

Musically, Capet left Handel's work unchanged. However, in the climactic scene in Capet's version, there is no trace of the Philistine temple. Instead, Samson's mother unbuttons her coat, removes the explosives belt she had concealed, and attaches it to Samson's beaten body. She then helps him put on a shirt and he is led offstage. Moments later there is the blast of an explosion and a burst of light offstage.

[...]

The Samson story is morally repugnant in any number of ways, but it's a big stretch to transform him into a suicide bomber. Besides the fact that, as the article notes, there have not been any Jewish suicide bombers. This sounds to me like one of those artsy modernizing adaptations that regularly ruin Shakespeare and the like.

MORE JEWISH-TEMPLE DENIAL, this time from the Chief Palestinian Justice, according to the Palestine News Network:

Dozens of settlers enter grounds of Al Aqsa Mosque
(Jerusalem) Palestine News Network
Sunday, 08 April 2007

After the Chief Palestinian Justice warned of an impending attempt by Jewish fundamentalists to storm Al Aqsa Mosque on Sunday, dozens did.

Sheikh Taysir Al Tamimi said that the support that the Israeli government gives not only to political, but religious extremists, is an illustration of its own fundamentalism. The military did not try to stop the settlers, but instead provided them protection.

“This provocation, for which the military provides full support and protection, directly wrongs the religious feelings of Muslims."

He continued, "It is sinful to desecrate the sanctity of the Mosque and is a flagrant abuse of the role of worship.”

The Sheikh pointed out the political folly of claims that an ancient Jewish temple exists in the area. He said, “The claims of the alleged temple are pure fabrications which fact, archaeologists and history prove wrong. The work of the extremists is contrary to heavenly and divine laws, and also to international law.”

[...]

My emphasis. I'm not sure what the "storming" of the site by religious extremists is about, but whatever happened seems not to have attracted any attention by the major media outlets.

RICHARD FREUND is lecturing on the Cave of the Letters at Washington University in St. Louis:

Dead Sea cave archaeology is focus of Richard Freund lecture, April 20

By Gerry Everding

April 9, 2007 -- Richard Freund, director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, will discuss "Temple Treasures in the Dead Sea Caves: New Insights from Archaeology" at 11 a.m. April 20 in Room 301, Lab Sciences Building, Danforth Campus.

[...]

TOO BUSY TO BLOG right now and the news seems to be quiet anyhow. But you might want to have a look at posts on blogging and tenure by Mark Goodacre and April DeConick. Also, happy second blogiversary to Tyler Williams's Codex blog. And Pete Williams is blogging on Sogdian and Middle Persian Psalters.

ST. VERONICA has been deleted from the Via Dolorosa by the Vatican because she comes from apocryphal traditions. Tony Chartand-Burke takes exception.

I have no theological stake in this issue, but, for what it's worth, the New Testament quotes from lost and not-so-lost apocrypha and pseudepigrapha from time to time (see, e.g., 2 Timothy 3:8 and Jude 9 and 14-15). So in purely historical terms the biblical corpus cannot be sharply separated from noncanonical texts.

ANNIE JAUBERT'S THEORY that Jesus celebrated the Last Supper according to the Qumran solar calendar seems to have been mentioned recently by the Pope. The theory, first published half a century ago in French, is being "hailed as radical" by the press.

ANOTHER 60TH-ANNIVERSARY ROUNDUP on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Looks like an accurate and well done summary of the mainstream scholarly views on the Scrolls.

Dead Sea Scrolls fuel imagination

Found 60 years ago, they remain iconic

By Craig Nelson
Cox News Service
April 8, 2007

KIBBUTZ KALIA, Israel -- Whenever fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are put on exhibition anywhere in the world, throngs of religious believers crowd in front of display cases.

The fragments are faded, some even black, with age and the effects of the amino acids in the animal skins on which they were written. Most are illegible.

Still, the ancient scrolls, discovered 60 years ago this year, have an enduring grip on the imagination and offer important insights of life in ancient Israel at the dawn of Christianity.

[...]

HAPPY EASTER to all those celebrating. More on Easter here.

ANNE WIDDECOMBE on Jeffrey Archer on Judas. Whew!

Excerpt:

Not even the severest critics of Jeffrey Archer can deny his style. Recognising the need for scholastic input to give some verisimilitude to his fiction, he doesn't bother with the local priest, but goes to the Vatican and one of the greatest living scriptural scholars, Professor Francis Moloney, whom he persuades to get heavily involved. If nothing else, it will ensure that The Gospel According to Judas will not endure the indignity, inflicted on The Da Vinci Code, of being greeted with a published rebuttal, whatever heresy it may contain (eg that Jesus was the actual son of Joseph).

Archer wrote this book knowing that everyone would draw parallels with his own life, although I defy anyone to imagine him going off to the obscurity of some latter-day Essenes. Can a reputation be rescued? Can the reviled man be reinvented as a hero? Can the man shunned become the man venerated?

Interesting. But please don't waste your time on Who Moved The Stone?

TWO NEW GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS at Brown University are worthy of note here:

* Susan Harvey, a professor of religious studies, who specializes in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, focusing on Syriac studies. She is widely published in the fields of asceticism, hagiography, women and gender, hymnography, homiletics, and piety in late antique Christianity. Harvey will work on her current book project, “Teaching Women: Biblical Women and Women’s Choirs in Syriac Tradition.”

* Michael L. Satlow, an associate professor of Judaic studies and religious studies, whose specialty is early Judiasm. A member of the board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and a co-editor of the Brown Judaic studies series, he earned his Ph.D. in ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Satlow will investigate how the Jews of late antiquity understood their relationship with God, in a project titled “Jewish Piety in Late Antiquity.”

Congratulations to Professors Harvey and Satlow, and to the other Fellows listed as well.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS were discovered sixty years ago this month. More or less. Maybe.

60 years and still scrolls a mystery

Apr 07, 2007 04:30 AM
Stuart Laidlaw
Faith and Ethics Reporter (Toronto Star)

Sixty years ago this month, a poor Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib cut down a series of parchments hanging in his tent and handed them to his older cousins, who had contacts in the shadowy world of antiquities in nearby Bethlehem.

Convinced they had nothing of real value on their hands, but needing money, Juma and Khalil walked into the shop of Khalil Eskander Shahin, better known by the nickname Kando, and sold the scrolls for £5, or about $10. Kando later resold them for five times that, a tidy profit.

Today, they are priceless and better known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Popular legend surrounding the scrolls says, several months earlier, 16-year-old edh-Dhib was looking for lost sheep and became convinced they were in a cave on the edge of the Dead Sea. Throwing a rock in the cave to scare the sheep out, he heard the sound of breaking pottery.

[...]

Looks like a pretty good article on the story of the discovery of the Scrolls.

A DIRECTOR has been chosen for NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World:

NYU Antiquities Center Director Is Named
Institutions

By GARY SHAPIRO (New York Sun)
April 5, 2007

New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World has named a classics professor and former Graduate School dean at Columbia University, Roger Bagnall, as its first director.

[...]

For more on the Institute, see here and follow the links back.

TODAY IS GOOD FRIDAY. More info here.

THE BRITISH LIBRARY has announced a forthcoming important exhibition of sacred texts:

Jewish Christian And Muslim Sacred Texts Exhibition At BL

The British Library is proud to announce that HRH The Duke of Edinburgh and His Majesty Mohammed VI, King of Morocco, are the royal patrons of its forthcoming exhibition, Sacred: Discover what we share, which presents some of the world’s earliest-surviving, most important and beautiful religious texts from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.

[...]

Sacred sees priceless examples of the Torah, New Testament and Qur’an mounted alongside each other – not individually in separate zones. The texts will be treated thematically, exploring points in common, looking at the ways in which they have been produced, interpreted and used. By integrating material in this way, the exhibition will demonstrate how these faiths have interacted and influenced one another, and will enable visitors to learn about all three alongside each other.

The exhibition explores inter faith attitudes in the UK both today and in the past and takes a look at community and schools projects from around Britain.

The exhibition is part of the Library’s long-term plans to feature other major world faiths which are represented within its collections.

Among the treasures to be displayed are:

* Codex London: One of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which are central to Jewish worship. The traditional Jewish view is that these five books were written by the Prophet Moses at divine dictation. This rare early copy was made in the Middle East, perhaps Palestine, in the 10th century.

* Codex Sinaiticus: It is the oldest complete manuscript of the New Testament and the earliest and best witness for some books of the Old Testament as well. This copy of the New Testament in Greek is absolutely key in the history of Christian textual scholarship. It was produced around 350 AD, possibly in Palestine, but its name derives from the still active Monastery of Saint Catherine near the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt where it was preserved for many centuries.

* Ma'il Qur'an: One of the earliest Qur’ans in the world to have survived, this dates from the beginning of the 8th century AD. That equates to the 1st century in the Muslim Hijri calendar, which means that this manuscript was penned within 100 years of a key event in the founding of Islam i.e. the hejira or flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD to escape his enemies. It was produced on the Arabian peninsula, probably in or near the holy cities of Islam.

* Syriac Pentateuch: The earliest known dated Biblical manuscript. This copy of the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in Syriac is the earliest known dated Biblical manuscript. It was written by Deacon John at Amida (modern Diyarbakir in south eastern Turkey) in 463. Syriac was the language of the Syrian Church which extended across modern Turkey, Syria and Iraq. This version of the Bible (known as the Peshitta or 'simple' version) became important as the origin of most of the translations made into other languages of the Eastern churches, including Armenian.

[...]

And more! This sounds like a superb project. The article has the usual sort of glitches, such as giving the impression that the whole of Codex Sinaiticus will be displayed (only part of it is in Britain and I doubt they are gather all the surviving leaves from the other sites). It also refers to the Book of "Revelations," which should be "Revelation."

HEROD THE GREAT is to be the subject of a lecture at Bryn Mawr:

Archaeologist Brings Historical Perspective
To the Reign of a Biblical Villain

Each year, the C. Denismore Curtis Lecture is presented by a speaker chosen by the graduate students of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. This year, the students have extended the honor to University of Cincinnati archaeologist Barbara Burrell, who will provide an historical perspective on Herod the Great, a biblical figure long reviled in the West. She will deliver the lecture, titled "Conquering Nature: Herod the Great's Caesarea," on Friday, April 13, at 5 p.m., in Carpenter B21. The lecture is free and open to the public; those who wish to meet Burrell are invited to tea in the Quita Woodward Room at 4 p.m.

ONE OF MY BOOKS with Brill is on sale this month at half price. Marinke de Rooij e-mails the following information. Get 'em while they're hot!

I would like to inform you that your title, Descenders to the Chariot - The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature, published in 2001 by Brill, will be available as the monthly special offer of our Biblical Studies & Religious Studies E-Bulletin in April. In case you are not yet familiar with the Brill E-Bulletins I kindly refer you to the attached March edition of this free monthly newsletter, announcing per subject area new and forthcoming titles, new journal ToCs, book reviews, news about our program and a special offer. And as said, this month your title was selected and will be available at 50% discount from 15 April till 15 May 2007: Special offer price EUR 69 / US$ 93. This offer is open to all E-Bulletin subscribers and any interested parties (no additional discounts apply), so please feel free to spread the word. I of course hope you would then also endorse a subscription to this E-Bulletin, as this is a guarantee of receiving the latest information from Brill plus the opportunity to be the first to profit from any special offers and free trials we have for you.

In addition, I would like to update you on one of the links on your webpage for the Journals Online. As of 2007, the journal Aramaic Studies is available from Brill. Access to the online content from Brill can be found at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/arst
With the transition to Brill, we have seized the opportunity to significantly lower the subscription rates to Aramaic Studies. Individual subscription rates for 2007 are now at EUR 54 / US$ 69. For more information please see www.brill.nl/arst.