INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE MEETS THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS? Would new scanning technology for reconstructing shredded documents help us reconstruct the Dead Sea Scrolls? I don't know. Interesting question.

ARCHAEOLOGY IS GETTING MORE DANGEROUS. Religious and nationalist concerns are leading people to take it personally. The Temple Mount is a premier example. Indiana Jones, move over.

HERE I AM IN CAMBRIDGE, blogging from an Intenet Cafe. Only they don't seem to serve coffee. Yesterday in the opening session of the International SBL meeting, Steve Mason gave a stunning lecture on "Rediscovering Josephus." He decried the usual approach of using Josephus as "background" to NT or rabbinic studies without taking him first on his own terms. My favorite sound bite was when he said that scholars try to make Josephus disgorge undigested chunks of history by performing a kind of historical Heimlich maneuver on him, or words to that effect. I've been making similar points about the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha for some time (without the Heimlich maneuver), so I found his presentation especially welcome. He also doubts the widely accepted connection between Josephus' Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He said that Josephus speaking so positively on the Qumran group would be like President Clinton praising the Branch Davidians during his 1994 State of the Union address.

This morning I went to the session on Hebrew seal inscriptions in the Shlomo Moussaieff collection. Dr. Moussaieff (who was present) is a private collector who has made his huge collection of Hebrew and Aramaic epigraphic material freely available to scholars for study and publication. All the papers were interesting but I'll just note Robert Deutsch's, since I have his handout in front of me. He spoke on royal bullae (clay seal impressions). I won't repeat specifics, but I'm sure he won't mind if I say that he displayed and commented on numerous bullae that included names of kings and names of royal officials of various types, and that this material gives us lots of new details about the Judean royal court in the monarchical period. His paper will be published in Shlomo: Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography, History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff (Tel Aviv-Jaffa) later this year. If you're into Hebrew seals, look for it.

Please excuse typos; the conditions here are a little primitive. I'm going to poke around on the Web now to see if there's anything interesting worth noting and, if so, I'll post it. Otherwise, I'll try to blog again in the next few days, but no promises.

I'M OFF TO CAMBRIDGE early tomorrow morning for the International Society of Biblical Literature conference. As promised, I have posted my paper "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Apocryphon or Pseudepigraphon Has Been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" online, along with the handout that goes with it. It replaces an earlier version that was an online lecture for my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha course in 2002 and is a short and preliminary version of a chapter in the book that I intend to finish next year while on research leave. Comments welcome, as always.

The conference starts tomorrow evening and goes until Friday morning. I will try to catch a few minutes here and there to let you know how things are going, but blogging is likely to be very light until Saturday the 26th.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to visit the sites I mentioned when I left for the Enoch Seminar. (And by the way, Avraham, if Naomi Chana was there, she didn't reveal herself to me and I can't think of any likely candidates unless she's fiddled her biographical details.) Readers should also keep an eye on Bible and Interpretation News, which invariably has interesting online stuff pertaining to the Bible.

Want more? Then have a look at The Sch�yen Collection:

This is a huge private collection of manuscripts (ancient to modern) including Qumran and later Hebrew Bible manuscripts, NT and LXX manuscripts, Latin Bible fragments, Coptic Bible fragments, biblical and Christian Ethiopic MSS, Bible fragments in other languages, other Qumran texts and materials, and much more, ranging from Sumerian tablets to Shakespeare fragments, with good photographs of most of it. The collection is located mostly in London and Oslo and most of the manuscripts are not yet published, although publication of much of it is underway.

I'm not sure our server problems are entirely over, so if you want to e-mail me about something it would be a good idea to wait until I'm back home. Have a good week, I'll blog if and when I can, and I expect to be back at my desk on Saturday, 26 July.

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS WONDERING ABOUT THE NAILS IN THE PALMS IN THE TRAILER FOR THE PASSION (scroll up for more). He cites two web pages, one of which is by a medical doctor and which includes some dodgy references (e.g., studies of the Shroud of Turin and stuff from Josh McDowell). The other is an article by Joseph Zias, who is perhaps the world's expert on the subject. In another article Zias said:

The upright remained stationary and the victim carried the crossbeam to his execution. Once the crossbeam was affixed to the upright, the victim would be nailed or tied to the cross. In the case of nailing, the nail would be driven through the wrist rather than the palm.

although he doesn't say why he concludes this. But elsewhere he is quoted as explaining:

``You cannot crucify a person through the hands because there is nothing there but skin and muscle. It will tear. It has to be through the wrist,''

So, sorry Mel Gibson, but physiology requires that crucifixion by nailing (as opposed to tying, which also happened � see both articles just quoted) was through the wrists, not the palms.

UPDATE: Sullivan cites an unnamed reader who says that a "newer theory holds that indeed the hands and feet were entry points, but that wooden washers made from the cut trunk of young trees were used for additional support." I've never heard of this and no reference is cited. Would this prevent the palms from ripping? Is there any evidence for it? In any case, no wooden washers are visible in the trailer. Sullivan also notes that Pilate speaks Latin with the ecclesiastical pronunciation.

UPDATE (21 July): Okay, the trailer does show ropes holding him to the cross. I doubt this would work (i.e., keep the hands from ripping through) but at least they're acknowledging the problem. And the Aramaic pronuciation sounds all right (Elohi rather than Matthews Eloi).

SOME PEOPLE COUNT THE REIGN OF CHARLEMAGNE AS THE END OF ANTIQUITY, so on that theory I'll link to the following story, which involves the king, a Jewish merchant, the Caliph Harun ar-Rashid, and a white elephant named Abu Abbas.

Baghdad, Jerusalem, Aachen � On the Trail of the White Elephant (Deutsche Well)

1,200 years ago three men set off on a journey from Europe to the Middle East and back. Today their trip across three cultures and religions is recreated in the Aachen exhibit "Ex oriente: Isaac and the white elephant."

Baghdad and Jerusalem. Today the cities conjure up images of armed conflict and religious strife. For many they are the epitome of the collision between the Orient and Occident, the battlefields of global interests, where the foreign other is so different and distant from Europe. But a thousand years ago the cities represented the pinnacle of cultural and religious symbiosis and were the choice destination for one of history�s lesser-known but certainly more interesting journeys.

The year was 797 in the Christian calendar (4557 in the Jewish and 175 in the Muslim dating system). Charlemagne, King of the Francs, had sent forth two of his envoys and the Jewish merchant Isaac to the court of Harun al Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad. Their mission: establish contact with the ruler of the Abbasids and observe the ways of the city on the Euphrates. Compared to the town of Aachen with its 400 some residents, Baghdad was a flourishing metropolis, a renowned place of learning and a melting point for various cultures and religions.

When the envoys departed from Charlemagne�s court in western Germany, the distant lands of the Orient were still largely unknown and exotic. The envoy�s route led them first to upper Italy, then by ship to the holy city of Jerusalem, and from there to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliph. All in all, the men traversed a good portion of the known world at the time, passing through the territories of the three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

After several months in Baghdad, the men embarked on their return journey, laden with gifts, the most impressive of which was a white Indian elephant, Abu Abbas � a symbol of friendship from the Muslim caliph to the Christian king. But because the pachyderm was so much slower than a horse, the return voyage turned into an arduous four-year adventure along the southern Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Carthage, where Isaac � who was now traveling alone � and Abu Abbas set sail to Italy. In the spring of 802, Isaac crossed the Alps on elephant-back and rode on to Aachen in the Kingdom of the Francs.

[�]

PROFESSOR SHMUEL SAFRAI has passed away.

(Via H-Judaic Digest)

We are saddened to learn of the passing, in Jerusalem, of Prof. Shmuel Safrai, Emeritus Professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University, and one of the world's greatest experts on the era of the Second Temple. His numerous publications on the Temple, the Mishnah, the liturgy, the early synagogue, and more stand as a monument to his many decades of productive scholarship. Prof. Safrai passed away in his sleep in Jerusalem at age 84.

Jonathan D. Sarna
Chair, H-Judaic

May his memory be for a blessing.

THIS IS OFF TOPIC, but it's good news for archaeologists and, I think, for the American public as well.

House Votes To Save Jobs Of Park Service Archaeologists

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page A04

The House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to block the Bush administration from privatizing two National Park Service archaeological centers and firing the archaeologists who work there.

The action late Thursday was a setback for the administration's "competitive sourcing" initiative, which seeks to submit 15 percent of all government jobs to private competition. The Interior Department has targeted the Midwest Archaeological Center, in Lincoln, Neb., and the Southeast Archaeological Center, in Tallahassee, as part of its quota under the plan.

Late Thursday, the House voted 362 to 57 to cut off funding of efforts to put the jobs of the 100 archaeologists at the centers up for bid. The measure was attached to the Interior Department spending bill, which passed late Thursday, 268 to 152.

[�]

BAGHDAD MUSEUM LOOTING UPDATE:

Roger Atwood's account of the looting of the Baghdad Museum has been reprinted by the Wall Street Journal (via Jack Sasson on the IraqCrisis list). Walter Sommerfeld's version of the same events (noted in the 23 June update here) has been reprinted by Counterpunch and Countercurrents and some similar sites. Which is more likely to be reliable? I blog, you decide.

There's lot's more in the news about the looting of Iraqi antiquities but I don't have time to track it all. The current estimate is that about 10,500 artifacts were taken from the Baghdad Museum. And serious looting continues in many ruins. (I wish someone would take up my proposal to douse the looters with liquid putrescine from the air. Anyone know who I could suggest this to?). Anyhow, I encourage you either to subscribe to the IraqCrisis list and/or to watch its archive and Francis Deblauwe's site.

ACADEMIC TALMUD STUDY is listed as #4 in Jewsweek's list of not-quite-60 hottest people and things in the Jewish universe this year. Torah is #48, God is #52.5, and Alicia Silverstone is #1. But the list isn't ranked.

LOCAL NEWS: BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGICAL WEEKEND (via Archaeology Magazine News). The London Times reports:

NEARLY 200 museums and archaeological sites across Britain will be open this weekend to celebrate National Archaeology Days.

There's more information here. This ties in nicely with the Scotsman's report of two important Neolithic finds (via ditto) in the Kingdom of Fife, where St. Andrews is located.

Let's party!

THE HARVARD GAZETTE INTERVIEWS KAREN KING ABOUT HER BOOK WHAT IS GNOSTICISM?:

Student of early Christianities:

Karen L. King doesn't want to rewrite the Bible. But she does want people to take another look at the parts that got left out.
By Ken Gewertz
Gazette staff



King, the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Divinity School, is the author of a new book, "What Is Gnosticism?" (Harvard University Press, 2003), which offers a provocative look at Christianity during its formative centuries and the heterogeneous array of groups, doctrines, and beliefs that all claimed to be inspired in some way by Jesus.

At the beginning, each of these groups claimed to represent the true Christianity, although they disagreed over basic issues. It wasn't until later that one group succeeded in labeling the others as heretics and driving them out of the fold.

"I wanted to rewrite the history of early Christianity without writing backwards, without looking at it as a process that culminated inevitably in the Christianity we know today. How did things look to the people who were around at that time? How do you go about inventing a new religion?"

It is a book King has been thinking about and working on for at least 20 years, ever since she was a graduate student in Germany studying under Hans-Martin Schenke, one of the first editors of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

[...]

"Gnosticism is a blanket term that covers a lot of early Christian movements. There wasn't a distinct religion called Gnosticism. It only existed as a tool of orthodox identity formation."

[...]

"Now this one group defines itself as orthodox, and all the rest get lumped together as heretical. Modern scholars then divide them up into two groups, Jewish Christians if they stay too close to Judaism, and Gnostics if they seem to reject Judaism and move toward Greek philosophy and mysticism. It gives each an identity and a unity they never actually had."

While King questions the existence of an early Christian sect identifying itself as Gnostic, her research does show that a wide diversity of groups flourished in the early Christian era. The picture contradicts long-cherished assumptions that early or "primitive" Christianity possessed a salutary purity and simplicity.

[...]

If such doctrinal diversity existed among early Christians, how is it that the version of the religion we call orthodox eventually vanquished its rivals? While the answer is extraordinarily complex, King believes a crucial factor was the influence of one man - the emperor Constantine.

[...]

"Constantine picked the kind of Christianity that best suited his political needs," King said. "He had a huge influence on the subsequent development of the religion."

[...]

But now that 1,500 years have passed, King suggests it may be time to reconsider some of the writings that the early Fathers of the Church decided were noncanonical.

"Are those choices that were made in the fourth and fifth centuries the right ones for Christians living today? Maybe we should go back and look at those early choices. As a feminist theologian, I think there are some texts that it would be good to recover."

The texts King has her eye on include "The Gospel of Mary," in which Mary Magdalene plays a prominent role as an apostle in spreading the faith; "The Gospel of Thomas," which leaves out traditional features of the Jesus story like the virgin birth and the resurrection but portrays Jesus as a divine teacher of wisdom; and "The Secret Book of John," which criticizes the violence, deceit, and materialism of society.

King doesn't expect or want these texts to achieve biblical status, but she thinks they are worth studying for a sense of the alternative voices that are still part of the Christian heritage.

"All religions have within them plural possibilities, which means we are always selecting materials to apply to the situations in which we find ourselves, and so people are responsible for what they appropriate and how they interpret tradition."

Students who are committed to particular Christian traditions sometimes find King's probing, questioning attitude toward scripture disturbing. For them she has a message that is part reassurance, part challenge.

"I'm not trying to take the canon away from them, but to bring it to their attention. I believe that if these texts are important to you, then you need to know what theological controversies and political events shaped them, and who decided that they should be authoritative for you."

As an experiment, I'm blogging from our local Internet cafe this morning. My coffee is finished and I think I've had enough for now, so I'm headed back to my office.

SPEAKING OF BOB KRAFT, "'Parabiblical Literature' in Early Judaism and Early Christianity" is a course taught by Professor Kraft at the University of Pennsylvania last (2002-03) academic year in tandem with the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, which was devoted to the same topic. These course notes are just one of the pages on Bob's extraordinarily useful website.

THE JEWISH STUDIES QUARTERLY (Princeton University) is looking for a part-time managing editor (via Robert Kraft on the PSCO list).

BELIEFNET HAS AN INTERVIEW WITH ELAINE PAGELS about her new book Beyond Belief (via Bible and Interpretation News).

STEVE MASON ANNOUNCES A NT JOB OPENING AT YORK UNIVERSITY (via Ioudaios-L):

Dear Colleagues:

I have been asked by my university to post the following job opening in my unit. Please direct any enquiries about (not to me but) to the person named in the ad. Please feel free to circulate it further.
SM

____________________________________________

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS/NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE �

The Division of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, York University, invites applications for a tenure-stream appointment at the Assistant Professor level in the field of Christian Origins and New Testament Literature. The appointment, to commence July 1, 2004, is subject to budgetary approval.

We seek a candidate with a completed PhD at the time of appointment, evidence of a vigorous research agenda with scholarly interests in the Jewish, Greek, and Roman contexts of early Christianity, and promise of excellence in teaching. Other requirements include the ability to teach broad undergraduate courses in Christian studies from an interdisciplinary perspective in the first- and second-year Foundations programme, as well as ancient Greek language. The successful candidate must also have the potential to undertake graduate teaching and supervision. The successful candidate will join the Programmes in Religious Studies and in Classical Studies within the interdisciplinary Division of Humanities; membership in the Centre for Jewish Studies is also possible.

A letter of application, curriculum vitae, three confidential letters of recommendation and a sample of the applicant�s written work (no longer than 20 pages) should reach the Chair by 31 October 2003: Professor Doug Freake, Division of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (email: dfreake@yorku.ca; phone: 416-736-5158; fax: 416-736-5460).


York University is an Affirmative Action Employer. The Affirmative Action Program can be found on York�s website at http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be obtained by calling the affirmative action office at 416 736-5713.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents will be given priority.

HERE'S AN ARTICLE ON THE INTERNET SACRED TEXTS ARCHIVE, which I've been blogging on during the last week.

Sacred Text Site Explains World Faiths (from Editor and Publisher)
A Wonderful Resource for Religion Journalists

Finding the actual texts that are sacred to specific religions around the world can be a daunting task, even when you have access to a world-class library. How many libraries can provide precious shelf space, for instance, for the Akaranga Sutra and Kalpa Sutra of Jainism or the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, the Kitab-i-Aqdas of Baha'i, or even the early books of Christianity?

Fortunately, because of an important Web site called Internet Sacred Text Archives, you no longer have to hunt those dusty shelves. Calling itself "a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship," the Sacred Text Archives is the brainchild of J.B. Hare. Working with a number of colleagues and volunteers, Hare has compiled and preserved a vast reservoir of religious and philosophical texts from a number of public domain sources.

[�]

Read it all. The site has just added a section on Kwakiutl Tales. Cool.

PHILOLOGOS ON THE DECALOGUE:

Decalogue or Eleven-alogue? (from Forward Magazine)

The Decalogue, or Ten Commandments � so a federal court has decided, citing the Constitution's separation of church and state � must be removed from the rotunda of the Alabama State Judicial Building in Montgomery, together with the granite monument on which they were carved.

Or is it the Eleven Commandments? Anyone counting the number of commandments appearing in photographs of the monument's two tablets of the Law � something that, to the best of my knowledge, no one but the author of this column has bothered to do � can't help blinking. Nine....ten....eleven. You can count them from top to bottom or bottom to top, left to right or right to left; they still come out the same.

That's right, Eleven: Five on the left-hand tablet and six on the right-hand one. On the left we have, "I am the Lord thy God"; "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me"; "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"; "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," and "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." And on the right, "Honor thy father and thy mother"; "Thou shalt not kill"; "Thou shalt not commit adultery"; "Thou shalt not steal"; "Thou shalt not bear false witness," and "Thou shalt not covet."

Eleven.

What gives?

To find out, read the rest of it.

HERE IS A MIDRASH BIBLIOGRAPHY compiled by faculty at HUC-JIR. Searchable and annotated with useful comments but does not seem to have been updated since 1997.

I'VE UPDATED YESTERDAY'S POST ON THE ZECHARIAH INSCRIPTION with a note from Joe Zias on those "earlier writings."

A NEW ARTICLE IN THE JERUSALEM PERSPECTIVE PIPELINE:

A Quest for the Lost Hebrew Gospel
by David Bivin

I've recommended articles on this site in the past, so I should note that this is a very weak piece on the Semitic language background of the Gospels, which pretty much ignores the secondary literature (on the NT and on retroversion) over the last century. It also mixes up the question of reconstructing Q (composed in Greek) with the quite separate question of retroverting a Hebrew or Aramaic original from a Greek translation. Rather than trying to evaluate the piece at length (which I don't have time to do), I'll refer you to my paper on the latter problem for the Greek Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. I'm writing it now for presentation next week at the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Cambridge and, as usual, I'll post it before I go. Read it and you should be able to see why I'm so disappointed with this article, even as a popular presentation.

Watch this space.

HERE'S A NEW ARTICLE IN BIBLE REVIEW:

The True Cross
Separating Myth from History

Jan Willem Drijvers

In the days of Constantine the Great, the cross on which Jesus died was �rediscovered� in Jerusalem. Tradition gives Constantine�s mother, Helena, full credit for the find. Today, visitors to Jerusalem are shown the very spot, in a cistern beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the empress is said to have unearthed not only the true cross, but the nails that punctured Jesus� hands and feet, the crosses of the two thieves who died beside Jesus, and the plaque, naming Jesus �King of the Jews,� that hung on his cross.

For her efforts, Helena was named a saint by the Roman Catholic and Eastern churches; in art, the cross became her symbol. In more recent times, she has been hailed as the first biblical archaeologist. But did Helena actually find the true cross? And if not, how did this legend, kept alive in Renaissance paintings and today�s popular press, arise?

[...]

As you probably already guessed, she didn't find the true cross. Indeed, it appears she didn't even find a fake one. An interesting story.

The August issue also has an article by Bernhard Lang on the names of God, and some other goodies too.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Silberman, Neil Asher and Ernest S. Frerichs
Archaeology and Society in the 21st Century: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Case Studies

Talmon, Shemaryahu, Jonathan Ben-Dov and Uwe Glessmer
Qumran Cave 4 XVI: Calendrical Texts

Funk, Wolf-Peter, Paul-Hubert Poirier and John D. Turner
Marsanes (NH X)

Turner, John D.
Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition

DISCUSSION BETWEEN FRANK MOORE CROSS, ANDRE LEMAIRE AND HERSHEL SHANKS (via Bible and Interpretation News)

Cross has thought for some time that the "James Ossuary" is a forgery. Shanks and Lemaire want to see the full IAA report before they are convinced.

JOE ZIAS E-MAILS regarding the Zechariah (Absalom's Tomb) Inscription:

One last item, vis a vis the inscriptions atop Absalom. While the inscriptions are 4th century they are based on earlier writings which suggest that Zach. James and Simon may be buried there in the valley. We have just finished some more casting and preliminary results show that there are more inscriptions there. We will present these at the SBL meetings in Atlanta. What is of interest is that no one has challenged the finding, prob. because no dealers nor is Shanks involved, also Puech is one of those rare scholars who seldom 'gets it wrong. Secondly, as the insc. is 1.5 meters long one has to ask about literacy among the 'people of the book' it was def. meant to be seen from a distance.

I'd like to hear more about these earlier writings.

UPDATE (16 July): Joe Zias e-mails in reply:

Basically I'm presently contemplating that that the (1st century AD?) "pillar" mentioned by Hegesippus in the 2nd (quoted by Eusebius)�may be identical to the "Absalom" monument.

"...and they buried him [in the valley?] on the spot [where he was killed] and the [nearby but not same spot?] pillar [="Absalom"?] erected to his memory still [according to Hegesippus and/or Eusebius?] remains..."

The quotation is from Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History 2.23.

IN RESPONSE TO MY MOST RECENT POSTING ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT, a reader e-mailed:

I'm writing to you about the following from your blog:
"two ancient temples once stood.
''And that, please God, is where the temple shall rise again,'' he said.

Although I strongly support the right of people of all religious faiths
(or none) to visit the Temple Mount, I don't find that last quotation
very encouraging."


Whenever I read anything like this it reminds me of my first visit to the western wall. There, as a religious Jew, I faced the extraordinary reality of the dome of the rock - one of the most beautiful and revered buildings in the world. One can't help noticing that it is, shall we say, in the way of rebuilding the Jewish Temple.

Traditionally religious Jews must believe that the third temple will be built in that location, unless we receive a clear divine command to build it elsewhere, but most of us believe the rebuilding will happen, at that very site, only when the Messiah comes. When the Messiah comes anything can happen, so - who knows - perhaps the dome of the rock and the Jewish temple will superimpose.

There are definitely Jews (not a large number) who want to rebuild that temple as soon as possible, and to them the Dome of the rock is an immediate annoyance. Please do not assume that the person you quoted belongs to that minority. He may just, like me, long for a time in the future when religious hatred will be completely resolved and there will be no impediment to rebuilding.

The reason why I found that comment "not very encouraging" is that it can hardly be taken by Muslims as anything but "fighting words." I don't know exactly what the speaker meant; maybe he was hoping that God would put a third temple on the Temple Mount in quantum superposition with the Dome of the Rock or put them both in parallel timelines linked to the temple platform or whatever, but what would naturally occur to most readers would be that he wanted the Dome of the Rock torn down and replaced with the third temple. Who knows how selectively he was quoted by the reporter who, being a reporter, would naturally display his words prominently and not necessarily in context. But saying anything like this to the media on a newly reopened tour of the Temple Mount was, to say the least, imprudent and unhelpful.

To underline my point I refer you to a recent article in Al Jazeerah (via Protocols), which quoted "The Islamic Action Front (IAF), Jordan�s largest political party" as follows:

�Bush spoke during the Aqaba meeting on June 4 about sharing the holy land between Israelis and the Palestinians. What Bush meant found expression in the Zionist decision allowing Jews to enter the Islamic shrine, because historians do not recognize the existence of any holy place for the Jews in Jerusalem,� the statement said.

My italics. The Islamic Action Front is promoting a fantasy that denies a basic historical fact - the ancient Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, a fact verified by a vast amount of historical evidence - to support their political agenda. The article continues:

The IAF cautioned that allowing Jews to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque had the aim of �demolishing the Islamic shrine and rebuilding the alleged biblical temple in its place�.

My italics. Unfortunately, statements like the one from that Jewish tourist give support to this accusation and indirectly give credibility to the people who deny that there was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. When Jews and Christians call for a third temple on the Temple Mount, it can only be seen by Muslims as a provocation. It too is a fantasy, about the future rather than the past. Fantasizing about how we wish the past had been is futile: we can't change what really happened. Fantasizing about the future can be pretty futile too: what we imagine may not happen (and fantasies about what God is going to do have an especially poor track record). In the meantime there is the present to be lived in. I wish we could leave aside both fantasies and try to get along with each other right now.

AFTERTHOUGHT: No, I'm not saying that all eschatological scenarios are false. How the heck could I know that? I'm saying that such scenarios have had a lousy track record so far and if you hold to one you should hold it with humility and put some real thought into how your expression of it affects events and people in the here-and-now.

HERE'S A COLLECTION OF JEWISH SCRIPTURES AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS from the Internet Sacred Text Archive. It includes links to the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew and in English, translations of the Talmud, Pirke Avot, Sepher Yetzirah, Kabbalah extracts, Midrash, and Maimonides. It also has Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (already noted here) and some modern Jewish texts. The translations are generally very old and should not be used for serious work, but they could be useful for initial soundings and, of course, the price is right.

THERE IS A NEW E-MAIL DISCUSSION LIST ON ARAMAIC. (Via Jim West on Ioudaios-L.)

THE TRAILER FOR MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION IS OUT.

If you are squeamish don't watch it. Also, note to Mel: the nails go in the wrists, not the palms. Even Stigmata got that right.

NOW THIS TECHNOLOGY MAY HAVE PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS IN OUR FIELD SOMEDAY:

Maybe time travel could be possible (USA Today)

Q: I believe Einstein's General Relativity Theory mathematically proved that time travel into the past is impossible. Do the recent experiments showing that light can be slowed, then returned to its normal speed, have any theoretical implications for time travel?

A: Yes, according to Ronald Mallett, theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Connecticut, recent experiments slowing light's speed may make time-travel feasible. Mallet thinks he can harness slow-light energy and turn the future into the past.

[�]

Mallett thinks time travel is not merely theoretically possible but doable , given the speed-of-light breakthrough. He and a group of scientists at University of Connecticut are designing the first experiment to test Mallett's ideas. They plan to build a time-travel device.

[�]

This is an old article (06/20/2001) but Professor Mallett was recently featured on the Discovery Channel and he also gave a public lecture on his work last week. Unfortunately, the device they're building only transfers atomic particles through time, but I suppose that's a start. A greater drawback is that travel to the past can't go any farther back than when the time machine itself was built, so we'd have to borrow a machine from a friendly ancient alien civilization if we wanted to go back to paleojudaic times. Other articles on Professor Mallett's work can be found in the Village Voice and Ananova.

THE EARLY JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM WEB PAGE of the Society of Biblical Literature lists the papers that have been presented in the group since its inception in 1996. The texts of many of the papers are included. I'm currently a member of its steering committee.

ARCHAEOLOGY IS RUBBISH. A new book by the people who make the television series "Time Team" in Britain.

MORE ON THE ARAMAIC MUSIC OF SAEVE:

Music taps roots of religion (Cincinnati Enquirer)

The San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble are playing in the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains in downtown Cincinnati today. For a sample of their music go here.

HERE'S A ROUNDUP OF THE CURRENT SITUATION WITH THE "JAMES OSSUARY":

Defender of 1st-century Jesus inscription fight back following Israeli fraud charge (Dodge City Daily Globe)

Nothing new, but it covers what's been said and done so far.

THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS, the great classic by Louis Ginzberg, can be found at the Internet Sacred Texts Archive. Ginzberg's notes do not seem to be included but you can read all the stories. (I've already cited the traditions about Ezekiel's and Baruch's tombs from this source.)

The Internet Sacred Texts Archive looks like a useful site and I'll try to profile some more of the material on it when I get a chance.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW has the following new articles of interest in its online July/August issue:

Literacy in the Time of Jesus
Alan Millard

Excerpt:

Some scholars contend, with Stephen Patterson, that �very few people could read or write [in Jesus� day].� � But such statements are no longer supported by the evidence. Not everyone could read and write. And some who could read were not necessarily able to write. But archaeological discoveries and other lines of evidence now show that writing and reading were widely practiced in the Palestine of Jesus� day. And if that is true, there is no reason to doubt that there were some eyewitness records of what Jesus said and did.

Brother of Jesus Ossuary
New Tests Bolster Case for Authenticity
Edward J. Keall

(A defense of the inscription's authenticity by a senior curator of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where it was subjected to tests last fall.)

Whatchamacallit
Why It's So Hard to Name Our Field
William Dever

Excerpt:

The only way I see to cut the Gordion Knot is simply to adopt the current modern names of the various political entities in the region, however much we acknowledge their arbitrariness. Thus in future we should simply speak of �the archaeology of Israel�; of the �West Bank� (perhaps in time, �Palestine�); of �Jordan�; and of �Syria� (�Lebanon,� too, if conditions return to normal).

These are simply proper nouns, and they are thus accurate, useful, and non-judgmental. To be sure, there is a semantic difficulty when we use them as adjectives, especially for foreign archaeologists. For instance, I can hardly identify myself as an �Israeli archaeologist,� simply because I work in Israel.

When asked who we are and what we do, we may say something like �I am a Near Eastern archaeologist, specializing in X, Y, and Z.� If a non-specialist is interested only in the Biblical period, we can comfortably use language such as �the archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age,� as I suggested some time ago; or simply �archaeology and the Bible.� For the later periods, perhaps, we can speak of �the archaeology of early Judaism and Christianity.�

The terminology that I am advocating here is admittedly rather prosaic, but that�s better than being explosive these days. And it can help us all to get on with the real business of archaeology in the Middle East.

And in his editorial Hershel Shanks replies that he wants to know where the "Archaeology of Israel" section is in the next meeting of ASOR. And his political battle with the Israel Antiquities Authority continues.

NEW ARCHAEOLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY:

Satellite Microwave Radar Finds Buried Objects (via Archaeologica News)
Wed July 9, 2003 06:08 PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Microwave radar from satellites could be used to find buried archaeological treasures, underground buildings and even mass graves.

Scientists at Ben Gurion University in Israel have shown that such radar can see below the surface of dry ground and locate objects under tons of sand.

"Buried objects can be detected from airborne systems," Dan Blumberg, a researcher at the university, told New Scientist magazine on Wednesday.

[�]

"Blumberg hopes that as well as archaeological remains, the method will in time be used to find fossils and geological structures," the magazine said, adding that it could show underground buildings, pipes and mass graves.

HERE'S A SITE THAT LISTS HEBREW ABBREVIATIONS WITH THEIR MEANINGS (from the Library of Princeton University). It has quite a few, although there are many, many more that are not listed. I hope they continue to expand it.

THE SITE LIVIUS, which I mentioned the other day in the context of sources on ancient Iran, also has an excellent set of pages on first-century Judaism. It has lots of short essays on people, texts, and historical events, with many extracts from primary texts. I've only spot-checked it, but it looks like a great resource.

I SHALL BE VERY, VERY BUSY TOMORROW. Blogging is likely to be light.

SHOOT THE LOOTERS! says Donny George according to MSNBC. And according to the Daily Telegraph archaeologist Elizabeth Stone concurs: helicopters should fly over sites being looted and kill some of the looters. (Both via Francis Deblauwe on the IraqCrisis list)

This is a bit too bloody minded for me. How about if we just bombard them with refined putrescine? (Hey, it worked in Neal Stephenson's Zodiac.)

MORE BYZANTINE-PERIOD TRADITIONS ABOUT JOHN THE BAPTIST may survive in the excavation of the Suba "Cave," a water-installation west of Jerusalem which was reused by Christian monks in late antiquity. (Via Sam Wolff on Ioudaios-L)

THE PIRQE RABBI ELIEZER ELECTRONIC TEXT EDITING PROJECT, edited by Professor Lewis M. Barth (HUC-JIR), includes column-by-column images of three Hebrew manuscripts, articles on Pirqe R. Eliezer, and information on Hebrew text encoding. This is a pioneering project that has a great deal of promise.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION is covered in an informative and well-balanced article in the Christian Science Monitor today. An excerpt:

New Testament seen as anti-Semitic

Some Jews and Christians suggest that the New Testament itself is anti-Semitic. So concerned are some over the continuing impact of historical interpretation that an October 2001 article in the Jewish magazine, Moment, asked, "Can Christianity be purged of anti-Semitism without changing the Gospels?"

While most people dismiss that idea, some Catholic scholars say the Gospels' human origins and historical context need to be emphasized more for regular churchgoers. Others researching the historical Jesus assert that the Romans, not Jews, killed him for political reasons.

Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, suggests the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other - from blaming all Jews to claiming no Jews were involved. "That's wrong, too," he says. The final responsibility lay in Rome's hands, but historical sources support the Gospel narrative that some Jewish leaders were involved in the prosecution.

"Flavius Josephus is one of the sources, and in fact, he reports a similar event, when Jesus' half-brother was brought before the Sanhedrin in AD 62," Dr. Maier adds. "In that case, they stoned him without waiting for the Roman governor to arrive."

The way out of interpretations that provoke anti-Semitism, he says, is to point out that "a tremendous number of Jews never turned against Jesus during Holy Week," as Luke reports.

It also helps to clarify that the Gospel use of the phrase "the Jews" referred to Jesus' Jewish opponents, not all Jews. It was a common construction of writing of the time, Maier says.

Hard labor of changing stereotypes

Jewish groups have labored for decades, however, to change negative stereotypes that persist in passion plays, showing that official church teachings haven't been thoroughly spread. They're concerned, for example, that a survey shows that American Catholics who have come from Latin America still tend to believe the charge of deicide. Prominent Protestants have voiced similar beliefs.

[�]

"I've worked with mayors, directors, and stage managers, and through consultation with religious leaders and scholars over the past 30 years, they've removed a lot of the Jewish stereotypes," says Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser for the American Jewish Committee.

"It's not just the text," he emphasizes. "It's the staging, the music, and costumes that say right away, 'This is the bad guy.'"

In recent years, passion plays have drawn busloads in towns around the United States, such as Eureka Springs, Ark.; Lake Wales, Fla.; Union City, N.J.; and the Black Hills of S.D. And Jewish and Christian leaders have taken pains to offer guidelines via the Internet to local churches for their productions.

But a powerful dramatic film by the Hollywood megastar promises to have global impact, many feel. "Given that this is radioactive material - that's the only way I can describe it - I'm urging Mr. Gibson to follow what others have done and consult prior to release," Rabbi Rudin says.

HERE IS THE SCHEDULE FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM, posted with the kind permission of the organizers, Dr. Lawrence (who, alas, is leaving us for a permanent post at the University of Glasgow in September) and Dr. Aguilar.

Anthropology and Biblical Studies: The Way Forward?

Symposium Itinerary


Monday 7th July

Arrival at Hamilton Hall

7.30pm Dinner at Hamilton Hall

Tuesday 8th July

All symposium papers will be given in St Mary�s College Hall, St Mary�s College, South Street.


9.30am: Introduction

Dr Louise Lawrence (University of St Andrews): �A Taste for the Other�: Thoughts on Interpreting Biblical Texts Anthropologically

10.30am: Paper 1

Prof. Philip Esler (University of St Andrews): The Context Group Project

11.30 am: Coffee (Served in Senior Common Room)


12noon: Paper 2

Prof. Douglas Davies (University of Durham): An Anthropologist�s View of Acts

1pm: Lunch (Served in Senior Common Room)

2pm: Paper 3

Dr. Nathan MacDonald (University of St Andrews): Abraham's Purchase of the Cave of Machpelah and Anthropological Theories of Exchange

3pm: Afternoon Tea (Served in Senior Common Room)

3.30pm: Paper 4

Mr Timothy Ling (Canterbury Christ Church College): Virtuoso Religion and the Judean Social Order

4.30pm: Paper 5

Mr Albert Hogetorp (University of Gottingen): Anthropology and the Community as a Temple in Paul�s Letters: The Case of Cultic Terms in 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1

7 for 7.30pm: Conference Dinner

To be held at The St Andrews Golf Hotel, The Scores, St Andrews.

As you come out of the main door of Hamilton Hall, turn right around the corner. Follow the road up the Scores and the St Andrews Golf Hotel is on your right.

Wednesday 9th July


9.30am: Paper 6

Dr Mario Aguilar (University of St Andrews): Changing Models and the Death of Culture: A Diachronic Critique of Socio-Scientific Assumptions

10.30am : Paper 7

Dr Jim Davila (University of St Andrews): Ritual in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha

11.30 am : Coffee (Served in Senior Common Room)


12noon: Paper 8

Dr Seth Sanders (University of Chicago): Textual Criticism and the Study of Ritual: Parallel Literary Editions of Joshua as Arguments about the Conquest and Cosmic Geography of Israel


1pm Lunch (Served in Senior Common Room)



2pm: Paper 9

Ms Karen Wennel (University of Glasgow): Jesus and the Land : A Comparison of Second-Temple Judaism�s view of the Land and Colonised Maori Land.


3pm: Afternoon Tea (Served in Senior Common Room)

Departures.

Great conference. Thanks Mario, Louise, and all the participants!

HERE IS MY PAPER, "Ritual in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha," for the Anthropology and Biblical Studies Symposium, and here is the handout that went with it. This is the draft I presented orally this morning. A longer version with the nitty-gritty details and references for each text will go into the conference volume in due course. Comments welcome, as always.

Conference schedule and photo to be posted presently.

For translation and explanation go here.

TODAY IS A DAY OF SOLIDARITY PROTESTS FOR FREEDOM IN IRAN. Others in the Blogosphere are far more on top of the situation in Iran and are commenting on it. See the Carnival of the Liberties at Winds of Change for a roundup. For my small contribution let me point out a few websites that cover Iranian history and antiquities, in the hope that one day soon Iranian and outside scholars and archaeologists will be able to study them together in a free Iran.

This site, "Iran: History (Pars Times)," has a very large collection of links on the history of Iran from antiquity to the present. It includes links to sites on Iranian religions, mythology, archaeology, museums, and learned societies devoted to Iranian studies. Most of them seem to be of good quality. Here are a few:

Iranian Museums

A huge list with some basic information, but unfortunately there are no links to museum websites.

National Museum of Iran

The material on this site is an excellent start, although there are lots of broken and missing links.

Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)

This site contains lots of useful information by major scholars in the area but much of it is still under construction.

Apart from Pars-Times, another information-rich site is provided by Livius, which has a collection of short articles on ancient Persia. Farsinet (a site that seems to be aimed at Christian speakes of Farsi) has a page on Iranian and Persian History with some interesting information and links. Finally, have a look at the Persepolis and Ancient Iran exhibit from the Oriental Institute Photographic Archives and these images of artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Then there's this from Day by Day.

ABOUT THOSE APOCALYPSES: I said on Sunday that I would try to get back to examples of apocalypses that lack references to future eschatology. I mentioned 3 Enoch 1-15/16 (in Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1:255-68). Add to that 3 Baruch (OTP 2:653-79), the Apocalypse of Paul (Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, 2nd ed., 256-59) and the Apocalypse of Adam (Robinson, 277-86). My point in the "Animal Apocalypse and Daniel" paper was that when you take works like these alongside Daniel and Revelation it is difficult to see how they are "apocalyptic" apart from simply embodying the genre "apocalypse." Apocalypses need not deal with future eschatology. They do always have divinely revealed secrets, but so do other genres such as pesharim, Sibylline oracles, and even incantations. There is no center to the term "apocalyptic" apart from as an adjective applied to apocalypses. It is true that there was much interest in ancient Judaism and early Christianity in revealed heavenly secrets and speculations about future eschatology but to call this apocalyptic is to use confusingly imprecise terminology.

I rest my case. Off now to the Symposium.

NO, I WASN'T POSTING AT 7:51 AM. Blogger has reset itself to GMT with no Daylight Savings Time again. I've now told it that I'm in Algiers, so the time of the postings should be correct henceforth.

JUDAISM BIBLIOGRAPHY ONLINE:

RAMBI (Index to Articles on Jewish Studies) is an incredibly useful resource that I've been meaning to mention for some time. It indexes a huge collection of articles pertaining to Jewish studies going back to the 1960s and includes their bibliographic data in a searchable database. Indispensable!

THE TEMPLE MOUNT HAS BEEN REOPENED TO NON-MUSLIM VISITORS.

Israel renews tours to flashpoint Jerusalem shrine (MSNBC)

By Allyn Fisher-Ilan
JERUSALEM, July 7 � Seated on an embroidered red rug outside Jerusalem's flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque, Muslim worshippers glared on Monday at the wide-eyed Jewish visitors who walked by with an Israeli police escort.

[�]

Three years after a Palestinian uprising for statehood erupted following a visit to the compound by Ariel Sharon, then opposition leader and now Israel's prime minister, police are allowing local and foreign tourists back on to the site.

[�]

Police shut the area to tourists immediately after the Palestinian revolt began in September 2000. The compound, where biblical Jewish temples stood, is Islam's third holiest site.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has criticised the tours as ''provocative.'' President Yasser Arafat accused Israel of letting in extremists under ''the pretext of tourism.''

[�]

''We are not doing this for religious reasons, but to bring Jerusalem back to normalcy and ensure that all the holy sites are accessible to visitors of all faiths,'' Gil Kleiman, an Israeli police spokesman, said about the tours.
Kleiman said dozens of Israeli, Jewish and Christian tour groups have participated in the visits, which run up to an hour. Police allow only a handful of visitors into the compound at a time, in an apparent bid to maintain a low profile.
Police cut short one impromptu visit arranged on Monday to only 20 minutes, to make sure the Jewish tourists would be out before noon prayers began at al-Aqsa.
Shuki Haas, a religious Jew on the tour, pointed at the golden-topped Dome of the Rock. He remarked that this is where Jews believe their two ancient temples once stood.
''And that, please God, is where the temple shall rise again,'' he said.

Although I strongly support the right of people of all religious faiths (or none) to visit the Temple Mount, I don't find that last quotation very encouraging.

30%-60% OF THE BAGHDAD NATIONAL LIBRARY IS SAFE according to library employees. This according to a preliminary report, dated 30 June, by a team of scholars who visited Baghdad for eight days. A longer report is promised by 10 July. Via the IraqCrisis list.

I'M FINISHING MY PAPER for the Anthropology and the Bible Symposium, which starts tomorrow, and while doing some Google research I ran across this page, which extracts lists of the scriptural canon from early Christian writers. The site has its own agenda, which you can take or leave as you please, but the collection of primary passages is useful.

The symposium takes place here at St. Mary's College on Tuesday and Wednesday. Blogging will be light, but on Wednesday I'll give you some treats on Iranian antiquities in honor of the Blogosphere's Iranian Freedom Day. At some point I will also post a draft of my symposium paper.

IT APPEARS THAT SOME E-MAIL WAS LOST from my account while I was away. If you sent me anything, you should assume I didn't get it and resend.

AN INSCRIPTION ON "ABSALOM'S TOMB" in the Kidron Valley refers to John the Baptist's father, Zechariah (Luke 1). But . . . it's an inscription from the Byzantine period.

Tomb References John the Baptist's Father (The Guardian)


Monday July 7, 2003 12:29 AM

By KARIN LAUB

Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) - The discovery was a stroke of luck: the light of the setting sun hit an ancient tomb at just the right angle and revealed hints of a worn inscription, unnoticed for centuries, commemorating the father of John the Baptist.

``This is the tomb of Zachariah, martyr, very pious priest, father of John,'' the inscription of 47 Greek letters reads.

The inscription probably does not mean that the father of the biblical figure is actually buried in the 60-foot-high funerary monument at the foot of the Mount of Olives, say the text's discoverers. But it does give new insight into the local lore surrounding the early figures of the Christian Church.

Scholars say the words were probably written several hundred years after Zachariah's death - and after the tomb's construction - by Byzantine Christians.

[�]

There's more writing on the monument and it may include a reference to the Simeon who blessed Jesus in the Temple according to Luke 2:25-35. The discoverers, osteologist Joseph Zias and epigrapher Emile Puech (Emile was at the Enoch Seminar last week), promise an article publishing the inscription in the next issue of Revue Biblique. This inscription gives us some interesting information about Byzantine Christian traditions but everyone recognizes that it doesn't necessarily follow at all that those traditions preserve accurate data from the early first century.

ONLINE HEBREW COURSE MATERIALS:

"Biblia Hebraica (Biblical Hebrew � Home)"
"Found on this site are notes from a graduate Biblical Hebrew Level I class taught by Dr. David Wallace."

Biblical and Modern Hebrew (DaaT)

The first lesson of each is free but there is a charge for all the rest.

Welcome to Basics of Biblical Hebrew Online. (by Gary Pratico and Miles V. Van Pelt)

"This site has been established to support and complement this recently published grammar, workbook and CD (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). Basics of Biblical Hebrew is a beginner's grammar which constitutes a one year course at the undergraduate and graduate level. It is designed to prepare students to read most passages of the Hebrew Bible."

HERE ARE SOME RECENT ITEMS VIA ARCHAEOLOGICA NEWS:

The Destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria (Archaeological Odyssey)

This article is by J. Harold Ellens, one of the organizers of the Enoch Seminar. There has also recently been a conference on the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, who catalogued the Library of Alexandria.

Ancient wine press unearthed in Jaffa dig (Ha'aaretz)


Hi-tech imaging could reveal lost texts (BBC)

Deals mainly with carbonized medieval texts but the multispectral imagining technology has already been used on the Herculaneum library. I assume it must be being used on the Petra Papyri too, although I don't know.

I'M BACK. We got in after 11:30 last night. Venice was glorious � I grew up in San Diego and anywhere with warm weather immediately feels like home to me. Venice a fascinating city and I wish I had had more time to explore it. But duty called and much of the time was spent (as one conference spouse commented) in a small room with sixty other people discussing a guy who died five thousand years ago � or maybe he didn't. I had hoped that my comments on apocalyptic (see below, "The Animal Apocalypse and Daniel") would goad people into explaining in more detail what they meant by the term, but mostly they continued using it without comment. John Collins did disagree with me in his response to the papers of the first session, but when we discussed it later it developed that we actually pretty much agreed after all and the misunderstanding arose over my insufficiently informative abstract of the paper, which was all he had seen before the session. He also pointed out that the Book of the Watchers did not work well as an example, since in fact it is fairly interested in eschatology. This is a fair point, so replace it with the core of 3 Enoch (1-15/16, which appears in a separate unit in some MSS). I think some of the Nag Hammadi apocalypses work too; I'll try to dig up another example or two later. Anyway, it was an excellent conference and many thanks to Gabriele Boccaccini, Harold Ellens, and the others who made it all happen.

Lots more came up in the Seminar and if I think of other interesting bits I'll post them. I haven't been able to bring myself to look at the backlog of e-mail in my account yet. I've also been away from the news all week, but I'll try to catch up on everything today. Meanwhile, I'll just note that the Baghdad Museum is still a dangerous place:

British journalist killed in Baghdad (USA Today)

BAGHDAD (AP) � A British journalist was shot and killed outside the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad on Saturday, witnesses said.

The identity of the journalist, a freelance television producer, was not immediately known. Fellow journalists, asking that their names not be used, said the male journalist was outside museum when he was shot.

Britain's ITN television news said it believed the man previously had worked as a researcher for the network but was not employed by them when he was shot.

[�]

Ambushes, shootings and other attacks, blamed on loyalists of Saddam Hussein, have plagued American soldiers in Iraq in recent weeks � but so far there has been no sign of journalists being explicitly targeted. An American soldier guarding the museum was shot and killed by a sniper on Thursday.

[�]

More presently.

I'M OFF TO VENICE first thing tomorrow morning for the Enoch Seminar. I don't expect to do any blogging while I'm there unless I get extremely bored and find an Internet caf� (unlikely) or someone finds the Holy Grail while I'm away (less likely). I should be back late on Saturday the 5th but probably won't be blogging again until Sunday. E-mail sent to me today or later will have to wait for me to get back.

If you aren't going to the Enoch Seminar, you can have a taste of it here. This is a short paper I'm giving on "The Animal Apocalypse and Daniel" and this is the handout that goes with it. I'm not allowed to show you the full text of my other paper, which is slated to be published in the conference proceedings in the journal Henoch, but I'll give you a longish abstract of it. It's called "Enochians, Essenes, and Qumran Essenes."

While I'm away, there are other sites that cover news on the ancient world, although none of them deals with exactly the same areas as PaleoJudaica. The Archaeologica News website is always full of the latest on world archaeology. David Nishimura's blog Cronaca deals with art history, antiquity, and archaeology but it is on hiatus too right now. He promises to be back by the Fourth of July weekend, so have a look then. He also recommends Mirabilis, which I haven't seen before but which looks interesting.

And, finally, here are some timely online exhibits from the British Museum website:

Limestone ossuary
Roman/Jewish, 1st century AD
From Jerusalem
Perhaps a representation of the Temple of Jerusalem

Limestone ossuary
Roman/Jewish, 1st century BC to 1st century AD
From Jerusalem
Donor of doors to the Temple of Jerusalem

Pottery lidded jar of the sort used to store the Dead Sea Scrolls

Happy Independence Day to all my American readers. Look for me again on Sunday, 6 July. Have a good week.

TORONTO FILMMAKER THINKS THE OSSUARY INSCRIPTION MAY BE GENUINE.

Ossuary might be real after all: Filmmaker (Toronto Star)

CANADIAN PRESS

A Toronto filmmaker says the "jury is still out" on the authenticity of the controversial James ossuary, despite the declaration last week by Israeli experts that its inscription is fake.

Simcha Jacobovici, whose documentary on the ancient burial chest aired in April on the Discovery Channel, calls the announcement by Israel's Antiquities Authority "a rush to judgment."

Why should we care what a Toronto filmmaker thinks? Well, there's this.

The test, which compared the ossuary against other burial boxes by checking isotopes in the patina, was done by the Geological Survey of Israel and had never before been used to verify an ancient inscription, Jacobovici said.

The filmmaker said he was in Israel earlier this week where he interviewed the director of the Geological Survey, Amos Bein, who told him that the box may in fact still be authentic. Jacobovici filmed the interview and said he may update his documentary.

This is a very interesting codicil to Dr. Bein's letter to the IAA, copied to Archaeology Magazine. I'd like to see this interview or at least read a transcript.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS from the Review of Biblical Literature:

DiTommaso, Lorenzo
A Bibliography of Pseudepigrapha Research, 1850-1999

Hiebert, Robert J. V., Claude E. Cox and Peter J. Gentry, eds.
The Old Greek Psalter: Studies in Honor of Albert Pietersma

Engberg-Pedersen, Troels
Paul Beyond the Judaism / Hellenism Divide

Porter, J. R.
The Lost Bible: Forgotten Scriptures Revealed

A NEW ISSUE of the Journal for the Study of Judaism (vol. 34, issue 2) has just appeared and has the following articles:

(RE)DATING THE STORY OF SUSANNA: A PROPOSAL
Dan W. Clanton Jr

THESEN ZUR TEXTLICHEN VIELFALT IM TOBITBUCH
Tobias Nicklas; Christian Wagner

POSEIDONIOS D'APAMEE ET LES JUIFS
Katell Berthelot

APORIEN DER THEODIZEE. ZU EINEM SCHLUSSELTHEMA FRUHER RABBINISCHER MARTYRERERZAHLUNGEN
Friedrich Avemarie

REVIEW OF ARTICLES

(Requires paid personal or institutional subscription to access online.)

THE JOURNAL FILOLOGIA NEOTESTAMENTARIA has full editions online of (only) its 1998 and 1999 volumes. Articles of interest include:

Maarten J.J. Menken, �The greek translation of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15: matthean or pre-matthean?� , Vol.12(1999) 79-88.
The author discusses the textual form of the quotation from Hos. 11:1 in Matt. 2:15, which differs significantly from the LXX Version and agrees with the Massoretic Text and Aquila�s translation of this clause.

J. Duncan M. Derrett, �a)/nqrwpoi eu)doki/aj (Lk 2:14b)�, Vol. 11(1998) 101-106.

At Lk 2:14 is the true reading a)/nqrwpoi eu)doki/aj, or...eu)doki/a? Unknown to scholars, the long-standing Jewish picture of the Angelic Host makes it quite clear that the first (the genitive) is right. With the birth of Christ at last God has created a human being deserving of his favour, proving that human-kind is worthy of his favour. The Angels, always jealous of Adam and Abraham, al last admit that God has "got it right".The shepherds are qualified to learn this.

Some of the others also overlap with Jewish or Aramaic interests.

More tomorrow.

THE "JESUS OSSUARY," NOT THE "JAMES OSSUARY"?

I've run across this detail in a couple of places this morning and I can't remember seeing it before (From the Charleston Post and Courier, but evident originating in the Washington Post):

[Authority Deputy Director Uzi] Dahari said "there is some doubt" about whether the word Yeshua (Jesus) is a forgery, "but the rest for sure is fake," and Yeshua "was a very common name."

"If all you have is the name Jesus, that proves nothing," he said.

This would complicate the whole patina issue, wouldn't it? Is some of the patina genuine after all?

Also, Archaeology Magazine reports that the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) has now come out in support of the conclusion of the Israel Antiquities Authority that the patina is a fake and "could not have formed under natural climactic conditions...that prevailed in the Judea Mountains during the last 2000 years."

NOW HERE'S A COINCIDENCE. Dr. Eugene Fisher, Consultor to the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, gives an interview with Zenit on Jewish-Catholic relations after Vatican II. Here�s an excerpt:

In the wake of the Holocaust, and with a growing understanding of how the traditional anti-Judaic teaching of the Church had rendered Christians all too vulnerable to the attacks against Jews by modern racial anti-Semitism, "Nostra Aetate" wisely went to the source of the problem in Christian teaching.

The problem was serious misunderstandings of the New Testament that began to infect the writings of the Fathers of the Church as early as the second century.

These misunderstandings revolved around the idea that the Jews as a people and all their descendants bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus. As "proof" the protagonists of this charge of "deicide" against the Jews would take various phrases from different Gospels and put them together to tell a "story" that none of the four evangelists would have recognized in their own versions of the Gospel.

The cry, "his blood be on us and on our children," for example, is recounted only in the Gospel of Matthew, but there it is the cry of a small "crowd" of people in Pilate's courtyard and not at all representative of the whole Jewish people.

But if one takes from the Gospel of John the phrase, "hoi 'Ioudaioi" -- "the Judeans" or "the Jews" -- which is a generalization used only in John, and attaches it to the Matthean text, as in "the Jews cried, 'His blood be upon us ...,'" one has an implication of collective guilt for Jesus' death not found in any of the Gospels, but only in the manipulation, conscious or unconscious, of the text.

Around this fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel texts there arose over the centuries what has been called a "teaching of contempt" against Jews and Judaism -- for example, the notion that Jews were cursed by God for "their" crime, and suffered the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and perpetual wandering as divine punishment for it.

Interestingly, so pervasive was this negative teaching that no previous council of the Church had ever formally taken it up, though the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent had argued that "our sins made the Lord Christ suffer" and that "our crime in this case is greater in us than in the Jews," since what the Jews of Jesus' time who were actually involved did was done in ignorance. "We [Christians], however, profess to know him, and when we deny him by our deeds, we seem in some way to lay violent hands on him," says the Roman Catechism 1, 5, 11.

The Second Vatican Council restated this ancient but obscured tenet of our faith in entirely unambiguous fashion, stating that one cannot blame all the Jews of Jesus' time "nor Jews today" for Jesus' death, and adding that "the Jews must not be spoken of as rejected by God or accursed," as if this followed from sacred Scripture. The council then formally rejected any form of anti-Semitism as contrary to the spirit of Christ.

While rejecting definitively the negative teachings against Jews and Judaism of the past, the Second Vatican Council simultaneously laid the doctrinal groundwork for an entirely positive theological appreciation of God's "irrevocable" covenant with the Jewish people, in our time no less than in biblical times.

It did this especially by recalling the positive implications of the New Testament text, Romans 9-11, that most thoroughly looks at the Mystery of Israel on its own terms after the time of Christ, translating in the present "theirs are the covenants and the promises," and calling on the Church to change its posture toward the Jews and Judaism from one of judgment into one which seeks a dialogue of "mutual esteem."

Worth reading in full.

I VIDEOTAPED STIGMATA last week and finally watched it over the last couple of evenings. Here are some thoughts on it. I'm usually the last person in the western hemisphere to see any movie, so I'll allow myself a few spoilers. If you haven't seen it yet and don't want the experience sullied by advance knowledge, read no further.

1. I know that Hollywood movies are supposed to have lame, unimaginative plots, but really, Father What-A-Waste and the Tempting, Beautiful, Secular Woman vs. the Evil Vatican Conspiracy? Was there no other rack on which to drape the Aramaic Gospel of Thomas?

2. If, as the movie notes at the end, the Gospel of Thomas was already discovered in the 1940s, albeit in Coptic translation, and anyone in reach of a good bookstore or library has had access to the English translation since the 1970s, tell me again why having the Aramaic original is such a big deal? (To philologists it would be, of course: we'd descend on it in a slavering pack. But for the spiritual lives of normal people? We already know what it says, near enough.)

3. Assuming this Lost True Gospel was different from the Coptic translation, what exactly was its Explosive Revelation that the Evil Vatican Priests were try to suppress? Near as I can tell from the movie, it was "Do your own thing."

4. What about that vision of the woman who drops her baby into the traffic? Did we ever come back to that? What did it mean again?

5. The movie has been criticized for writing all the Aramaic in paleo-Hebrew script, since in the time of Jesus the newer square script was in normal use and the paleo-Hebrew script was only used rarely for extremely authoritative works like books of the Pentateuch (of which a few copies in this script were recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls). But this was one thing that didn't bother me. If the book in question was actually the One True Gospel of Jesus, I can see the Aramaic-speaking, first-century Jewish author writing it in the Paleo-Hebrew script to make a statement on how authoritative it was. Of course, I'm probably being too generous to Hollywood, but at least I could work out a rationale for this one.

6. The Vatican divides up the noncanonical gospels from its Secret Archive and Hoard of Looted Manuscripts among the three priestly orders so that none of them knows too much and they don't get into tiffs over who gets what, and each translator only gets every third page. That's a lousy way to do it and would result in translations that aren't nearly as good as they could be. For example, who translates the fragmented sentences at the beginning and end of each page? I've worked enough with fragmentary texts in ancient languages to be sure that many of those sentences will be completely opaque to both translators until they can see the whole sentence. But I guess this is part of the price of running an Evil Vatican Conspiracy.

7. At one point Father What-A-Waste, who resourcefully had his miniature tape recorder running when Frankie started spouting glossolalia during one of her fits, played the tape through the telephone to his translator-priest friend at the Vatican. On the basis of hearing one sentence on a scratchy tape over the phone the translator-priest immediately pronounced the language to be first-century Galilean Aramaic. Not Judean, not Syrian, not second century. Right.

8. Okay, some of the photography and some of the music were cool. And the casting of the three cardboard cut-out main characters was pretty good. It's a tolerable evening's entertainment, if disengaging your brain that long doesn't give you a cramp.

JANE C. WALDBAUM, President of the Archaeological Institute of America, writes the following on the IraqCrisis list about two bills before Congress which pertain to Iraqi artifacts:

Dear List Members,

Pasted below is a statement from the Archaeological Institute of America comparing the relative merits of House bill H.R. 2009 and Senate bill 1291. We urge support of the former but NOT of the latter. Instead, urge your senators to introduce a bill that tracks H.R. 2009. And tell your friends and colleagues to do the same.

For the rest of the message, with details on the two bills, go to the list archive here.

UPDATE (28 June): For more information on this just go to the link and keep following the links to the messages that come after.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS from the Review of Biblical Literature:

Hachlili, Rachel
The Menorah, the Ancient Seven-armed Candelabrum: Origin, Form &
Significance

Tov, Emanuel
Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Loader, William
Jesus' Attitude Towards the Law: A Study of the Gospels

DAMN BLOGGER! Will someone please tell them that people who live in a Greenwich Mean Time zone have daylight savings time like everyone else!

BEN WITHERINGTON makes his case for the authenticity of the "James Ossuary."

AUTHENTICITY IN QUESTION (Lexington Herald-Leader)

[�]

But Witherington, 51, co-author of The Brother of Jesus, a book about the burial box, said scientific tests performed by two independent sources indicate the inscription is genuinely ancient and not a fake.

"Any high stakes artifact is going to be subject to controversy and an amazing amount of rhetoric and debate," said Witherington, a New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore.

The fact the box was sold to a collector by an antiquities dealer is part of the reason the Israelis wish to discredit the find, Witherington said. The argument is that anything bought from an antiquities dealer is suspect because it may have been looted from an ancient site, or, worse, it may be a forgery.

"The problem with that is, a large amount of the biggest finds in modern history have come to light through the antiquities market and not through some approved archaeological dig," Witherington said.

[�]

Well, okay, maybe. But this is an ad hominem argument and doesn't lead us anywhere useful. Whatever anyone's agenda, either the inscription is a fake or it isn't.

Then there is the film or patina on the box that the Israelis said could have been created only in modern times. The implication is that this was an attempt to make the inscription look old.

But the box's owner said the film is the result of his well-meaning mother attempting to clean the inscription and make it clearer, Witherington said.

"She took out some kind of hot water and cleansing solution and started scrubbing away," Witherington said. Neither he nor The Brother of Jesus co-author Hershel Shanks dispute that there might be a modern film on the box.

"But as far as we're concerned, that proves nothing about the antiquity of the inscription," Witherington said. "It's not an attempt to make it look like a forgery. It was an attempt to clean the thing."

This argument is more interesting. Surely it would be possible to distinguish modern cleaning from a modern deliberately-faked patina. The Archaeology Magazine article says "Strangest of all was the "James Bond," the chalky material that coated the letters. It contained numerous microfossils called coccoliths, naturally occurring as foreign particles in chalk, but not dissolved by water. Hence it was clear that this was not a true patina formed by the surface crystallization of calcite, but rather powdered chalk--microfossils and all--that was dissolved in water and daubed over the entire inscription." Does a modern household cleaner have chalk in it? With microfossils? I don't know.

[Authority Deputy Director Uzi] Dahari said the Authority decided to examine the ossuary's authenticity "because the whole world was talking about this, and a lot of innocent people could be hurt if you're trying to fool them to make money." Experts have estimated the value of an authentic James ossuary at $1 million to $2 million.

Witherington argues such speculation doesn't make sense.

"Nobody has made any money on this James Box," he said. "The antiquities dealer in Jerusalem who bought it in the mid-70s from a private person paid $200 for it" and the present owner paid perhaps $500.

"If either one of those persons had known what they were getting, it would have cost a whole lot more money," Witherington said.

Fair point, although Altman thinks the forgery was done in the last couple of years and would presumably call the whole story of its discovery in the 70s into question.

Witherington suggests there may be theological agenda for the attempt to discredit the inscription, which he calls "an indirect testimony to the resurrection of Jesus."

He said it's unusual for burial boxes to bear the names of deceased brothers, so this brother must have been someone extremely important.

"The fact that Jesus is mentioned on the box in a laudatory way -- that's the only reason to put a brother on an ossuary, because he is more notable and honorable than the deceased," Witherington said.

"If crucifixion had been the end of Jesus' life -- that's the most humiliating and shameful way to die in antiquity, right? If that had been the end of the story of Jesus, there's no reason on God's green earth why anybody would be bragging about being related to Jesus. You don't brag about the black sheep in the family who was executed. So what it reflects is that those who buried James strongly believed that Jesus was raised from the dead."

[�]

Besides being ad hominem again, this is a very indirect argument and I really can't see the Israeli authorities being worried about it.

The article says that the IAA report is coming out this week and I assume it will be online as well. I'll be very busy for the next few days and then in Venice next week and I probably won't have time to worry about it. But I'm reserving judgment until I see the report and have time to digest it.

I'M NOT IMPRESSED so far with Blogger's new publishing interface, which came online today. Twice already I've tried to publish something and the system has jammed hopelessly so that I had to shut down the browser and start over. Not a great opening performance.

UPDATE: Just got a double posting, so it appears that the jamming was just a long delay - very long: in one case I let the system oscillate for an hour or so before I shut it down. (I am doing some work here, you know: this week I've been writing my paper for the upcoming Bible and Anthropology conference. I'll let you see a draft in due course.)