THERE ARE STILL KARAITES IN ISRAEL - quite a few of them:

In Israel, Karaites keep their faith ---
and distance from mainstream Jews (Jewish Telegraphic Agency News)
By Ariel Finguerman and Elana Shap

ASHDOD, Israel, Sept. 14 (JTA) � They have been branded as one of the worst enemies of the Jewish people.

They have attacked the authority of the rabbis and claimed the Talmud is full of falsehoods, and were allied with some of the cruelest adversaries of the Jews, including the Russian czars and Nazi leaders.

Yet today the Karaites � members of a Jewish offshoot that denies the talmudic-rabbinic tradition � are flourishing in Israel. In fact, some members suggest that the community is experiencing a rare high point in its 1,300-year history.

Mainly concentrated in the cities of Ashdod and Ramla, Israel�s Karaite community is about 30,000 strong. There are about 5,000 Karaites elsewhere in the world, mainly in the United States.

The Karaite sect first appeared in the eighth century, breaking with mainstream Judaism by declaring that Talmudic oral law was a rabbinic invention with no legal authority. Maintaining that the Bible was the sole source of religious law, the Karaites adopted a number of practices that kept them apart from mainstream Jews.

[...]

Over the centuries, the Karaites developed a religious tradition of their own consisting of doctrines not found in the Bible.

In Israel today, they have an imposing synagogue and cultural community center in Ashdod that adheres to their particular traditions.

[...]

In Israel, the Karaite community has been able to grow thanks to the relaxation of an ancient Karaite law that prohibited �mixed� marriages with Jews, whom they call �rabbinic Jews.�

�I myself allow marriages with rabbinical Jews, but only after checking that there are no incestuous cases in their families,� says Rabbi Haim Levi, the white-bearded man at the head of the Karaite Court of Justice.

Karaites also do not don tefillin or post mezuzahs on their doorposts. They do celebrate Chanukah because, they say, the festival was established after the biblical period.

�We say that it is not possible that the Almighty gave a written law and another oral law, which partially contradicts the former one,� Levi says.

Karaite women do not immerse themselves in mikvahs, as required by Jewish law, instead using showers as a means of spiritual purification after menstruation.

The group also has a different calendar, so the Karaite Yom Kippur does not always match the fast day observed by world Jewry.

Some Karaite interpretations of the Bible are more lax than those of rabbinic Judaism, but other interpretations lead to more strict practices than in rabbinic Judaism, such as those concerning Sabbath observance.

�On the day of rest we don�t leave home, we don�t practice sexual intercourse and, on the eve of Shabbat, we disconnect the refrigerator,� Levi says.

[...]

Read it all. In July I linked to information about some Karaites outside of Israel here.

HERE'S A PAGE FROM THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD with explanations of the elements therein by Professor Eliezer Segal.

HERE'S A BELIEFNET INTERVIEW with Rabbi Harold Kushner on his new book on Psalm 23 (via Bible and Interpretation News).

HANAN ESHEL reports that he may have found a Qumran text that tells a different version of the Aqedah (Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac), one in which God did not order Isaac to be sacrificed. Jim West on Ioudaios-L points to this Star Telegram article on the Dallas "Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book" exhibit. The relevant passage reads:

The center has designed one gallery room to look like a cave. The tiny, darkened fragments hang in frames above infrared photographs that reveal their original text. Noted archaeologist and scholar Hanan Eshel of Bar-Ilan University in Israel studied these fragments of the books of Genesis and Isaiah that are on display.

In one fragment, Eshel believes he may have discovered an ancient commentary on Chapter 22 of Genesis that contradicts the traditional interpretation of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac. In other words, Eshel said, he now believes that God may not have asked Abraham to sacrifice his son.

"God called Isaac 'My son,' not 'your son,' " Eshel said. "This is the first time we have found this distinction."

The passage sounds interesting, but without seeing it all in context it's hard to tell how likely the proposed interpretation is. (It's interesting, isn't it, that the echo of Gen 22:2 in Mark 1:11 also has God saying "my beloved son," although in this case the change in possessive pronoun seems to come from the influence of Psalm 2:7.) The article has more information on the exhibit and several photos of ancient manuscripts.

Also, here's an article from 5 September in the North Texas Daily about another lecture by Eshel in Texas, this one about his archaeological work on the Bar Kokhba era. Excerpt:

Eshel began his work in 1986, the same time that the Israeli Cave Research Center was founded. A small comb was found in a cave north of Jericho, spurring further research into the caves. To date, Eshel's discoveries include 19 Greek and Aramaic economical documents, several coins and skeletal remains.

Eshel primarily studies areas of Israel associated with the Bar Kokhba Revolt in A.D. 135. Jewish rebels fled from Roman armies and into desert caves, only to die of starvation or at Roman hands. "Although I'm dealing with a catastrophe that happened more than 1,900 years ago, the struggles of the 20th century make me feel connected to struggles in the past," Eshel said.

Past excavations focused on religious artifacts, and Eshel said he believes what he found sheds even more light on the lives of the people that lived at that time. "We will never know exactly what happened from [A.D.] 132 to 135, but you can still learn history from economical documents," Eshel said.

The most recent excavation took place late 2002 in Ein Gedi, Israel. Eshel and his team found several coins, arrows, pots and two Greek documents.

Eshel said he has no immediate plans for another excavation, but there is still more work to be done. "There are still illegal excavations, and I'm always afraid of looters." He has a license to survey Ein Gedi and keeps a close eye on possible discoveries.

By the way, Jim West's web page, which sends me a lot of traffic, has changed its address. The new address is http://www.biblical-studies.org.

TWO NEW SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS reviewed in the Guardian have ancient classical themes. One, Roma Eterna, by Robert Silverberg, explores an alternate history in which the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is delayed until the 28th century C.E., the Roman empire doesn't fall, and Christianity and Islam fail to become world religions. As I've mentioned before, the book I'm currently writing uses alternate history as a tool to analyze the transmission of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, so I'm interested in keeping track of such things. I think I read the chapter on Muhammad a few years ago when it was published as a short story. Robert Silverberg . . . well . . . Robert Silverberg rules.

ANDERS BELL at Phluzein asks whether the LarkNews website, which currently has this article on the "discovery" of Proverbs chapter 32 is a (Christian) humor site and if it is credible. If he really isn't sure, the answers are yes and no, respectively. Look at the disclaimer in red caps at the bottom of the page. I've cited it before here.

THE SIEGFRIED H. HORN ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM at Andrews University in Michigan (not to be confused with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland) is moving quarters and tripling its size. Looks like they have some cool stuff.

A CATHOLIC SCHOLAR will lecture in a synagogue on Mel Gibson's The Passion. Whatever the movie's problems, it's good that it's generating this kind of dialogue.

KABBALAH FOR KIDS from the Material Girl: The English Roses. Excerpts from the NY Daily News article:

The book, inspired by the kabala, the ancient Jewish mystical system of which Madonna is a devotee, tries to communicate "the importance of sharing," she says, "and the desire to enlighten others" through the story of five little girls, a pumpernickel-fancying fairy godmother and some MTV-ish dance moves.

[...]

The five little girls' names are Charlotte, Nicole, Amy, Grace and Binah (which means "wisdom" in Hebrew).

Because the proceeds are supposed to go to charity, "I was liberated," Madonna says in her interview, "and my creativity was not motivated by ego or greed for the first time in my life."

I don't remember any dance moves in the Zohar, but I haven't read it all.

UPDATE (13 September): it occurred to me during the night that the Hekhalot Rabbati (a pre-Kabbalistic Merkavah mystical text) does have some dance moves in it. I quote my translation of �189 in Descenders to the Chariot:

Every single day, when the afternoon prayer arrives, the adorned King sits enthroned and exalts the living creatures. The word does not finish coming from His mouth before the holy living creatures go forth from under the throne of glory. From their mouths chanting is fulfilled, with their wings rejoicing is fulfilled, their hands make music, and their feet dance. They go around and surround their King; one on His right, one on His left, one before Him, and one behind Him. They embrace and kiss Him and uncover their faces. They uncover and the King of glory covers His face, and the Arabot firmament is split like a sieve before the King.

MTV-ish? Well, maybe. I'm afraid I'm even less up on MTV than I am on the Zohar.

Incidentally, the peekaboo moves are there to keep the angels from looking straight into God's uncovered face, which would be fatal even for them.

PREMIERE MAGAZINE reviews The Order and isn't much impressed. Excerpts:

Now, these aren't your average priests. Fathers Alex (Heath Ledger) and Thomas (Mark Addy) know Latin and Aramaic, but favor four-letter expletives. They subscribe to the old ways, but conceal cell phones in their cassocks. And when they're not delivering mass or praying the Rosary, they're perfectly comfortable fighting demons . . . which is convenient, since Rome seems to be full of them this time of year.

[...]

Writer-director Brian Helgeland has fashioned a dark and creepy enough supernatural yarn to entice the kind of suckers who fell for Stigmata and The Ninth Gate. But all this doomsaying is just too silly to take so seriously...

THEY'RE SERIOUS! The proposed Egyptian lawsuit against the Jews for reparations for the plunder they took during the Exodus is "under study by a group of lawyers in Egypt and Europe" according to a Reuters interview with Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law faculty at Egypt's al-Zaqaziq University. The Yahoo article quotes him as saying "This is serious, and should not be misread as being political against any race. We are just investigating if a debt is owed."

Surreal.

Luckily, Alan Dershowitz is willing to act as defense attorney for the Jews.

"THE ORDER OF NAZOREAN ESSENES, a Buddhist Branch of Original Christianity" is a modern Gnostic group with a large website. Despite the name, they seem more influenced by the Nag Hammadi Library, the Mandeans, Mani, and other things than by the Dead Sea Scrolls (although I have not gone through the site exhaustively). In any case, their approach is highly eclectic. They give summary data on their group here. This site was drawn to my attention by a neighbor who is interested in such things.

FUN FACTS about the Ten Commandments, mainly things people think they know which aren't so. This stuff probably isn't news to most PaleoJudaica readers, but I suppose it is to lots of other people. The article should have added that to "bear false witness" means to perjure yourself in court under oath, not just to lie. The Ten Commandments have no problem with lying per se.

JIM WEST replies to Bruce Chilton on the "James Ossuary" in Bible and Interpretation News.

DAVID NISHIMURA at Cronaca comments on the BBC's coverage of the new evidence for dating Hezekiah's Tunnel. The findings are being covered in lots of places now. Here's a good article in the Washington Post.

ST. ANDREWS AND ANCIENT TIBERIAS are not the only places with a problem with corpse impurity. But in Israel today, a solution is demanded, no matter how expensive:

The impure corpses cost NIS 4 million (Ha'aretz, again via Bible and Interpretation News)
By Dalia Shehori

The expansion of Kibbutz Galuyot Street, along the stretch between Schocken Street and Herzl Street in south Tel Aviv, was recently completed at a cost of NIS 12 million. A "floating bridge" - raising the surface of the road above ground - was built there for the new traffic lanes. Without this bridge, the project would have cost just NIS
8 million.

This section of the road was considered especially jammed, and widening it was necessary to allow a smooth flow of traffic; but building the bridge, so it turns out, was not a result of transportation necessities, but of religious dictates.

A Jewish cemetery dating from the period of the Second Temple and found at the site was what obliged the Netivei Ayalon company to find a creative halakhic solution - the floating bridge - to create a space between the ground and the road that would allow the impurity to escape.

[...]

The rest of the article also describes Haredi interference with the excavation of the burial site of a fifth-century nunnery (denied by the IAA) and the incorporation of a late Roman era burial cave into a new Knesset wing, facing the fitness room.

BLOGI ANTIQUITATIS:

David Meadows at Rogue Classicism has a roundup of blogs having to do with the ancient world, a number of which I mean to put in my weblogs etc. links section as soon as I get the time.

MARY MAGDALENE IN THE MEDIA:

First, a new essay (via Bible and Interpretation News), which I find irritating not so much for what it says as for its supercilious tone that implies criticism of the current state of affairs without explaining what's wrong with them or how the author would fix them.

A Quite Contrary Mary (Beliefnet)
Like Jesus, Mary Magdalene is now the subject of a cultural makeover. What agenda do feminist scholars have in mind?
By Kenneth L. Woodward

Some excerpts, with my comments interspersed:

When it comes to Biblical figures, it is not enough to say that every generation entertains notions already imagined and discarded by previous generations. In the case of Mary Magdalene, the news is not what is being said about her, but the new context in which she is being placed--and who is doing the placing and why. In other words, Mary Magdalene has become a project for a certain kind of ideologically committed feminist scholarship. That's the real news.

True enough, and an interesting sociological observation. Woodward discusses these scholars at length in paragraphs that I'm not going to excerpt, but which make a thought-provoking read.

But is not hard to guess what is going on now. For several years I have kept an anthology of selections from the various world religions that on the cover invites the reader to choose from them those that they find appealing and thereby "create your own scriptures." That anyone would package this material, I thought, was indicative of one wind blowing in the mixed weather pattern of contemporary American religion. The operative assumption is that all sacred texts are of equal value and the reader is free to make sacred those that provide personal appeal. (Karen Armstrong, who calls herself a �serial monotheist,� does much the same thing.) It is the ultimate in consumer-oriented religion, of course, and has the added advantage of bypassing the authority of any community as to which texts count as sacred and which do not.

Well yeah. This is a problem? It should be replaced with what exactly? We live in a free market of religions in which they all have to compete for adherents. People can join whatever they want or make up whatever they want. I like it that way, thanks.

And the next step? That is already upon us in the form of a new book from Harvard's Karen King, "What Is Gnosticism?" which aims at showing the great diversity among Gnostics�true and pluralizing Gnosticism --fair enough--but also at divesting Gnostics of their opposition to orthodox Christianity, thereby dissolving the very category of heresy. In short, if there is no error, then anything can be true. How very American. How inclusive and nonjudgmental. And in this age of postmodernism, so Now. In this kind of environment, even the figure of Mary Magdalene can be prostituted for polemical purposes.

Heresy only makes sense in the context of a specific faith community and the boundaries it chooses to draw around itself. And given the history of heresiology and the policing of heretics, I think the category profits from some serious watering down. I hardly think it will be "dissolved" for those to whom it matters, but I'm thankful that they don't run things anymore - at least around here. There's no danger of any inclusive, nonjudgmental, dissolving of the category of heresy in, say, Iran right now, is there?

Mr. Woodward doesn't seem to get that there is a position between anarchy, where anything and everything can be true, and dogmatic imposition of orthodoxy: letting people use their own critical faculties to decide for themselves what they think is true and what they want to treat as sacred.

I don't always agree with the feminist scholars he is talking about and he makes some legitimate criticisms of them, but I think that last sentence is a cheap and tacky shot.


Second, Karen King replies to some of Woodward's substantive criticisms in "Letting Mary Magdalene Speak" (also in Beliefnet and also via Bible and Intepretation News). Two excerpts:

Early Christians intensely debated such basic issues as the content and meaning of Jesus� teachings, the nature of salvation, the value of prophetic authority, the roles of women and slaves, and competing visions of ideal community. After all, these first Christians had no New Testament, no Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed, no commonly established church order or chain of authority, no church buildings, and indeed no single understanding of Jesus. All of the elements we might consider essential to define Christianity did not yet exist. Far from being starting points, the Nicene Creed and the New Testament were the end products of these debates and disputes. They represent the distillation of experience and experimentation�and not a small amount of strife and struggle.

One consequence of these struggles is that the winners were able to write the history of this period from their perspective. The viewpoints of the losers were largely lost since their ideas survived only in documents denouncing them. Until now. The recent discoveries provide a wealth of primary works that illustrate the plural character of early Christianity and offer alternative voices. They also help us to understand the winners better because their ideas and practices were shaped in the crucible of these early Christian debates. The Nicene Creed, for example, was never intended to be the full statement of Christian faith�after all, it does not ask Christians to affirm anything in the teachings of Jesus even though they were of fundamental importance to faith and practice. Instead every article of the Creed was formulated as a hedge against views that were considered to be wrong.

[...]

Far from suggesting that religious claims are always true and can offer no errors, this perspective insists that communities of believers need to engage critically with their tradition and be held responsible for how they appropriate it. Although nothing can guarantee that people will live wisely and morally, an account that includes all the historical resources of tradition might create a surer basis upon which theological judgments are made. An accurate historical account will not ensure that the figure of Mary Magdalene won�t continue to be prostituted for polemical purposes as she has been for centuries�but it does restore some dignity to this important woman disciple of Jesus.

Finally, on a lighter note, Monica Belluci, who plays Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson's The Passion, has recently been quoted as saying that the movie is very . . . um . . . well . . . Oh heck, go and read it yourself. I have not been able to verify the quote in the Mail On Sunday. As if Mel didn't have enough controversy on his hands.

NEW CONFIRMATION of the dating of Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription which, surprisingly, is covered by the press only (so far) in the Arab Times:

Bible's tunnel vision gets scientific backing

PARIS, (AFP) - Modern science has thrown its weight behind Biblical historians, backing their account of an Old Testament king who drove a tunnel under Jerusalem to ensure water supplies for his besieged subjects. The underwater aqueduct is known as the Siloam Tunnel or "Hezekiah's Tunnel" in honour of the embattled Hebrew king reputed to have ordered its construction in order to bring water from Gihon Spring, outside the city, to Siloam Pool in Jerusalem's ancient heart. Historians have long contended that this event is described in two Old Testament texts, 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:3,4. These recount how Hezekiah (727-698 BC) had to grapple with denying water to the besieging Assyrian king Sennacherib, yet also provide water for the besieged:

. . . "It was Hezekiah who stopped up the spring of water of Upper Gihon, leading it downward west of the City of David." The historical record, however, was only indirect, and no evidence has ever been found that directly links the tunnel to Hezekiah.

Now, however, science has provided powerful backing, thanks to forensic evidence found buried in the tunnel's walls and the latest tools in chemical analysis. Israeli scientists took samples from a layer of ancient lime plaster that the tunnellers used to line the aqueduct to prevent the precious water from draining back into the Earth. They found the plaster -- since covered with other protective smotherings over the years -- included tiny pieces of bone, rare charcoal and ash to bind it, as well as chips of wood and "extraordinarily well-preserved" plant fragments.

Radiocarbon-dating at a laboratory at Oxford University put the age of the wood sample at between 822-796 BC, and that of two plant samples at 790-760 BC and 690-540 BC respectively. That gave a ballpark date of 700 BC which also tallied with a radioisotope estimate of an ancient stalactite found in the tunnel's ceiling."Our dating agrees well... with the date commonly assigned to King Hezekiah," the authors say. "The three independent lines of evidence -- radiometric dating, palaeography and the historical record -- all converge on about 700 BC, rendering the Siloam Tunnel the best-dated Iron-Age biblical structure so far."

[�]

This is a summary of a study by Israeli and British scholars which is scheduled to appear tomorrow in the journal Nature.

�����NEW EVIDENCE FOR CALIGULA'S "GOD COMPLEX,": excavations this summer indicate he may have connected his palace to a temple of Castor and Pollux. Also discussed earlier on PaleoJudaica here.

"HEBREW AND KONKANI": a linguistic sideline to the current closer relationship between Israel and India. This article compares the history of Hebrew with the history of Konkani, a language in India which I confess I've never heard of before. The parallels aren't all that close, but it's an interesting article. (You can read more about Konkani on the culture.konkani.com website.)

KFAR KEDEM - another living history project. I've already blogged on Nazareth Village. Kfar Kedem (which means roughly, "village of long ago") is a similar project, one where tourists can get some hands-on life experience of ancient village life in the Galilee. This is no doubt fun as long as you can still get antiseptic if you cut yourself and you can take a hot shower at the end of the day and drive to a nice restaurant, then e-mail home about your experience. (Despite my love of ancient history, I wouldn't want to live there, thank you.) I'm currently writing a chapter section on to what degree we can speak of ancient Galilean culture as something distinct from Jewish culture, and I ran across this site during a Google search.

MORE LARA CROFT DISSING, this time from the Chinese Government, which has banned Tomb Raider II for being culturally insensitive. (Via Archaeology Magazine News).

I guess this just goes to show that no movie is so stupid that it won't be taken seriously by somebody.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA may not have existed, according to archaeologist Ricardo Eichmann (son of Adolph Eichmann - and I'm not making that up). He can't find any evidence that there was such a person. No matter: ancient Judaism and early Islam produced a rich cycle of legends about the Queen. To read some of them, go to the Solomon chapter of Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews and scroll down until you get to "The Queen of Sheba."

MORE BOOK REVIEWS IN TC:

Johann Cook, ed., Bible and Computer: The Stellenbosch AIBI-6 Conference: Proceedings of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique "From Alpha to Byte," University of Stellenbosch 17-21 July, 2000.
(Thomas Hieke, reviewer)

David J. A. Clines, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 5: m-n
(Johan Lust, reviewer)

David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls
(Robert F. Shedinger, reviewer)

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION NEWS has published three new essays:

"Thoughts on the James Ossuary"
By Craig Evans

"Scholars, Journalists and the Ossuary"
By Bruce Chilton

"Conservative Scholarship-Critical Scholarship"
By Niels Peter Lemche

HERE'S MORE ON THE ORDER, another movie with Aramaic in it. Follow this link for The Order's website. You can view the trailer there and, if you have Flash installed, can waste lots more time looking at photos, clips, etc. The trailer claims to show a bit of Aramaic ("the language of Christ"), but it doesn't look much like Aramaic to me, and "blood in, blood out" is not a phrase that would be easy to say in Aramaic, which doesn't allow dangling prepositions. (They would need direct objects: "blood in something, blood out of something.") Oh well.

UPDATE: Boston.com reviews The Order and trashes it.

A NEW BOOK REVIEW FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Bellia, Giuseppe and Angelo Passaro, eds.
Il libro del Qohelet: Tradizione, Redazione, Teologia

MORE ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN:

'John' tells Gospel truth, word for word (GoErie.com - Erie Times News)

Carter Lumber

By RICHARD N. OSTLING
Associated Press

TORONTO � Mel Gibson take note: There's another new film about the life of Jesus that also depicts Jews' involvement in the events leading to the Crucifixion. But this one has several Jewish producers and has attracted much less controversy.

While Gibson's "The Passion" won't be released for months, Jewish and Christian commentators already are debating whether its gory treatment of Jesus' death will rouse anti-Semitism. By contrast, there's no advance acrimony surrounding "The Gospel of John," which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on a symbolically chosen Sept. 11.

"John" is a Canadian-British production made for $15 million, roughly half the cost of Gibson's film. It opens in four U.S. markets Sept. 26, then 75 others through the autumn, mostly in cinemas across the southeastern Bible Belt.

Gibson's movie, which he funded, co-wrote, produced and directed, puts all the dialogue into the ancient Aramaic and Latin languages. "John" has a different oddity. The script is in English but consists entirely of John's Gospel, word for word.

[...]

Garth Drabinsky, the Canadian producer who heavily shaped "John," is Jewish. He thinks John's Gospel, which most scholars believe was written around the end of the first century, is an inspirational masterpiece in which one of the themes is the conflict over Jesus among Jews.

[...]

In making the film, Drabinsky hired University of Toronto retiree Peter Richardson to enlist an advisory board of scholars consisting of five Protestants of varying views, a Roman Catholic sister and two Jews.

One of the Jewish scholars, Alan Segal of Barnard College, told a Toronto media preview that "it's a stunning and illuminating film." But Segal also acknowledged that, of the four Gospels, John is "the most Jewish in its subject matter, and the most anti-Jewish in its perception."

[...]

There's lots more; read it all.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW has a new issue online. Hershel Shanks responds to the summary of the IAA report on the "James Ossuary." I don�t have time to read it all right now, but here it is. And he has an editorial on the subject here. (And I thought I was sarcastic!) There are also articles on the Exodus and two reviews of a book that claims to locate one of the lost ten tribes.

GARY LEUPP has e-mailed a reply to my comments on his Counterpunch essay on Mel Gibson and The Passion. He writes:

Jim Davila posted my Counterpunch on the controversy surrounding �The Passion� on this site, generally praising it (thanks, Jim) but indicating that he had �serious problems� with three points in particular. I�d like to briefly respond to those below, at his invitation.

8. Mel Gibson is a devout, if dissident, Catholic. Anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance.

Davila found this unfair, and on reflection I basically accept the criticism. Being anti-abortion or pro-death penalty is not to lack tolerance but merely to have an opinion. And I don�t know how Gibson relates to feminists and gays in his personal life. Feminists and gays have criticized aspects of some of his films (for example, the depiction of the homosexual relationship between the prince and his lover/advisor in Braveheart, and its impact on his princess-bride, although I personally have no problem with it). What I wanted to say is that Gibson is associated with conservative views that are in fact held by many anti-Semites, and for the ADL or anyone else to be concerned about his intentions in his film is thus especially understandable.

11. Objective historians consider the "real" history underlying the Passion storyline unclear. Most concede (although some scholars contest this) that there was a Jewish man living in the Roman province of Judea in the early first century CE who, killed ca. 30, became an object of worship of the Christian faith.

Davila says he knows �of no living, serious scholar in historical Jesus studies (and by �serious� I mean people who publish in the major peer-review journals and present papers at the major conferences) who holds the view that Jesus never existed�. If Professor Leupp has specific people in mind, I'd be interested in hearing names and references.�

First of all, my piece, appearing on a political website, was not intended as a thoroughly scholarly discussion, which I (as a Japan historian) am not best-qualified to produce. My point was to encourage a dispassionate approach to the question of Jesus and his representation by people holding different points of view. In that context, I think it was reasonable to include the parenthetical note that not all scholars concede Jesus� historicity. I did not specify that I referred to contemporary, peer-reviewed scholars. But Albert Schweitzer was surely a �scholar,� and he wrote that the Jesus who said he was the Messiah and preached the kingdom of heaven upon earth �never had any existence.� G. A. Wells (who is, whatever else, surely a scholar) in several works challenges the thesis that a Jesus remotely similar to the figure in the Gospels ever existed. One may dispute their scholarship, and it isn�t my point to uphold it. (My own view is more along the lines of Crossan�s.) But the alternative to expressing myself as I did would be to say, �All scholars agree that there was a Jesus such as is depicted in the Gospels.�

32. This concept of a god undergoing a horrible death, descending to the netherworld, the rising from the dead, offering salvation to humankind (or to select believers), is not unique to Christianity but occurs in other religions once popular in the Middle East. The Babylonian god Tammuz (earlier, the Sumerian god Dimmuzi) rises from the dead, due to the actions of the goddess Ishtar, on the third day.

Davila says the Sumerian god was not the object of a resurrection cult. But it�s my understanding that his cult led to that of Tammuz, who was dead & resurrected. A scholar of classical Egypt wrote me in response to that piece that �one might make the case that� the dead-god-rising �is the standard pattern,� listing also the cults of Adonis and Antinous. I happily leave the details to specialists. My modest point (which I think Christians in particular need to hear) is that the death and resurrection drama is not unique to their faith and that the latter may have borrowed from pre-Christian cults.

I�m glad these issues are being debated on this site. Gary Leupp

I am grateful to Professor Leupp for taking the time to write this response. I concur that it is very much a mainstream view, although certainly not a universal one, that the historical Jesus wasn't remotely similar to the Christ of faith in the Gospels. My understanding is that it has also been called into question whether the Tammuz and Adonis cults involved resurrection (see Jonathan Smith's article in my previous post). But I am assured in an e-mail by someone who knows about such things that the dying and rising god category is still of some use as an interpretive construct. I should mention also that some people think that the ancient Davidic king may have engaged in a cultic drama of dying and rising at the annual enthronement festival (and I think this is a real possibility, although not one that can be proved with the current data). Since elements of the early Jesus movement used the Davidic royal tradition as a template for understanding Jesus, one could make a similar argument using it.

Thanks again, Gary.

I'M BACK. The conference was excellent and I want to thank Mark Goodacre, the University of Birmingham, and Mark's postgraduate assistants Catherine Smith, Helen Ingram, Kuyseok Han, and Richard Goode, who not only made everything run incredibly smoothly, but also made it look effortless. Having held a couple of conferences myself at St. Andrews, I know just how much hard work goes on behind the scenes to make one successful. Mark and team, your efforts are much appreciated.

I'm in a hurry this morning and I'm not going to try to blog the conference in any detail. But I do want to mention two things. First is the Mingana Collection, a collection of hundreds of Syriac and thousands of Arabic manuscripts (with a few in Ethiopic, Coptic, Greek, Persian, cuneiform, etc.) at the University of Birmingham. Some of us were given a tour of it and there's a great deal of fascinating material in it. We were shown codices of the Acts of Thomas in Garshuni (Arabic written in Syriac script) and Syriac, among many other things. Alphonse Mingana was an Iraqi Chaldean Christian who gathered the collection in the 1920s. See the web page for lots more information.

Second is Friday evening's presentation by an international team of scholars on "Digital Editing: A New Generation of Greek New Testaments." This team is currently producing an incredibly ambitious new edition of the Greek Gospel of John, eventually to be expanded to include the whole Greek New Testament. Spin-off projects include an edition of the Old Latin Gospel of John and an edition of the Byzantine text of the New Testament for Orthodox scholars and lay people. You can read about their work at the Institut f�r neutestamentliche Textforschung INTF website. The site is mostly in German, but a number of very interesting pages are in English. These people are the Special Forces of New Testament textual criticism and anyone interested in the subject should keep a close eye on their work. It promises to change the face of the field in years to come.

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre is blogging the conference at length. Start at the link and just keep scrolling up.

I LEAVE FOR BIRMINGHAM first thing tomorrow morning for the annual British New Testament Conference. Follow the link to see the program. Most of the papers are represented at least by abstracts. (I'll be responding to a paper in the Second Temple Judaism Seminar, but since the full paper isn't online, I'm not going to post my response either. Sorry.) Some of the papers are given in full in PDF format. Some of these are marked as such, while for others you need to click on the paper title to access the full paper. Poke around in all the sections; there are plenty of papers scattered throughout which are of considerable relevance for ancient Judaism. If you want to read any of the complete papers, be sure and download them right away. They're generally taken down not long after the conference.

The conference lasts for three days and I expect to be home late on Saturday night, with blogging resuming on Sunday. I don't plan to do any blogging while I'm away. If you want something to look at in the meantime, go to Mahlon Smith's website "Into His Own: Perspectives on the World of Jesus", which contains a wealth of information on ancient Judaism, including excerpts from numerous primary texts, introductory material on Josephus, on the Dead Sea Scrolls (including a timeline of the story of their discovery and publication), and on rabbinic literature, and much more. It could be a very useful resource for your undergraduate and even postgraduate students. Also, of course, keep an eye on the blogs in my weblog links section to the right.

And if we're lucky, maybe Mark Goodacre, whose institution is holding the conference, will blog it some.

Look for me again on Sunday. Have a good week.

"FROM CHINA TO THE MEDITERRANEAN � AND BACK":

Traveling the Silk Road (by "S.B." in Archaeological Odyssey via Archaeologica News)

Excerpts:

In the 1870s, the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the name die Seidenstrasse�the Silk Road�to refer to the 5,000-mile-long trade route that connected China and the Mediterranean in ancient times.

Richthofen thus imbued the immense terra incognita of Central Asia with romance. But he also created something of a misnomer: There was not just one route connecting East and West, but several; and silk�craved especially by Roman women�was just one of the treasured commodities transported along these routes. Intrepid caravans carried spices, gems, gold, ivory, works of art, furniture, garments, perfumes, exotic animals and much else across the Eurasian steppes.

Even more important, the great east-west highway carried knowledge: ideas about medicine, printing, engineering and cosmology. Along these routes, monks traveled side-by-side with merchants, instructing those they met in the secrets of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam. From about 200 B.C. to the 15th century A.D., the oasis towns of Central Asia witnessed an exchange of cultures that had no precedent in human history.

[...]

The Silk Road�s greatest legacy is the exchange of religious beliefs and ideas that took place along its caravan routes�the teachings of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucianism and others. Who knows how long it would have taken Buddhism, which originated in India, to reach Central Asia and China had it not been for the merchants and monks, those early cultural ambassadors, who stopped at the oasis towns on the Silk Road�places such as Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Bactra and Kashgar�bearing scriptures and winning converts?

THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM is the subject of a new book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, profiled and excerpted by MSNBC. Excerpt from chapter one:

I would guess that there is one, and only one, chapter of the Bible that most people in the English-speaking world know by heart. We may remember a lot of stories about Adam and Eve, Noah, Joseph, and Moses. We may be able to recite the Ten Commandments, parts of the Sermon on the Mount, and other passages that have entered into our literature. But when it comes to an entire chapter, I suspect that the only one we remember completely is chapter twenty-three of the Book of Psalms, the Twenty-third Psalm, �The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . .�

Even if you cannot recite the entire psalm perfectly, you know it well enough to say it along with a congregation, the way many of us sing along with �The Star-Spangled Banner� at a baseball game. We are so familiar with the Twenty-third Psalm that when a new translation of the Bible comes along, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to help us understand more accurately what the original Hebrew and Greek meant to say, we are uncomfortable with the �improvements.� We welcome the rewording of the stories, stripped of the Elizabethan vocabulary of the four-hundred-year-old King James translation (done in the time of Shakespeare). We don�t miss the use of �begat� and �wouldst� and �thee� and �thou.� But when it comes to our favorite psalm, we crave familiarity more than accuracy.

Why do we love this psalm so much, more than any of the other 149 psalms in the Bible? Why do we reach for it at moments of personal distress, cherishing its recitation at funerals and memorial services? It is a beautiful literary creation, but the anthologies are full of beautiful writings, and they don�t capture our hearts as the Twenty-third Psalm does. In just a few lines, it conveys the distilled wisdom of generations, offering us a way of seeing the world that renders it less frightening, teaching us to deal with the loss of people we love and with conflict with people who don�t like us or who treat us badly. It shows us how to recognize the presence of God at times and in places where we might think God was absent or when we might be so distracted by our own concerns that we would overlook God�s presence. It has the power to teach us to think differently and, as a result, to act differently.

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Dr. Mark Goodacre has just started the NT Gateway Weblog as a supplement to his superb New Testament Gateway website. Bookmark it now!

MORE ON THE MANDEANS IN IRAQ:

Dwindling sect attempts to rebuild in Iraq

By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
Published 9/2/2003 7:43 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- The end of the short war brought long-awaited news for the Mandeans, an obscure religious sect that follows the teachings of John the Baptist and takes a somewhat dim view of Christ and Mohammed though it respects all religions.

Documents recovered from the vaults of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided answers for what happened to 69 of the sect's members who disappeared. They were executed. A mass funeral laid their souls to rest Aug. 8.

The Mandeans, or Sabeans as they are known in Iraq, are still awaiting news of 73 others, all of who disappeared during the 40 years Saddam's Baath Party was in power. It's a paltry number compared to what other groups have lost to political violence in Iraq, but when you are among 20,000 like-minded believers, each one counts, says Alaa Dhlh Kamar, the spokesman for the church in Baghdad.

The U.S. led war exacted its own toll -- 31 Mandeans died in the bombing of Baghdad, 13 of them in a single house, Kamar said.

Despite the losses, which are felt grievously, it is a great relief for the Mandeans to be free of Saddam. The regime made a big show of allowing the Mandeans to practice their religion unfettered, as they were considered "people of the book" -- actually mentioned in the Koran -- but Kamar says it was just that: show.

"We practices freely in the public media only," he said.

The Mandeans were a periodic stop for the international media as it trouped through pre-war Baghdad. Their unusual baptismal ritual -- often once weekly, with the adherents in glowing white robes -- and multiple simultaneous weddings made for good television and good public relations for the regime, which systematically slaughtered Kurds, Shiites and political opponents.

[...]

The Mandeans were not allowed to have schools for their children to teach them the ancient Aramaic in which their sacred texts are written. Al-Ginza Raba, which means "the greatest treasury," their holy book was translated into Arabic by a famous Iraqi poet two years ago after more than 2,000 years in the lost language. The religion will have a hard time recovering from 40 years of oppression.

[...]

The article has lots more interesting details, so read it all.

PROFESSOR GARY LEUPP has published a piece on Mel Gibson's The Passion in Counterpunch. He is a specialist in Japanese history, but his essay, entitled "Gibson's Christ on Trial: Dispassionate Notes on the 'Passion' Controversy," is overall well informed and informative and you should take the time to read it in full. He has his own agenda, which is fair enough, but he does make a real effort to treat the matter dispassionately and the piece is a contribution to the debate. That said, I also think he gets it seriously wrong just in terms of fairness in one place, and in at least two others he gets some facts wrong. There are other places where I think the emphasis goes too far in a particular direction or where I want to quibble about details or where my opinions differ, but let those go.

The section I have serious problems with is the following:

8. Mel Gibson is a devout, if dissident, Catholic. Anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance.

Actually, I thought that "tolerance" meant tolerating the views of people who disagree with you. Unfortunately, the politically correct meaning of tolerance is adhering to a particular political agenda and a particular set of political views and no others. It sounds suspiciously as though that is the operating definition here. Professor Leupp evidently is pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Fine. But are people who disagree with him by definition intolerant? Let's make it personal with a single example. I disagree with him on capital punishment. Am I intolerant as a result? I respect his view. Does he respect mine? I recognize that the issue is heavily debated and problematical and I regard my view as coming to terms with necessary evils. I have had many discussions with people who disagree with me and almost always I find them to have thoughtful and respectable reasons for their view. That sort of mutual respect and agreement to disagree is what I think of as tolerance. If Professor Leupp is labeling people who disagree with him on the issue of capital punishment as "no models of tolerance," well, he has the right to say and think whatever he likes, and I don't care if he approves of me or not, but I think that is an Orwellian and provincial opinion. If that's not what he was saying, I think he needs to speak more clearly. And if Gibson has said something outrageous about these subjects, let's hear it. Let's have links to the quotations in full context so we can judge it for ourselves.

But that is a minor point. It's the rest of the sentence that really crosses the line: "and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance." Being accused of something makes someone "no model of tolerance"? Since when? I challenge Professor Leupp either to show (again, links to quotes in full context, please) that Mel Gibson has actually said or done something disrespectful to feminists or gays or else to retract this statement. As it stands now, this just won't do.

The other two points are the following.

11. Objective historians consider the "real" history underlying the Passion storyline unclear. Most concede (although some scholars contest this) that there was a Jewish man living in the Roman province of Judea in the early first century CE who, killed ca. 30, became an object of worship of the Christian faith.

I know of no living, serious scholar in historical Jesus studies (and by "serious" I mean people who publish in the major peer-review journals and present papers at the major conferences) who holds the view that Jesus never existed. I'm not a historical Jesus specialist myself, but I do publish on Jesus sometimes, and I can tell you that the scholarly debate is on how much we can tell about the historical Jesus from our problematical sources, not whether he existed at all. If Professor Leupp has specific people in mind, I'd be interested in hearing names and references.

32. This concept of a god undergoing a horrible death, descending to the netherworld, the rising from the dead, offering salvation to humankind (or to select believers), is not unique to Christianity but occurs in other religions once popular in the Middle East. The Babylonian god Tammuz (earlier, the Sumerian god Dimmuzi) rises from the dead, due to the actions of the goddess Ishtar, on the third day.

It's been awhile since I've tried to keep up with Sumerology (although, again, I have published in the area in the past). But it's common knowledge that the idea that Dumuzi (not Dimmizi) was a dying and rising god has been refuted by better Sumerian sources. Samuel Noah Kramer talked about this long ago in The Sumerians, 153-60, and Thorkild Jacobsen reinforced it in The Treasures of Darkness, chapter 2. More recently, Jacobsen has an article on "Dumuzi" in the Encyclopedia of Religion. The whole category of "Dying and Rising Gods" is dubious. See the article with that title in the Encyclopedia of Religion by Jonathan Z. Smith. This point bears on #49 as well.

I hope at this point I don't really need to repeat that I am not defending The Passion; that I haven't seen it yet and won't have an opinion until I do; that the trailer gives me causes for concern; that I just think that the debate should proceed as accurately and fairly as possible; that my criticisms of what others say about it are intended to be constructive to those ends; and blah, blah, blah. I don't need to repeat all that, do I?

ROGUE CLASSICISM has its official launch today, with a very ambitious agenda. Later today we are promised an introduction to blogging and the nonsordid story of how David's blog came to be. This is one to bookmark. (Either that or click on the convenient PaleoJudaica link to the right, under weblogs, since you'll be visiting here already. Right?)

THE MINIMALIST-MAXIMALIST DEBATE is summarized for a popular audience in the article "The Old Testament wars: Is the Bible history or fiction?" in the Baltimore Sun, with mention of a number of recent books that bear in one way or another on the Bible's historical accuracy. Excerpt:

The extreme revisionist position, as summarized by William G. Dever in the March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology, is that the Hebrew Bible is the product of the religious and cultural identity crisis of Judaism in the Hellenistic era, dating from the fourth to the first centuries B.C.

This was a period in which Judaism came into full contact with Greek culture, and needed desperately to form a clear sense of its own identity in order to survive. According to the revisionists, the Torah is essentially literature, and is a "social construct" reflecting the religious interests and propaganda of a late, elitist theocratic party within Judaism.

According to these critics, there was not an "early Israel" as a distinct ethnic entity from the 13th to the 11th centuries B.C., as described by the Torah, no Judahite state before the late eighth century, and no significant political capital in Jerusalem before the second century B.C.

Even Dever himself, once thought of as a traditionalist, does not believe in the full accuracy of Hebrew text. In his Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 280 pages, $25), Dever says that while the Exodus stories "may rest on some historical foundations, however minimal," the Israelites did not spring primarily from the people who fled Egypt, as the Bible maintains.

THE TEN SEPHIROT are a theological construct integral to the Kabbalah. Eliezer Segal explains them at this link.

����������HE'S BACK! Indiana Jones will be limping through a fourth adventure. No word on what archaeological treasure he'll be raiding this time. Via Archaeology Magazine News, although I also saw it somewhere else earlier but I forget where.

UPDATE: It was in Phluzein.

MY SABBATICAL BEGINS TODAY. I have the whole academic year off to finish the book I'm writing on Christian transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha. Regular readers will be familiar with some of the work I have done in this area from draft papers here, here, and here. I intend to post more draft material from the book as the year progresses, so stay tuned.

All this means that the summer is over and I shall be very, very busy from now on. I still intend to post something here most every day, except when I'm out of town or have a cold or other major distraction, but I'm not going to allow myself to waste much time on the blog during the day. Longer, more analytic posts will have to wait for evenings and weekends � and then only as time and family permit, so commentary on really interesting articles and such may come with a certain time lag.

Still, as I said, I mean to provide you with something new here daily under normal circumstances. So do keep coming.

THE JERUSALEM POST has an editorial on Mel Gibson's The Passion:

Editorial: This battle is Christian, not Jewish (via Bible and Interpretation News)

It concludes:

Uncouth threats notwithstanding, stifling this film strikes one as wrongheaded and counterproductive. The best way to combat potential anti-Semitism here is to turn to our Christian friends.

It is they who should be trying to influence Gibson into removing from the movie elements which perpetuate the canard of deicide and eternal collective Jewish guilt. Failing that, they should be teaching the faithful that a true Christian rejects doctrinal anti-Semitism and all that comes with it. It is Christianity that must come to terms with its own theology and history, and decide whether it wants to allow Mel Gibson to steer it back to another era.

Leading Christian Zionist Rev. Elwood McQuaid strikes just the right note: For Christians, the Crucifixion "was a crime of humanity. Scapegoating Jewry is only a cop-out for the rest of us."

MAYBE NOT. According to this New York Times article, 20th Century Fox has declined to distribute Mel Gibson's The Passion. " Many executives in Hollywood say that Mr. Gibson's movie, which chronicles in bloody detail the last hours of Jesus' life, is potentially inflammatory and not commercial enough for a high-profile mainstream studio like Fox."

HERE'S WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING lately on the Temple Mount.

THE LINKS COLUMN on the right has just been thoroughly updated. I have made small changes and corrections to the "About PaleoJudaica.com" page and (the space provider did this, not I) it also now has a slightly different address (http://www.flyservers.com/members4/paleojudaica.com/About%20PaleoJudaica.com.html - the "%20" can also be written as a single blank space). In the unlikely event that you have a link to it, you will need to update the link to get the latest version. In addition, in the links to other sites I have corrected a dead link and added about thirty new links, mostly to things I mentioned in the blog over the last few months, bringing the grand total to around 150. If you encounter any dead or incorrect links among them, please let me know.

I've already found several other pages I meant to add and I have a number of things in the queue to be profiled on the blog. I will add them as time permits. Meanwhile, there's a lot of new content in the links section. Enjoy.

GEORGE NICKELSBURG has a new book out:

Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins: Diversity, Continuity, and Transformation

Synopsis:

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

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST got it right too. Last week I watched the video: there are two crucifixion close-ups and both clearly show the nails going through the wrists, not the palms. I won't carp about the movie's historical inaccuracies and weirdnesses, since both the book and the movie make clear that the story is just the fantasy of Nikos Kazantzakis. But it's worth noting that, nevertheless, Martin Scorsese did bother to get that crucifixion detail right. I have some other comments that include spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie and intend to, don't read the next paragraph.

I'm struck by the "Gnostic" themes taken up in the story, things found particularly in the Nag Hammadi library. The docetic myth, which inverts the traditional meaning of the crucifixion story, is itself inverted to a procosmic stance. And then there's laughing savior on the cross. For both, read The Apocalypse of Peter. Some of the Nag Hammadi texts also make Mary Magdalene a close confidante of Jesus, although not, um, that close (e.g., the Dialogue of the Savior and � the non-Nag Hammadi text in the Berlin Museum � the Gospel of Mary). The theme of the "holy whore" also appears: see for example The Thunder: Perfect Mind. I don't think Kazantzakis could have read all these in 1955 when the book was published, but perhaps he picked up on descriptions of similar heretical ideas criticized at length in the Church Fathers. Or maybe he just had Gnostic revelatory fantasies. If you're interested in this stuff, you should invest in James Robinson's (ed.) The Nag Hammadi Library, which translates the texts, and John Dart's The Jesus of Heresy and History (earlier title, The Laughing Savior) which gives a basic, nontechnical and user-friendly introduction to them and their context and implications. Unfortunately the latter is out of print, but you can pick up a used copy from Amazon at the link above. You can read selections from the Nag Hammadi texts, along with lots of other interesting information, at the Gnostic Society Library website.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS disses the Ten Commandments. A bit shrill, especially toward the end, but he makes some good points. Strangely, he seems to think it's debatable whether Moses was "pre-Christian."

MORE ARAMAIC ON THE BIG SCREEN:

SEPT. 5

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

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

I thought the Sin Eaters were British (scroll down for entry). What's with the Aramaic? Weird.

UPDATE: Anders at Phluzein comments.

A NEW REVIEW ARTICLE IN TC:

James A. Sanders, "Avenues of Access to Scripture in Early Jewish Literature," a review of David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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

OUR SCHOOL LIBRARIAN just casually mentioned to me that for space reasons they have to get rid of Lane's multi-volume Arabic-English Lexicon and would I like it. Hyperventilating around the fangs I'd just grown, I told him yes please. Plus they're giving me the Lewis and Short Dictionary of Latin.

The Zayed Centre has officially been shut down for "engaging in a discourse that starkly contradicted the principles of interfaith tolerance."

I BLOGGED ON THE "REVADIM" ("Layers" in English) approach to Talmud some time ago. Here's the website of the Revadim program (via Protocols).

PHILOLOGOS ON ARAMAIC AND LATIN:

What would Jesus Speak? (Forward Magazine)

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

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

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

[�]

Read on for a story about a rabbi, an expensive courtesan, and Greek.

A NEW ACADEMIC YEAR IS UPON US and other people (heh heh) need to be thinking about class preparations. As a public service, I refer you to the following article (via Arts & Letters Daily):

PowerPoint is Evil

HERE'S A PETRA TRAVELOGUE from the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

[�]

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

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

With lots of descriptions of specific monuments as well.

WHICH TEN COMMANDMENTS AGAIN?

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

Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer

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

Next question:

Which Ten Commandments?

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

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

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

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

And it just gets worse from there.

HERE ARE THE LINKS to the recent articles on Mel Gibson's The Passion by Eric J. Greenberg in the Jewish Week:

"Burning �Passion�"

"Jews Horrified By Gibson�s Jesus Film"

"Gibson To Launch �Jewish Initiative�"

Kindly sent to me by Carla Sulzbach.

THE ENOCHIAN DISCUSSION LIST is not about the academic study of Enoch, it's a venue for practicing Enochic magicians to discuss their craft. (Found via someone's Google search for "enochian movie," which led them here. I hope they find their movie.) This list is run by Jerry Schueler, who also has a very full Enochian website that I haven't noted before, and the list has been going on since 2001. All the postings are archived. If you want to listen in on actual magicians talking with each other about what they do, have a look. Enoch lives!

My interest is anthropological and I have a pretty high tolerance for such things. But as in my earlier posting on Enochiana, if occult materials make you uncomfortable, best leave these sites alone.

JAMES CAVIEZEL (Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion) is here in St. Andrews right now, working on the film "Stroke of Genius," the story of golfer Bobby Jones.

Small world.

RUMOR HAS IT that distributors are lining up to take on Mel Gibson's The Passion, which, it seems, may have to change its title.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Bechtel, Carol M.
Esther

Oakman, Douglas E. and K. C. Hanson
Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts

FROM THE "YOU COULDN'T MAKE THIS UP" FILE:

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

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

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

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

Trillions of tons of gold, actually.

Here's a link to the excerpted MEMRI translation of the Al-Ahram Al-Arabi interview. My favorite bits:

The inteviewer asks:

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

Last question and response:

Question: "Is a compromise solution possible?"

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

Even my sarcasm fails me.

UPDATE: MEMRI is a pretty reputable source, so I don't doubt that they're translating what they found. I would really, really like to believe that Al-Ahram Al-Arabi is indulging in a "he looks!" spoof, but even if that turns out to be so, the interview is awfully anti-Semitic, as Eugene Volokh points out. And Judith Weiss at Kesher Talk collects various answers to the proposed lawsuit on the level it deserves. Lots of people in the Blogosphere and elsewhere are scratching their heads over this one.

AMAZON LISTMANIA: "Egyptian Jews & Elephantine Mystery" by "didaskalex."

JUST NOTICED some of the response to my snarky exchange with Meredith Scheck about biblical scholars and their roommates last month (see comments section to this Protocols post). I didn't intend to call Meredith "stupid" but rather to say (sarcastically) that I wouldn't want to have a roommate who held the view she expressed. I think we both intended and took our exchange as a joke, but obviously I offended some people. I let my sarcasm get the better of me on this one (not the first time in my life, I regret to say) and I should not have replied in kind to Meredith's comment - which had amused rather than offended me.

I apologize to Meredith and readers.

Memo to future self: sarcasm on the web comes out worse than you intend. Write one hundred times on the blackboard.

MINIMALISM VS. MAXIMALISM AGAIN:

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


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


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

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

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

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

The rest of the article is very difficult to excerpt, but the concluding paragraph reads:

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

This is a very interesting and thought-provoking piece. Allow me to respond on a few issues. If the point is that the biblical writers thought that they were describing real historical events, of which they were giving us the true interpretation, I agree completely. However, isn't it important that from our perspective as critical historians the evidence for many of the stories they tell is so weak and problematic that we would never consider believing they really happened if they were from anywhere but the Bible? This is a point virtually universally agreed upon by specialists, the difference between minimalists and maximalists begin one of degree. The good faith of the biblical writers isn't in doubt (at least to me). Their competence as historians by our lights is another matter entirely.

If Professor Isbell is saying that the authors knew they were writing edifying literature rather than history, I agree. If he is saying they knew they were writing fiction (and I'm not sure whether he is or not), I disagree. Their moralizing was based on what they thought were the actual facts, even though they knew they were not writing history per se. At least some of the point of their moralizing would be lost if the events didn't happen. If he is saying we can't tell whether much of what they tell really happened or not, I suppose I agree, but then we have no business trying to use it as history for our own purposes (and it's perfectly reasonable for us to ask our own historical questions of the text for our own agenda).

It seems to me that a false dichotomy between moralizing and history is being set up here. The biblical writers thought they were giving true theological interpretations of events and facts that were real. Their interpretations are ultimately unfalsifiable but we can still test the veracity of the alleged events and facts they were interpreting and we may well decide they were wrong about some of those events and facts. It's important for us to understand and appreciate their agenda but it's also important for us to evaluate their work for ours. This is not grousing or declaring the biblical writers to be failures. It is not haranguing them or pronouncing them at fault.

But don't accept my interpretation! Read it all yourself and see what you think.

ON BOTCHING THE BIBLE: A newspaper finally notices that it's the Book of "Revelation" not "Revelations." This article, by William Safire's language consultant Jeffrey McQuain, is nicely done and amusing, and - all too unusual for a newspaper article - I couldn't find any errors in it.

UPDATE: The link above is to the New York Times, where the article originates, and requires free registration to access. But you can also read it without registering at ABS-CBN News (Philippines).

PHLUZEIN is a blog on archaeology by Anders Bell. (Via David Meadows's Rogue Classicism," which he warns us won't launch officially until September. He warns us in one of his seven posts for 23 August - with seven posts and counting today, so I'm looking forward to when the blog actually starts and he gets serious.)

I'M A LITTLE TIRED of Mel Gibson and The Passion, so I haven't posted much on it for a while. But I seem to be the only one who's tired, so here's an update on what's going on. Michael Novak saw the rough cut and he liked it. Professor Amy-Jill Levine saw the leaked draft of the script and she didn't like it. The Baptist Press gives its take on the movie here. Eric J. Greenberg, Interfaith Affairs correspondent for the Jewish Week, has expressed serious concerns about the movie over the last few weeks. (A reader sent me copies of his articles. If I can find a URL I'll post it.) And some specialists on Ioudaios-L are wishing scholars would engage more with the public on such things (start at the link and just keep going to the next message). Note to my colleagues there: if you're serious about this, start a blog. I've been discussing this particular issue (and many others of public interest) for months and I could use some help. I suspect more people read my individual blog-post blatherings than read many of my professional articles. (Is that good or bad? I don't know.) And a lot of my readers are nonspecialists.

MORE ON THE ST. ANDREWS ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION:

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


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


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

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

[�]

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

[�]

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

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

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

[�]

As I said, my office is across the street and down a bit from all this. I think I'm outside the "dead zone" (if you will), but only just. Gross!

UPDATE: In the first century C.E. the city of Tiberias had the same problem.

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL "I WITNESS," coming out next summer, will have some paleojudaic themes, including a first-century scroll discovered in Israel. Naturally, the contents turn out to "earthshaking."