The Vatican Library catalogues and Syriac

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME: Professor critiques Vatican Library texts (Emily McConville, The Observer). The headline isn't very accurate, since it is the catalogues he is "critiquing" (i.e., correcting), not the texts:

The Vatican library provides invaluable resources for Department of Classics professor Joseph Amar, but in the course of his study, he has worked to correct discrepancies in one of the library’s manuscript catalogs, he said.

Using manuscripts from the first centuries of Christianity, Amar said he studies the writings of early Christian thinkers. Many of the manuscripts he studies reside in the Vatican Library, collected over many centuries and cataloged in the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, an 18th-century tome that lists the authors of documents, their publication dates and descriptions of their contents, Amar said.

He also studies the Aramaic language and its dialects, which linked Christianity and Judaism and, at times, made them almost indistinguishable.

“In general, it’s about documenting Christianity at a crucial stage in its history, where it’s still very Jewish-looking but hasn’t become entirely the kind of Christianity we recognize today,” Amar said. “It sort of still has one foot in Judaism and one foot in Christianity. This is preserved in these ancient manuscripts because Jews and Christians were using the same language.”

[...]

Tucked away near the end of the article is a tidbit that could be quite important:

Amar said the process often leads to new discoveries. For example, scholars believed for centuries that Jacob of Edessa, an influential Biblical scholar, had written a commentary on the Book of Genesis ⎯ but no one could find it. Meanwhile, a catalog contained a misidentified Genesis commentary, Amar said. By comparing that manuscript’s writing and handwriting style with Jacob’s known works, Amar said he was able to correctly attribute the commentary to him.

Finding a lost Syriac commentary on Genesis by Jacob of Edessa sounds like a big deal to me. The only other information given is the photo of Professor Amar, with what looks like a photocopy of the manuscript, with the caption "Classics professor Joseph Amar examines a copy of the commentary of the Book of Genesis by Jacob of Edessa. Amar said he believes this manuscript was published in the third century." Something is garbled there, because Jacob of Edessa was born c. 640. Perhaps he said that the Aramaic dialect Syriac spread from Edessa in the third century?

The text in the photo appears to be written in Syriac script, but I can't make out anything else. Out of curiosity I flagged the article on the Hugoye list and Alison Salvesen and Bas ter Har Romeny commented here. Cross-file under "Syriac watch," "Lost book found?" and "Watch this space."

GJW latest, plus the Green collection

MARK GOODACRE gathers up all the latest on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Jesus' Wife Fragment Round-up. It is a good sign that CNN is taking note of the latest developments.

Background here and links.

On a tangentially related note, Brice C. Jones has an interesting and slightly disquieting post about the Green Collection of ancient manuscripts: On the Green Collection and Private Collectors of Biblical Artifacts.

Background on the Green Collection is here and here and links

Second-Temple-era bones?

DISCOVERY: Hikers Find Human Skull and Bones in Gush Etzion Cave (Tazpit News Agency).

A surprised group of hikers in Gush Etzion stumbled across human bones in a cave near Ein Tzurim, according to police.

The hikers immediately called 100 (Israel’s 911), and the police came to investigate.

The police, once on the scene realized that this wasn’t a murder scene and called the Israel Antiquities Authority. A preliminary examination by their experts indicate that the bones are apparently those of Jews from the Second Temple period.

[...]

The article doesn't give any reason for this identification of the bones and expresses proper caution about the conclusion. Watch this space ...

Jewish epigraphy workshop

WITH MARGARET WILLIAMS: Jewish Epigraphy: A Workshop, at New College, University of Edinburgh, on 11-12 June. Tempting ...

GJW: the latest

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE is still generating blog posts and media attention:

April DeConick: What are the facts about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife?

April is asking some important questions, one or two of which I have also touched on here. There is a lot of interesting discussion happening on Facebook, especially from Mark Goodacre and Bob Kraft on the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins page (which is a closed group). I hope some of it ends up in some public forum in due course.

Mark Goodacre: Laboratory tests can’t always catch modern forgeries - as Harvard Theological Review has (inadvertently) proved (guest post by Andrew Bernhard)

Mark Goodacre: Tentative chronology on Coptic "Jesus Wife" fragment (guest post by Stephen Goranson)

Charlotte Allen: The Deepening Mystery Of the 'Jesus' Wife' Papyrus (Weekly Standard)

Background here and links.

Assyrian seal: time travel not required

HAARETZ: Archaeologists baffled by 8th century BCE seal found in Galilee How the seal from Assyrian King Sargon II’s rule came to be found where it is remains unclear; ancient ring made of carnelian also found (Eli Ashkenazi).

Two archaeological finds at the Omrit site in the northern Galilee have baffled Israeli archaeologists. The first is a seal dating back to the eighth century B.C.E., which was found in the "wrong" place. The second is an orange carnelian ring of uncertain origin, that apparently dates from the Middle Ages.

[...]

The site includes the ruins of three concentric temples:

The innermost part contains the most ancient temple, dated to the year 40 BCE. In the middle is a shrine dated to the time of Herod, around 20 BCE. Some believe that it is one of three temples Herod built in honor of Emperor Augustus, along with two others in Caesarea and Tiberias.

The third, later, temple dates back to the first century CE.

The seal, the older of the two artifacts, was found behind the wall of the earliest shrine, within a layer of filler between an internal and external wall.

Archaeologists don't understand how the seal ended up there, as the temple was built roughly 700 years before the seal was created. The layer of filler also contained small glass tools and other objects which were apparently taken out of the temple during construction.

[...]

The last paragraph baffled me for a while, since it's a bit difficult to explain an artifact excavated in the fill of a wall that was built seven hundred years before the artifact was made. A careless time traveler, perhaps? But as Joseph Lauer already independently worked out, this is just a typo. Read "after" rather than "before." It is unusual to find a prime artifact in a wall that is seven centuries younger, but time travel is not required.

Moles?

A MOLE BY ANY OTHER NAME ... Word of the Day / Khafarperet: The word that means mole but shouldn't, The sages didn't realize Israel has no moles. Hint as to what khafarperet might mean: It probably isn't fruit-digger (Elon Gilad, Haaretz).

Rather more recently, a text of Isaiah [2:20] was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in fact had the word khafarperet as a single word. But this doesn’t free us from the problem of what a khafarperet was, since as we already said - the Holy Land has no moles.

[...]

There may not be moles but there are spalax, which are blind rodents that live in holes, also known as mole-rats. The zoologically challenged might be pardoned for thinking the delightful rodents are moles, since they look like moles, dig like moles et cetera.

In modern parlance, when an Israeli sees a spalax (or more likely, a mound created by one), he'll probably tell you it's a khafarferet, not realizing that he's dead wrong and the species is actually a mole-rat, known locally as kholed. But that's okay, since that is probably what khafarperet originally meant anyway.

It's always good when an even number of mistakes makes you right.

Yad Vashem

FOR YOM HASHOAH*: Word of the Day / Yad Vashem Any bewilderment over the Holocaust memorial museum's name can be cleared up by the knowledge that 'yad' doesn't always mean hand (Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz).

This use of yad, which means “power” and “strength” as well as “monument,” can be seen in the biblical description of a memorial to Avshalom, King David’s rebellious son: “Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself the pillar, which is in the king’s dale; for he said: ‘I have no son to keep my name in remembrance’; and he called the pillar after his own name; and it is called Absalom’s monument [yad Avshalom] unto this day” (2 Samuel 18:18).

There is indeed a stone tomb called Yad Avshalom (known in English as the Tomb of Absalom or Absalom’s Pillar) in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley, though Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay recently announced that it’s more likely to be the final resting place of Herodian monarch Agrippa I.

“Thus saith the Lord: Keep ye justice, and do righteousness; for my salvation is near to come, and my favor to be revealed,” reads Isaiah 56:1. In verse 5, we are told: “Even unto them will I give in my house and within my walls a monument and a memorial [yad vashem] better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting memorial, that shall not be cut off.”

Indeed, Yad Vashem, which was established in 1953, describes itself as “the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust.”

*Israeli Holocaust Memorial Day, which was yesterday.

GJW: recent related blog posts on Coptic, papyri, and legal issues

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE remains a live subject for now.

First, Coptologists continue to comment on it and the reasons for concluding it is a forgery.

Alin Suciu: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Papyrus. Final Considerations

Christian Askeland: The forgery of the Lycopolitan Gospel of John

Incidentally, if you would like to know more about the Lycopolitan dialect of Coptic, Peter Nagel has an informative online article at the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia: Lycopolitan (or Lyco-Diospolitan or Subakhmimic).

Second, David Meadows is starting a new Papyrus Series over at Rogue Classicism. It will be on recent papyri discoveries and it sounds as though the GJW and the the new Sappho papyrus will receive attention in due course. The series begins with The Papyrus Series I: Egyptian Soldier Letter Home.

Third, I've been meaning for a while to note a blog post at Faces and Voices by Roberta Mazza on the legal issues of dealing with unprovenanced fragments like the GJW and the Sappho papyrus: Papyri, private collectors and academics: why the wife of Jesus and Sappho matter.

Background on the GJW is here and links.

www.floodofnoah.com

DR. INGRID LILY has set up an interesting website on the Noah movie called Noah's Flood. It collects essays and media by scholars and writers. I don't think I've mentioned it before, so have a look.

Background on Noah is here and links.

Schiffman on exile and return in the DSS

ANOTHER BLOG SERIES BY LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Exile and Return in the Dead Sea Scrolls (2 posts).

GJW latest and some reflections

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS REGARDING THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE are discussed in some blog posts.

Mark Goodacre: Illustrating the forgery of Jesus' wife's sister fragment

Steve Caruso: The Final Nail in the Coffin For The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

Mark and Steve explain very clearly the implications of the new information from the Gospel of John fragment from the same cache of manuscripts as the GJW.

Anthony Le Donne: Interview with Caroline T. Schroeder re: Jesus' Wife Fragment

The interview with Prof. Schroeder, who is a Coptologist, presents the issues especially lucidly. Excerpt:

CTS: I am now convinced the fragment is a forgery. Christian Askeland's research discovery on Thursday changed my mind. In a nutshell: the Jesus's Wife fagment (JWF) was written by the same copyist as another papyrus fragment in the same collection, and that other papyrus is a forgery. Ergo, the Jesus's Wife fragment was forged.

The Jesus's Wife papyrus was part of a small collection of six papyri, which also included a fragment of a copy of the Gospel of John. As part of the testing of the JWF, its ink was compared to the ink of several ancient papyri, including of this Gospel of John fragment. (In an attempt to determine whether the ink on the JWF was indeed ancient.) The Gospel of John piece has never been published, so scholars had not seen it or studied it before. Not even photographs. However, as part of the latest issue of the Harvard Theological Review about the Jesus's Wife Fragment, documentation of the ink tests was posted online, which included digital photographs of the Gospel of John fragment. Christian Askeland examined the photographs and compared them to the JWF. He has persuasively shown that the handwriting on the two is the same. Since the John fragment is a forgery, ergo Jesus's Wife is a forgery (same copyist).

Why is the John fragment a forgery? Line breaks on this John papyrus correspond exactly to line breaks of another published fragment of John. On both the recto and verso sides of the papyrus. This is just an impossible coincidence. Anyone who has read Coptic manuscripts and papyri can tell you that we have never seen a case in which two copies of the same text break the lines in exactly the same places so consistently. (And in this case, if you look at the aligned photos provided on Alin Suciu's blog and Mark Goodacre's blog, you will see that the "scribe" copied every OTHER line break of the published John edition, in an attempt to make it look like the new John fragment was twice as wide.) There are also issues of dialect. The dialect of the text in the John fragment died out a century or two before the dating of the actual fragment and Jesus Wife).

Finally, the so-called Gospel of Jesus's Wife also contains uncanny resemblances to an online edition of the Gospel of Thomas, including replicating a typo in the edition. (See here)

I was willing to consider the possibility of coincidence with just one manuscript. But two out of six papyri in a collection so similar to published editions of other manuscripts? Both written in the same "scribal" hand? And the published editions all available online? That cannot be coincidence; it must be deliberate

I have seen various comments on Facebook etc. pointing out that the new John fragment could be an ancient copy of the Coptic manuscript published in 1924 and it is possible that the dialect of Coptic in which it was written continued to be copied after the sixth century and this happens to be the first case we have discovered. As for the first point, the fact that the new John manuscript copies only every other line sure makes it look as though the copyist was trying to make the manuscript look twice as wide as it was. But yes, an ancient scribe could have copied the other ancient John manuscript and just happened to have a papyrus that was exactly twice as wide and decided to copy accordingly. And luckily we found both manuscripts. That is not impossible. I don't know exactly what the case is for the extinction of the Lycopolitan dialect of Coptic in the sixth century, but I imagine it is thinkable that the odd manuscript written in it could have been copied a century or two after that.

But really, what are we doing here? As I have already pointed out, if the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is genuine, this already involves a pile-on of unusual and suspicious features that amounts to us having won the lottery. Now another manuscript from the same cache written in the same hand again presents us with another pile-on of simlarly suspicious features. At what point do we stop claiming another lottery win and just accept that the whole thing is a forgery?

If Coptologists start objecting and explaining why Askeland's arguments are wrong, then we would be back to just one lottery win. So far that isn't happening. If the current state of the question holds, the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a fake.

James Kugel

MOMENT MAGAZINE: James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief. Excerpt:

After completing his graduate studies, Kugel taught at CUNY and Yale before returning to Harvard in 1982 to teach Hebrew literature. It was at Harvard that he began to make his mark on the world of biblical scholarship. Prior to Kugel’s work, the discipline generally focused on the nuts and bolts of the Bible: how it was written, when it was conceived and what early historical periods it reflected. Kugel offered a different approach in two of his early books, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts in Early Judaism and Christianity (1990) and The Bible As It Was (1997), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. (Kugel published two versions of this book, one for a popular audience and another, re-titled Traditions of the Bible, for an academic one.) In them he argues that much of what is considered the Bible today is based on interpretations developed between 200 BCE and 100 CE. These interpretations came primarily from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—or as Kugel calls them in Hebrew, sefarim achi kitzonim, the Outside Books—texts preserved by the Christian tradition and not considered part of the Jewish canon, such as the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Judith and the Book of Enoch.

“Even more importantly, Kugel demonstrates that those early interpreters are the real authors of the Bible as it came to function in Judaism and Christianity,” says Benjamin Sommer, a Hebrew Bible professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By dint of his encyclopedic knowledge, Kugel was able to put pieces together from sources as diverse as obscure midrashim and the writings of early Church fathers. “There’s a gap between the last pages of the Tanakh [Bible] and the first texts of our rabbis,” Kugel explains. “So much of what we think about the Bible is really dependent not on the Bible but what these ancient interpreters said. I tried to highlight that they were as important to Jews as they were to Christians.”

His emphasis on the importance of scripture to early Christians and Jews was well received by Jewish and Christian scholars alike. “It’s hard to overstate what Kugel’s work has brought about,” says Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh professor of Catholic theology at Notre Dame. “His deeper point is not always appreciated but bears repeating: The very notion of sacred scripture arises in this environment of early interpretation.” Anderson continues, “This is an argument that will wear well over time; it constitutes a lasting legacy to Kugel’s oeuvre.”

Kugel was one of my teachers during my PhD program at Harvard and I was a teaching fellow for his famous undergraduate course The Bible and Its Interpreters. I continue to introduce my students to his books at every opportunity.

More on James Kugel here and links, as well as here and here.

GJW: conclusively a forgery?

CHRISTIAN ASKELAND (ETC BLOG): Jesus had an ugly sister-in-law.

The too-clever title of this blog post misled me yesterday into thinking it was a joke or satire, and I was busy so I didn't read it until this morning. It is actually a very important contribution to the debate about the authenticity of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. It seems that Harvard website has more information on the ink tests, which included the elusive fragment of the Gospel of John which came along with the GJW. A photo of the Gospel of John fragment is included. And Coptologists Askeland and Alin Suciu conclude that it is an obvious fake. The Harvard fragment is based on a modern edition of a Coptic manuscript of John, down to the same line divisions, and the dialect of the fragment is too early for the date of the papyrus it is written on. And it is written in the same handwriting, in the same ink, and using the same writing instrument as the GJW. The two were written by the same person.

This is very big. Unless the claims of the Coptologists can be shown to be wrong, the evidence is conclusive. The Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a fake.

See also further comments by Mark Goodacre.

Endless background on the GJW going right back to the first announcement is here and follow the links.

UPDATE: Leo Depuydt weighs in by e-mail over at What's New in Papyrology.

UPDATE: Hot off the press (virtually speaking), this article by Charlotte Allen in the Weekly Standard Magazine has already been overtaken by events. But it's a good overview of the story up to yesterday: The Wife of Jesus Tale. An investigation into the origins of a scrap of papyrus raises more questions than it resolves.

UPDATE: Bible History Daily (BAS) links, in an e-mailing received just a few minutes ago, to a summary by Noah Wiener of the state of the question as of 23 April, two days ago. Wiener surveys the story commendably thoroughly with lots of links to recent blog posts: The “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” Papyrus Revisited. Harvard Divinity School declares the papyrus ancient, but the debate rages on. But again the story has moved on significantly in the last two days and the piece needs an update.

Pre-premiere review of Lilith, the Night Demon

DAN PINE: Lilith, the Night Demon: Racy, raucous, homegrown opera rears its head in Bay Area (Jweekly.com).

At the heart of the opera stand Adam and Lilith. As written by composer-librettist Horowitz, they resemble a Garden of Eden version of George and Martha, the pugilistic protagonists from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Though the opera is filled with salacious dialogue and NC-17 topics, Horowitz says none of it came from him. He drew his Lilith story directly from accounts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Talmud, the Zohar and a medieval Jewish tale called “The Alphabet of Ben Sira,” which added juicy details to the saga.

Though not directly mentioned in the Torah, the Lilith figure explains for some the presence of two creation stories in Genesis. Lilith, presumably, was Adam’s first bride, later tossed away for Adam’s trophy wife, Eve.

The article is quite well informed and goes into a lot of detail both about the opera (which opens on 1 May) and about the mythic background of the story. The opera itself seems to have made good use of all this material and Heather Klein makes a cute Lilith. I wish I could make it to San Francisco to see this one.

Background here.

Second-Temple-era chisel?

DISCOVERY NEWS: Ancient Chisel Used to Build Western Wall Found
(Rossella Lorenzi).

A 2,000-year-old stonemason’s chisel that may have been used in the construction of Jerusalem’s Western Wall has been unearthed at the bottom of the structure along with a number of Second Temple-era objects, claims an Israeili archaeologist.

Some of the artifacts, which include a Roman sword, cooking vessels, a gold bell, coins and a ceramic seal, would suggest the Western Wall, a holy site for both Muslims and Jews, had not been built by King Herod at all.

Eli Shukron, an archaeologist working for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), found the chisel last summer during a dig near a tunnel at the lower base of the Western Wall.

[...]

The IAA is still studying the artifact and has not yet verified anything about it. Further to the above, this is interesting:

According to Shukron, the excavation revealed a number of coins beneath the wall which date decades after Herod’s death.

This would suggest that construction of the Western Wall had not even begun at the time of Herod’s death and was likely completed only generations later by one of his descendants.

It couldn't have been very many generations later. Herod died in 4 BCE and the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

Watch this space ...

Samaritan Passover again

INNA LAZAREVA: Postcard from... Mount Gerizim (The Independent).

There is a cry as one priest raises a large knife and then swoops it down sharply on the sheep’s neck. Cheers erupt as others lean in to slaughter the lambs. Moments later, everyone embraces each other, leaving bloodied handprints on the starched white clothes. Each community member steps forward to receive a dot of the sheep’s blood on their forehead. The feast of Passover begins...

Background here and links.

St. George's Day 2014

HAPPY BELATED ST. GEORGE'S DAY! It was yesterday, 23 April. I thought of it but didn't have a chance to post on it. St. George is the patron saint of England and a hero to Palestinian Christians. He was also martyred in Palestine c. 300 C.E. and reputedly (alas in only in very late traditions) slew a dragon.

Background here and links

"Lilith" the folk opera

MUSIC: Legendary 'Lilith' inspires edgy folk opera (Janos Gereben, The Examiner). Excerpts:

“Producers of the show, which opens next week across the Bay Area, call it an “edgy folk opera” and “bawdy alternate Jewish story of Creation.”

[...]

The demonic character Lilith (in Hebrew, the name translates to “night monster” or “night hag”) first appeared in the Babylonian Talmud. Jewish folklore says she was created at the same time as Adam, but refused to be subservient to him and was forced to flee Paradise.

She mated with archangel Samael, becoming an accuser, seducer and destroyer. Even worse, she was a child-killer. A succubus, she roamed at night, seeking newborn babies and strangling them in their sleep.

Soprano Heather Klein doesn’t seem daunted about playing the evil character. She calls the score a “huge work that brings together so many genres — Jewish liturgical, operatic and folk,” and adds that she is “amazed by the character-driven melodies that bring this daring Yiddish and English libretto to life.”

Lilith started out as a Sumerian wind demon who was transmogrified into a baby-killing Babylonian demon; she made an appearance as a ruins-inhabiting demon in the Bible (Isaiah 34:14); she took a side turn to become Adam's disobedient first wife in Jewish legend; and she also became a Jewish demon who went back to her baby-killing ways. She gets around.

I was surprised at how many past PaleoJudaica posts there are on Lilith. They (excluding ones whose links have succumbed to link rot) are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Queen Helena of Adiabene's sarcophagus?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene. Steven Notley and Jeffrey P. García disagree with the widely accepted position that the Aramaic-inscription-bearing sarcophagus from the "Tomb of the Kings" in Jerusalem belonged to Queen Helena, although they do think that she was buried there in a different chamber.

For more on Queen Helena and that sarcophagus, see here and here.

Samaritan Passover 2014

SLIDESHOW: A Passover ceremony at Mount Gerizim (Haaretz). The Samaritan Passover runs on a slightly different calendar from that of the Jewish Passover.

Past posts on Samaritan Passover are here and links.

More doubts about the GJW

MARK GOODACRE: More doubts surface on the Jesus Wife Fragment. The doubts are raised by Owen Jarus at LiveScience: 'Gospel of Jesus's Wife': Doubts Raised About Ancient Text. The problem is that, according to an estate representative, the now dead West German man who supposedly provided the papyrus was not an antiquities collector and did not own papyri. Not conclusive, but interesting and worth following up further.

Mark also links to a recent video interview with Karen King here.

Background on the GJW is here and links.

On the DSS

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING: What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? These ancient parchments discovered by chance in desert caves by the Dead Sea tell mysteries about the mysterious Jewish sect that wrote them, and debunk a myth about Goliath's height while about it. (Elon Gilad, Haaretz).

This is a pretty good summary of the majority opinion about the Scrolls, with which I more or less agree. But I would like to nuance the confident identification of the Qumran sectarians with the Essenes, and I would be very caution about the uncritical harmonization of the sectarian texts with the accounts of the Essenes by Philo, Pliny, and Josephus.

Also, there are a few papyrus scrolls from Qumran in addition to all the parchment, and the extra passage about Nahash was already known through Josephus' retelling of the story before the Qumran Samuel manuscript was discovered.

For some related posts, see here, here, here, here, here, and here and follow the many links. Also relevant posts at the old Qumranica blog are here and here.

St Andrews Symposium

LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER: The St Andrews Symposium for Biblical and Early Christian Studies: Ancient Readers and their Scriptures, 2-3 June 2014 (University of St Andrews). The registration deadline is 1 May 2014. For registration information, follow the link or e-mail Garrick Allen (ga22@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Mouse in Hebrew

HAARETZ: Word of the Day / Akhbar from the bible to the digital age. The word for mouse goes back millennia, completely unchanged, but its antecedents may be an artifact of some ancient's sense of humor. (Elon Gilad).

At any rate, much like mice in the pantry, this word for the humble rodent has lasted through the ages, from Biblical times to the time of the Mishnah, through Talmudic times in Aramaic and then to rabbinic writings in Hebrew of the Middle Ages. Nor has it changed with the revival of Hebrew as a living language in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

That said, akhbar underwent an important semantic twist in the late 20th century, when in 1963, Bill English built a prototype of a device designed by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute. The little palm-sized box with a cord protruding from its front resembled a mouse and thus it was so named.

Sof pasuk

IT'S NOT OVER: Word of the Day / Sof pasuk: Ending things, biblical style. A poetic phrase to help express one's strongly-held feelings. (Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz).

“This isn’t sof pasuk,” they said, using a phrase that roughly means “This isn’t the last word” or “It’s not over yet.”

Sof means “end” and pasuk (pah-SOOK) is a verse in the Bible (with pasuk muzikali meaning “musical phrase”), such that the term literally means “end of the verse.”

More to the point, perhaps, it is the name of the Torah cantillation symbol that signals, not surprisingly, the end of the verse, the same way that “period” in American English and “full stop” in British English are the names of the punctuation mark that signals the end of a sentence.

Maaloula, Easter, Assad, and Aramaic

MAALOULA WATCH: Assad makes Easter visit to recaptured Christian town.
State television reports Syrian president goes to Maalula, taken by government forces in December (AFP). See also here.

Well that was a good gesture, but more is needed: Why the language of Jesus is at risk (Kinda Jayouse, Globe and Mail).

But in the Syrian civil war, Maaloula is also strategically significant. The village is located near the main road that links Damascus to Homs, which is considered an essential supply route. That is why the government was eager to retake Maaloula from rebels – to cut off their supply routes and give the government more control of central Syria.

The exodus of Christians over the past year has worried experts, who fear that Aramaic speakers will integrate into their new communities and eventually the language will disappear. And although the village has been recaptured, many believe that the residents will not return because their homes have been destroyed, they are not wealthy enough to rebuild and the insecurity of the civil war continues.

“The village is badly damaged and security is very limited,” says one Maaloula resident who did not want to be named for safety reasons. “I do not think we will be able to go there to settle in a long time.”

“We are so happy [Maaloula] is free now, but the village is littered with land mines, many parts of it are destroyed and some homes have been torched,” says a former resident named Ward, who fled in late 2013 and has taken refuge in Damascus. “Most villagers are poor and I doubt they would have the means to rebuild their homes. And those who have the means are afraid that the general security situation is not stable yet or safe,” she added.

Meanwhile in the USA: Assyrians Who Fled Syria Prepare to Celebrate Easter in Chicago (Angie Leventis Lourgos, Chicago Tribune).

The situation in Maaloula is critical and its status as one of last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken as a daily language hangs in doubt. This is a chance for the Assad Government to demonstrate its goodwill and commitment to human rights and religious tolerance. Let's see Maaloula rebuilt, re-established for the original inhabitants, and made secure.

The world is watching.

Background on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) is here and links.

Easter 2014

HAPPY EASTER to all those celebrating!

The links have rotted in my old Easter post, so here they are again. The resurrection narratives in the four Gospels are found in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John 20-21. Paul refers to Jesus' resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. As a bonus, go have a look at the Passion and resurrection fragment of the Gospel of Peter, which may, at least in part, be independent of the canonical Gospels.

Schiffman on Iraq and the Jewish People

ANOTHER BLOG SERIES BY LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Iraq and the Jewish People (11 posts).

De Troyer et al., In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes

NEW BOOK FROM PEETERS:

In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes
Studies in the Biblical Text in Honour of Anneli Aejmelaeus

Series:
Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology, 72

Editors: De Troyer K., Law T. M. , Liljeström M.

Year: 2014
ISBN: 978-90-429-3041-4
Price: Forthcoming

Summary:
The book contains a preface by the Three (editors) and has five sections—all befitting the recipient of this Festschrift with her interest in Septuagint and Textual Criticism. The first part of the book, entitled The Septuagint. Origins and Translations contains articles on what a translator is and does (such as the contribution from Benjamin G. Wright and Joachim Schaper) or how LXXGenesis functions as the first translation of Scripture (Emanuel Tov) and contains numerous articles on idioms and accuracy (John A.L. Lee), on lexical variation (Arie van der Kooij) and on renderings of nouns (Bénédicte Lemmelijn), verbs (Anssi Voitila), tenses (Raimund Wirth), semi-prepositions (Raija Sollamo), particles (Michael N. van der Meer) or lexical expressions and themes such as the “end of times” (Staffan Olofsson) or ‘labouring women (Takamitsu Muraoka), etc. In the second part, entitled The Septuagint and the Versions. Textual Criticism and Text History, the books that are focused on are Samuel and Kings (with contributions by Jan Joosten, Philippe Hugo, Zipora Talshir, Siegfried Kreuzer, Andrés Piquer Otero, Pablo Torijano Morales, Juha Pakkala, Christian Seppanen) and Joshua (with contributions by Seppo Sipilä and Julio Trebolle Barrera). Then, there are also studies on textual issues and text history of Isaiah (Anna Kharanauli), Ezechiel (Johan Lust), Job (Claude Cox), Ecclesiastes (Peter J. Gentry) and Minor Prophets (Hans Ausloos). The third part of this volume is entitled The Septuagint in New Testament and Christian Use and contains two contributions on textual links between LXX and the New Testament (contributions by Tuukka Kauhanen and Georg A. Walser) and patristic texts (contributions by Reinhart Ceulemans and Katrin Hauspie,). A fourth part of the volume is devoted to The Septuagint in Jewish Tradition (with contributions on how the Tabernacle Account was received in Hellenistic Judaism by Alison Salvesen and ‘Seeking “the Septuagint” in a Scroll Dependent World by Robert A. Kraft). The final part of the volume is dedicated to The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It opens with an attempt by Martti Nissinen to answer the question: ‘Since when do Prophets Write?’ Then, there is the contribution by George J. Brooke who offers a variant on the issue of variant editions, albeit from the perspective of the scrolls. Eugene Ulrich explores the fine balance between intentional variants and isolated insertions in 4QSama and the MT. Sarianna Metso offers an article on the Leviticus traditions at Qumran and Jutta Jokiranta offers a reflection on ‘the stranger’ in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea. The contribution by Hanne von Weissenberg forms a nice inclusion with the opening contribution by Benjamin G. Wright as it too focuses on Authority.

Congratulations to Professor Aejmelaeus. And on Facebook, T. Michael Law adds, "Notice this volume's number in its series." He says that the volume should be out by the end of this week.

GJW: Depuydt replies to King

MARK GOODACRE: Jesus' Wife Fragment Latest: Leo Depuydt responds to Karen King . Mark posts the response as a pdf file. I'm not a Coptologist, so I won't try to address the substantive issue. But I do have two observations. First, King's response addresses many of Depuydt's objections, whereas his reply only addresses one of her points. What about the others? Second, the tone of the two responses is very different. King writes objectively and respectfully. She accuses Depuydt of making a grammatical error. If she is wrong, she made a mistake, but she isn't rude about it. Depuydt's reply is very sarcastic and it tries too hard to sound hip and edgy, complete with emoticons. Now regular readers know that I am by no means above a little sarcasm if I think it's justified, but it isn't justified here. King is trying to advance the discussion. If she accused Depuydt incorrectly of making a mistake, this could be pointed out politely and respectfully.

I am still quite skeptical that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is an ancient artifact, but King has made a real effort to keep the tone high and the skeptics should do the same.

Background here and links.

Maaloula in ruins

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Syria fighting leaves Maaloula, a historic Christian town, in ruins. Syrian forces have driven most rebels from Maaloula, home to ancient churches and monasteries now smashed and defaced after months of battles (Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos). Excerpt:

Maaloula never had the strategic value of other nearby areas, such as the city of Yabroud to the north, which was recaptured by the military in March. But it possesses vivid symbolic importance. The Christian enclave has long been a signature site for Syria's diverse assemblage of faiths and ethnicities.

Assad's government has presented itself as a staunch defender of religious tolerance and minorities in the face of Islamic militants who make up some of the strongest rebel forces. Recapturing Maaloula helps reinforce that message.

The town is acclaimed as one of the few places where a version of Aramaic, said to be the language of Jesus, is still spoken and taught. Its ancient churches and monasteries are iconic.

Most of the 2,000 or so residents fled long ago. A group of 13 nuns abducted by Islamic rebels who overran the town last year has since been freed in a prisoner exchange.

One of the first tasks facing officials will be to determine the damage inflicted on Maaloula's historic churches and other Christian sites. Statues of Jesus and Mary that once looked down from twin ridges have been destroyed — whether by the rebels or government shelling is not clear.

St. Thecla monastery, from where the nuns were kidnapped last year, remains in a perilous zone. It was impossible on Tuesday to assess the damage. But crosses had been removed from the tops of St. Thecla and other churches, apparently by Islamic rebels. It seemed likely that the crosses and hillside statues will be easier to replace than other, more profound losses yet to be cataloged.

Up the hill from St. Thecla, the ancient Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus lay in ruins. The sturdy brick structure still stands, but shells have crashed through the dome, and much of the interior has been reduced to wreckage.

The record of the Syrian Government with regard to Maaloula has been at best mixed (e.g., here and here). But now is their chance to demonstrate their support of religious tolerance. Let them rebuild the city and restore it to its ancient inhabitants. And re-open that Aramaic Institute.

Much more on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) here and links.

Lod mosaic at Waddesdon Manor

THE LOD MOSAIC IS COMING TO THE U.K.: Predators and Prey: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel (PastHorizons). The article has lots of cool detail photos.

From there the Lod Mosaic will go on display in St. Petersburg, then back to Israel to be housed in its new permanent museum home, the Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Archaeological Center.

More on the Lod Mosaic and other, related ancient mosaics here with many links.

Maaloula retaken

LEBANON DAILY STAR: Syrian regime troops sweep through Maaloula.

MAALOULA, Syria: Syrian troops triumphantly swept through some of the last remaining opposition strongholds north of Damascus, including the ancient Christian village of Maaloula, sending rebel fighters fleeing to nearby hills amid an ever-tightening noose.

The near total collapse of rebels along a key supply route that has long funneled weapons to opposition-held districts around Damascus helps strengthen President Bashar Assad’s hand in and around the capital.

The dramatic capture of Maaloula, Sarkha and Jibbeh was the fastest series of army successes against rebels in the Qalamoun region since the government launched an offensive in November in the strategic area, a wedge of mountainous territory between the capital and the Lebanese border.

[...]

This is certainly news, but it remains to see whether it is good news or bad news for Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula). Background here with many links. Cross file under "Aramaic Watch."

GJW and online discussion

LIV INGEBORG LIED: GJW and the status of online academic discussion: will you cite this?

This post will neither discuss aspects of the textual contents of GJW nor the possible status of the fragment or its text as a forgery - I am not a Coptologist. Rather, this post concerns the function, use and status of online academic discussions: the discussions that take place in blogs, in their commentary fields, and sometimes even on Facebook, and which sometimes may turn out to make a difference to wider academic debates.

Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here and links.

Noah and white people

EXPLANATION: "Noah" Screenwriter Ari Handel Addresses the Reason For An All White Cast: To Represent "Stand-ins for All People" (Diane Cho, Complex).

I raised this issue in passing in my review of the movie, but I didn't really think through the implications until later. The problem, of course, is that by making everyone white before the Flood, the film opens the door to the old racist meme that dark skin color is the curse of Ham. Now to be absolutely clear, the movie does not include the curse of Ham (although Ham does go into self-imposed exile) and I am not for a moment suggesting that the writers intended any such implication. Still, I do not find their explanation satisfactory. Myths do matter, and the problem could easily have been solved with a little diversification of the cast.

Much more on Noah here and links.

Blood moon tetrad, the Talmud, Passover, and Thallus

COSMIC SYNCHRONICITY WATCH: Watch the lunar eclipse ‘blood moon’ tonight, and witness the beginning of the end of the world (maybe) (Sebastian Anthony, Extreme Tech).

If you’re into skygazing, you really should stay up late tonight (April 14, April 15) and watch the first of a series of four “blood” moons — a sequence of lunar eclipses called a tetrad that will occur over the next two years, and which some religious types believe signifies the beginning of the apocalypse. Mars is also incredibly close to Earth at the moment, making it one of the brightest objects in the sky. This alignment between the Sun, Earth, Mars, and the Moon has only occurred a handful of times in the last two thousand years, each time coinciding with a “hugely significant” religious event. For non-religious types, though, it’s just a great opportunity to see an amazing astronomical event that probably won’t happen again in your lifetime.

[...]

And don't forget that Jupiter is very visible up there too, whatever that means. Besides this lunar and planetary alignment, a number of cosmic synchronicities suggest themselves. Various people (notably here) are pointing out that the Talmud (Sukkah 29a) says that a lunar eclipse is a bad omen for Israel and a blood moon is a sign of war. The relevant passage reads:

Our Rabbis taught, When the sun is in eclipse it is a bad omen for idolaters; when the moon is in eclipse, it is a bad omen for Israel,23 since Israel reckons by the moon25 and idolaters by the sun.26 If it27 is in eclipse in the east, it is a bad omen for those who dwell in the east; if in the west, it is a bad omen for those who dwell in the west; if in the midst of heaven it is bad omen for the whole world. If its face is red as blood, [it is a sign that] the sword is coming to the world; (Soncino Talmud)

Let's hope those omens don't work out this time.

Another synchronicity is the eclipse of the moon during Passover. Granted, the synchronicity is mostly in my own head, in that the connection made me think of the famous citation of an ancient historian called Thallus by the fourth-century writer Sextus Julius Africanus as quoted by the ninth-century chronographer George Syncellus. Syncellus quotes Africanus, with reference to the darkness over the land at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus as reported in the Gospels, as follows: "Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse of the Sun in the third book of his Histories." Africanus adds that he thinks this is wrong and explains that a solar eclipse is impossible during Passover because the moon is full and on the opposite side of the earth from the sun.

But, of course, eclipses of the moon are okay, and here we just had one last night to remind us of that!

Quite a bit has been made of this reference to Thallus as potentially being the earliest external reference to the crucifixion of Jesus and the attendant darkness, but the relevant work of Africanus is lost apart from quotations and the work of Thallus is also lost, again apart from quotations, so whatever Thallus said (which is not quoted verbatim) is nested in two levels of missing context. It is quite unclear whether he said anything about Jesus or the crucifixion in his comment about an eclipse. In addition, we don't even know exactly when he lived, and the argument that he is a Samaritan Thallus who lived a generation after Jesus and was mentioned by Josephus is dodgy. First, Thallus was not an uncommon name and, second, Josephus doesn't actually mention a Samaritan Thallus. This is a debatable modern emendation of Josephus' text. So, alas, the notion of Thallus as a non-Jewish historian writing in the 50s C.E. who mentions Jesus and his crucifixion pretty much evaporates when one looks closely at the evidence.

Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud

NEW BOOK FROM PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud
Moulie Vidas

Hardcover | May 2014 | $35.00 / £24.95 | ISBN: 9780691154862
256 pp. | 6 x 9 | 5 tables. |

eBook | ISBN: 9781400850471 |

Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud offers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that the ancient rabbis were committed to maintaining continuity with the past. Moulie Vidas argues on the contrary that structural features of the Talmud were designed to produce a discontinuity with tradition, and that this discontinuity was part and parcel of the rabbis' self-conception. Both this self-conception and these structural features were part of a debate within and beyond the Jewish community about the transmission of tradition.

Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud, produced in the rabbinic academies of late ancient Mesopotamia, Vidas analyzes key passages to show how the Talmud's creators contrasted their own voice with that of their predecessors. He also examines Zoroastrian, Christian, and mystical Jewish sources to reconstruct the debates and wide-ranging conversations that shaped the Talmud's literary and intellectual character.

Moulie Vidas is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University.

Follow the link for TOC, excerpt, ordering info, and endorsements.

St. Catherine's Monastery threatened?

BARBARIC: Retired army general wants Egypt's St. Catherine's Monastery demolished. Ahmed Ragai Attiya says that the historic UNESCO site in South Sinai poses a threat to Egypt's national security, after the monks turned it into 'a place for foreigners' (Sherry El-Gergawi, ahramonline).

It is one thing for a crank columnist to call for a lawsuit over the legend of the ten plagues. It is quite another for an (up to now) respected member of the military actually to bring a lawsuit to try to destroy some of Egypt's history. If the story is true (and one hopes it is inaccurate or exaggerated), it is dismaying that the suit is being taken as seriously as it is. It should be laughed out of court.

More problems for St. Catherine's Monastery, as well as much background on it, noted here and links.

Moss on the GJW

CANDIDA MOSS: The ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ is Still as Big as Mystery as Ever. Scholars had concluded that a papyrus referring to Jesus’s wife was a clever forgery—until new evidence re-opened the case. Is there any way to figure out the truth? (The Daily Beast). Professor Moss sums up the issues well. Excerpts:

The biggest problems were the grammatical errors in the text and the similarities between GJW and another early Christian Coptic text, the Gospel of Thomas. Francis Watson argued that all of the fragmentary sentences preserved on the papyrus are also found in the Gospel of Thomas. He tentatively suggested that the text is a pastiche compiled by a modern forger with an elementary grasp of Coptic.

Even more damning was the argument that one of the typographical errors in the fragment appears to have been copied from an erroneous online edition of the Gospel of Thomas. The sixth line of the GJW nonsensically seems to read, “Evil man habitually does not he does habitually bring [sic].” Interestingly, precisely the same error appears in a 2002 online edition of the Gospel of Thomas. The chances of two independent texts making the same grammatical error are remarkably small. (You just can’t trust the internet for anything these days.)

[...]

In the absence of clear evidence, the debate is still where it was over a year ago. On the one hand, tests designed to prove that the text is a forgery failed to establish its inauthenticity. On the other hand, the grammatical errors and similarities to the Gospel of Thomas are still a problem. A modern forger with the right materials could still have made this text.

And let none of this be forgotten in the excitement over the test results. It really comes down to two possibilities. The first is that we happened to find a very old unprovenanced text that says exactly what the Zeitgeist of the second decade of the twenty-first century would like to hear about Jesus. This text happened to be written in what looks like a fourth century Coptic script, even though the papyrus it is written on tests (at least on the second try*) some centuries younger than that. Moreover, the text is more or less based on the Gospel of Thomas, which luckily we already had, and the ancient scribe even made the same copying error as an entirely independent modern editor of an internet edition of the Gospel of Thomas. So it's possible that the fragment is a genuine ancient(-ish) artifact, but we sure won the big-time lottery on this one!

The second possibility is that a forger did a good job of obtaining ancient blank papyrus and obtaining (or mixing up a reasonable facsimile of) ancient ink and used them to create the artifact. Unfortunately for the forger and fortunately for us, the Coptic script used by the forger was some centuries too early for the papyrus, the forged text is rather too close to its Gospel of Thomas template, and there was a pesky typo in the Gospel of Thomas edition which the hapless forger copied.

Those seem to be the options. I blog, you decide.

Background here and links.

*The first try at a C-14 test gave a date range that was even earlier — before the birth of Jesus.

UPDATE: Christian Askeland at ETC highlights an attempt in 1990 to forge a Gospel of Thomas manuscript. Leo Depuydt also debunked it on grounds very similar to the objections to the authenticity of the GJW: Demotic Gospel of Thomas.

Superhuman angelic priests

DANIEL R. STREET: Priests and Israel as Superhuman (καὶ τὰ λοιπά).

Passover

HAPPY PASSOVER to all those celebrating! The holiday begins this evening at sundown.

Biblical passages that describe the precepts for Passover include Exodus 12 and Exodus 23:15 and Leviticus 23:5-8 and Numbers 9:1-14 and Deuteronomy 16:1-8 and Ezekiel 45:21-25.

Another recent post on Passover is here.

Schiffman on Purity as Separation

ANOTHER BLOG SERIES BY LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Purity as Separation (4 posts).

Passover and Jesus

TIS THE SEASON: The ASOR Blog has a star lineup of posts on Passover and Jesus.

Eric M. Meyers, Did Jesus Celebrate Passover in Sepphoris?

Adela Yarbro Collins, The Passover and Jesus

Helen K. Bond, Passover as Jesus Knew it

Tasty scroll fragment

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To: Make A Dead Sea Scroll.

GJW latest

THE NEWS ON THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE is predictably making a splash in the media and the blogosphere. The media coverage is for the most part repeating the line of the Harvard press releases and getting that pretty accurately. I see no need to link to any of the many news articles beyond what I covered yesterday. As for the blogosphere, much the same applies, but I do want to note blog posts by Mark Goodacre here and especially here. The latter publishes a new essay by Professor Watson of Durham University: Jesus’ Wife Attempts a Comeback: Initial Response (pdf file) which gives a preliminary evaluation of the new evidence. Excerpt:

A press release that accurately represented the analyses published in the
Harvard Theological Review might have been entitled: “Testing of Jesus’ Wife Fragment Yields Inconclusive Results”. That would not have attracted much attention, but it would at least be truthful.

I am very busy with my own work in the coming weeks and it will be some time before I can get around to reading the HTR articles, but meanwhile I'll try to keep track of any interesting developments.

Background here and links.

UPDATE: I've been meaning to link to this post by Larry Hurtado, which came out before the GJW test results but is nonetheless relevant: Carbon-14 and Palaeographical Dating of Papyri. Note this in particular:

To summarize results of the tests [on Green Collection manuscripts] reported on in [the conference in] Oklahoma City, the results from the three labs were basically/broadly in agreement, which gives some assurance about the reliability of the process. But also, these results were broadly in agreement with the prior/independent palaeographical dating of these items. And this (as I see it) is the really larger import. It means (contrary to the reported comment by a distinguished papyrologist, who is not himself a palaeographer, that palaeographical dating is “bullshit”), that palaeographical dating (using today’s standards and practices) by competent palaeographers can be treated as broadly reliable.

Contrast this with the test results on the GJW: the two C-14 tests came up with results that differed by many centuries, not overlapping at all, and both results were incompatible with the dating that had already been proposed by paleographers. When lined up against the Green Collection tests, this sounds inconclusive indeed.

UPDATE: New blog posts: Christian Askeland (ETC): Jesus's Wife Resurrected from Dead; Larry Hurtado: “Jesus’ Wife Fragment”: Further Observations.

GJW test results finally in

HARVARD MAGAZINE: The Jesus's Wife Fragment: The Scientific Evidence. Bottom line: the papyrus and "ink" test as ancient and the results are being published in HTR:

Now the scientific dating of the papyrus and the ink (which is not ink at all, but rather lampblack, a pigment often used in ancient Egypt for writing on papyrus) indicate that both are consistent with an ancient origin.

Because the fragment is so small, carbon-dating it proved troublesome. Researchers at the University of Arizona called into question their own results—which dated the papyrus to several hundred years before the birth of Christ—because they were unable to complete the cleaning process on the small sample of papyrus with which they were working, and felt that might have led to spurious results. A second carbon-dating analysis undertaken by Clay professor of scientific archaeology Noreen Tuross at Harvard and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute dated the papyrus, and a separate one (also believed to be of ancient origin) with text from the Gospel of John to approximately A.D. 700 to 800.

The article then mentions the literary context:

Because the text concerning Jesus’s wife is written in Sahidic, a language of ancient Egypt, it may be a transcription of an earlier Coptic text that was based on a Greek copy, as many early Christian gospels are. Given similarities in wording and subject to the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip, the text of the GJW may originate in a time as early as the second half of the second century C.E.

This may be, at least in part, an allusion to the literary-critical arguments by that the text is a forgery based on ancient material published in modern times or even on an online edition of one of the texts. There were also objections to authenticity on paleographic and papyrological grounds.

The article goes on to indicate that the HTR issue contains some dissent, formulated before the test results came in, but not irrelevant to them:

The April 2014 issue of the Harvard Theological Review (HTR) includes King’s article (originally slated to be published in January 2013) discussing the fragment and its importance to understanding early Christian debates about whether wives and mothers could be disciples of Jesus. The issue also contains a counterpoint by professor 
of Egyptology and ancient Western Asian studies Leo Depuydt of Brown University, who writes that he is certain that the text is a modern forgery. Depuydt’s analysis, which predates the scientific findings, points out that a forger could have written with lampblack on ancient papyrus. Infrared microspectroscopic analysis of the ink and papyrus, however, found nothing to suggest that they had been “fabricated or modified at different times.” In a rebuttal, King finds Depuydt’s textual analysis unpersuasive.

One point that does not come up in the Harvard Magazine article is that the date originally proposed for the fragment on paleographic grounds was the fourth century, yet the C14 date for the papyrus is 700-800, some centuries later. Even granting that both kinds of dating are approximate, this is a very large discrepancy. And it took two tries to get a result that was anywhere near the paleographic date or indeed any possible date that involves the text being genuinely ancient. If the C14 dating is correct, either Coptic paleography is a very inexact science (which may well be) or it is not unthinkable that a forger wrote in a fourth-century script on a blank piece of papyrus that was very old, but not quite old enough.

The April 2014 issue of HTR is not yet available online, but I look forward to reading the articles when they come out (and when I have time). But my opinion on this is not particularly important. It will be the evaluations of the Coptologists, paleographers, specialists in radiocarbon dating, and historians of late antique Christianity which matter. I will be looking for clear information on who did the tests (which seems to be given) and replies to the literary, paleographic, and papyrological objections. I would also like to know more about the dating of the lamp black, which is reportedly "ancient" also, but what does that mean? What is the range of possible dates and how does the range compare to the dating of the papyrus?

This round goes to those who think that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is a genuinely ancient literary artifact. I'm still skeptical, but maybe we did win the lottery on this one. But the really good and important news is that the material is being published in a peer-review journal. Now the discussion can start in earnest.

Background here with many links.

Also, it really doesn't need to be repeated, but I'll repeat it anyway, that if this fragment is genuine, it still tells us nothing about whether Jesus was married or not. At best it preserves speculation from a century or more (perhaps much more) after Jesus' time. That, of course, would be of considerable interest to historians of early Christianity, but not for the study of the Historical Jesus.

UPDATE: More in the NYT: Papyrus Referring to Jesus’s Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say (LAURIE GOODSTEIN). Regarding the ink:

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

At M.I.T.’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Timothy M. Swager, a chemistry professor, and two students used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether the ink showed any variations or inconsistencies.

“The main thing was to see, did somebody doctor this up?” Dr. Swager said in an interview. “And there is absolutely no evidence for that. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

[...]

A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he [Dr. Depuydt] said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.

But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. ...”

How about ancient ink recovered from an ancient inkwell and rehydrated with distilled water? One can find inkwells dating to somewhere in the vicinity of the relevant period on eBay, although I don't know if such are ever found with desiccated ink inside.

CORRECTION: The April 2014 issue of HTR is available online here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jodi Magness reports that one of the inkwells discovered at Qumran still "contained the remains of dried ink" (The Archaeology of Qumran and The Dead Sea Scrolls [Eerdmans, 2002], p. 60). So it does happen. (HT private communication from Dan McClellan.)

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: See the blog posts by Christopher Rollston, Larry Hurtado, and Robert Cargill. And further, James McGrath has much linkage.

Volokh on the Golb case

EUGENE VOLOKH: Crime to e-mail your roommate’s girlfriend saying ‘he really is a useless person’? Volokh, who is a Constitutional lawyer Law Professor, seems to think it not unlikely that some or all of the charges in the Raphael Golb identity-theft-case appeal will be upheld, but he also thinks that the prosecutor is reading the criminal harassment statute dangerously broadly.

Background on the Golb case is here and links.

Frogs or crocodiles?

HAARETZ: Word of the Day / Tzefarde'a: A weird word for an unimpressive plague. Could it be that the rabbis have had it wrong all these centuries, and the plague was actually of crocodiles? Short answer: probably not. As the article notes, the evidence for the meaning "frog" goes back to the Septuagint, whereas the suggestion of the meaning "crocodile" is medieval.

The [five-letter-root] Hebraic word is also pretty unique among the Semitic languages, whose words for "frog" are similar – but only slightly so. Arabic has ḍifda, Aramaic has orda’a, Ge'ez has karn’na’at, while old Egyptians called the pop-eyed amphibian the krar.

As this is the case, how can we be sure that the plague of frogs was really a plague of frogs, especially since the word only appears in the Bible in relation to the same plague and in no other context?

The answer is that we can’t be entirely sure. In fact, in the 12th century Rabbi Abraham Ben Meir Ibn Ezra suggested tzefarde'a actually means "crocodile." That would surely have been much worse than a plague of frogs.

Free OUP stuff for a week!

FOR YOU, SPECIAL DEAL: National Library Week — All OUP Online products are free April 13-19th.

CLARIFICATION: "Access is available in the United States and Canada only."

JSIJ: Cohen, "'Shmuel said: Hilkheta'"

JEWISH STUDIES, AN INTERNET JOURNAL, has published a new article pertinent to ancient Judaism: Barak S. Cohen, "Shmuel Said: Hilkheta": The Halakhic Rulings of Shmuel in the Two Talmudim (pfd file). The article is in Hebrew. English abstract:

The well-known amora Shmuel was one of the central rabbinic figures in the first generation of Babylonian amoraim. He is known as a sage familiar with Persian culture who brought about the transformation of tannaitic law in Babylonia. This article examines his halakhic methodology by analyzing one of the most significant collections of halakhic rulings found in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: the more than 130 sources in which Shmuel issues a ruling based on a tannaitic source. These sources employ the literary formula “Shmuel said: Hilkheta.” This analysis reveals important findings about the application of tannaitic law in Babylonia and about Shmuel’s unique Babylonian approach which emerges from these rulings. By analyzing the methodological characteristics that underlie Shmuel's halakhic rulings we can offer a systematic and comprehensive explanation of his rulings, as well as of his disputes with other sages, especially in light of the apodictic phrasing of these rulings. This study contributes to clarification of the important question of the reliability of amoraic statements in the Babylonian Talmud, demonstrating that the study of specific amoraim and their rulings can offer a significant contribution to scholarly exegesis of the Babylonian Talmud.

The Syriac Gazetteer

SYRIAC WATCH: The Syriac Gazetteer is a new online publication of Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal.

The Syriac Gazetteer is a geographical reference work of Syriaca.org for places relevant to Syriac studies. “Places relevant to Syriac Studies” include places named in Syriac texts (such as Ḥarqel — ܚܪܩܠ), places interesting to historians who work on Syriac texts (such as Dura-Europos), and places where scholarship on Syriac is being produced (such as Japan). There are no temporal or spatial boundaries for the geographic database, which collects places relevant to any period of history useful for Syriac studies, from places mentioned in the Peshitta version of Genesis to places founded recently, and from ancient Edessa to Mongol-era outposts in China and diaspora communities in the United States of America. At least in theory, any type or size of place could be represented in the geographic database, from large empires to single churches or a particular named city gate. Maps are provided for places whose location is known, but the database includes places which are not located or even locatable: each place is a conceptual thing with a mental existence related to, but not reducible to, its physical manifestation. Mythological and other ahistorical places are also included in the database.

Via David Allen Michelson on the Hugoye List.

Apollo of Gaza: more no news as news

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What happened to Gaza's Apollo statue? A precious statue vanished after its discovery in Gaza last summer and many suspect it is now a hostage to politics (Lena Odgaard, AlJazeera). Excerpt:

Bassem Naim, advisor for foreign affairs to Ismail Hanyieh, the prime minister of Gaza's Hamas-led government, told Al Jazeera that the statue is in the custody of the Ministry of Tourism. "They are taking care of the statue and finding out how Gaza can make the maximum benefit of the statue - not only at a financial level, but also culturally," he explained. "When we find a statue like Apollo, I'm sure it will divert the attention of millions around the world toward the small suffering city, and I hope it can help Gaza attract the attention of the international community towards the suffering of Gaza."

But time is precious when it comes to restoration, said Fadel Alotol. He leads the archaeological excavation of the Tel Umm el-Amr site in Gaza, and is one of the few archaeology and restoration experts in the Palestinian territory. To his frustration, he has not been able to see the statue except for the few leaked pictures of it, and said he was the one who identified the statue as depicting Apollo.

Experts, including Alotol, have questioned Jawdat's story, arguing that the colour and apparent excellent condition of the statue contradict the story that it was found in the sea. They speculate it was discovered inland, under the ground, and that the real story has been stifled either to avoid arguments of ownership or to avoid revealing that it was found while digging tunnels to nearby Egypt.

Alotol fears that the government is using the statue as political leverage to engage with European countries. The European Union brands Hamas as a terrorist organisation and will not meet with members of the party at an official level.

We've heard all this before, and the only actual news in the story is that there is still no sign of or word on the Apollo of Gaza.

Background (including concerns about the authenticity of the statue) here and links.

Chickens, eggs, and torch relays

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Which Came First: The Chicken, the Egg, or the Divine Law That Governs Their Use? The apparent abstraction of Talmudic rulings, immune to the vagaries of history, are also a key to Jewish survival. Excerpt:

The tractate has come to be called Beitzah because that is its very first word, and just as advertised, the pages we read this week were entirely devoted to eggs. “An egg that is laid on a holiday,” chapter 1 begins: What is its legal status? As always when the Talmud seems to be focusing on a trivial issue, the rabbis are not interested in eggs per se, but in the concepts that this particular question brings to light. In this case, we are dealing with our old friend muktzeh, a legal category that was dealt with extensively in tractates Shabbat and Eruvin.

Plus torch-relay sabotage.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

The new Patriarch and Teaneck

THE NEW SYRIAN ORTHODOX PATRIARCH is from Teaneck, New Jersey: Teaneck archbishop is named patriarch of Syriac Orthodox Church (Chris Harris, NorthJersey.com).

Hundreds of enthusiastic well-wishers gathered outside St. Mark’s Cathedral on Saturday afternoon to congratulate and welcome back Cyril Aphrem Karim, the new worldwide patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Karim, 48, who had been serving as archbishop of the church’s Eastern United States Diocese since moving to Teaneck in 1996, was elected March 31 to head one of the world’s oldest Christian sects.

Karim — whose official title will be Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East — returned Saturday from Damascus, where he was installed this week as the 123rd successor to St. Peter the Apostle.

He will reside in Syria.

[...]

Teaneck is a scholarly place. It is home to an important Syrian Orthodox community that has ties to the early history of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as to Neo-Aramaic and scholarly Syriac studies. Gorgias Press, the well-known academic press specializing in Syriac studies is located in nearby Piscataway. Other associations of Teaneck with ancient Judaism are noted here and here.

Background on the new Patriarch is here.

Ari Handel interview

NOAH CO-WRITER ARI HANDEL is interviewed by David R. Henson at the Edges of Faith Blog: The Faithfulness of the Noah Film: Writer Ari Handel on God Learning From Humankind, Vitriolic Christians, & Midrash. Excerpt:

Even the parts that were not directly in the Noah story you can find resonances and themes throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. I loved the way you wove in not just the Noah story but themes that you find throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

AH: Wherever possible it was our aim not to contradict Genesis explicitly and our secondary aim that wherever possible draw off of midrash, exegesis and extrabiblical texts to try and pull, because we had to create a world — but also we were taking advantage of the centuries of thinking that has gone into the story by others and bring that stuff in because it makes everything richer.

Much more on Noah here and links.

Random thoughts on the Noah movie

I SAW NOAH THIS WEEKEND. The film more or less met my expectations, which were not high, but it certainly did not exceed them. The CGI was good, of course. Thank you Titanic, Lord of the Rings, and Transformers.

Below are a few random thoughts, most of which I have not seen elsewhere, although I don't doubt that some of them have already appeared in other reviews that I haven't seen. There are some spoilers, so don't keep reading if that matters to you.

• It was a forgettable, shamelessly emotionally manipulative movie which said more about our society (indeed this decade of our society) than anything about the Bible.

• In its favor, it grasped and expressed the full psychotic horror of the Flood story which is only implicit in the biblical narrative.

• Earlier I expressed reservations about the movie functioning as midrash. But in favor of that view, it did make ample use of the midrashic technique of transferring biblical motifs from one story to fill out another one. Notably we have the theme of the barren matriach Ila (cf. Sarah, Rebekah, etc.) made fertile by divine dispensation; the blessing by the aged patriarch Methuselah (cf. Isaac and his sons etc.); and of course, the-binding of-Isaac theme applied to Noah and his granddaughters.

• The oddest departure from the biblical narrative was the matter of the wives of the sons of Noah. Genesis has God telling Noah to bring the sons' wives aboard (6:18) and reports that he did so (7:13). The movie makes up the story of Ila, which is fair enough in that none of the wives is named in Genesis. But then no other wives come aboard and we are left to believe that Ham and Japheth will eventually marry their nieces. Presumably all this was to inject some romance and drama into the story, but I still thought it was weird.

• Incidentally, the name "Naameh" for Noah's wife comes from the name of Tubal-Cain's sister ("Naamah") in Genesis 4:22, who was identified with Noah's wife in Rabbinic midrash.

• The story of the sons of God and the daughters of men (Genesis 6:1-4) was picked up in two different ways in the movie. The Enochic myth of the descent of the Watchers was brought in (where the sons of God are angels), but otherwise the narrative stuck to the Rabbinic and Patristic tradition that the sons of God were the godly line of Seth and the daughters of men were the corrupt line of Cain. The whole episode of the mating of the Watchers with mortal women and the resulting birth of the Nephilim or giants was left out entirely, perhaps to preserve that 12A rating.

• The idea of the Promethean descent of the Watchers to share their knowledge with humanity comes from Jubilees 4:15. The fallen Watchers are eternally damned, not forgiven, in all ancient versions of their story.

• What did Noah and his family eat if they lived in a blasted volcanic landscape with no crops and no eating of animals? Lichen?

• What did that snakeskin heirloom do besides glow?

• Why didn't anybody ever ask what an "Ark" was?

• Why were there only white people before the Flood?

• Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

• Why didn't someone kill Noah in his sleep during those nine months in the Ark?

• How many extinct species did Tubal-Cain eat during those same nine months? Is that what happened to the unicorns and the saber-toothed cats?

• Speaking of animals and the Ark, what about the dinosaurs?

• The message of the movie seems to be that a feeling of love (or not) should decide the most consequential of moral issues. It's creepy that a lot of people seem to think that's okay.

• I really, really hope that they don't make a sequel.

• Ham comes back in sixteen years and marries Miley Cyrus ...

More reviews of and commentary on Noah are here and links.

Juditha Triumphans

APOCRYPHA WATCH: Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans was performed last week by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in Northern California to pretty positive reviews:

Juditha Triumphans a Triumph (Ashley Webb, Stark Insider): "It’s hard to imagine a time when the Philharmonia Baroque ever sounded better."

Philharmonia Baroque review: Uneven but strong 'Juditha' (Joshua Kosman, SFGate): "But it's not until the second half that Vivaldi pulls out all the stops."

Schiffman on Second Temple Literature and Rabbinic Judaism

ANOTHER BLOG SERIES BY LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Second Temple Literature and Rabbinic Judaism (7 posts).

John of Patmos

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Visions of John of Patmos (The Anxious Bench).