WILLEM-JAN DE WIT has placed the text of his (Dutch equivalent of a) Master's thesis at Utrecht University online:

Expectations and the Expected One: 4Q521 and the Light It Sheds on the New Testament

I don't have time to read it right now, but there you have it.

Via Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog.

MORE ON THE OTTAWA EXHIBITION from the Globe and Mail. Excerpt:

TORONTO � There's a tiny ivory pomegranate from Solomon's Temple, an engraved slab of stone that alludes to the biblical House of David, and three fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most important archeological discovery of the 20th century. All of these are among a stunning collection of more than 100 artifacts that go on display Friday at the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa.

The exhibition, developed by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in collaboration with Montreal's Museum of Archaeologiy and History, where it was shown earlier this year, covers a period of roughly 1,900 years, from the 12th century before the birth of Jesus to the seventh century AD. It's a span that includes seminal events of ancient Western civilization -- the destruction of the First Temple and the exile of the Jews to Babylonia, their subsequent return and the construction of the Second Temple, and the schisms in Judaism that ultimately gave rise to Christianity.

The Ottawa exhibition even contains scroll fragments that have not yet been displayed In Israel, including the so-called Isaiah B portion.

"THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION are more important than the Torah." So Dr. Yousef Ziedan, director of the new Library of Alexandria, on why he decided to add a copy of an Arabic translation of the former to a display including the latter. Excerpt of his comments from the MEMRI translation of the Al-Usbu' interview:

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.

"Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it� It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

Keep reading; it just gets weirder.

Thanks to Ellen Birnbaum for the reference.

UPDATE: David Nishimura has more at his blog Cronaca.

CHRIS KNIGHTS e-mails in reply to my latest comments on the History of the Rechabites:

Thank you, Jim, for reponding so quickly to my communication. It would perhaps be helpful for readers of this Blog if I charted the substantial areas of agreement that exist between you and me:

1. We agree that The Sory of Zosimus�is the best title for rhe whole text, with The History�of the Rechabites being reserved for chapters 8-10 alone (using Charlesworth's chapter divisions)
2. We agree that HistRech is a separate�text, that has been inserted into StorZos at some stage after the creation of a form of StorZos.
3. We agree that HistRech is currently only extant within StorZos
4. �We agree that HistRech is a Greek composition
5. We agree that StorZos is - in its current and final form - a Christian work
6. We agree that the only certain date we have for HistRech is the date of the oldest ms of StorZos
7. We agree that HistRech is pseudepigraphical
8. We agree that HistRech is short and that, therefore, coming to any conclusions about it is very difficult.

In all of these, there is perhaps more�common ground between�the two of us than between either of us and Charlesworth and Martin.

Where we disgaree is over whether HistRech is a Jewish or a Christian composition, and whether we have enough evidence to tell. In considering this issue, I will freely admit that I was swayed by the views of McNeil, Martin and Charlesworth - and will observe that, when I first started researching HistRech in 1986, Charlesworth's�standing as an OT Pseudepigrapha scholar was very high indeed. Perhaps I instinctively felt that, as a mere doctoral student, there were limits to how far I could disgree with C! It's interesting that it's taken 10+ years for a better classification of what is Jewish and what is Christian in the parabiblical literature to emerge!

What we have to take into account with HistRech are:

1. Its clear use of the Septuagint, and its Greek language, and when the LXX stopped being used by Jews in antiquity
2. Its clear affinities with some rabbinic traditions about the Rechabites, and whether these affinities are coincidental or not.
3. Its lack of what�I would term 'high profile' Christian signature features, as McNeil so clearly observed
4. The extent to which the nudity command and NT quotes in it are (or are not) integral to the text - on literary-critical grounds, not theological ones. If they are integral and not inserted by a redactor then, clearly, it is most unlikely that�HistRech is Jewish.

It may be that we should see HistRech as a�Christian composition, composed by someone familiar with Jewish rabbinic traditions. I certainly have no vested interest in HistRech being Jewish, beyond having to rethink what�I said in my contribution to Roots in the Future, the Festschrift for Alec Graham, the previous Bishop of Newcastle, in 1997, where I talked about 'The Christian Use�of Jewish Writings: Ancient Example and Modern Practice'. I have also been at pains to observe in all my articles on the text that my conclusions were only preliminary, and open to development and revision. Of course, the editors of JSJ and JSP�might be concerned - although the editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers will be rejoicing in heaven.

But I'm still not convinced that we are unwarranted in claiming that is likely to be Jewish- but your skepticism is well-taken, Jim!

Like you, I wonder if Ronit is�out there somewhere reading this ... or perhaps even Charlesworth, or Martin, or McNeil?

Best wishes,

Chris Knights

Thanks Chris. I'm busy right now, but if I can think of anything else useful to say, I'll try to post it tomorrow.

A COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS is evidently circulating on the antiquities market and Stephen C. Carlson of Hypotyposeis gives some information on it. (Scroll up for another posting on it as well as an additional mention of our own Jonathan Pennington.) There's also an entry on the Gospel of Judas in Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings website.

The concept of a Gospel in which Judas is the (or a) hero is pretty interesting and reminds me of the Judas of the Last Temptation of Christ: perhaps yet another "Gnostic" theme in it. I wonder if Nikos Kazantzakis knew about the Irenaeus passage.

THE "GENEVA ACCORDS" WERE SIGNED ON MONDAY. Of course the trouble is that actual treaties are generally signed by the governments involved. I'm not at all happy with the idea of giving the Palestinians sovereignty over the Temple Mount until their leaders repudiate their denial that the Jewish temple ever stood there.

MEL GIBSON has refused a request from the Vatican for an advance screening of his The Passion of Christ, according to Business Day. (Warning: this link has repeatedly made my Internet Explorer crash, but works fine on Netscape. Open at your own risk.) Excerpt:

VATICAN CITY - Movie director Mel Gibson has turned down a request from the Vatican to have an advance look of his movie about the last hours of Jesus of Nazareth, the film's producer said yesterday.

The Pontifical Council for Culture asked for the showing in the context of a congress here on the theme "Christ and the Cinema," which has brought together experts from Roman Catholic universities around the world.

Producer Nick Hill said the film was not ready for showing because Gibson was in the cutting room "softening" the most violent images of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Yesterday there was a report in the Daily Mirror that a special screening next week had been arranged for the Pope. It sounds as though the refused Vatican screening is something different, but I can't tell for sure from the available information.

ARTIFACTS EXCAVATED FROM BETHSAIDA will go on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum, according to the Billings Gazette. Excerpts:

Beginning Friday, 137 ancient artifacts unearthed at the Bethsaida site by [Elizabeth] McNamer [adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Rocky Mountain College] and others will be on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum. The exhibit titled "Bethsaida: Life Revealed in the Layers" will remain in Billings through March 14.

[...]

Visitors to the exhibit will see such items as pottery, coins and fishing implements that date back to the first century A.D.

"We found a fisherman's house that was quite large," McNamer said. "Fishermen were middle-class businessmen."

Members of the archeological team found wine bottles imported from the island of Rhodes in a fisherman's house and golden jewelry, McNamer said. A gold earring will be on display at the museum.

Interestingly, continued excavation of the site unearthed a city that existed in the time of Israel's King David, McNamer said. Bethsaida most likely served as the capital of the kingdom of Geshur.

"We have unearthed the city gate that David would have walked through - it's the largest city gate ever unearthed in Israel," she said.

The exhibit will include a full-scale replica of a stele, a marker with the image of a moon god, to whom people paid homage when they entered the ancient city. According to McNamer, the city was destroyed by the Assyrians in 732 BCE (before the common era).

The city was not rebuilt until a couple of centuries before Jesus' time, McNamer said. In the year 30 A.D., Philip, the son of Herod the Great, dedicated a temple built at Bethsaida in honor of Livia Julia, Julius Caesar's wife.

An incense shovel from the temple and incense bowls were both discovered, McNamer said, and they will be part of the exhibit.

Bethsaida was destroyed in the year 70 A.D. by the Romans. Sixty years later, a great earthquake changed the topography of the land "and because of that, the city was never rebuilt," McNamer said.

THE JOURNAL TC has a new article:

Michael Graves, The Origins of Ketiv-Qere Readings

Abstract: Attempts to explain the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings have centered around two basic models. According to one model, both the Ketiv and the Qere represent variant readings which can be traced back to an ancient collation of manuscripts. According to the other model, readers introduced the Qere into the written text (the Ketiv) with the intention of correcting what they perceived to be an error. Views that combine features of these two models also exist. The author suggests that the two traditional models have not supplied an adequate framework for evaluating the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings and that a better approach can be established by focusing on the central questions which cut across both traditional positions.

The Hebrew in the article requires SBL fonts to be readable (for instructions, go here).

"SHOULD CHEESEBURGERS BE KOSHER?" asks Jack M. Sasson in the December issue of Bible Review. He answers no, but he still thinks that those biblical passages about seething a kid in its mother's milk may have been misunderstood. The, uh, meat of his argument is as follows:

Since bissel can mean �cook,� and hlv can refer to �fat,� and the Israelites were apparently permitted to eat fat as long as it did not come from a sacrificial offering, I propose translating our prohibition: �You may not cook a kid in its mother�s fat.� If so, we would be dealing not with an arcane or enigmatic dietary injunction, but with a wise counsel, an aphorism, instructing a farming community not to squander the bounties that God has given Israel. For, to cook an animal in its mother�s fat would require the slaughter of both the mother and the young. The imprudent killing of the producer and the produced on the same occasion would lead to a serious reduction in stock, with potentially disastrous results.

The same kind of prudent advice is found in Deuteronomy 22:6-7: �Should you chance upon a bird�s nest before you on the road, on any tree or on the ground, as hatchlings or as eggs, with the mother sitting by the hatchlings or on the eggs, do not take the mother along with the young. Shoo away the mother and take the young, so that you may prosper and live long.� As in our prohibition, banning the killing of the mother bird allows the mother to produce more eggs to chance upon later.

[...]

Within a couple of centuries after the Hellenistic period, the interdiction against cooking a kid in milk itself developed from a quaint, narrowly interpreted practice to one with a sweeping application against mixing milk and meat. In passages of the Talmud, the injunction inspired a major segment of Jewish traditional practice of kashruth, or kosher laws. In turn, as it has been persuasively argued, this attachment to a remarkable interpretation of dietary rules and regulations became a bulwark for Jewish survival. Adopting them, observant Jews found it necessary to avoid intimacy with populations that obeyed no religious rules concerning the eating of meat, preserving their distinctiveness as a community in faith and practice.

I have sought to explain the original meaning of a law that remains enigmatic to scholarship. Yet this explanation should prove irrelevant to how traditional Jews today display their attachment to their faith. Traditional Judaism owes its rules of practical life to biblical laws as interpreted by the Jewish sages. This means that lasagna and cheeseburgers must still not be served at their tables.

THE POPE HAS REQUESTED a private screening of Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, according to the Daily Mirror.

THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION in Ottawa is opening a new exhibit, Ancient Treasures and the Dead Sea Scrolls, on Thursday. Excerpt from the Toronto Star article:

The exhibition includes portions of three of the first Dead Sea scrolls ever found � the Isaiah B Scroll (one of the oldest biblical manuscripts known), the Community Rule and the War Scroll. The Isaiah B Scroll has never been displayed, even in Israel, before being brought to Canada.

A somewhat different version of this exhibition was on view in Montreal at the Museum of Archeology and History over the summer.

But the Ottawa museum is putting more emphasis on some of the artefacts accompanying the scrolls � seven of which were not part of the Montreal exhibit and will be making their Canadian debut in Ottawa.

One of the most startling of these artefacts: a replica of a foot bone, discovered in Jerusalem in 1968 just after the Six Day War, which provides the only known physical link to the practice of crucifixion.

"It's the cast of a heel bone," says [curator Adolfo] Roitman, an energetic 46-year-old visionary who moved to Israel from Argentina as a young anthropology scholar.

"This heel, dating back almost two thousand years, was discovered in an ossuary, which is a box for bones," he explains.

The heel bone had a nail through it, and a piece of wood was still attached to the nail. According to Roitman, the discovery of this remnant had major implications for the reconstruction of history.

"The practice of crucifixion was a reality for many years in the eastern Mediterranean," Roitman explains. "It was a widespread practice of the Romans, and thousands of victims were crucified.

"But for centuries, we had to rely on literary descriptions and images rendered by artists using their imaginations. Until this discovery, we had no physical indication of just how it was done, in the case of Jesus and

There's more on this heel bone in the article by Joe Zias cited here.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Fitzmeyer, Joseph A.
Tobit
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Fountain, A. Kay
Literary and Empirical Readings of the Books of Esther
Reviewed by Slivniak Dmitri

Eve, Eric
The Jewish Context of Jesus' Miracles
Reviewed by Douglas Geyer

Malina, Bruce J., Gerd Thiessen and Wolfgang Stegemann, eds.
The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels
Reviewed by Robert Derrenbacker

TWO MORE NEW BOOKS ON ANCIENT JUDAISM:

Christian M.M. Brady, The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations
Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture, 3 Vindicating God (Brill)

M. Patrick Graham, Gary N. Knoppers, Steven L. Mackenzie, The Chronicler as Theologian (JSOT/Continuum)

IN RESPONSE TO MY SBL PAPER ON THE STORY OF ZOSIMUS, Dr. Chris Knights e-mails:

Thank you for bringing my researches on StorZos/HistRech to a wider audience at the recent SBL meeting. It's also pleasing to hear that there is someone else in the world who shares my love for what my wife has for years called 'The Ripping Yarn'... although I did suspect that you had an interest in the text, as one of your students, Alan Turnbull, did contact me a year or so back in connection with an essay he was writing. Your survey of the secondary literature suggests to me that no-one else has produced anything on the text of late. I'm not in an academic context, so keeping up with research, either my own or others', is virtually impossible. There was, I seem to remember, a research student at the Hebrew University called Ronit Nikolsky a few years back, whose own research had some overlap with mine, but where she has got to I don't know.

Thank you also for praising my work, and for agreeing with it in many respects.

Can I respond - briefly - to your main contention? I actually agree with you (and have thought for a while) that my attempt to claim a Jewish origin for AbBles rests on a very shaky foundation. Rereading that article now shows to me that it is little more than special pleading. But - as I noted at the end of 'An Initial Commentary' - my real interest is in the Rechabites, and I guess that I should have stayed with just StorZos 8-10.

Despite your observations, and noting all that you say about some early Christian texts containing little that is explicitly Christian and about early Christian writers being aware of some early Jewish traditions, I would still claim that HistRech is more likely to be Jewish rather than Christian in origin. I dispute your apparent claim that just because StorZos is a Christian monastic text, we must read all of it as such and only as such - that would be close to saying that any attempt to perceive the text's sources is unwarranted (which, clearly, you wouldn't subscribe to).

Of course, like all our theories of the tex's sources and redactions, it is all entirely subjective (in the same sense as JEPD and Q are subjective), but it seems to me that what we have in HistRech echoes too much that we find in the rabbinic references about the Rechabites (not just the late ones) - and nothing else - for it to be other than Jewish in origin. Couple this with the lack of explicit Christian motifs in the chapters and the argument is complete.

I came to the Story of Zosimus and HistRech after studying the Biblical material about the Rechabites, then the Qumran material that is not about them (pace Matthew Black - see my piece in JSP 10) and then the Rabbinic references to them - so I was reading (and still read) HistRech against a Rabbinic background.

You sugest that these similarities are coincidental, and seem to me to rather dismiss them. But who knows? Of course, you have done more work on the whole business of whether ancient texts are Jewish or Christian - and I will read your paper on that subject in due course, and look forward to reading the monograph when it appears. I've only worked on the one text, in the way that I've described, and not recently even on that one. Certainly, for me, reading HistRech against the background of all the Rabbinic references to the Rechabites makes me believe that it is Jewish in origin.

I had hoped - but never had opportunity - to look at the early Christian references to the Rechabites, as you obviously have - although I did do some work recently on how the Independent Order of Rechabites, a nineteenth century temperance organisation, used the biblical material, which appeared in The Expository Times a year or so back.

Many thanks for your reply, Chris. I corresponded with Ronit Nikolsky last spring but she was not ready at that point to share her research. At the SBL conference Tal Ilan told me that Ronit had finished her dissertation, so I'm looking forward to hearing more about it soon. Are you there Ronit?

Regarding the History of the Rechabites, I don't say that "just because StorZos is a Christian monastic text, we must read all of it as such and only as such." I say that that is the place to start and that any attempt to move backwards from there must be established on the basis of compelling positive evidence, whether external, based on the nature of the contents, or linguistic. I have discussed at length the criteria I use at earlier conference papers on "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?" and "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Pseudepigraphon Has Been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" Both papers are very early drafts of chapters of a book I am writing this year on the Christian transmission of Jewish pseudepigrapha.

Your key arguments are (1) a number of parallels to rabbinic texts on the Rechabites and (2) the lack of explicit Christian motifs in the History of the Rechabites. As for the second, you yourself have noted that the Greek of 9.10 echoes Mark 9.5 par., so the text as we have it does have an obviously Christian feature that has to be removed to make the text Jewish. I see no good reason for doing so.

As for the first argument, I've explained at length in my paper why I don't find the parallels to the rabbinic texts compelling and I won't repeat myself here. Let me make the more general point that Aggadic parallels (i.e., parallel stories) are generally unconvincing as proof of Jewish origin because they traveled readily from Jews to Christians. Halakhic parallels (about Jewish law or ritual or purity, etc.) are much more useful because Christians were considerably less likely to borrow them, since many (but by no means all) Christians were ideologically opposed to the concept of halakhah.

It would be a fair question to ask me what would convince me that the History of the Rechabites was a Jewish work. In other words, is my position falsifiable? Is there some way I could be proved wrong that a text of this size and with this sort of origin is likely to be Jewish? I'll be frank and say that it would be difficult. One of the limitations I give in my paper on Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha is that a text needs to be of substantial length, so that we have an adequate sample of the author's viewpoint. So the nature of our evidence already makes analysis of the History of the Rechabites very difficult. Still, I would say my approach is falsifiable in that I can imagine a text of this length which had been incorporated into a monastic Christian work and transmitted in Christian manuscripts and which was still verifiably Jewish. If the History of the Rechabites contained a number of references to clearly Jewish halakhic or ritual purity issues, that would be a strong argument in favor of its Jewish origin. And if the text were written in a Greek that had a high density of the Semitisms noted by Martin as characteristic of translation Greek � or, better yet, Semitisms not explainable by LXX influence � and a couple of linguistic features or transliterated words which were clearly Hebrew rather than Aramaic, that would clinch it. I would then agree that it was very likely that it was a Jewish composition and would include in the corpus of Jewish texts.

I can even envision a situation that would convince me that the actual History of the Rechabites that we have before us was Jewish. It seems to have had an independent existence before it was incorporated into the Story of Zosimus. Suppose we found a fourth century Greek manuscript in a Syrian synagogue that had been destroyed by an earthquake and never rebuilt. And suppose that this manuscript contained a long (say, 15 chapter) and clearly Jewish account of the Rechabites � one with lots of references to halakhah, ritual purity, national/ethnic issues, etc. � which included our History of the Rechabites and gave every indication of being the original context of those three chapters. I would in that case agree that it was overwhelmingly likely that the History of the Rechabites was a Jewish composition which later had been excerpted and incorporated into the monastic Story of Zosimus.

Now you may well say that neither scenario I've given above is very likely, and you would be right. My reply is that this is not because my methodology is wrong; it's because the problem itself is nearly intractable and needs to be taken seriously as such. And I should add that although these convincing cases are extreme, the arguments that you have made in favor of the History of the Rechabites being Jewish look very weak in comparison.

Perhaps I should reinforce the additional general point that I'm not saying that we can be sure that the History of the Rechabites is not a Jewish text but that, given its transmission we cannot be even reasonably sure that it is and, unless we are, we have no business using it as such. I have a larger agenda here in that I think that the field of early Jewish studies (i.e., concerning the Judaism of the first few centuries C.E.) has been contaminated for a long time by our using a number of works to reconstruct ancient Judaism when there is excellent reason to doubt that these works are Jewish and to fear that at least some of them were composed by Christians. These include the Life of Adam and Eve, parts of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Story of Zosimus, the Testament of Abraham, 3 Baruch, the Martyrdom of Isaiah, the Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Lives of the Prophets. This is an incomplete list off the top of my head. Perhaps some of them are Jewish; probably at least some of them are Christian. I think it is important for the field to adopt, at this point, a minimalist position and ask which texts we can be highly confident are Jewish and use those for our reconstruction of Judaism. My book aims to tackle the problem of how to do that. It may well be that as our methods and technologies improve and we find more and earlier manuscripts etc., that we'll be able to move some of the above works into the pretty certain category. But for now they are quite uncertain and we are better off leaving them out. Another way to put this is that our picture of ancient Judaism, is by the nature of our imperfect evidence, bound to be distorted. I think we are better off distorting it by omitting some texts from consideration which potentially might be relevant than by including some texts some of which are almost certainly not relevant. I would rather work with what we are confident are Jewish texts than risk contaminating the sample with texts that may well be of Christian or other origin.

I could probably go on at length, but I have to go to a party and then to hear a lecture, so I should stop here. (Well, strictly speaking I don't have to go to them, but I intend to.) I hope some of these extemporaneous comments are helpful, or at least stimulating. I've been thinking about these matters for a long time and I would be glad to hear anything you, Chris, or anyone else has to say in reply.

VETUS TESTAMENTUM has a new issue out (53.4) with the following articles of interest:

TREADING THE BOW
J. A. Emerton

HEBRAISMS IN THE OLD LATIN VERSION OF THE BIBLE
Matthew Kraus

IN SEARCH OF TREES: ISAIAH XLIV 14 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Simon J. Sherwin

THE PROPHET AS INCOMPETENT DRAMATIST
John G. F. Wilks

DELIVERANCE OR DESTRUCTION? ISAIAH X 33-34 IN THE FINAL FORM OF ISAIAH X-XI
G. C. I. Wong

2 CHR. XXVI 22: ISAIAH BEN AMOZ OR ISSHIAH THE PROPHET?
John W. Olley

There are also a couple of other articles that deal with the earlier period, plus lots of book notes. Requires paid personal or institutional subscription to access.

HERE ARE SOME NEW BOOKS FROM JSOT PRESS (Continuum):

Leonard Greenspoon and Sidnie White Crawford, The Book of Esther in Modern Research

Todd Klutz, Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the Ring of Solomon

Thomas L. Thompson, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition

Ian Young, Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology

I have some automatic alerts that tell me about new books, but if you have a new book out in the area of ancient Judaism and you would like me to note it, please e-mail me with the information, preferably including a link to a descriptive web page.

THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT is mounting a �2 million campaign (about $3.4 million) to promote tourism in Israel according to the London Times. Excerpts:

Among the country�s selling points are the old city and Western Wall in Jerusalem, the international opera festival at Caesarea, the site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and scuba diving at the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

[...]

The value of tourism to Israel has fallen from �2.3 billion in 2000, with 3 million visitors, to �1 billion last year. But the Israel Tourist Board has found that the figures are reviving this year, with large numbers of Christian groups visiting religious sites alongside Jewish travellers.

Visitor numbers began to increase after the Iraq war, with 54 per cent more people coming to the country in July than in the previous summer.

A spokesman for the Israel Tourist Board said: �Even though the media magnify the problems in Israel, the reality is Israel is a safe place to visit. Security is stringent and tourists are not targeted, while El Al is probably the safest airline flying at present.�

EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM has seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ in a private screening and he liked it.

SENIOR QUMRAN SCHOLAR GEZA VERMES WRITES ON SEX. Can't say I ever expected to pen that sentence. And yes, this Guardian article does have to do with ancient Judaism too, at least a little. Via Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog. (I can't get Mark's permalinks to work for some reason, but it's the 5:15 pm entry for 30 November.)

UPDATE: His permalinks are working again and the link is here.