APOCRYPHA 101: Over at zhubert's blog, Zack asks for some help.

Ok, so I'm working on adding the deuterocanonical works, specifically: Baruch, Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, 1&2 Maccabees but I'm not sure what order to put them in (in relation to the canonical works). Should I put them between the OT and NT? Am I missing any? Also, I'm considering reverting the LXX back to original naming, such that Ezra/Nehemiah would be 1/2 Esdras etc. Hopefully I have my history right...1,2,3,4 Esdras is certainly one confusing mess :)

I looked through my library last night for some definitive answers on the LXX, but it just wasn't covered much in the classes I took, so I'm at a bit of a loss. A search on the internet just leads to contradictory answers. Can anyone help clarify this?

Bless you for taking this on! Here's my best shot at an explanation (from home, without access to most of my library, so subject to correction later).

The Catholic Bible mixes the Deuterocanonical books among the other OT books and also includes the additions to Esther and Daniel in the books of Esther and Daniel. The Protestant Bible, when it includes the Apocrypha at all, puts them (including the additions) in a separate section, either before or after the NT. (The Jewish Bible, of course, as well as many Protestant Bibles, leave them out entirely.) For the Catholic order, see any Catholic version, such as the Jerusalem Bible. For the order of the works as a separate section, see, for example, the RSV Study Bible or the NEB with the Apocrypha.

I believe the Greek Orthodox Bible mixes the Deuteroncanonica among the other OT books too, but it also includes 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. 4 Maccabees isn't in any of the major canons, but I think it comes as an appendix in the Orthodox canon. I have trouble keeping straight the Orthodox canons in non-Greek languages (Syriac, Coptic, Slavonic) and I'm not going to try here.

In modern translations, when the "Apocrypha" is set apart as a separate section of its own, it seems normally to include all or most of the above. Latin 2 Esdras (incorporating 4 Ezra), of course, does not survive in Greek, apart from a few fragments, but usually a translation of it is included as well.

I think ideally you should include all of the above Greek works (i.e., everything except 2 Esdras) as a separate section and tagged so that the Greek of the Protestant canonical books can be searched either separately or else along with the Apocrypha. Those interested only in the Protestant canon can then ignore them, while those who want to can search the Apocrypha and the rest of the OT LXX together.

All this of course, is contingent on how much work you want to put into it. But since you ask, that's my answer.

FORGERY SCANDAL WATCH: Over at Ralph, Ed Cook translates the section of the indictment which deals with the Joash inscription.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

PMO to take over running Western Wall (Ha'aretz)
By Nadav Shragai

The government has decided to transfer responsibility for the Western Wall, the plaza facing it and the nearby excavations, currently handled by the tourism minister, to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which is overseen by the prime minister.

[...]

I'm not sure what "PMO" stands for. Prime Minister's Organization? The point of the change seems to be to centralize the administration of the site under one organization.

UPDATE: Cynthia Edenburg suggests "Prime Minister's Office," which sounds right.

CULTURAL ICON WATCH: The late Johnny Carson (R.I.P.) on the place of the Tonight Show in the scheme of things:

Not that Carson was overly impressed by his legacy, mind you. "It's just a television show," he once said, "not the Dead Sea Scrolls."

MORE VISITOR RESPONSES to the Mobile Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. On Friday 1200 people paid to see it. The Mobile Register is doing quite a good job of covering it.

HERE'S A TOURIST'S GUIDE TO SEPPHORIS, home of some interesting ancient ruins, in the Jerusalem Post.

THE LIBRARY FROM HERCULANEUM is the subject of a long article in the Times today. It was buried by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 C.E., recovered in the 1700s, and only recently have many of the carbonized scrolls become readable with the help of new technologies. I don't know that the scrolls have ever been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Classical world, but if not, they should be. Now there is a move to reopen the excavation to try to find more texts.

Focus: The search for the lost library of Rome
Robert Harris
Even in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation

[...]

Once the villa had been stripped, 200 years ago, the tunnels were sealed. But last week a group of the world�s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance � �quite likely�, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it � that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be uncovered.

These are scholars, cautious by nature. Their optimism is therefore worth taking seriously. It follows the first detailed analysis of the 1,800 papyri, now largely unrolled and deciphered thanks to a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). What appear to the naked eye as jet-black cinders are transformed by MSI into readable text. Thirty thousand images are now legible on CD-Rom; suddenly poems and works of philosophy are speaking again, 2,000 years after they were sealed in their cedar-wood cabinets in the summer of AD79.

The author chiefly represented in the collection is Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC who taught Virgil, the greatest Latin poet, and probably also Horace. He may indeed have given lessons to both beneath the porticoes of the Villa of the Papyri, for it is known that Philodemus was employed in the household of a powerful Roman senator, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of the dictator Julius Caesar. And it is now regarded as almost certain that Piso � who died more than a century before the eruption of Vesuvius � was the original owner of the Villa of the Papyri.

Apart from the texts of Philodemus, hundreds of other lost works of Greek philosophy � including half of Epicurus�s entire opus, missing for 2,300 years � have been rediscovered. Among them is a treatise by Zeno of Sidon, who Cicero saw lecture in Athens in 79BC. According to Richard Janko, professor of classics at Michigan University: �This is the first copy of Zeno�s writings to come to light; they had all been lost in later antiquity.�

[...]

... Eight of the world�s leading scholars of ancient history, including professors from Harvard, Oxford and London, wrote to The Times in the spring of 2002 demanding action: �We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined.�

The signatories have now formed a pressure group, The Herculaneum Society, which convened in Oxford last weekend, and moves have begun to raise the $20m (�10.6m) or so needed to dig.

Frankly, it would be cheap at almost any price. Even in our age of hyperbole it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation. We have, for example, a mere seven plays by Sophocles, yet we know that he wrote 120; Euripides wrote 90 plays, of which only 19 survive; Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90, of which we have just seven.

We also know that at the time when Philodemus was teaching Virgil on the Bay of Naples, the lost dialogues of Aristotle were circulating in Rome (Cicero called them �a golden river�: the essence of ancient Greek philosophy); they, too, have vanished.

Then there are the missing Latin texts. Is it really likely that a palace on the scale of the Villa of the Papyri would not have had contemporary copies of Virgil�s Aeneid or the poems of Horace? Scholars have dreamt of making such discoveries for centuries, but until the last couple of years they were understandably dismissed as fantasies. Books in the ancient world were written on papyrus � strips of plant grown in Egypt and glued together � and papyrus simply cannot survive for 2,000 years except in freak conditions.

Conditions like being sealed in hot volcanic ash. I wonder if it's optimistic to hope that such a well-stocked library might have included the Septuagint or maybe even Greek translations of some of the Enochic books. In any case, it sounds to me like a possibility worth checking out.

The article also gives the web address of the Herculaneum Society: www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk.

WHAT STARTED AS A MILDLY STUPID JOKE has turned into an interesting discussion. Zeth has moved his "Er What" post here and replied to my update here. My posts are also often thoughts-in-progress, so I appreciate his continued reflections. One small point and one larger one in response. The small one: how do you know that Nicole and Pammy aren't donating lots of money to starving people in Africa? If I had to bet, I'd bet they're both giving more to charity of some sort than either you or I could afford. Say what you like about celebrities (and I do, don't I?), but that's something they usually get right.

The larger one: just to clarify, my stance is not one of "moral relativism" (and Zeth wasn't saying it was), but rather classical liberalism. That is, the belief that individuals have the right to do whatever they please as long as they're not directly hurting someone else by malice or culpable stupidity. I may or may not approve of what they're doing, but that's my problem, not theirs, and if I want them to change, its up to me to reason with them and up to them whether they want to listen to me. (This is neither a conservative nor a leftist position, but for some reason it often seems to make conservatives think I'm a leftist and leftists think I'm a conservative.)

I've already said what I have to say about using the Bible for moral insight in my first SBL resolution post, so I won't repeat myself here. I've commented on the Waterstone's debacle here.

I do take the point about Internet humor, and am still feeling my way through that one. But I don't have it in me to be earnest all the time. Bear with me.

THE LECTURE HALLS EXCAVATED IN ALEXANDRIA are the subject of an illuminating article ("Intellectual life in Roman Alexandria") by Jill Kamil in Al Ahram. These are late antique ruins, and thus long after the time of the Septuagint translators and Philo, but still from a place and period of great importance for intellectual history. The article has lots of interesting details. Excerpt:

More recent excavations have revealed a vast complex of well-preserved lecture halls of late Roman (fifth to seventh century) date. Some of them had been explored in the 1880s, but their total number has now grown to 13 and Majcherek says that only now has their purpose become apparent. The auditoria have similar dimensions to, and stretch along, the theatre portico, which is also the eastern colonnade of a large public square in the centre of the city. In all the rooms rows of stepped benches run along the walls in a horseshoe shape, with an elevated seat for the lecturer at the rounded end. When new rows of seats appeared in place of the lateral parodoi (passageway separating the stage from the auditorium), the classical semicircular plan of the cavea (auditorium) was changed into a horseshoe-shaped arrangement that archaeologists immediately recognised as similar to that found in the auditoria or lecture halls. The discoveries have shed new light on the function of the theatre, which was excavated back in the 1960s.

The rebuilding on antiquity appears to have been carried out to fulfil the need to adapt to a new function, which was to provide an assembly hall for meetings and lectures, seating a larger audience. Estimates of the capacity of the total number of auditoria, which are estimated to number 20 in all, run at several hundred students, which, incidentally, is the estimated capacity of the theatre structure.

This discovery has caused great excitement, since it has become clear that the Polish mission has actually put a finger on the very hub of intellectual life in late Roman Alexandria. The important issue now, according to Majcherek, is to understand what exactly this complex of auditoria represented. He claims that the entire evidence so far indicates that we are dealing with an academic institution that operated in late antique Alexandria. The central location of the complex in the ancient town, and the characteristic arrangement of particular halls, corroborates the conclusions drawn on their function.

(Via Archaeologica News.)

THE PRESIDENT'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS had quite a lot of religious language in it, as is pointed out by Deborah Caldwell in her Beliefnet article "Decoding Bush's God-Talk" (via Helenann Hartley and Michael Pahl). I think a few of her annotations deserve annotations of their own. Her comments are in square brackets, referring to the bold-font selections in the speech.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights, and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and Earth. [Elegant phrasing that resonates with Christians, Jews and Muslims.]

It's much more specific than that. This is a clear allusion to Genesis 1:26-27, which says that God made humanity in his own image.

You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, [This is a nod to evangelicals and conservative Catholics, have been united with the president in their disdain for moral relativism.] and courage triumphs.

I think that belief in the reality of evil has a wider constituency than that.

Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor [Vague reference to Jesus, who says in Matthew 22:39, "Love your neighbor as yourself."] and surround the lost with love.

This formulation of the golden rule, which indeed is also in the New Testament, actually originates in Leviticus 19:18. But I suspect a more immediate source for the President's comment is the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37. The last phrase in the sentence may also echo the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15:3-7.

May God bless you, and may he watch over [Somewhat unexpected wording, again harkening to the "awesome God" of Calvin who is attentive to the world] the United States of America.

I don't see why this is "somewhat unexpected." It sounds like an echo of the benediction in Numbers 6:22-26 ("The Lord bless you and keep you...), important in both Judaism and Christianity (and, incidentally, the earliest-attested biblical passage).

Also, there's one possible religious allusion that Caldwell missed. It was caught by Lynn Sweet in an article on the speech in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Advancing self-government "is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time," said Bush, laying out a yardstick for which his tenure can be measured, not in four years, but over time.

"The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations," he said. "The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it."

In a speech laden with religious inferences, this line about not avoiding the work ahead seems an echo of an inspirational admonition from a Jewish text, the Pirkei Avot. Said an ancient rabbi, "It is not incumbent on you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

THERE'S AN OBITUARY OF ROGER MOOREY today in the Times:

Roger Moorey
Expert on the history and industries of Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BC down to more recent biblical times

ROGER MOOREY was deeply respected throughout the global network of archaeologists working in the Near and Middle East. He was Assistant Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for 19 years, and he wrote extensively on the excavated materials of Iran and Iraq, the Levant, Egypt and Turkey � from the fourth to the first millennia BC.

[...]

He also worked with Kathleen Kenyon on the Jerusalem excavation in the 1960s.

SOME INITIAL REACTIONS to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Mobile, Alabama (Mobile Register):

First visitors are awed by Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit
Friday, January 21, 2005
By ROY HOFFMAN
Staff Reporter

Quietly, almost reverently, the first visitors to the new Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit filed into the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center on Thursday, making their way to softly illuminated display cases where 2000-year-old goatskin parchments held ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

The short opening day was designated for "walk-ins" who could buy same-day tickets at the counter and local clergy. The mood was a mix of intellectual curiosity and religious awe.

Lots of people of different religious backgrounds are then quoted. Here's my favorite:

On the second floor of the exhibit, Kevin Hurt, the Exploreum's theater manager was giving computer-generated virtual tours of the ancient temple in Jerusalem. Just outside the the ater was a little girl, Carly Cefalu, a 2-year-old with a red ribbon in her sandy hair, who skipped about asking, "Where's Jesus?"

Carly had come to the Exploreum with her parents, David Cefalu and Sheryl Cefalu, as they had been driving from Pensacola to New Orleans and decided to detour into downtown Mobile.

"We told her Jesus is the word," said David Cefalu, "and they found the word in the caves."

FORGERY INDICTMENT UPDATE: Ed Cook has been translating and commenting on key excerpts from the Hebrew text here and here.

THE PROMISED ONLINE SEPTUAGINT is now available at www.zhubert.com. Looks good.

AN IMPRESSIVE NEW EXHIBIT AT THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE:

Oriental Institute to feature ancient, global society in new exhibition: Empires in the Fertile Crescent
By William Harms
News Office (University of Chicago Chronicle)

Visitors will get a rare look at one of the most important geographic regions in the ancient Near East beginning Saturday, Jan. 29, with the opening of �Empires in the Fertile Crescent: Ancient Assyria, Anatolia and Israel,� the newest galleries at the University�s Oriental Institute Museum.

The galleries showcase artifacts that illustrate the power of these ancient civilizations, including sculptural representations of tributes demanded by kings of ancient Assyria, and some sources of continual fascination, such as a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls�one of the few examples in the United States.

The galleries also contain artifacts connected with the beginning of two important eras, the Bronze Age and the later Iron Age, as well as artifacts from Megiddo, a site that is figuratively connected with the end of all eras�the site referred to in the Bible as Armageddon.

[...]

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT in Mobile Alabama (The Dead Sea Scrolls: An Exhibit of Biblical Proportions) opened yesterday. They are expecting 160,000 visitors before it closes on 24 April. I hope they get them.

UPDATE: The exhibit also includes a guided interactive tour of a visual simulation of ancient Jerusalem:

SGI Helps Science Center Simulate Ancient Jerusalem (HPC wire)

The largest touring exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and related artifacts ever seen in the United States arrives today at the Gulf Coast Exploreum science center in Mobile, Ala. Part of the Exploreum's Gala Opening tonight is the unveiling of the Exploreum's brand new Virtual Journeys Immersive Theater, powered by a visualization system from Silicon Graphics.

Virtual Journeys will allow visitors at this and future exhibits to experience and interact with scientific discoveries using the same SGI technology that leading researchers around the world depend on for groundbreaking innovations in all areas of science. To further enhance the public's experience of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, the Virtual Journeys Immersive Theater features a guided interactive tour of the reconstructed Herodian Temple Mount in Jerusalem as it existed 2000 years ago. Starting tomorrow, January 21, the general public can visit the 50-seat theater, which will hold four screenings an hour and will highlight the archeology, history and religious significance of the temple.

Using the SGI Reality Center facility, an Exploreum facilitator will encourage questions and interaction from the audience. The facilitator acts as tour guide and, with just a click of the mouse in the Reality Center facility, can take the audience, based on their areas of interest, just about anywhere they may want to go within the Temple Mount real-time visual simulation model. The data set even includes differing opinions on the archaeological finds, which can be pointed out both visually and verbally during the presentation.

[...]

CELEBRITY BIBLE STUDY WATCH: First Nicole Kidman. And now Pamela Anderson informs us that she's reading both a book on the Sermon on the Mount and The One Year Bible. This from Biblioblog blogger Zeth, who claims he was Googling "Sermon on the Mount" when he found it. You believe that?

UPDATE (21 January): Zeth's evaluation of my attempt at humor: "... at least he tried."

Well, that's more credit than my sense of humor often gets and probably as much as it deserves.

But seriously, I'm kind of surprised by the rest of his reply. Is being a sex symbol in our society really comparable to being a cheating tax collector in a desperately poor, ancient society? And I think one widespread criticism of some types of American religiosity - their making sex such an important factor in their religion - is entirely fair. Yet Zeth writes:

If these people [Ms. Kidman and Ms. Anderson] can read the bible and interpret it in such away that justifies their activities or at least does not ask questions about them, then either the biblical text does not have any power itself, or serious questions need to be asked about the interpretations offered by American culture.

[...]

So Pamela Anderson is rightly or wrongly an international symbol of America. The fact now that she is now a bible reading symbol, even someone who may read biblical studies books, while to put it bluntly, making money from a modern form of prostitution.

Well, okay, but this seems to be doing just what both that SBL resolution and its election opponents were doing: assuming there is a "biblical" stance on political and cultural issues; assuming that the Bible has a unified message about "values"; and finding the writer's own values in the Bible, even for issues the actual texts show little interest in. One can play dueling verses here, as with anything else. Using the word "prostitution" above seems to me to be harsh and to be moving the definitional goalposts (and trivializing the plight of many actual prostitutes who are without alternatives), but for the sake of argument, note that Rahab the prostitute is a heroine in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The Bible recognizes and praises what it regards as her achievement, while never once making an issue of her profession. Her choosing the right side in the story seems to be what counts. And Jesus had only kind words for prostitutes who took an interest in his message.

Zeth, I really appreciate your blog, and I'm sorry my little joke seems to have offended you. But give Nicole and Pammy a break. Their studies will do them no harm and may do them some good. Who are we to judge?

UPDATE (23 January): More here.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Chief rabbis prohibit Jews from entering Temple Mount
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, as well as 21 other leading rabbis, have issued a religious ruling forbidding Jews from entering the Temple Mount compound, Western Wall rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch said Tuesday.

[...]

MORE ON THE FORGERY SCANDAL: The Guardian has an interesting article today (via Paul James Cowie on the ANE list).

Faking it

The discovery that ancient artefacts sacred to Jewish history are forgeries has sent shockwaves through the museum world. But was the gang behind the scam only interested in cash, or did they have other motives? Rachel Shabi investigates

Thursday January 20, 2005
The Guardian

It all started with the pomegranate. On Christmas Eve, the Israel museum in West Jerusalem made an announcement about a tiny ivory pomegranate that had been on display at the museum since 1988, believed to have come from the First Temple of Israel. The pomegranate, the museum sheepishly revealed, was actually a fake. It was still a very old and beautiful carving, but the inscription denoting its First Temple origins had been forged.

Five days later, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared that it had uncovered a sophisticated forgery ring, based in Israel, which had produced a stash of fake Bible-era artefacts. In addition to the pomegranate, it revealed that two other objects, both similarly revered, had also been rumbled as bogus. One was a limestone ossuary box said to have held the bones of James, the brother of Jesus, and supposedly the oldest physical link to the New Testament. The other was a stone tablet, from the ninth century BC, inscribed in ancient Hebrew with instructions by King Joash for maintaining Solomon's Temple.

This opening is misleading. It makes it sound as though there was some entirely new revelation in late December that the James ossuary and Joash inscription were forged. In fact, both have been considered forgeries as far back as 2003. There had even been speculation that the ivory pomegranate was fake since at least March of 2004.

This sentence, which comes a bit later, has problems too:

So what tipped off the investigators? "We got some information in September 2002 about a stone with an inscription about the third temple of Joash in Jerusalem," says Amir Ganor, head of investigations at the IAA.

This has to be a misquote. What temple of Joash? What third temple? Herod's temple is sometimes considered a third temple, and the inscription was supposed to have been in the time of Joash, but in Solomon's temple. This is just sloppy.

Despite this not very promising beginning, the end of the article has some interesting thoughts about how the academic world may have brought the scandal on itself.

What this episode shows is the extent to which the antiquities community has laid itself open to abuse. According to Israel Finkelstein, archaeology professor at Tel Aviv university, most biblical land has been officially and rigorously excavated and produced few relics. "Do you want me to believe that robbers are then going with a flashlight at night and managing to find 50 inscriptions? Of course I don't believe it."

That is an extremely good point. This is similar to Schiffman's point that the more exciting the artifact, the more likely it is to be forged.

Still, the sale of marketplace antiquities is booming. Aren Maeir, archaeology professor at Bar Ilan university in Ramat Gan, describes it as "an astounding market, particularly among private collectors with millions of dollars at their disposal". Objects can sell for $1m apiece, and academics say that top forgers hunt academic journals for the objects that would be considered significant if unearthed, and then sneak fake finds into the market - giving the antiquity community exactly what it wants. "There is an eagerness all over the world, in museums, to display antiquities of great value," says Finkelstein, "and there is no question that some of them were not careful enough in their [evaluation] methods. It was some sort of naivety, something about wanting to believe."

The discovery of a Temple-era pomegranate, in particular, was always going to provoke excitement. The pomegranate is a deeply resonant fruit in Judaism that, according to the Bible, was used as a decorative motif in Solomon's temple. There is a Rabbinic reference to its seeds, which in legend always number 613 - one for each of the commandments of the Bible. One Israel museum press officer explains the effect of seeing such relics: "It is very exciting, very emotional, very Jewish feelings," she says. "Any time you see something like this, it feels very special because you can see your roots."

It underlines the intense political significance that antiquities, particularly Biblical-era artefacts, attain in Israel, where discoveries of ancient sites or relics can be claimed by particular groups as proof of their historic claim to a particular piece of land. Early Zionism was enthusiastic in promoting Bible-era relics - they cemented the Jewish connection to the land, and were seen to give credence to the new state of Israel: ancient facts on the ground, if you like. It is telling, suggests Dr Shimon Gibson, archaeology professor at the Albright Institute, Jerusalem, that the Joash stone emerged at around the same time - early 2003 - that Palestinian leaders were becoming more vociferous over the "alleged" Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. The stone's inscription describes repair works to the Jewish temple at Jerusalem. "Those who forged, if that is what they did, would be trying to identify key spots of interest to Israel at that moment," he says. "One of those is, of course, the Temple Mount, because in any deal made with the Palestinians, the status of Jerusalem and who controls the holy places is one of the key things that will be on the table."

Yes, this was a remarkably well-timed coincidence. As was the appearance of the James ossuary just when James had been getting a lot of attention, as Mark Goodacre pointed out recently.

Some have argued that the only way to stop antiquity fraud is to properly ban the sale of objects with unknown provenance. Others, such as Snyder, counter that this would serve only to bury precious artefacts in the hands of private collectors, not evaluated by experts and not appreciated by the public.

That's a good point too. Even if scholars take the high road and refuse to sully themselves by studying unprovenanced artifacts, the lucrative market of antiquities collectors won't be affected. The only solution I've seen which addresses the central problems head-on is that of Joe Zias: flood the market with prime-quality, undetectable fakes so that both scholars and collectors lose the incentive to deal in unprovenanced artifacts.

REGARDING MY SBL RESOLUTION POST, Kenneth Litwak e-mails:

I find the comments about the resolution (many of which I agree with) opposing �Fundamentalist� practices while using them to be troubling. I do not style myself as a �Fundamentalist,� and in fact, don�t even know what that represents in 2005 to anyone except a catch-all term for views of the Bible that are opposed by others. I would, however, be interested in knowing what practice is in view here and why it is viewed as the primary property of �Fundamentalists,� whoever they are. Lots and lots of scholars, clergy and others use the Bible to prove their point of view. It�s unclear to me why that is particularly �Fundamentalist.�

I think I said "fundamentalist" because I read the SBL resolution to have in mind people who treat the Bible as a unity with an unambiguous central message about "values" which embodies uniquely Divine and nonnegotiable authority. I suppose one could debate whether "fundamentalist" is an adequate shorthand term for that demographic. It seems more to apply to Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals than, say, Catholic or Jewish fundamentalists. For the last two, the Bible is less centrally urgent and going back to the "fundamentals" of the faith does not involve a principle of sola scriptura.

But if you don't think the term fundamentalist is accurate or useful, you may be right. In that case, please edit my original statement by deleting "fundamentalist" wherever it appears and replacing it, if necessary, with "opponent," adjusting the grammar as needed (e.g., "the fundamentalist view" -> "the view of the opponents," etc.). I don't need to define the opponents of the (still anonymous) authors of the resolution more specifically than they do. I am perfectly happy with that formulation and would have written it that way if I'd thought of it. But granting that change, I think my points remain.