CONFERENCE AT ST. ANDREWS:

Genesis and Christian Theology
14-18 July 2009
The University of St Andrews is pleased to announce its third conference on Scripture and Christian Theology. Since the first conference on the Gospel of John in 2003, the St Andrews conferences have been recognized as one of the most important occasions when biblical scholars and systematic theologians are brought together in conversation about a biblical text. The conferences aim to cut through the megaphone diplomacy or the sheer incomprehension that so often marks attempts to communicate across our disciplines. We invite you then to join us and some of the best theological and biblical minds in careful and often lively interaction about one of the most theologically generative of biblical books: the book of Genesis.

We are now calling for papers that integrate close readings of Genesis with Christian theology. While we are particularly interested in explorations of the dynamic relationship between Genesis and Christian doctrine, we also welcome proposals that combine careful reading of the text of Genesis with theological attention to art, creativity, ecology, ethics, the history of interpretation, or Jewish and Christian dialogue.

The call for paper proposals closes on 15 March 2009. Please visit our website for further details or to submit a proposal: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/conf/genesis09/.

AN ANCIENT PERFUME BOTTLE FROM MAGDALA:

Perfume vials from Christ's era unearthed in Israel
Wed Dec 10, 2008 7:57pm GMT

ROME (Reuters) - A team of Franciscan archaeologists digging in the biblical town of Magdala in what is now Israel say they have unearthed vials of perfume similar to those that may have been used by the woman said to have washed Jesus' feet.

The perfumed ointments were found intact at the bottom of a mud-filled swimming pool, alongside hair and make-up objects, the director of the dig conducted by the group Studium Biblicum Franciscanum told the Terrasanta.net religious website.

"If chemical analyses confirm it, these could be perfumes and creams similar to those that Mary Magdalene or the sinner cited in the Gospel used to anoint Christ's feet," Father Stefano de Luca, the lead archaeologist, told the website.

Mary Magdalene is cited in the New Testament as a steadfast disciple of Christ from whom seven demons were cast out. She is often considered the sinner who anointed Jesus' feet.

[...]

Why, oh why, did it have to be found in Magdala? The Mary Magdalene connection probably would have been dragged in anyhow, but this makes it irresistable. In fact, there is nothing in the Gospels that connects Mary Magdalene to the penitent sinful woman of Luke 7:36-50. The connection comes much later, I would imagine at the time when Mary began to be regarded as a reformed prostitute. (More on Mary Magdalene here.) What looks like a variant version of the same tradition appears in the other three canonical Gospels (Mark 14:3-9; Matthew 26:6-13, and John 11:2; 12:1-3). In that version there is nothing about the woman being sinful, and John identifies her as Mary the sister of Lazarus.

The find is interesting and important, but it doesn't have even a tenuous historical connection with Mary Magdalene. Perhaps it does with the perfume-on-the-feet episode(s) in the Gospels, but it's very hard to say.

UPDATE (14 December): Useful comments from Todd Bolen here and Mark Goodacre here.

AN UPDATE ON THE JESUS PROJECT:

Quest for the Historical Jesus Begins Anew

Amherst, New York (December 08, 2008)--Scholars gathered this past weekend, December 5-7, in Amherst, New York, for the inaugural meeting of The Jesus Project in a renewed quest for the historical Jesus. The project, sponsored by the secular think tank Center for Inquiry and its Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), is an effort by historians, biblical scholars, and theologians to determine what can be reliably recovered about the historical figure of Jesus, his life, his teachings, and his activities, utilizing the highest standards of scientific and scholarly objectivity.

[...]

The project has drawn together a diverse and rich group of scholars, including, among others Gerd Lüdemann, Paul Kurtz, Robert Price, James Tabor, Robert Eisenman, David Trobisch, Bruce Chilton, Dennis MacDonald, and R. Joseph Hoffmann.

At the session this past weekend, participants agreed that a rigorous scientific inquiry was needed, and that the Project would be committed to a position of neutrality towards the sources used as "evidence" for the Jesus tradition. Participants represent a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from Tabor's argument that there is substantial evidence that the tomb of the family of Jesus has been located, to the view that the evidence for the existence of Jesus as an historical figure is not persuasive. "Jesus remains after 2,000 years the most fascinating figure of Western civilization," said James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. "Scholars now at the beginning of the twenty-first century are able to take advantage of a plethora of new texts, sources, and methods, including the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, various lost Gospels that are not in our New Testament, and a rich archeological record." Tabor says that scholars today find themselves uniquely positioned to examine the issue of who Jesus was in new and challenging ways. During the closing conference round-table, Tabor was quick to emphasize that "the Jesus Project repudiates any theological agendas, special pleading, or dogmatic presuppositions." All members of the project share a common commitment to the importance of applying scientific methodologies to the sources used to construct the Jesus tradition.

The Project has outlined a set of priorities for its next meetings, including a "consistent" translation of the Gospels, an inquiry into the causes of the canonization of the existing New Testament documents, parallels between Islam and early Christianity in delineating its sacred books, and the need to carve a middle path between what Hoffmann describes as "Da Vinci Code sensationalism and the truly fascinating story that underlies the history of Christianity."

[...]

Sounds ambitious. Kol HaKavod.

Background here.

AN OBITUARY FOR JOSEPH BAUMGARTEN has been published by Larry Schiffman at the SBL Forum website. Excerpt:

When I began studying the halakhah of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he was the only person in the field. I knew his name but had not yet met him. Very early in my career, it must have been in the mid-70s, I attended a meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature to present what was then my first paper. As I was talking, I noticed a fellow standing near the door who had entered just before I began. He was holding his proverbial tan lined raincoat and the hound’s-tooth checked hat that he usually wore. I do not even remember what the subject of my presentation was, but I do remember meeting him. Right after the session ended he came up to me. He introduced himself as "Joe" Baumgarten, welcomed me into the small circle of students of Qumran halakhah, and immediately dispelled any fear I might have that he would see me as an unwelcome competitor. Within fifteen minutes I was meeting his beloved wife Naomi who somehow or other was waiting for him in the hall. This was the beginning of years of friendship and collegiality. It was not long before my wife, Marlene, met the Baumgartens and, as our children grew older, she started to join me at various meetings and spent a considerable amount of time with Naomi while Joe and I were busy with our sessions.

Academically, Baumgarten set the example for those of us who apply Talmudic material and methodology to the scrolls, a method and a skill that had virtually gone into disuse in the earlier years of scrolls research. His work exemplified the judiciousness and the depths of Talmudic learning that were necessary for such research to be of true value. His work on the Damascus Document not only brought its manuscripts to publication but provided the basis for understanding it within the framework of the history of Judaism. He lived to participate in conferences in which days of papers were given following the methods he had espoused, and it is to a great extent due to the example of his scholarship that this field has developed as well as it has.

THE TOMB OF ESTHER AND MORDECHAI (traditional) in Iran is in the news:

Jewish shrine in Iran registered as national work

Hamedan, Dec 8, IRNA - Head of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Office in Hamedan province said the old and valuable place of Esther and Mordecai tomb has been registered in country's national works list.

[...]

There are some pictures of the tomb, inside and outside, here. They start midway through the fourth column of photos. Note the Hebrew inscriptions. Some critical evaluation of the tradition is here.

UPDATE (14 December): Jan Pieter van de Giessen has posted more photos of the tomb, including close-ups of the Hebrew inscriptions, at his Aantekeningen bij de Bijbel blog.

AND HE THOUGHT their doctrine of Divine grace needed work:

St. Paul lands a look at Dead Sea Scrolls

Their messianism was out of date too.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

A HIGH-TECH ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT run by Brown University in Israel is being funded generously by the National Science Foundation:

Archeology Reborn with Grant for New Systems
Computer-based archiving, imaging and interactive education to aid research

By Dan Talpalariu, Science Editor [Softpedia]

8th of December 2008, 14:20 GMT

The scientific field of archeology will undergo severe make-up sessions and will be fully revitalized through the means of a new grant offered to a team of experts. The new funding received by a group of archaeologists form Brown University and engineers from the National Science Foundation is aimed to change the way archeology is performed and perceived, as well as how its results are accessed and used.

The $2.6 million grant will allow the team of specialists to implement techniques like computer vision and pattern recognition in processes such as conducting archaeological excavation, reconstructing sites and monuments, as well as interpreting results over the next four years. The site that will serve as a testing ground is going to be Apollonia-Arsuf, on Israel's Mediterranean coast, one of the world's 100 most endangered monuments, according to the World Monuments Fund.

The project is set to develop a visual archaeological database (VAD) with the goal of exchanging tediousness for fast access and interactivity. The archaeological site will be surrounded by video cameras and digital scanning stations, ensuring a constant visual track of the excavation. The discovered items can be processed and archived instantly, by providing the VAD with the proper text, video, still images, dense-data 3-D laser scans, and spatial coordinates associated to the finding.

[...]

HERSHEL SHANKS takes on Nina Burleigh:

Ganging up on biblical archaeology
A[n LA] Times Op-Ed writer stubbornly dismissed evidence that shows an important artifact from the Holy Land may not be a hoax.
By Hershel Shanks
December 9, 2008
Nina Burleigh ("Hoaxes from the Holy Land” Op-Ed article, Nov. 29) is unwilling to consider the possibility that the now-famous bone box inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" is authentic. This is despite the fact that the Jerusalem judge in the case, after listening to the state's witnesses for more than three years, is of the view that the government has failed to prove the inscription is a forgery and should consider dropping the case. Burleigh's view after the judge's pronouncement remains the same as in her book, "Unholy Business." Burleigh has only vitriol and nasty innuendo for anyone, including myself, who defends the authenticity of the inscription.

I start from the assumption that it is just as bad to claim an authentic inscription is a forgery as to claim a forgery is authentic. If this inscription is authentic, I want to know about it -- and so does the public.

[...]

Background here.

RABBI SHIMON BAR YOHAI'S GRAVE is in need of attention:

State comptroller finds chaos, danger at Bar-Yohai grave
By DAN IZENBERG (Jerusalem Post)

One-and-a-half million people visit the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai on Mount Meron, near Safed, each year, but the holy site is improperly administered and in disrepair, the state comptroller reported on Sunday.

The state comptroller also found that the celebrations on Lag Ba'Omer draw 250,000 to 400,00 people each year but are illegal because the Merom Hagalil Regional Council does not issue a permit.

They are also dangerous, because there is no supervision of the accommodations and the activities.

[...]

More people visit Bar-Yohai's grave than any other holy site in Israel other than the Western Wall. Nevertheless, there is no effective management of the site. Four religious trusts claim rights over the grave and each acts as it sees fit. The regional council has not tried to assert its own authority over the site.

As a result of the administrative chaos, there has been a great deal of illegal construction at or near the grave. For example, "In 1980, an awning was added to the visitors' center supported by iron beams connected to the northern wall of the original building, which conceal part of the upper windows and ruin the unique and ancient look of the northern façade."

All the additional construction was executed without building permits.

The grave itself was built in the 18th century. The Antiquities Authority Law states that any structure built by man from the 18th century that has historical value may be declared an antiquity.

[...]

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai lived in the second century CE. The Zohar is pseudepigraphically attributed to him.

A BYZANTINE-ERA BATHHOUSE has been uncovered at Zikhron Ya‘aqov. (IAA press release, noted via Joseph I. Lauer.)

TODAY is Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day.

Don't worry, I'll behave myself. But it is sooooo tempting.

PAULA FREDRIKSEN is defending St. Augustine's view of Jews in her new book, Augustine and the Jews. Time Magazine has an interview with Professor Fredriksen. Excerpt:

What caused you to question the received wisdom?
Back in 1993 I was reading a work of Augustine's attacking a Christian heretic. Usually when ancient orthodox Christians said terrible things about heretics, they found even worse things to say about Jews. Until 395, Augustine had not been much different, but here he was, writing about one of the flashiest heresies of his time, and marshaling as arguments unbelievably positive things about Jews. As I read further, my scalp tingled. I had been working on Augustine for 20 years and I'd never seen anything like this before. Not only could I establish that he had changed his position, but I could locate this shift in his thinking very precisely, to the four-year period when he also wrote his monumental Confessions.

Interesting. Read it all.

PROFESSOR JOSEPH M. BAUMGARTEN has passed away. Just got the sad news from Professor Lawrence Schiffman, who e-mails:

Dear friends,

I regret to have to inform you of the passing on Thursday of our colleague and friend Prof. Joseph Baumgarten. He was memorialized in Baltimore on Friday and he will be buried in Israel on Sunday.

May his righteous memory be for a blessing!

Amen.

Professor Moshe Bernstein also e-mails with information on the funeral arrangements. The message has personal family information, so I won't post it here. But if you'll be in Jerusalem this evening and wish to attend, drop me a note and I'll forward it.

Here's the notice of (Rabbi Dr.) Professor Baumgarten's passing in the Baltimore Sun. I can't find an online biography or vita, but here's a list of some of his major publications. He did a great deal of important work on the legal traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

SORRY for the blogging silence. I had an Internet outage this morning and have been busy ever since until a little while ago. But I've now had a chance to poke around in the news and things seem pretty quiet. I have been meaning to note the upcoming conference on the Codex Sinaiticus, pointed out by Mark Goodacre.

A JERUSALEM CAVE provides new data on ancient climate change:

Cave's climate clues show ancient empires declined during dry spell

by Jill Sakai, Space & Earth science / Earth Sciences

(PhysOrg.com) -- The decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes.

Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.

The researchers, led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geology graduate student Ian Orland and professor John Valley, reconstructed the high-resolution climate record based on geochemical analysis of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave, located in the Stalactite Cave Nature Reserve near Jerusalem.

[...]

BRUCE ZUCKERMAN has some new equipment for photographing ancient texts:

Closer Look at Ancient Documents

Written by Lauren Walser - USC (Imperial Valley News)
Wednesday, 03 December 2008
Los Angeles, California - It feels impolite to call them “small dinky things” or “smashed mushrooms.” But researchers in the USC archaeology labs said as much. And pressed onto a piece of glass while undergoing intense photography, those descriptions do not seem far off.

Technically, they’re called Dead Sea Scrolls. And for a single day in November, researchers in the USC Archaeological Research Center had five “dinky” fragments of the scrolls in their hands. But the researchers saw this day as more than just a chance to unlock new clues to these ancient texts. It was an opportunity to test out some of the most high-tech equipment in the field using techniques only available in their labs at USC.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have long been artifacts of intense scholarly and public interest – as well as heated debate. In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds stumbled upon a cave full of jars containing ancient scrolls. This discovery led to an ongoing search that has produced thousands of tiny fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents, dated from the third century BCE (before the common era) to the second century C.E. – including documents nearly a thousand years older than any other surviving manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s a rare opportunity for scholars to have these documents available to them, but the researchers in the Archaeological Center have been working with these scrolls for more than 20 years – longer than any other group of scholars.

“If someone wants the best images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they know to come to us,” said Bruce Zuckerman, USC College professor of religion and director of the USC West Semitic Research Project and the Archaeological Research Center.

And this time around, new photographic equipment made their acquisition of Dead Sea Scroll fragments all the more exciting.

“What we especially wanted to do this time was see if this equipment would work the way we expected it to,” Zuckerman said. “It wasn’t certain that this would be the case. No one had ever tried these techniques before.”

But their results were astounding. “The images we captured are far better than anything we’ve ever seen before,” Zuckerman said. “We were able to pick up details we didn’t expect to see.”

[...]

Technical details of the work follow. Bruce's team does not seem to have identified new fragments of specific, known texts yet, but the work is still at an early stage.

UPDATE: More on Professor Zuckerman here.

PETER BROWN has won a major award:

Historian Peter Brown selected to share $1 million Kluge Prize
Posted December 3, 2008; 11:33 a.m.

by Ruth Stevens

Peter Brown, Princeton's Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, has been named a co-winner of the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

He and Romila Thapar, a professor emeritus in history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, will receive the award in a ceremony Wednesday, Dec. 10, at the Library of Congress. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the prize's 2003 inception, and each will receive half of the $1 million award.

[...]

As both scholar and teacher, Peter Brown has worked at the highest level of intensity and creativity for more than 40 years. His books have captivated thousands of readers, and his celebrated lectures and seminars have inspired students and younger scholars around the world.

Brown is the author of a number of important works, including the St. Augustine biography, "Augustine of Hippo" (1967); "The World of Late Antiquity" (1971), in which he wrote about 200 to 1000 C.E. as a whole new period that had not previously been seen as such and set the agenda for a new field of study; and "The Rise of Western Christendom" (1996), in which he showed the rise of Christianity as the emergence of a new social and intellectual world long before the Renaissance.

He currently is on sabbatical writing a book examining attitudes toward wealth and poverty in the later Roman Empire. In addition to the major European languages, Brown has developed a capacity in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Syriac and Turkish.

[...]

Congratulations to Professor Brown.

STILL MORE on Khirbet Qeiyafa and its inscription from Bloomberg.com:

Unearthed City Near Jerusalem Revives Debate on Biblical David

By Gwen Ackerman

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The remains of a walled city over a plain where the Bible claims David killed Goliath; a pottery shard bearing script that experts claim is the oldest Hebrew text ever found; an ancient water tunnel.

Do these support Scripture’s story of King David and his empire? It depends on who you ask. Recent archeological finds have reopened the debate on David and Solomon, whose reigns almost 3,000 years ago as chronicled in the Bible left so little physical proof that scholars like Neil Asher Silberman, a University of Massachusetts historian, question biblical accuracy.

Hebrew University professor Yosef Garfinkel, in an interview, said his findings amid the ruins of a fortified city in Khirbet Qeiyafa, a five-acre site 20 miles west of Jerusalem, support the biblical portrayal of David as a ruler of a kingdom strong enough to field an army. The findings, the most important of which were a second city gate and the shard, dispute claims by some scholars that David was a chieftain of a largely illiterate tribe.

[...]

More along this lines, with nothing much new, then this contrary view:

Hani Nur el-Din, a professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, said further digging might uncover more gates and dispel biblical links to the site.

“The Israeli archaeologists are always trying to link what they found to the Bible and not to other contemporary historical texts,” said el-Din.

And this on the inscription:

Then there’s the other important finding: a piece of broken pottery inscribed with 50 characters and considered the oldest known example of Hebrew writing. It contains one critical pair of words, “al-ta’as,” or “don’t do,” used exclusively by the Judean tribes, Garfinkel said.

If that phrase is a correct transcription, it, along with the word "land" reported earlier, weaken the possibility that the inscription is a list of names or at least that it is only a list of names. That said, if the words given above are just a bit misreported, perhaps they could be the name ʿAsaʾel, which means "God has done."

One really can't draw conclusions without a full transcription and a good photograph. I hope both are forthcoming soon.

Background here.

THE KHIRBET QEIYAFA INSCRIPTION has been subjected to high-tech photography:

A closer look at the ancient fine print

Megavision, a small firm near Santa Barbara, has a growing reputation for the kind of specialized digital imaging sought by museums, archives, research institutes and elite collectors.

By Catherine Saillant (LA Times)
December 2, 2008

Researchers gathered recently in a small darkened lab near Santa Barbara, nervously pacing as a digital camera snapped hundreds of images of a shard of pottery resting a few feet below the lens.

There was good reason for their anxiety. The terra-cotta fragment is about 3,000 years old and was inscribed with five lines of text that could alter knowledge about the existence of an ancient Judean kingdom.

"To find any text is really off the charts," said David Willner, an expert in Jewish antiquities who accompanied the shard from its excavation site in Israel to California. "And to have five lines of text is extraordinary."

That this world treasure ended up at Megavision -- a small, employee-owned company tucked away in a nondescript industrial park -- speaks volumes about the firm's growing reputation for the kind of specialized digital imaging sought by museums, archives, research institutes and elite collectors.

[...]

The result is hundreds of high-resolution images shot with different light filters. Using a process called spectral imaging, Boydston and Bill Christens-Barry, another imaging expert, aimed to maximize the contrast of the ink, made of charcoal and animal fat, against the terra-cotta piece.

Although they didn't find any hidden text, the images will be sent back to Israel. Other high-tech images were produced -- using slightly different imaging techniques -- at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and two other technical shops on the East Cost.

Once the shard's message is fully scrutinized and decoded, findings will be published in scholarly journals by Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University, who led the dig. A few words already deciphered -- "slave," "king," "land" and "judge" -- indicate that it may be a legal text, lending weight to some scholars' belief that King David wielded considerable power over the Israelites.

[...]

I also heard speculation at SBL that it may be a list of names. Many of these words do appear regularly as elements in ancient Israelite names. Abimelech, Ebed-Melech, Jehoshaphat, etc., etc. We'll see.

Background here and here and follow the links back.

UPDATE (3 December): I have a few more ruminations on the inscription here.

"OH, I AM so blogging this."