Award for the NYT

A WELL-DESERVED HONOR: HONEST REPORTING GIVES THE NEW YORK TIMES A 2015 DISHONEST REPORTING AWARD.

5. Most Unholy Row: New York Times

When the Palestinian Authority accused Israel of altering the status-quo arrangements on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the New York Times weighed in with an article questioning whether the ancient Jewish Temples were located in the contested area. The Times ignored the consensus among leading historians that the Temple Mount was indeed the location (hence the current name “Temple Mount,”) for these structures, but seemed oblivious to the damage that the inaccurate article’s timing would cause.

[...]

HT Breaking Israel News. The PaleoJudaica coverage of the story is here and links.

Biblical Archaeology 2015

HAARETZ: Biblical Archaeology in 2015: King Hezekiah's Seal and Other Exciting Discoveries. And some maybes: Archaeologists think they may have found where Jesus lived in Nazareth and was tried in Jerusalem (Ruth Schuster).

Is the bible literally true? Are at least parts of it plausible? In digs throughout the region, biblical archaeology sets out to shed light on these questions. It is a difficult task made all the harder by the pull of our deepest wishes: Even artifacts found in situ, exactly where they had been left thousands of years ago, can be of controversial origin, let alone purpose.

[...]

Background on that New-Age gold object is here; on Ben Carson's Egypt gaffe is here; on the possible discovery of the Acra is here and links; on the Hezekiah bulla is here, here, and here; on the discovery of a first-century CE house (rather than "Jesus' house") in Nazareth is here; on the possible discovery of Herod's palace in Jerusalem is here and here; and on the possible discovery of Sodom is here. I didn't post about the stories on the Philistines mentioned in this article, but instead see this year's post Psychedelic Philistines.

UPDATE (31 December): Another list is noted here.

Circumcision

CANDIDA MOSS: Male Circumcision: What Would Jesus Do? On the eighth day of his life, before the Wise Men visited, Jesus was circumcised. What would he make of the debate raging today over male circumcision? (The Daily Beast). Excerpt:

It’s true that the Christmas story is more babe in a manger than bris in the synagogue, but as a Jewish male infant Jesus was circumcised and, chronologically speaking, on the eighth day—and thus before the appearance of any wise men from the east. And yet somehow with all the food, presents, and Santa-fetishizing, the circumcision of Jesus doesn’t get a look in. But as debate about the ethics of circumcising children rages on, perhaps it really should.

The only biblical evidence for Jesus’s circumcision comes from the infancy narrative found in the Gospel of Luke. On the eighth day, we are told, he was circumcised and officially given the name Jesus (although Gabriel had called it at the Anunciation).

Two thoughts.

First, it is interesting and entertaining to compare the debate about circumcision among first-century Jesus followers to the current debate about it, but they are really very different and I do not see that the first sheds any useful light on the modern discussion. The first-century issue was whether gentile followers of Jesus needed to keep the ritual law, particularly circumcision. The present debate is about hygienic matters and the right of patients to make informed decisions.

Second, we should be careful not to draw a moral equivalence between male circumcision and female "circumcision" (better, female genital mutilation). (Professor Moss mentions this position, but frames it hypothetically and refrains from endorsing it.) There is a debate on the costs and benefits of male circumcision and people of goodwill disagree about it. Female genital mutilation is a horrific and barbaric practice that inflicts serious damage on a woman's body and it cannot be justified. The two are not comparable.

Some posts about the present-day debate over male circumcision are here and links. And this debate is not about circumcision per se, but rather about a particular traditional method of circumcision (metzizah b’peh) that poses some significant health risks.

Jewish-Temple denial from an Egyptian newspaper

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Egyptian paper claims Jewish Temple was never in Jerusalem. Article seeks to deny Jewish connection to ‘Al-Quds’, says Jews’ place of worship was actually a converted Egyptian building in the Galilee (LEE GANCMAN, Times of Israel). Here we go again.

An Egyptian newspaper claimed Wednesday that the Jewish First Temple was in actual fact an Egyptian temple that the Jews took over, and that it had never been located in Jerusalem at all.

Sprawling over almost a full page of the daily newspaper “al-Youm al-Saba’a,” the article presented an elaborate theory based partly on analyses of Jewish sources, with assistance from Dr. Iman Tayyeb, an Egyptian professor of Talmud and the Old Testament at the University of Assiut.

While Tayyeb conceded that the Jewish temple may have existed in a place called “Jerusalem,” she said that the city wasn’t located in the same place as Israel’s modern capital. Citing Jewish texts, she claimed it was unclear where the ancient temple stood, but that there was ample evidence that it could not have been at the Temple Mount.

[...]

I don't think I've heard this particular goofy "theory" before, but it seems there's always a new one. You can read about it in detail at the link. It has no basis in reality. Some other recent cases of Temple denial are here, here, and links. And there's more on that early-twentieth-century guide to the Temple Mount by the Supreme Muslim Council here, here, and here.

The AJS annual meeting

REPORT: Connecting the dots. Association for Jewish Studies convention offers food for thought (Larry Yudelson, Jewish Standard/Times of Israel).

If your idea of a good time is hearing someone explain at length the connections between the treasures of King Tut’s tomb and the biblical ark of the covenant, you should have been in Boston last week for the annual convention of the Association of Jewish Studies.

I was there. And yes, I had a blast.

[...]

The meeting was held in Boston on December 13-15. This is a long report by a well-informed nonspecialist on some papers on Rabbinic and Second Temple Judaism. Excerpt:

A key difference between academic Jewish studies — a field barely 200 years old — and traditional yeshiva studies is that academics look not just at what the texts (the Torah, the Talmud, the midrashim) say but asks: How did those texts fit into the broader picture of the Jewish community of that era? How much do they represent the reality of their era, as opposed to what the authors wanted to be true? How does other historical evidence mesh with those texts? And when were those texts written anyway?

The central problem in these lines of inquiry is there isn’t all that much other evidence. Like paleontologists deducing a species of dinosaur from the shape of a fossilized jawbone, academic Jewish scholars are trying to recreate a world from bits and pieces (and sometimes, in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, actual scraps of parchment). If you visualize pre-modern Jewish history as a timeline, then you might put 1500 B.C.E. on the far left — that’s about when the Bible dates the Exodus — and the invention of printing around 1500 C.E. on the right. For most of this period, scholars have occasional points of evidence, but there are huge gaps. Some of the points on the timeline are the traditional Jewish texts: biblical books, Mishna, Talmud, medieval responsa. Other points are archaeological evidence: ancient inscriptions, buildings, utensils, animal bones. (The latter show, among other things, whether the inhabitants of a certain place at a certain time did or did not eat pork.) Then there is the evidence of books and texts that didn’t become part of the Jewish tradition. Some of those were written but not preserved by Jews — this includes books kept as part of Christian editions of the Bible; writers like the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who didn’t write in Hebrew, and those texts that happened to be preserved alongside Biblical scrolls in the dry caves of Qumran at the shores of the Dead Sea. And finally, there are those books written by non-Jews that give insight into Jewish histories, whether they are Christian church fathers describing their debates with Jews or Babylonian books from the time of the Talmudic sages.

Faced with three or four dots that more or less line up, the temptation is to connect them into a pretty picture. For a professor seeking renown and career advancement, that’s pretty mandatory. The danger, though, is that someone will discover a dot that was overlooked — and that shows the pretty picture didn’t capture all the dots; a theory that overlooked the evidence. So there is a tension between the desire to innovate and the fear of sticking out your not-yet-tenured neck.

Nag Hammadi Seminar

ANDRÉ GAGNÉ: Activities of the NH Seminar for 2015-2016. At Concordia University.

Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project

THE BRITISH LIBRARY: Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project. The Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project has been digitising items from the British Library's significant collection of Hebrew hand-written books, charters and scrolls, in order to make them available online.

Coming towards the end of this phase of our project, we have almost finalised the digitisation of 1,255 manuscripts selected for this phase, with the total of approximately 430,000 digitised images. These are mainly manuscripts catalogued and published by George Margoliouth at the end of the 19th century, but some of these have never been published. At this point, several manuscripts still await more thorough conservation treatments. In addition, four of our Torah scrolls included textile covers (mantles), made of silk brocade and linen. These are undergoing conservation treatment by a textile conservator prior to imaging.

So far, 748 digitised manuscripts have been uploaded and can be viewed on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site, and the remainder is expected to be fully accessible by the end of June 2016.

Background on the project, which is also associated with the Israel National Library, is here. For many other manuscript digitization projects, go here and just keep following the links.

The aftermath of 4 BCE

PHILIP JENKINS: After the Crisis (The Anxious Bench).

I have sketched the political and social meltdown that Palestine suffered in the terrible year of 4 BC. Wars and insurrections were by no means unusual anywhere in the ancient world, and Palestine was no exception. But this particular crisis was unusual in its severity, and several features make it worthy of special notice, especially for anyone interested in Christian origins.

[...]

Background here.

Lied on Syriac and Coptic fragments of 4 Ezra

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Two forgotten sources to 4 Ezra.

In the last few years, I have mentioned on two occasions manuscript witnesses to 4 Ezra that have apparently been left out of scholarly discussions focusing on this writing. In this post, I propose two possible reasons for this omission, and discuss why these manuscript sources to 4 Ezra deserve our attention. My interest here is not the decisions made by individual scholars, but rather the assessment schemes embedded in philological paradigms and the structuring effects of disciplinary borders to research practices.

[...]

Background here and links. Cross-file under "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch."

Explorator

AWOL: Open Access Journal: Explorator. It's good to see this weekly column of news on archaeology and antiquity by David Meadows. And let me take this opportunity also to mention David's blog on Classical Studies, Rogue Classicism. Both are well worth reading and PaleoJudaica links to both from time to time.

A Coptic Christmas story

'TIS THE SEASON: Putting Together the Puzzle of a Christmas Story: A Coptic Document in Princeton and Its Related Fragments. Alin Suciu discusses a Coptic text about the birth of Jesus.

Goodacre on the Magi

'TIS THE SEASON: NT Pod 76: This year's Christmas episode (Mark Goodacre). The subject of Mark's Christmas podcast this year is "The Magi in Matthew's Gospel."

Past PaleoJudaica posts on the Magi are here, here, here (and links), here, and here. And past posts on the Star of Bethlehem story are here, here, and links.

Forensic reconstruction of Jesus' face? No.

'TIS THE SEASON: Jesus Christ’s ‘face’ recreated utilizing Semite skulls by Richard Neave.

Is this the REAL face of Jesus? Forensic experts use ancient Semite skulls to reveal what Christ may have looked like

He may be shown as a Caucasian man with long, flowing light brown hair in many religious artworks, but Jesus would have likely had a darker complexion and short, dark, curly hair, a forensic expert claims.

Retired medical artist Richard Neave has recreated the face of ‘Jesus’ by studying Semite skulls using modern-day forensic techniques.

[...]

This is an old story that is obviously being recycled for Christmas, but I don't think I have noted it before. The actual story is this:

The team analysed skeletal remains of Semite men from the time of Jesus to come up with the average build of a Jewish man living in Galilee.

So this is an interesting project of forensic reconstruction that gives us a vaguely averaged idea of what an ancient Galilean man might have looked like (assuming the skulls were from the Galilee, which is implied but not stated). Only vaguely averaged, because any averaging of this type that would have statistical significance would need a lot more than three samples. There is no particular reason to think that their reconstruction looks very much like Jesus looked. We already knew he wasn't blond with blue eyes. Related thematic and seasonal post here.

And now after the above was composed, Professor Joan Taylor has published the following with the BBC: What did Jesus really look like? That forensic reconstruction comes up briefly, but she also discusses his likely hair and beard style and clothing style, as well as the origins of the idea of Jesus as the bearded longhair wearing a long robe.

Apocryphal Christmas revisited

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Christmas Stories in Christian Apocrypha. The birth of Jesus in the apocryphal gospels (Tony Burke). Also noted last year, but 'Tis the Season and it has been updated, so noted again.

Christmas 2015

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

Posts of Christmas past are collected here and links. A couple of recent seasonal posts are here and here. And I have some more Christmas posts coming today.

Another review of "Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs"

THE ART NEWSPAPER: One God to rule them all: Garry Shaw on Faith After the Pharaohs at the British Museum. The exhibition beautifully captures how religion shaped the region.

In the British Museum's latest exhibition, Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs, there is a long fragment of papyrus, one of many on display, written in Greek and called the Gospel of Thomas. What is striking about this fragment is not its beauty or penmanship, but the era in which it was written. In Oxyrhynchus, an Egyptian city, the scroll’s Christian owner had copied the text less than 300 years after the death of Jesus, a time when the ancient Egyptian gods were still widely worshipped, before the acceptance of Christianity across the Roman Empire and before the appearance of Islam. To many of his contemporaries in Egypt, this ancient copyist—a man simply trying to preserve his messiah's sayings—would have been a rebel. He could not have predicted how Egypt, and the whole world, would change over the coming centuries, or that the church would forbid Christians fr om reading the very text he was copying once the contents of the New Testament had been agreed upon.

[...]

Past posts on the Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs Exhibition at the British Museum are collected here and links.

Books on the Persian Empire and Hebrew philology

AWOL: Two new volumes in the ANCIENT NEAR EAST MONOGRAPHS Series.

Political Memory in and after the Persian Empire
edited by Jason M. Silverman and Caroline Waerzeggers, ANEM 13, 2015

Epigraphy, Philology, and the Hebrew Bible: Methodological Perspectives on Philological and Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Jo Ann Hackett
edited by Jeremy M. Hutton and Aaron D. Rubin, ANEM 12, 2015

Follow the link for downloading and ordering information. And congratulations to Professor Hackett on the Festschrift!

Sidnie White Crawford on canon

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Canon Forum: A Response. Sidnie White Crawford responds to the three essays in the recent AJR Forum on the biblical Canon, on which see here and links.

Mystery golden object identified

AN "ISIS BEAMER HARMONIZER": It Took Israeli Authorities Months to Identify This Strange, Gold Object (Danny Lewis, Smithsonian.com). Sorry, no Temple treasure this time.

Talmudic and Gnostic Star Wars?

IT'S COME TO THIS: How 'Star Wars' Became America's Talmud [SPOILER ALERT!] (Jay Michaelson, The Forward).

And if that weren't enough, there's this: The religious case for ignoring Star Wars Episodes I, II and III (Bob Smietana, WaPo).

There won’t be any “Attack of the Clones” at our house this Christmas.

No “Revenge of the Sith.”

And definitely no “Phantom Menace.”

Instead, we’ll sing carols, decorate the tree, exchange presents, all while watching the original three “Star Wars” movies.

Then we’ll head out for a late afternoon showing of “The Force Awakens” on Christmas Day.

At our house the prequels are like the gnostic Gospels of “Star Wars.” They exist, but we don’t watch them. Why?

Like the gnostic Gospels, the prequels aren’t true. Or to put it another way, they aren’t the same story as the originals. Something about the essential nature of “Star Wars” was lost along the way.

[...]

Again, the first article above has SPOILERS, so don't click in the link if that matters to you.

Both articles have quite a few assumptions built in, but these are interesting to explore. For my part, I ignore the second-made trilogy because it was awful. I'll take the Gnostic gospels over them any time.

I saw The Force Awakens on Monday and, frankly, was not much impressed. But your mileage may vary.