Posted on Fri, Jun 18, 2010 @ 12:46 PM
Archaeology season in Israel for 2010 is well underway, with some digs coming to the end of their summer season and others yet to begin. Todd Bolen, of Bible Places blog, keeps track of the progress at a number of sites including an interesting time lapse video of an excavation.
Most sites also have "unofficial" blogs to provide details of progress--presumably as they are independent of the IT departments of the university sponsoring the dig. Aren Amaeir's Tel Es-Safi or Gath blog is an interesting example.
James Tabor also provides a positive review of the efforts of Eilat Mazar at probably the most controversial dig presently being undertaken, the City of David. In a post titled "Excavating the City of David: Has Eilat Mazar found David's Palace?" James sets out context of Mazar's efforts.
Will add details of interesting discoveries as they come to light.
Posted on Thu, Jun 17, 2010 @ 12:45 PM
It has long been recognized that Deuteronomy, Isaiah and the Psalms were the most frequently quoted parts of the Bible by the writers of the New Testament. In a new book, David Lincicum evaluates Paul's use of Deuteronomy in his writings.
Mohr Siebeck, the publishers, provide the following comments on the new title:
Attending to the realia of ancient practices for reading Scripture, David Lincicum charts the effective history of Deuteronomy in a broad range of early Jewish authors in antiquity. By viewing Paul as one example of this long history of tradition, the apostle emerges as a Jewish reader of Deuteronomy. In light of his transformation by encounter with the risen Christ, Paul's interpretation of the end of the Pentateuch alternates between the traditional and the radical, but remains in conversation with his Jewish rough contemporaries. Specifically, Paul is seen to interpret Deuteronomy with a threefold construal as ethical authority, theological norm, and a lens for the interpretation of Israel's history. In this way, the volume sets Paul firmly in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation and at the same time provides a wide-ranging survey of the impact of Deuteronomy in antiquity.
Lincicum's work appears to chart some new territory in the appreciation of Paul's writing that grounds him in a first century Jewish tradition rather than the creator of some new religion as he has so often being portrayed.
Posted on Wed, Jun 16, 2010 @ 06:14 PM
A pleasant surprise was included in a recent Review of Biblical Literature. It contained a review by Professor James Dunn of Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom, of a new title on a subject on which I've been writing: Peter in Rome. Professor Dunn is a highly respected New Testament scholar. He provided a review of Petrus in Rom: Die literarischen Zeugnisse or to the non-German readers "Peter in Rome: The literary testimony". This was a monograph written by Professor Otto Zwierlein, a noted writer on classical literature and philology and published by Walter de Gruyter at $137.00. So don't expect to see it appearing on any best seller lists. Subsequent examination finds that another review was published in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (03/25/2010) by Pieter W. van der Horst a Professor at Utrecht University and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
Firstly a word of caution. The author of this book is not a theologian, but a classical scholar of some standing. The reviewers are both respected scholars within the area of the New Testament and related Jewish literature. None appear to be adherents of the Catholic faith. But Horst notes that the approach of Zwierlein is not that of a polemic (streichschif) against the Roman church but "a very sober and thorough philological and historical analysis of all the literary documents from antiquity that are commonly supposed to underpin the Vatican myth". Dunn corroborates this view with the opinion that Zwierlein provides a "painstaking examination of the textual traditions relating to Peter's residence and martyrdom in Rome, in which Zwierlein finds little or no sound history."
Both reviewers note the points of departure that Zwierlein takes with previous writers on this subject. Zwierlein's understanding that the use of Babylon in 1 Peter 5:13, not as a cipher for Rome but as "a metaphor equivalent to Jas 1:1 'in the diaspora' and hence equivalent to 'in exile'" is quickly noted. That is a new approach to the use of Babylon in 1 Peter that I have never noted before and judging from Dunn's literary raised eyebrow, he has never seen or considered previously. 1 Clement is also re-dated to the second century and Zwierlein argues that Clement simply bases his detail of Peter and Paul on Luke's writings in the Acts of the Apostles. Such a dating is a departure as of recent date; some have been seeking to date the writing of 1 Clement into the 60's of the first century. Similarly, the Epistles of Ignatius are noted to contain later interpolations or are the product of the late second century which makes them unreliable evidence for the subject at hand.
Dunn records that Zwierlein's thesis is that the idea of Peter being martyred in Rome developed in the mid second century as a response to the challenge to the church from Gnostic ideas and groups that were using Simon Magus as a focus. Horst notes that "[h]e proves how in this process of anti-Gnostic struggle, which went hand in hand with the consolidation of the monarchic episcopate, developments that took place in the second half of the second century were retrojected to the middle of the first century (as happened so often) in order to provide them with apostolic authority." This idea is of interest as it is the same point I sought to make in "The Birth of a Legend".
Both reviewers note the care and detail given to the textual and philological analysis by Zwierlein, which is clearly the man's forte.
Dunn concludes with an interesting wish for Zwierlein. While accepting the plausibility of Zwierlein's argument, Dunn notes his failure to connect with a lengthy article on this subject written by Richard Bauckham "The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature" (ANRW 2.26.2:539-95). This is an interesting article and I'm indebted to Professor Dunn for giving me the segue to discuss it here. I read the article in preparation for my own writing on the subject and then put it aside, hoping to be able to write on Bauckham's approach subsequently.
The article in question provides a comprehensive introduction to the earliest literature relating to Peter being in Rome. While a useful article as Dunn notes, my evaluation of Bauckham's article has a strong negative aspect. Bauckham starts his examination of all the literary testimony with the New Testament "evidence" as he sees it. He reads 1 Peter 5:13 as being a cipher for Rome. However, he then approaches the rest of the New Testament with the ‘fact' that Peter was truly in Rome and finds numerous New Testament allusions to support his conclusion. However, if those same texts were examined without such a precondition, then the same readings would not be reached. To my mind, Bauckham establishes his conclusion by circular reasoning, which then influences the remainder of his work so that it lacks the objectivity for which he is normally known.
Posted on Tue, Jun 15, 2010 @ 05:09 PM
Should we use the Greek name Jesus to refer to the Son of God?
A feature of the 20th century has been the rise of a movement known as the Sacred Name Movement (SNM). Adherents believe that the Hebrew divine names are the essential names of God, and that those names should be used and not translated into other languages. For instance, the English name Jesus is considered a pagan name that should only be used in its Hebrew form of Joshua or more correctly Yehoshua.
The past century has seen a bonanza of early texts become available through archaeology. Today we have the benefit of being able to read and analyze texts that were written before and shortly after the time of Jesus Christ. This provides us with a new window into this idea. What do these texts tell us about the question of sacred names?
P52 is a fragment of papyrus that records part of John 18 and 19, while P66 contains most of the Gospel of John. P52 is considered the oldest New Testament text known presently, but both manuscripts have been reliably dated to the early part of the 2nd century. The Gospel of John was not written until late in the first century, so P52 and P66 are very early copies--within 50 years of the original. They show that the Greek name ‘Jesus' was being used and treated with reverence.
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| John 1 in P66 |
Beginning in the period of the second temple, Jews did not utter the name of Yahweh, substituting the term Adonai in Hebrew or Kyrios in Greek. The name was apparently only used by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. Greek texts of the Old Testament discovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls show how this sensitivity to the name was handled. The translators of the Scripture into the Greek language made a practice of writing the name YHWH, known as the Tetragrammaton, either by using Paleo-Hebrew characters or by abbreviating the title in Greek as IA- (Ja- or Ya-). The intention was to highlight to the reader that the name should not be pronounced. A third letter was added to provide the grammatical case--whether the Name was used as a subject or object in the sentence--thus maintaining the grammatical rules of construction.
That the likes of P52 and P66 are valid texts to consider is made clear by the way in which they continue to abbreviate the names of the Father, God and Jesus Christ. They are normally reduced to two or three letters in which the last letter changes according to the grammatical use--see above--and the name is highlighted with a line over the abbreviation. Jesus is abbreviated as Ιη-, (transliterated into English as Je- or Ye-). Christ is abbreviated as Χρ- (literally Chr-). The word God is recorded as Θ- while Father is shown as Πρ- and Lord as Κ-. These abbreviations clearly derive from the Greek terms and not the Hebrew. All early manuscripts of the New Testament were written solely in upper case letters (uncials), so the abbreviations used above would have been capitalized. I have used upper and lower case for clarity as some Greek letters are easier to recognize in the lower case. Hence we can depend on the fact that the names of the divine Beings were recorded in Greek and not Hebrew. A reader of the text would read the Greek title and not the Hebrew. Conversely, the Aquila translation of the Scriptures in Greek, created and used by the Jews in the second century after Christ, continued to use the Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew characters.
The question should rightly be asked as to why the scribes abbreviated these names. Clearly the Jewish practice began to avoid the usage of the Tetragrammaton. But we should note that they did not appear to handle the term Elohim in the same consistent manner. With the New Testament being recorded in the Greek language a problem arose that did not exist in Hebrew. Scribes writing in Hebrew differentiated between words as we do today by the use of spaces. Greek was not written with spaces between words. Spaces appeared only at the end of a sentence. By abbreviating, there was less chance of misspelling the name and with over marking the names respect was shown as it would not be read as part of another word by mistake. As a result the reader would not take the name of God in vain.
This is clear documentary indication that the early followers of Jesus Christ did not place any importance on the Hebrew names as the Sacred Name Movement would claim, but translated the names into the language that was being used for the proclamation of the Gospel and the instruction of the Church.
We can therefore conclude that the earliest available texts of New Testament writings deny the validity of the sacred name concept.
Posted on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 12:30 PM
Jacob Milgrom, a noted Jewish academic and Biblical commentator, died last weekend in Jerusalem at the age of 87. Professor Milgrom will be long remembered for his work on the priesthood in ancient Israel and especially the aspects of ritual purity that were required of the priests and the community. His commentaries on both Leviticus--published as part of the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary Series (3 volumes) as well as the Augsburg Fortress Continental Commentary Series--and the Book of Numbers, published in the JPS Torah series--will form the basis of study in this area for considerable time.
The impact of purity is often overlooked in terms of the New Testament. Christian scholarship, in a desire to create distance from Jewish antecedents, often overlook the importance of this within the early church. Most of the healing miracles that are detailed in the Gospels were undertaken by Jesus Christ to enable the sufferer to become "clean" and hence avoid the stigmatism of being impure. The great debate in the early Church was the application of the purity laws to gentiles who wished to be followers of the way.
Milgrom has thus made a sizeable contribution to further studies in this field.
As a prolific scholar, Milgrom had just finished a section of a new commentary on the Prophet Ezekiel for the Anchor Yale series.
Posted on Sat, May 01, 2010 @ 01:16 PM
The Samaritan Passover has just been celebrated (April 28, 2010). In so doing, they mainly follow the instructions of Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 16 in sacrificing lambs, albeit with a few local traditions as well. This is performed on Mount Gerizim together with the eating of the lambs in the same night. Any left overs are burned before daybreak.
Aren Maeir, a professor at Bar Ilan University was invited to the latest event and blogs about it--including photos--on his blog. It is worth a read as it captures some of the atmosphere that must have pervaded the temple in Jerusalem during prior to C.E. 80.
Interestingly, the Passover is kept at the beginning of the 14th according to the Hebrew Calendar, but in this case on the second month. Whether this was an intercalary year for the Samaritans is not given. I've tried to find information previously on the Samaritan calendar but have not found anything of substance on-line.
Posted on Mon, Feb 01, 2010 @ 05:48 PM
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Conference held to locate origin of a "Jewish" idea |
"How is it that Israel, a small nation living in polytheistic environment, brought Monotheism to the world?" With that challenge, Frederick L. Simmons opened the symposium he had sponsored with the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, January 10, 2010. Simmons charged the participants that he was not prepared to accept an answer of “God willed it.” Rather he demanded a rational explanation for the origin. Ziony Zevit, Professor of Biblical Literature and Semitic Languages at AJU-LA, had assembled a panel under the rubric of “A Day of Archaeological Insight: What Do We Mean When We Say Monotheism?” To address the subject, Zevit had brought together several notable archaeologists and biblical studies experts from the East Coast. Drs. Barry Gittlen from Towson University and Steven Fine of Yeshiva University, New York, discussed the archaeological evidence while Mark Smith from New York University and Jeffrey Tigay from the University of Pennsylvania discussed the biblical aspects. Some three hundred people assembled to hear their deliberations as part of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education program and AJU. Professor Zevit made it abundantly clear from the outset that we were dealing with a difficult term and that the audience should expect some surprises. Tracing the usage of the term Monotheism as presented in the Oxford English Dictionary (the second most quoted source of the day after the Tanakh), he suggested that “atheists like the idea of Monotheism as it gives only one target to shoot at.” But in a way, that almost provided a summary of the day. He continued by asking where one should go to find about polytheism, countering his own suggestion of the Hindu culture in India by showing that Hindu scholars see all the different emanations of Hinduism as simply different manifestations of the one Hindu deity. As a result they claim that Hinduism is also monotheistic. Jewish Kabbalistic lore likewise has emanations of God not dissimilar to those of Hinduism. Thus, he concluded his introduction by suggesting that the terms we use are so problematic that they are almost meaningless. Professor Gittlen provided an “Archaeological Introduction to Biblical Cult Places and Images,” graphically illustrated from his own field work in Israel and other sources. He appropriately described the prize of archaeology as coming to understand how and why people did things—understanding the context of their actions. Yet so much of the archaeological evidence is of practices that appear contrary to the instruction of Scripture. Professor Mark Smith was the only person to attempt to respond to Frederick Simmons's challenge. Accepting the limitation of the ideas of monotheism that Ziony Zevit had established at the beginning of the presentation, he still felt that monotheism had a place in Israel. After presenting a diachronic overview of worship in Israel, he posited that the idea of monotheism was developed as a response to the imperial powers of Assyria and Babylon that came to dominate Israel and Judah. However his own reasoning left holes in his argument. Noting that polemics are wars fought with words, and that polemics rightly help us appreciate the argument being combated, he failed to recognize that the rabbis some 1,000 years later were still involved in polemics against those who were seen as against their monotheistic ideas. If the idea of monotheism had been developed in the 6th or 7th century BCE, why were the Rabbis still fighting to have it established as the ideal of Judaism a millennia later? This question was never considered in Smith's argument. Professor Jeffrey H. Tigay's background in Deuteronomy equipped him to address the subject of “Monotheism in the Hebrew Bible.” He noted in opening that YHWH was a personal name and that the issue of monotheism is not that of "one god," but of "the only god." He opined that monotheism as commonly understood had no real part in Scripture. He showed that the Shema, contained in Deuteronomy 6:4 is not a monotheistic statement. Its claim to be a monotheistic statement was post-biblical. The scriptures normally used to support monotheism in the Hebrew Bible are not philosophical statements, but rather statements of historical reality to the authors and audience. To Professor Tigay, any solution to the quest of Fred Simmons lay outside the realm of Scripture.  Steve Fine moved the time scale forward to the archaeological evidences from the first centuries of the current era. With presentations providing visits to synagogues in Dura-Europos, and in the Galilee, Steve Fine raised questions about the Jewish rejection of representative art, either from the biblical record or the pagan world. Why was the synagogue in Dura-Europos decorated with art depicting biblical stories and accounts? The art was clearly presented to show that biblical and not pagan ideas were being presented. And why should synagogues in the Galilee from the same period have zodiacs so prominently displayed? They clearly were not for the purpose of a calendar as they mixed the signs of the zodiac and seasons from the normal order. What we accept as being normal has not always been the case. Such is true with our current ideas of monotheism.
Overall, the event presented a portrait to the audience that all was not as we would like to think it was. It created a challenge to the normally accepted and unquestioned views that underpin both Judaism and Christianity. Upon reflection, the conclusion of the matter at the end of the day was that the original challenge of Frederick Simmons was not worded correctly. Rather than asking why Israel gave rise to Monotheism, he should have asked why Israel gave rise to Monolatry. Only Israel worshipped a single God. Monotheism as we use it today was a construct of the Greek philosophers—most likely Antithenes, a pupil of Socrates—and then of subsequent Christian church fathers as well as the Rabbis of the current era. John J. Collins, Holmes Professor of Old Testament at Yale, summed up the situation described in the Dead Sea Scrolls at the start of the Christian era. This is a fitting description of the early followers of Jesus Christ as well. [M]onotheism hardly seems the right word to describe the religion of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To be sure, the supremacy of the Most High is never in doubt. But this is not a God who dwells alone. He is surrounded by ’elim and ’elohim, holy ones and angels. Some of these angels (Michael, Melchizedek, and the Prince of Light) are exalted above their fellows (Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2000, 27).
Given that conclusion, the ideas of the timing of the rise of monotheism within Judaism by Professor Mark Smith seem patently misplaced. |
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Posted on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 @ 05:53 PM
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Cuneiform fragments being examined |
The Cyrus Cylinder held and exhibited by the British Museum is written in Babylonian Cuneiform and dates to the conquest of Babylon and the neo-Babylonian Empire by Cyrus the Great who ruled the Medo-Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE. The cylinder has often been described as a bill of rights, and displays a pluralistic view of world religions that characterized the Medo-Persian Empire. In this declaration, Cyrus returns national religious treasures to the Babylonians, in a similar way to the edict of Cyrus recorded in the Biblical book of Ezra 1. The cylinder has been missing some pieces of the edict, as can be seen on the official photographs provided by the British Museum. Now the discovery of cuneiform fragments among other holdings of the museum that could be from the cylinder has heightened interest in the artifact. The fragments are to be studied and published firstly, before being put on display in Iran, a nation which traces its descent from ancient Persia. |
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Posted on Sat, Jan 02, 2010 @ 06:32 PM
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Section of Joshua from Codex Sinaiticus found as bookbinding in St Catherine's library |
The Codex Sinaiticus considered the oldest and most complete example of the Bible was found in St Catherine’s Monastry, Mt. Sinai in the mid 19th century by Constantine Tischendorf. Subsequently, additional pages have been found in the past decades. Now another missing section has been identified in the binding of another book in St Catherine’s Library. The Independent, a UK newspaper reports: A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world's oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book. Nikolas Sarris spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from about AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the library of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt. . . . Academics from Britain, America, Egypt and Russia collaborated to put the entire Codex online this year but new fragments of the book are occasionally rediscovered. Mr Sarris, 30, chanced upon the fragment as he inspected photographs of a series of book bindings that had been compiled by two monks at the monastery during the 18th century. . . . A Greek student conservator who is studying for his PhD in Britain, Mr Sarris had been involved in the British Library's project to digitise the Codex and quickly recognised the distinct Greek lettering when he saw it poking through a section of the book binding. Speaking from the Greek island of Patmos yesterday, Mr Sarris said: "It was a really exciting moment. Although it is not my area of expertise, I had helped with the online project so the Codex had been heavily imprinted in my memory. I began checking the height of the letters and the columns and quickly realised we were looking at an unseen part of the Codex." Mr Sarris later emailed Father Justin, the monastery's librarian, to suggest he take a closer look at the book binding. "Even if there is a one-in-a-million possibility that it could be a Sinaiticus fragment that has escaped our attention, I thought it would be best to say it rather than dismiss it."
The use of old codices for bookbinding is not unusual as the quality of the old parchment was ideal for the task. But it also speaks to the way in which the monastry valued older codices, in this case a codex that has not been far from the center of textual considerations of the Bible since it was found, a little over a century ago. |
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Posted on Sat, Jan 02, 2010 @ 06:24 PM
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Politics and Archaeology |
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An exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, provided and sponsored by the Israeli Antiquities Authority is the subject of diplomatic moves by Jordan. The Government of Jordan has requested that Canadian Government seize the scrolls presently in Toronto which “Jordan claims were illegally taken by Israel in 1967.” At the heart of the issue is an international agreement signed in 1954. Toronto’s Globe and Mail reports: Summoning the Canadian chargé d'affaires in Amman two weeks ago, Jordan cited the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which both Jordan and Canada are signatories, in asking Canada to take custody of the scrolls. Jordan claims Israel acted illegally in 1967 when it took the scrolls from a museum in east Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan during the Six-Day War and subsequently occupied. The Hague Convention, which is concerned with safeguarding cultural property during wartime, requires each signatory “to take into its custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory. This shall either be effected automatically upon the importation of the property or, failing this, at the request of the authorities of that territory.” This means Canada must act, says Jordan. “The Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would be grateful if the Government of Canada would confirm … whether it is prepared to assume its international legal responsibility, and the means by which it intends to do so,” it wrote.
Canada has not responded positively to the request, but the action by the Jordanians probably spells the end of any traveling exhibits from Israel, without some prior guarantee that the objects will be safely returned to the IAA. The action by Jordan is not a denial of the Jewish character of the Scrolls, but rather who really owns the material. H/T James Davila, PaleoJudaica |
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