Jesus 'may have visited England', says Scottish academic

(BBC)

Jesus Christ could have come to Britain to further his education, according to a Scottish academic.

Church of Scotland minister Dr Gordon Strachan makes the claim in a new film entitled And Did Those Feet.

The film examines the story of Jesus' supposed visit, which survives in the popular hymn Jerusalem.

Dr Strachan believes it is "plausible" Jesus came to England for his studies, as it was the forefront of learning 2,000 years ago.

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Shlomo Sand clearly intended his book as an explosive device, a big bang demolishing the myths of Jewishness on which both communal identity and Israeli state policies rest.

His hostile critics react as if it were a deadly bomb, a kind of literary-political terrorist attack. Actually, The Invention of the Jewish People is less a single detonation than a string of firecrackers, erupting or just fizzling in uncertain succession. Ranging across several millennia but with its main aim on Israel's political present, the book has too many diffuse themes and purposes quite to start the kind of fire Sand wants. It doesn't help that a few of his incendiary gadgets almost entirely fail, while others prove to be worn out from previous use.

That sounds harsh: perhaps unduly so. Sand's political purpose is (in my view) an admirable one, and many of his historical claims probably more right than wrong. But at least the mixed response this review will convey might help break away from the pattern of reactions the book is receiving: it has already been published in French and Hebrew. They are starkly divided between uncritical enthusiasm and total condemnation. The blogosphere has been buzzing with wild charges and vulgar abuse against Sand's book – most repeatedly, predictably and depressingly, calling it anti-Semitic.

[...]

Sand is not immune to similar zeitgeist factors. He rightly excoriates Zionist historiography that posits an unbroken continuum between the ancient Jewish homeland and its modern inhabitants in order to justify ownership of all the biblical territory. His particular beef is with geneticists who have “discovered” such ludicrous “facts” as the Jewish gene that is shared by Ashkenazim and Sephardim, or make the even more preposterous claim that a single chromosome is common to over 50 per cent of men surnamed Cohen.

But because Sand’s political ideal would be “the creation of a democratic bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan”, he is too cavalier in dismissing all of our standard historical narrative as an “invention”. Shared folk memories, totally accurate or not, have been a vital ingredient in Jewish survival.

YU Professors Fine and Tawil Make Mark on Jewish Studies Literature Scene

Yaelle Frohlich (The YU Observer)
Issue date: 11/25/09 Section: News

Dr. Steven Fine, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University (YU) and director of the YU Center for Israel Studies, was recently awarded a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies. Fine's book, "Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology," explores Jewish art and its relation to Jewish identity in the Greco-Roman period. Described as "the first historical monograph on ancient Jewish art in forty years," it won in the category of "Jews and the Arts."

[...]

Meanwhile, Yeshiva College Professor Hayim Tawil's Akkadian lexicon, "An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew" is being released this month. The work demonstrates the relationship between Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian, once the main language spoken in what is now known as the Middle East. ...

Dr. John P. Jackson, director of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, told CNA, “you have to be very careful when interpreting these things.” He cited the example of an image on the Shroud thought to have been the rope which led Jesus to Calvary which, under scientific investigation, turned out to be nothing more than a watermark.

“I'm not trying to demean someone else's work that I'm not familiar with,” Jackson said. He did, however, point out that “there is a long history of people finding things on the Shroud which are tied into subjectivity.”

Eugene Ulrich (ed.), The Biblical Qumran Scrolls (VTSup 134; Leiden: Brill, 2010) (Not yet on Amazon. Includes my work on the Cave IV Genesis-Exodus manuscripts.)

Bernard A. Taylor et al., Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint: Expanded Edition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009) (review copy)

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up ...

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory.

Yarmouk University DSS dss@yu.edu.jo:
================================

The Jordanian Dead Scrolls Project and the Publications Office of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology/Yarmouk University published the Arabic translation of David N. Freedman and Pam Fox Kuhlken's Book: What Are The Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter? Translated by Ikhlas Qanaweh.

The publications of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology are available for exchange. Please send your publications to the following address:

Publications Office
Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology
Yarmouk University
Irbid – Jordan

For more information please write to: archpubl@yu.edu.jo.

The Encyclopedia aims to offer a comprehensive introduction to scholarly research in Second Temple Judaism (or from the Babylonian Exile to the Bar-Kokhba Revolt). It includes biographies of Scholars and Authors as well as abstracts of scholarly and fictional Works on the period, from the 16th century to the present.

Our topic will be "2 Baruch and 4 Ezra: Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First Century Israel." The Seminar will take place June 26-30, 2011 (i.e., one week before the international SBL in London) in the Villa Sacro Cuore in Triuggio, just outside of Milan, Italy. The opening evening will be at the Ambrosiana Library, where we will be shown the famed Syriac manuscript that contains 2 Baruch, as well as several other treasures.

The Payvand copy of the Persepolis Annual Report is an unattributed copy of what I posted here http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/2009/11/persepolis-fortification-archive.html on November 12th. "Mine" is an authorized republication (with reformatting and hyperlinks added by me) of an article under copyright by the Oriental Institute.

No big deal really, but I thought I'd mention it any way.

Professor Frale has published a new book, The Shroud of Jesus the Nazarene, which claims an archaic script that appears on parts of the material was written by low-ranking Roman officials or mortuary clerks on a scroll or piece of papyrus to identify Christ's corpse.

Such a document would have enabled the relatives of a dead person to retrieve a body from a communal morgue, she suggested.

Scholars first noticed that there was writing on the shroud in 1978 but when the radiocarbon tests a decade later suggested that the shroud was a forgery, historians lost interest in the script, Dr Frale said.

She claimed the text also partially confirmed the Gospels' account of Jesus' final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.

On an enhanced image studied by Frale, at least seven words can be seen, fragmented and scattered on and around the face, criss-crossing the cloth vertically and horizontally.

The text also mentions that the man who was wrapped in the shroud had been condemned to death, she believes.

Professor Frale said the hidden text was, in effect, the "burial certificate" for Christ.

"I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside," she said. "What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place."

However Antonio Lombatti, anther historian who has written books about the shroud, said: "People work on grainy photos and think they see things. It's all the result of imagination and computer software."

Archaeologists publish first map of contested sites in Middle East
New online map reveals archaeological activity on Holy Land sites in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

By UCLA Newsroom November 20, 2009 Category: Research

A team of archaeologists from UCLA, USC, Israel and Palestinian territories has developed the first map detailing Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem – much of it never publicly disclosed.

The fully searchable online map, which serves as a window into thousands of years worth of archaeological sites in the Holy Lands, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from American Schools of Oriental Research, the main organization for archaeologists working in the Middle East.

The prize will be announced today at the organization’s annual meeting in New Orleans.
[...]