The Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

I wanted to let loyal readers of this Blog know that I am in the process “recreating” it in a different format that will be broader in scope than its inceptional ties to the publication of my book, The Jesus Dynasty in April, 2006. The topical scope and focus of the blog from the beginning has been, more broadly speaking, what scholars refer to as “Christian Origins.” What this change will involve will be a move of this blog to a new domain name and site, and an archiving of all the posts that are relevant to this broader focus. The Jesus Dynasty site will continue with links and information that are specifically related to the book itself, but it will be updated and redesigned. I have not been posting things as regularly as in the past due to travel and research commitments through the summer, however, I hope to get things back to normal soon.

Channel Five in the United Kingdom aired a new documentary this past Tuesday night titled “Secrets of the Jesus Tomb” produced by CTVC, with executive producer Ray Bruce and director Sean Smith. I was interviewed in Israel back in June, while at the Mt Zion dig, for the program. This film is part of a four part series called “Secrets of the Cross,” with programs forthcoming on Mary Magdalene, Who Killed Jesus, and the Templars.  I have not seen the film yet and I know of no plans for it to show in the United States at this time. I should get a copy by next week and once I have a chance to view it I will offer my own evaluation here. In the meantime Mark Goodacre, who has seen it, offers an excellent overview and evaluation on his NTGatewayBlog.

This film is not to be confused with the Cameron/Jacobovici program, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” that aired on Discovery and other worldwide markets in 2007, but never showed in the UK. My understanding is that this new UK film makes no mention whatsoever of the Cameron/Jacobovici film, and surprisingly, it does not even mention the producer, Ray Bruce’s key role in the 1996 BBC Easter film, “The Body in Question,” that first brought the “Talpiot Tomb” ossuaries, with the interesting cluster of names, to the attention of the public.

Stay tuned…

There are two traditional sites in Jerusalem that tourists and pilgrims revere as the likely location of Golgotha–the place where Jesus was crucified. The oldest and most revered is of course the 4th century Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest site in Christendom. It is located in the Christian Quarter, inside the present Old City walls and was built by queen Helena, the devout mother of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Coptic Christians share the veneration and operation of the site. Many Protestants prefer an alternative site, outside the Old City walls, just north of the Damascus Gate near the bus depot. It is commonly referred to as the “Gordon’s Calvary” or the Garden Tomb, after its “discoverer,” the British general Charles “Khartoum” Gordon. Gordon suggested the location on a visit to Jerusalem in 1882, impressed by the elevated craggy rock outcropping that he thought resembled a skull, and a nearby ancient tomb with an entrance sealed with a rolling stone.

There are photos of both sites in my book, The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 14) as well as a brief discussion of some of the problems with each site. Some years ago I encountered the view that the crucifixion took place on the Mount of Olives, as expressed in a little book published by the late Ernest Martin titled The Place of Christ’s Crucifixion: Its Discovery and Significance (Foundation for Biblical Research, 1984). This book is long ago out of print though used copies can still be found at Amazon and other sources. Martin later expanded his views in a subsequent volume, Secrets of Golgotha: The Forgotten History of Christ’s Crucifixion (ASK Publications, 1988), which I reviewed in Critical Review of Books in Religion 1991, pp. 213-214. Personally, I always preferred his first, much shorter work, as it focused on the location of the site itself, whereas the subsequent expanded volume contained a lot of theological ideas that Martin held about the atoning death of Jesus per se.

Although Martin independently came to his view that the crucifixion of Jesus took place on the Mount of Olives, after publishing his first work he discovered the views of Nikos Kokkinos (1980) who had developed a somewhat different argument related to the notion that the crucifixion would have taken place at the scene of Jesus’ arrest, based on Roman law, thus near the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mt of Olives. Later Martin also noted the views published by W. J. Hutchinson in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1873, 115; also 1870, 379-381), that Jesus’ crucifixion must have taken place somewhere east of the Temple Mount. Since Martin’s work was published and his views regarding the Mt. of Olives have become better known, quite a few others have taken up various aspects of his arguments as a simple Web search will reveal.

The basic case for the Mt. of Olives being the site of Jesus’ crucifixion rests on several interrelated arguments of varying evidential strength.

1) The first, and in my view, the strongest, is a passage in the New Testament book of Hebrews (13:10-13) that speaks of “going outside the city gate,” to a specific altar that was not inside the Temple, but “outside the camp.” This is a clear and unmistakable reference to the Eastern Gate, leading to the Mt of Olives, and the Miphqad altar located on its slopes. It was at this spot that the Red Heifer (parah ‘adamah) was burnt to provide the essential ashes for cleansing all things related to Temple worship (Numbers 19). The Talmud and Mishnah are clear that this altar was located 2000 cubits, outside the Eastern Gate, on the slopes of the Mt. of Olives (bYoma 68a, mSanhedrin 6:1). The author of the book of Hebrews makes use of this essential sacrificial practice, “outside the camp,” to establish the legitimacy of Jesus being crucified “outside the gate.” Rather than a gate on the north of the city, the Eastern Gate is really the only one that would make sense in this passage. This image of the Red Heifer, that had to be “without spot or blemish” was picked up by the early Christians as the most fitting allegorical image of Jesus’ own cleansing sacrifice, with the “sprinkling” of his blood likened to that of the water prepared with the ashes of the Red Heifer. The writer of Hebrews, preserving pre-70 AD traditions, subsequently lost after the destruction of two Jewish Revolts and the establishment of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina by Hadrian, clearly knows the geography of Jerusalem and is able to make a very effective point to his readers based on Jesus being crucified east of the city, outside the gate, on the Mt. of Olives.

2) The Acts of Pilate (aka Gospel of Nicodemus IX.5) preserves a tradition that Jesus was sent away by Pilate with two malefactors named Dysmas and Gestas, to be crucified in the garden where he was arrested–Gethsemane, which all our gospel sources agree was across the Kidron on the slopes of the Mt of Olives. As Prof. Kokkinos demonstrated, this was in keeping with Roman law.

3) The Hebrew Gospel of Matthew (preserved by Ibn Shaprut in his work Even Bohan), published by George Howard, refers to the site of the crucifixion, in Hebrew, as Har Golgotha, which means a “mountain” or “hill,” and certainly not the little outcropping of rock preserved at the stone quarry where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands.

4) Josephus says that during the Jewish revolt (66-70 AD) thousands of Jewish victims were crucified “before the wall of the city,” in order to terrorize the population. This description fits perfectly with the Mt. of Olives, before the main city gate, with the Romans camped just to the north on Mt Scopus. This was the only location that could be seen by anyone in the city of Jerusalem, thus providing a visible warning to those who might be tempted to sympathize with rebels.

5) In the time of Jesus, Jewish tombs, other than the tomb of David, had been moved at least 2000 cubits “outside the city,” (Tosephta Baba Bathra 1:2), to avoid ritual contamination. This indicates that the tomb in which Jesus was temporarily placed by Joseph of Arimathea, was, of necessity, far outside the area where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today–just a few yards from the city wall. That is why we find the tombs of Helena, the high priests Annas and Caiaphus, and the Sanhedrin tombs, well beyond this 2000 cubit parameter. No one was carving a “newly hewn tomb” that close to the city wall in the 1st century, and the tomb area there today most likely dates back to Hellenistic times.

The traditional site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre fits none of this evidence. By the time Constantine’s mother, queen Helena came to Jerusalem, in the early 4th century, there was no memory of the original tomb of Jesus or the site of the crucifixion, as that oral tradition, that would have belonged to the Jerusalem Church, led by James and Simon, brothers of Jesus, had long ago perished. The tomb and monument area she was shown, by a stone quarry, most likely was the tomb of John Hyrcanus, that is often mentioned by Josephus as precisely in that area.

Back in 2005 when I was working on The Jesus Dynasty I commissioned the artist Balage Balogh, highlighted in my previous post on this blog, to paint a crucifixion scene on the Mt. of Olives based on my own exploration of the site. I had located a bedrock area, flat and just above the site of the miphqad altar, that resembles a “skull” with natural pockets of indentations, that seemed to me to be a very likely possibility for the actual site. It is directly in front of the Eastern Gate, looking into the courtyard of the Temple. Nearby are lots of 1st century tombs, as well as a oil-press (Gethsemane/Gat Shemen means “press of oil), and lots of Olive Orchards. None of these features fit the quarry area just north of the 1st century city wall, where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today. Balogh was most exacting in his work on this scene, as he is with all his work. He made the victims nude, he placed the nails as they should be, in the wrists and ankle bones, and he positioned the soldiers, the family gathered in front of the scene, and the bystanders, in their proper grab. The results are so breathtaking and startling, that I asked Simon & Schuster, my publisher, to print the painting in color in the inside back cover of the hardback edition–making that edition, now out of print but with a few copies available on Amazon as a “bargain” book, a collectors item.

Frankly, the image of Jesus dying, overlooking the city of Jerusalem, on the very slopes of the mountain he had ridden down a week earlier, is surely one of the most touching scenes of human history. To this day there is a north path that goes up to the area of crucifixion I have proposed and a southern path that goes down, from Bethany, both worn deep into the bedrock.

I wanted to begin a series of posts highlighting the extraordinary artistic work of Balage Baloge and his contributions to our visualization of the ancient Roman World of Jesus and early Christianity. I first encountered his work in the wonderful volume by John Crossan and Jonathan Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts. There one finds dozens of his striking color reconstructions of ancient scenes and cities such as Caesarea, Tiberius, Jerusalem, Capernaum, and Nazareth. I found his work meticulously accurate in terms of our historical texts and our archaeological sources, while at the same time breathtakingly beautiful in layout, composition, and imagination. You can see a nice collection of some of these works, relating to Jesus, on the Discovery Web site feature: The Land of Jesus. It is an interactive feature and truly one of the most fascinating things one can find on the Web in terms of putting you back in the time of Jesus.

When I was writing The Jesus Dynasty I contacted Balage and asked him if I could commission him to do seven special color paintings for me, specifically designed to illustrate aspects of the book that I wanted to highlight:

Drawing of Sepphoris as viewed from Nazareth

Aerial Shot of Herod’s Sepphoris

Herod’s Jerusalem looking East to the Mt of Olives showing the Herodian Palace Grounds

The “Jesus Hideout” in Jordan at Wadi el-Yabis

Jesus Before Caiaphus in the Priestly Mansion

Jesus Before Pilate’s Judgment Seat at the Praetorium

Jesus Crucified on the Mt of Olives

The results were amazing, really breathtaking, when one looks at the originals in full resolution. Unfortunately, due to printing costs, only two appeared in color in the hardcover edition, as part of the front and back inside covers, and the rest were B&W and rather small on the page, in the text of the book itself. In the paperback all of them appear, but in B&W, and also rather small. If we ever publish a “Deluxe Illustrated” edition of The Jesus Dynasty, they will surely be included in full color plates.

What I wanted to do here on the Jesus Dynasty Web site was to feature these paintings, and others by Balage, in nice color versions so readers can get more of an idea of their beauty and their value in terms of historical reconstruction.

Balage Baloge was born in Budapest, Hungary where he attended art school. He immigrated to the United States in 1989 and lives in Baltimore. Although his artistic work is wide ranging, as one can see from browsing his Balage4Art Web site, he has become especially fascinated with ancient history, the Bible and archaeology. He lived in Israel for a number of years and began working with archaeologists and scholars to recreate the ancient past. In addition to The Jesus Dynasty and Excavating Jesus he has done illustrations for The World of the Old Testament, The World of the New Testament, and A Guide to Jerusalem.

Here is a nice color version of one of the paintings he did for me, showing Jesus and his little band of disciples hiding out in Wadi el-Yabis (Wadi Cherith in the Bible) in Jordan, the last winter of his life, based on the account in the gospel of John (chapter 12, “Last Days of Jesus” in The Jesus Dynasty).

I am flying to Israel tonight to do some post-excavation work with Dr. Shimon Gibson on our Mt. Zion project. Today marks the end of the sixth week of excavating and I was only able to be present for the first two weeks, as reported previously Week One and Week Two. We had three teams come in for two weeks sessions and each team has been so very enthusiastic, hardworking, and dedicated, as was the case last summer and last spring. I hope some of you who read this Blog regularly will consider joining us in 2009. We will put up details about those dates and opportunities soon at our main Mt Zion site.

I am quite anxious to see the site now at the end of our summer season, to discuss what we have found with Dr. Gibson and Rafi Lewis, our field archaeologist and supervisor, and access what is next for this important project. I plan to post full reports with photos next week so stand by for lots more. I do know we have had some really spectacular and interesting finds, but until I have time to see the site and get a thorough briefing, I will hold off on reporting. I will post one photo here to show how deep we have gotten in the main central area we opened just last summer. It is truly quite amazing and the intact condition of these structures bodes well for our sense that we are in an area with incredibly well preserved remains from the Byzantine and Roman periods.

James Tabor

P.S. I also wanted to say to regular readers of this Blog that my time has been quite limited during July for posting due to being in Israel for the dig, then returning to my “day job” as Chair of our Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte. However, that is not to say there is any lack of things to report and discuss. I have been saving up quite a few things and will try to get to them soon.

David Van Biema, one of the best religion writers in the business, has just published a major story in this week’s issue of Time, titled “Was Jesus’ Resurrection a Sequel?” He dives right into the thick of it by pairing off Knohl’s interpretation of a pre-Christian Messiah, raised from the dead, “on the third day,” with the assumption of many Christian believers that the Good Friday/Easter Sunday tradition is uniquely Christian. Such is surely not the case, since the “raised on the 3rd day” tradition is actually embedded in the Hebrew Prophet Hosea:

Come, let us return to the LORD;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him (6:1-2)

This, along with the Jonah tradition, of the “three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17; Matthew 12:40) are clearly the texts that Mark builds upon as he introduces the “after three days” and “on the third day” tradition into his narrative (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 14:58).

The way these texts were woven together is complex, but in late 2nd Temple Jewish sectarian/messianic groups such exegesis was common and obviously fed into this new “Gabriel” text as well. It is not so much a matter of Christians borrowing from the Gabriel text, but that the diverse Messianic movements within Judaism before 70 AD were drawing from these sorts of eschatological texts to develop and give life to their expectations, as well as their disappointments when their “Messiahs” were slain. There are other texts as well, such as the “pierced one” of Zechariah 12:10, as well as the “strike the Shepherd” passage Mark quotes in the mouth of Jesus the night he was betrayed (Zechariah 13:7; Mark 14:27).

I recently highlighted the fascinating interpretation of Prof. Israel Knohl of Hebrew University of a new “Dead Sea” style text, the so-called “Gabriel Revelation,” inscribed in ink on a stone tablet. The New York Times (Sunday, July 6, 2008) offers a comprehensive discussion of the storm of controversy that Knohl’s interpretation has sparked: “Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection.”

Several scholars, myself included, along with Michael Wise, Michael Fishbane, and Israel Knohl, have argued for some years now that the “Suffering Messiah” ideas, reflected in our Synoptic Gospels, were not creations of the Christian communities after Jesus’ death, nor even unique to Jesus himself, but in fact were ideas current within messianic varieties of Judaism reaching back into the 2nd century BCE or earlier.

I develop this in a narrative way in my book The Jesus Dynasty (section titled “The Making of a Messiah” in chapter 10; and “Going Underground” in chapter 11). I also have published two academic articles that deal with this subject more technically, “Are You the One? The Textual Dynamics of Messianic Self-Identity,” and “Patterns of the End: Textual Weaving from Qumran to Waco,” both available for downloading.

The second week of our summer season (June 22-27) was filled with much excitement and accomplishment. Our excellent team continued to bond together, gain skills, and exude great enthusiasm. As some of you know who have done a bit of archaeology, team members quickly become attached to given areas of an excavation and more or less lay claim to them, anxious to master all the features, tackle the interpretive problems, and advance the excavation efforts. Such was the case in our second week. We made tremendous progress in three areas and continued to find many valuable artifacts including fragments of stone vessels, fairly intact tops of pilgrim flasks, nails, glass, and lamp remains–plus thousands of pottery sherds, mostly now dating from the Byzantine and 2nd Temple periods.

It is always exciting to uncover a mosaic. Mosaics reached their full development in the 1st century B.C.E. and have become one of the hallmarks of archaeology in the Levant and Mediterranean worlds. Their development and history is quite fascinating. In previous seasons a patch of lovely colored mosaic floor that we believe to be Byzantine (5th-8th century A.D.) had been uncovered and preserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Much of it had been destroyed by later building but we were anxious to trace it under the area of soil along its edge which involved opening another square and removing two meters of soil. By all appearances it continued and was intact. Team members began talking on Sunday of how pleased they would be to reach their goal by the end of the week. The digging was careful but deliberate and enthusiastic, down through several loci or levels. On Wednesday the mosaic was uncovered and to our surprise it included a tiled sump for drainage and cleaning as well as a channel along the edge leading to a wall. It will have to be cleaned but we now have enough to really evaluate the floor and put it into the larger context. We celebrated the successful end of our task when the full mosaic was revealed and took lots of photos.

In our main open squares we continued to articulate and isolate the complex of walls and debris that appear to be Byzantine foundations over highly preserved 2nd Temple period rooms. This is clearly the most immediately excited area of our operations at this point but the whole week was spent in carefully digging around what is there and only doing selective removal until we could understand the complex of stones and walls. Our plan is to remove the entire Byzantine substructure (it was what supported our mosaic above) in the next two week session and we will at that point come down into the 2nd Temple areas. We are of course all eagerly anticipating that prospect.

Up above these deep areas another team came upon a floor and a robber trench and spent the whole week clearing it. Robber trenches are found frequently at complex multilayered sites and are the result of later cultures digging down into previous levels looking for stones to reuse. You can actually see the tunnels with their fill that are left behind, and trace them into the walls of stones left behind.

Once the tench was cleaned the floor was removed on the last day of the week of digging and immediately two lovely coins, in situ, were uncovered. A delicate bone hair pin was also spotted by our careful diggers who had become quite skilled at proper examination of sensitive areas. Such an item could easily be broken but we managed to remove it intact.

Over the weekend Gibson and I examined all our coins (100+) found so far that had just been returned from the Israel Antiquities Lab after cleaning and made some preliminary assessments. We have some exceptionally well preserved examples from almost every period, early Roman, late 2nd Temple, Byzantine, Crusader, and Islamic. We eagerly anticipate the arrival next week of Prof. Warren Schultz of DePaul University (Ph.D. in Islamic History from the University of Chicago), our famed Numismatist. He plans to dig with us a week, along with his daughter Amanda, as well as examine all our coins.

We just completed our first week (June 15-19) of the June/July six week season of the Mt Zion excavations. Things have gotten off to a very good start with great promise of things to come. Most of our Team members have come for two weeks, so we will have another group arriving June 29th, and a third July 13th, but since some stay longer than two weeks there will be some valuable overlap.

Mt Zion “Area E” as we call it, is just east of Zion Gate, down the slope along the present Old City Wall. This wall dates to the 16th century, built under the direction of the famous Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman “the Magnificent.” Though we are outside the present wall today, in antiquity our area was not only inside the city walls, but was precisely at the center of the”four-square” city. This location presents an unprecedented opportunity to explore ancient Jerusalem ‘through the ages,” from the Iron Age down to modern times. Thanks to the construction of the magnificent Nea Church by the emperor Justinian in the 6th century A.D., just to the north of our location, soil fill and rubble was pushed over site, sealing off earlier layers and periods quite effectively. We know from probes done in the 1970s by Magen Broshi that we have well preserved chambers and vaults, to a height of 18 meters, that date to the late 2nd Temple period (Roman 1st century Jerusalem) and were witness to the Roman destruction of the city in 70 A.D., with Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, and Ottoman layers above. Because the site slopes down from Zion Gate to the modern road, it is possible to see a kind of journey through time, with all these levels represented.

Our intent, as in any proper archaeological excavation is to “dig in phase,” that is, to take the whole complex of areas we have opened down together in sequence, without probing down deeply into one area before other areas are also removed. Everything we removed is meticulously recorded by drawings and photographs. In the particular areas we are now digging our plan is to expose and preserve the late 2nd Temple period remains, that is Herodian Jerusalem, prior to the 70 A.D. Roman destruction. For Christians this is indeed “Jerusalem in the time of Jesus.”

Our group jumped right into our task with great enthusiasm and fervor. As with any excavation, the first day or two is devoted to cleaning the site. This includes debris that has fallen in, repair of sandbags, and removal of weeds and vegetation that has accumulated. After two days of hard, hot, and dirty work the site began to literally “gleam” in the sun, inviting us to begin the actual work of excavation. On Tuesday we began that work in earnest, picking up where things had left off following our four week season in March.

We had previously opened four areas at the lower end of the site, exposing Byzantine structures including a lovely mosaic floor, and underneath, just the top of what we think are the 2nd Temple/early Roman remains, dating back to the Roman destruction in 70 A.D. We extended these areas to the north and to the west, with two additional areas. Half the team was thus removing modern layers while the other half began to work down through the Byzantine levels as well as removing the “fill” from the Justinian period. These ancient fills are extraordinarily rich with finds, including lots of coins, pottery, lamp fragments, glass, metal, bones, and broken stone vessels. We realized we were basically digging through the “debris” of Roman Herodian Jerusalem, but just above structures that are extraordinarily well preserved.

A highlight of the week was the arrival of Jesse and Michael Pinchas and their team to do Ground Penetrating Radar over the areas we have begun to examine. Their results offer great promise in guiding us as to our strategy in excavating what lies below, since they can give us 3-D imagery of subsurface structures. We also enjoyed visits from staff and students from the German School of Archaeology and the University of the Holy Land. David and Patty Tyler of New York, who are doing fund raising for us, joined us for the first week as our guests and they were quite happy to pitch in for three days and get as hot, dirty, and tired, as the rest of us.

We know we are in a palatial residential area, likely inhabited by the wealthy aristocratic and priestly classes. One could have looked out to the northeast from this site and seen the magnificent Herodian Temple. Some evidence of that turned up in our digging this week with fragments of stone vessels, that signal a regard for ritual purity, as well as terra sigillata, or imported ceramic fine ware. We expect much more of that to come. We also have reason to think that Herod’s Theater was close by, if not partially on our site. So there is much excitement ahead and our whole team, both staff and students, could not wait for week two to begin!

We hope many of you will join us in future seasons and whether you can come or not you can participate in our Web fund drive and do your part, small or large, to “Dig Mount Zion.”

June 4, 2008

One of the fields that has become absolutely pivotal for historical work on early Christianity is archaeology–in other words, the material evidence of our human pasts. I was trained at the University of Chicago as a textual scholar, but as all of my readers know, about 20 years ago I began to involve myself in field archaeological work in Israel and Jordan. The insights that this field of study and inquiry have added to my own understanding of our ancient texts would be hard to overestimate.

I leave next week to participate in what I think might be one of the most fascinating and potentially important excavations conducted in recent times in Jerusalem–namely the “Dig Mount Zion” Project that Dr. Shimon Gibson has inaugurated just outside the present Turkish Old City Wall. It is an honor to work with such a respected, experienced, and skilled archaeologist, and Gibson has assembled a marvelous professional team under the sponsorship of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In Herodian/Roman Jerusalem this was “center-city,” and two seasons of work have put us just above well preserved remains from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Our summer dig season runs for six weeks, June 13 through July 30th. We have scores of volunteers, or “team members,” from all over the world signed up to participate but if any of you are interested and able to move quickly we still have spaces for more at some of our sessions. You can check our Dig Mount Zion Web site for full details.

Whether you can come or not this season you can participate in a most significant way by joining our special Mount Zion June Fund Drive

Like many other archaeological digs in the region, our expedition has been successful in receiving funding from donors and corporate sponsors. However, to complete our funding for our 2008 work we have an immediate need of $63,000 for additional operational costs.

Political candidates have recently demonstrated that millions of dollars can be raised directly through the Internet by grassroots supporters who give amounts averaging $25 to $100. Most archaeological projects are seeking funding and constantly appeal to major donors and foundations for support, and we have been doing this as well. However, many people are not aware of the fact that they could play a vital part by donating smaller sums as well. Hence, we decided to take our needs directly to you and to ask if you might be willing to donate. We just inaugurated this Fund Drive yesterday and there is a Bar Graph that shows our progress. We invite each of you to help us move it all the way to our Goal.

Contributions for this Special Fund Drive go directly to The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology. TFBA, founded and directed by President Sheila Bishop, is our North Carolina based agent and long-term trusted partner. Ms. Bishop has earned the trust of the entire archaeological community in Israel and Jordan by her dedication to supporting and reviving Biblical Archaeology. Most Foundations charge overhead fees of 10-20% to handle and disburse funds, but TFBA is as committed to this Project as we all are, and delivers 100% of donations directly to the field for our expenditures. All contributions are tax-deductible and receipts and financial accounting is provided by TFBA in partnership with the sponsor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

All archaeological projects require funds to cover the operational costs for the dig itself; conservation of structural walls; scientific tests (radiocarbon-dating, animal-bone and plant examinations, flotation, etc.); post-dig research (sorting of finds, drawing of artifacts, coin cleaning and identification, drafting of site plans, etc.); and publication (printing and distribution costs). At this stage we are looking for additional help for the operational stage.

Please make your contribution of any amount today! The money you contribute will go directly to our operational costs without delay or overhead costs. You can use any major credit card or Pay Pal. Visit Mt Zion Donations and make a secure donation now. If you prefer a check mail it to TFBA/Mt Zion Project, P.O. Box 1553, Goldsboro, NC 27533-1553 (Made to TFBA, marked Mt Zion). We thank you!

For more information, an informative video and lots more photos see our Web site: or contact Prof. James D. Tabor (jdtabor@uncc.edu) 704-687-2783.