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.
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.