The Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

I wanted to call attention to the upcoming Biblical Archaeology Society Seminar in Austin, Texas in September. Details are below, or visit the Biblical Archaeology Society Web site. I have been doing these BAS Seminars now since 1990 and I find them among the most enjoyable and meaningful things I do outside my classes. Participants come from all over the country, drawn by the speakers and the topics, representing a rich mix of ages, experiences, backgrounds, and interests. Everyone is welcome and there is ample opportunity for attendees to have interchanges with the scholars, both in formal sessions and outside.
Dr. April DeConick has just moved to Rice University to take the Chair in New Testament there. Dr. Charles Hedrick is a marvelous scholar retired from Missouri State. I have worked with both of them before and they are not to be missed. I think the topics of this particular seminar are among the most fascinating I have ever seen on such a program. I hope to see some of you there.

James Tabor

The Biblical Archaeology Society Seminar on “Lost Christianties”
September 14-16, 2006 in Austin, Texas

Presenters:

April DeConick
James Tabor
Charles W. Hedrick

Back by popular demand! Our Lost Christianities seminar last fall received rave reviews, so we’re bringing it back in a new venue. One hot new topic has been added: “What’s the Flap about the Gospel of Judas?” a talk by Charles Hedrick. Also sure to draw lots of attention will be speaker James Tabor, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Jesus Dynasty; the book was the subject of a recent cover story in U.S. News & World Report.

Join fellow Biblical archaeology enthusiasts at the Biblical Archaeology Society’s 3-day seminar at the downtown Austin Holiday Inn, situated on the scenic shores of Town Lake on the “hike and bike” trail. Enjoy downtown leisure activities galore within walking distance of the hotel. Spend three days in this stimulating environment learning from eminent Bible scholars and archaeologists. Bring your questions, curiosity and a desire to take advantage of this exciting opportunity!

(P.S. The big Austin City Limits Music Festival is taking place this very weekend, so plan ahead to enjoy the music after the BAS seminar.)

Program Schedule

Thursday, September 14
7:30 AM • Registration and continental breakfast
9:00 AM • Charles Hedrick, “Orthodoxy and Its Earliest Competitors”
10:15 AM • Break
10:45 AM • April DeConick, “What Can the Gospel of Thomas Tell Us about the Jerusalem Church and the First Aramaic Christians?”
12 Noon • Lunch on your own
2:00 PM • James Tabor, “Hebrew Versions of Matthew and What They Tell Us about Lost Christianities”
3:15 PM • Break
3:45 PM • April DeConick, “The Road Not Taken: The Mystical Gospel of Thomas”
5:00 PM • Evening free

Friday, September 15
7:30 AM • Continental breakfast
9:00 AM • James Tabor, “The Lost Followers of John the Baptist (and Jesus!)”
10:15 AM • Break
10:45 AM • Charles Hedrick, “Rewriting the Gospel: John’s Revisionist Heresy”
12 Noon • Lunch on your own
2:00 PM • April DeConick, “A Gnostic Catechism: Who? What? Where?”
3:15 PM • Break
3:45 PM • Charles Hedrick, “Secret Mark: Ancient Fiction or Modern Forgery?”
5:45 PM • Cash bar
7:00 PM • Banquet for all participants with lecture by James Tabor, “James and the Boys: The Mostly Forgotten Family/Dynasty of Jesus”

Saturday, September 16
8:00 AM • Continental breakfast
9:00 AM • James Tabor, “Disparaging Jesus: Roman Gossip and Jewish Legend”
10:15 AM • Break (short)
10:30 AM • April DeConick, “Where Were the Women? The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene”
11:45 AM • Break (short)
12:00 PM • Charles Hedrick, “What’s the Flap about the Gospel of Judas?”
1:00 PM • Conclusion of seminar

About the Lecturers

April D. DeConick
April DeConick is Associate Professor of Religion at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her area of expertise is Second Temple Judaism and Early Christian History and Literature, with specialties in New Testament and apocryphal literature, early Jewish and Christian mysticism, and Gnostic traditions. Her books include: Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas (Brill, 1996); Voices of the Mystics: Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and Thomas and Other Ancient Christian Literature (Sheffield, 2001); and Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and Its Growth (T & T Clark, 2005). The companion volume, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation, with a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel (T & T Clark) will appear later this year. DeConick has co-edited (with Jon Asgeirsson and Risto Uro) a collection of papers entitled Thomasine Traditions in Antiquity: The Social and Cultural World of the Gospel of Thomas (Brill, 2005) in the prestigious Brill series, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies, and has edited Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (Society of Biblical Literature and Brill, 2006).

Charles W. Hedrick
Charles Hedrick is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. A retired U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain (Colonel) and Juvenile Probation Officer, Los Angeles County Probation Department, he has served as pastor of churches in Mississippi, California, and New York City. Hedrick was a member of the international team (UNESCO) of scholars who worked for several years in Cairo, Egypt, reconstructing and translating the Nag Hammadi Codices and later excavated at the site of the Nag Hammadi discovery. He is a distinguished author, translator and teacher in the academic study of religion. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Many Things in Parables: Jesus and His Modern Critics (Westminster John Knox, 2004), The Gospel of the Savior: A New Ancient Gospel (with Paul Mirecki, Polebridge Press, 1999) and When History and Faith Collide: Studying Jesus (Hendrickson Publishers, 1999).

James D. Tabor
James Tabor (Ph.D. 1981, University of Chicago) is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is professor of Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism. He has combined extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan with his work on ancient texts, including work at Qumran, Sepphoris, Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, Masada, Wadi el-Yabis, and with Shimon Gibson, the “John the Baptist” cave at Suba, and the recently discovered “Tomb of the Shroud” in Jerusalem. He is chief editor of the Original Bible Project that is producing a new scholarly translation of the Bible. Among his publications are Things Unutterable (Univ. Press of Amer., 1985), A Noble Death (with Arthur Droge, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) and Why Waco: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (with Paul Gallagher, Univ. of California Press, 1995). His latest book (Simon & Schuster, April, 2006) is titled The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity.

Location

The Holiday Inn Austin Town Lake is a recently renovated full service hotel located conveniently on the scenic shores of Town Lake near Austin’s central business district. Amenities include complimentary transportation from Bergstrom Airport (6 miles away), complimentary covered garage parking, Pecan Tree Restaurant, sports bar, jogging/hiking/biking trail, fitness room, rooftop heated pool, high speed wireless internet, coffee-makers and more.

Cost and General Information

PROGRAM COST
Registration by August 18, 2006: $385
After August 18, 2006: $485

FEE INCLUDES
All lectures, continental breakfasts, banquet on Friday evening and Continuing Education Units.

FEE DOES NOT INCLUDE
Transportation to and from the Holiday Inn Austin Town Lake, accommodations, meals (except where stated) and items of a strictly personal nature, such as phone, liquor, laundry, etc.

PAYMENT
$100 deposit (payable by check, money order, VISA, Master Card or AmExpress) is due with registration form. Balance is due by August 18, 2006.

REFUND POLICY
Full refund, less $60 per person for administrative costs, if registration is cancelled more than 5 business days prior to the seminar; less than 5 days, some nonrefundable fees may be charged. Cancellation requests must be in writing.

ACCOMMODATIONS
For those who would like accommodations at the hotel, the rate per night is $105 (single or double) plus taxes of approximately 15%. A limited number of lakeview rooms are available for a per night rate of $119 (single/double) plus taxes.

NOTE: BAS will make reservations for those who desire accommodations at the hotel, but payment for rooms is the responsibility of the participant at the time of checkout. We will convey your room-type preference to the hotel but this is not guaranteed. Room availability and group rate may be limited after August 18, 2006 or sooner depending upon demand. Please register early to avoid disappointment.

If you anticipate a need for special services for disabilities or if you have dietary restrictions or food allergies, please send a note with registration or call us.

REGISTER ONLINE NOW!

For More Information
Call: 1-800-221-4644 x221 or Fax: 202-364-2636
Email: travelstudy@bib-arch.org
Biblical Archaeology Society
Travel/Study Department
4710 41st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20016

Those “Biblical documentary” shows have become so ubiquitous on TV that it is hard to keep up with them. I have participated in many dozens of them over the years, some good, but many I am sorry to say, greatly disappointing. In fact, as the years go by I am often susprised to see myself on some ancient TV rerun in the wee hours on Discovery, History, or the Learning channel, looking shockingly younger with dark hair and beard. So many consist of a dramatic stage voiced narration, lots of “talking head” interviews with the usual suspects, and paintings of the Old World masters liberally spashed on the screen. It can get a bit tiring to watch. Recent attempts to add “reenactments” and special effects have by and large fell flat due to poor quality.

Still, from time to time some really good programing does come out in this made-for-TV genre and I wanted to draw your attention to a new documentary that I think really stands out of the crowd, one I think you will not want to miss, no matter what your persuation might be when it comes to the matter of the Bible and history.

Emmy award winning Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici has teamed up with academy award winning director James Cameron (”The Titanic”) to produce an amazingly provocative 90 minute program called “The Exodus Decoded” that will air Sunday night in the U.S. on the History Channel (8pm Eastern & Pacific; 7pm Central; 6pm Mountain). This unusual collaboration has yielded some fascinating results. The documentary is essentially based on Jacobovici’s investigative quest to determine whether the majority of archaeologists and historians are correct in maintaining that the Biblical account of the Exodus is a myth and never really happened. The results of his search are presented with the most amazing special effects I have ever seen in a TV production of this type in which Jacobovici and Cameron operate out of a virtual museum created to illustrate the story.

Jacobovici became convinced that the reason scholars have not found evidence of the Exodus is that they are looking at a period of Egyptian history two hundred years after it happened. Most historians have dated the Exodus (even as a mythological story) in the 1200s BC, during the time of Ramses II. Jacobovici argues that it should be placed under Ahmose I around 1500 BC. Although Jacobovici’s specific case is his own a few scholars have argued for an “earlier” Exodus, usually in the 1400s BC. It would be as if future historians of American history were investigating the American Revolutionary War but dating it 1976 rather than 1776.

Jacobovici also notes that the Hebrew Bible does not speak of crossing the “Red Sea,” but the “Reed Sea” (Yam Suf), and he also comes up with an alternative location for Mt. Sinai, in the northern Sinai area called Paran (Deuteronomy 33:1-2) not the traditional site around St. Catherine’s in the south.

Jacobovici is convinced that the eruption of a volcano on the island of Santorini around 1500 BC is the event that triggered the Biblical plagues that the Bible associates with the Exodus: waters turning to blood, frogs, lice, fire from heaven, darkness, and even the “death of the 1st born,” for which he presents a most intriguing natural explanation. He also focuses on a image of the lost “ark of the covenant” that he found in Greece, carried there, he speculates, by migrating Israelites.

The documentary has received widespread publicity with major stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines, plus an appearance by Jacobovici on NBC’s Today Show (view Part 6) just this past week.

I first met Simcha Jacobovici in Toronto in 2002 at a private viewing of the “James Ossuary.” He is the one who produced the Discovery Channel documentary on the ossuary and I related that story in the Introduction to my book, The Jesus Dynasty (You can read it on-line at the Biblical Archaeology Society Web page). I worked with him on a few of his Naked Archaeologist programs, which have already aired in Canada and the UK and will appear later this year in the U.S., but more recently on a new documentary, also with James Cameron, which at this time is still “under wraps.” I have been impressed with Jacobovici’s film-making skills. Some of you might have seen his award winning undercover documentary “Sex Slaves” that aired on PBS Frontline in February. I have had a lot of offers from film makers interested in producing some version of my book, The Jesus Dynasty, and after much thought and deliberation it seemed to me that Simcha Jacobovici was the obvious choice. We signed a contract earlier this year and will begin working on a multiple part series in 2007.

I have had a chance to preview “The Exodus Decoded” while in Jerusalem in June. It was featured at the Jerusalem Film Festival to standing room only crowds. I can state with confidence that this is one made for TV Biblical documentary that you will not want to miss.