We have moved forward, with an update to our software. Please let us know about any problems. We apologize for the delays in posting on the Blog. I have saved up a whole series of posts that I will begin to put up shortly.
James Tabor
I just received a copy of The Jesus Dynasty in Chinese produced by Locus Publishing Co. in Taiwan. This marks the 12th of an eventual 25 foreign languages in which the book has sold. It will circulate in all markets except the Mainland and is produced in Chinese Complex Characters. I am working with some very high level contacts in the Mainland now who are quite interested in seeing a version come out there, which would be in Simplified Chinese. There is a tremendous interest among Chinese populations in the historical Jesus, Biblical archeology, and associated subjects.
I am in the airport at Newark International ready to fly over to Israel for the Mt. Zion dig. I expect to send reports from the field through next week as well as continue posting on a number of topics, including new material on the form of the name Mariamene as related to Mary Magdalene.
I am working steadily on the sequel to the The Jesus Dynasty, a book mainly dealing with Paul and the development of early Christianity during the first 20 years (30-50 CE), the period Crossan called the “dark ages” of the movement in terms of our dearth of sources. The working title is The Paul Dynasty, but what I mean by that title has a surprising twist that I don’t want to reveal until the book is published. It is one of the major discoveries I have made on Paul over the past 25 years since I published my dissertation, Things Unutterable.
Two weeks from today, on March 2, which just happens to be my birthday, we will officially inaugurate our Mt Zion Excavation for 2008. We have three sessions planned this year, the first running March 2-28, the other two in the summer running June 15-July 25 and August 17-September 12. Minimum stay in March is one week; and two weeks for the summer sessions. Volunteers, whom we call “Team Members,” of whatever age, level of experience, or affiliation are welcome to join us, as long as they are physically fit. Full details are on our Web site: DigMountZion. Although we are past our deadline for registration there are still a few spaces left in March if anyone wants to join us at the last minute.
I have had quite a few people ask me just where we are digging. In this case, a photo is worth a thousand words. You can see below that we are just along the road, outside the Old City Wall on the south, at the base of Mt Zion, between the Dung Gate and Zion Gate. In Roman times this area of Herodian Jerusalem was square inside the city walls, in fact, fairly much at the center of the main city itself. Our Web site explains some of the exciting potential we anticipate lies just below the ground.
University sponsored excavations are usually funded by private donations. We are in the process of raising money for our Mt Zion efforts as described in this Proposal that we welcome you to download, print out, and otherwise circulate. If any of you wish to help with funding or point us to individuals or sources with which you are in touch, please contact me directly via e-mail: jdtabor@uncc.edu
I wanted to express my warmest best wishes in the New Year. I have appreciated so very much the personal messages and feedback so many of you have given me related to my book, The Jesus Dynasty, as well as the many related topics I have covered in this Blog during 2007. I will continue to address many of your queries through the Blog as well as personal responses as I can get to them.
2008 looks to be a most interesting and fascinating year in terms of news, developments, and further research in the ever changing field of Christian Origins.
I will be attending the Princeton sponsored Jerusalem Conference on the Talpiot Tomb in mid-January and will offer a series of reports and comments upon my return. Our excavations at Mt Zion in Jerusalem will become fully operational in 2008 and I hope to see some of you at the dig either in the March or the June seasons. My new book dealing with the apostle Paul, that picks up where The Jesus Dynasty left off, should see the light of day in the coming year. Although I began my academic career nearly 30 years ago with a published Ph.D. dissertation on Paul, this book promises to put things together in a way that truly ties up the loose ends and addresses some of the major questions with a new clarity. In writing the Paul book I have been able to construct a comprehensive overview that puts things together in a way that I think will make a lasting and significant contribution to our understanding of how Jesus became the “Christ” of Christianity.
I wanted to point out to new readers of this Blog, and older ones as well, that there is now an extensive archive of hundreds of posts at this site covering a variety of topics related to the historical Jesus and Christian Origins more generally. I have devoted many hours to writing these entries and they number now in the many hundreds of pages. Even though this Blog began in April, 2006, with the publication of my book, The Jesus Dynasty, as a way of updating readers and addressing various issues and questions related thereto, its scope has always been a broader discussion of what we generally call “Christian Origins.”
The WordPress software makes it quite easy for readers to investigate posts by Category, such as Archaeology (17 posts), Biblical Expositions (24 posts), Pantera (12 posts), Christian Origins (20), or the Talpiot Jesus Family Tomb (55 posts). There is a menu at the right of the page that one can simply click on to bring up all the posts under that topic. These categories are quite general, and there is some overlapping, but they are useful for a beginning survey of what is archived. The menu on the right of the page also contains a powerfully accurate Search feature whereby one can find all posts that mention a key word or concept. One could, for example, search for Mary Magdalene, and references to her would come up across a variety of the Categories.
There is so much here I was actually thinking of extracting these posts and turning them into a small topical book of some sort, or at least making them available on my University Web site, The Jewish Roman World of Jesus. If you don’t know that site you might take a look. It has a very extensive collection of materials I use in my classes here at UNC Charlotte and it is now used by many colleagues throughout the world who are teaching Christian Origins.
Anyway, this post was prompted by a reader of my book who wrote me this week asking some basic questions on the Talpiot tomb. Rather than trying to answer through e-mail, covering things I had already written, I referred her to this Blog site. I heard back from her two or three days later and she reported that she had spent two days reading through all the posts–literally hundreds of pages, and had found that the material more than answered her basic questions. Although I have put up posts that cover “news” items, about my book and other related things in the field, by far the majority of posts are serious and sustained treatments of various topics. I invite all of you to delve in and e-mail me (jesusdynasty@earthlink.net) with resulting questions or responses.
One question I get via e-mail several times a week is: What is the best and most accurate translation of the Bible? That is a tough one, in that there are so many good translations that serve well various purposes. Much depends on what one is looking for, whether for close scholarly study, devotional reading, or a literary overview. Since I have been working for over a decade on a new translation, the Transparent English Bible in connection with the Original Bible Project, I wish I could refer readers to that finished work, but alas, it is only now being released in preliminary samples on the Web.
My leanings are toward more “literal” translations, but unfortunately, most of those are done by evangelical Christians and they tend to reflect a Christian slant within the Hebrew Bible or so-called “Old Testament.” As Bibles go, meaning those that contain both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, I think the Revised Standard Version (that I rate in some ways above New RSV) might be one of the better scholarly translations, though I prefer one that would stay closer to the Masoretic text for the Hebrew Bible. If you can stand the archaic language, the older American Standard Version (1901) might be better in that regard. There is also the English Standard Version (2003) that tries to improve on the old RSV and in some ways does a good job–but again its Christian theological bias comes through all too often.
All in all I think it might be best to split off the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. For the latter I would highly recommend Hugh Schonfield’s The Authentic New Testament, that is unfortunately out of print. It is well worth searching out through the used book dealers or via e-Bay. I would recommend the hardback edition if you can find it, as it is beautifully designed. For the Hebrew Bible, even though it is out of date in many ways, I would say that the original Jewish Publication Society Holy Scriptures or Tanakh, is a good choice. This is the one first published in 1917 but revised in 1955. It too, unfortunately, is out of print, though there are still used copies around. There is also the Koren Holy Scriptures, also called The Jerusalem Bible, published in Israel in 1992 and still in print. The newer JPS Tanakh (1985) does not take a “literal” approach, but something closer to what the scholars call “dynamic equivalence.”
As some of you know I have been working for over a decade on a new and quite different translation of the Hebrew Bible, and eventually the Greek New Testament and the so-called Apocrypha. The official name of the translation is The Transparent English Bible and it is being produced as part of The Original Bible Project, a non-profit educational organization founded in 1992. I serve as the main textual editor, so it is my responsibility to produce preliminary drafts of the translation and Prof. Robert Haak of Augustana College has served as my main consulting editor for the Hebrew Bible. Once we have produced a given draft, and are reasonably satisfied with it, we have contracted with various other academic readers for input and evaluation. It is a long and tedious process and both of us have had to work on this in the midst of our otherwise full academic and scholarly agenda, but slowly we have made progress. A popular and non-technical overview of the translation method and the basic concept behind the Project is posted at the OBP site.
We have also made the decision, beginning this month, to release Beta Versions on the Web. It might be tempting for scholars to think that non-specialists would have little of value to contribute to discussions of translations of the Bible but many of us know such is not the case. It is absolutely amazing how many thousands of serious Bible students have given years of their time and devotion to poring over every line of the Bible, doing word studies, comparing translations, and learning how to use sophisticated Bible software. Dr. Haak and I have learned to welcome this kind of evaluation feedback as a crucial part of this Project, and of course, we welcome input from our professional colleagues as well.
The first Translation Sample is now available as a PDF file for downloading, consisting of the Torah Sedrah Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8). Others will follow over the coming weeks and months. Most readers of this Blog have come here because of an interest in the historical Jesus, and a critical part of understanding Jesus and early Christianity is to make use of good and historically accurate translations of both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, so I am thinking that the Original Bible Project might be of interest to many.
Comments on the translation can be sent to: originalbible@earthlink.net
Through this summer I have listened to the new CD by Sinead O’Conner titled Theology many dozens of times–every chance I get. It is the most amazing collection of songs, put together with a skill, a unity of vision, and a power that one seldom encounters. I have not been moved so deeply on a spiritual level by a CD since Ten New Songs by Leonard Cohen (2005), whom I consider to be the high priest of a prophetic musical genre of this type. The power of O’Conner’s work is based on the raw power of her soul, as with all her work, but shaped, often word-for-word, by the words of the Hebrew Bible–namely Jeremiah, Isaiah, Job, and several of the Psalms, cast at times with a Jamaican flavor (Yah for Yahweh, etc.). For me at least the effect was to leave me speechless, sort of “slain in the spirit,” I think the term is, and I have no “charismatic” background or experience.
My own understanding of the message of the Jesus movement (John the Baptizer, Jesus, and James the Just) is that the group was powerfully shaped by the visionary perspective of the Hebrew Prophets (particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah) and certain of the Psalms. That 
vision centered on the notion of the Kingdom of God, with the will of God being realized on earth as in heaven, through a new world characterized by peace, justice, and righteousness. In my book, The Jesus Dynasty, I try to bring to the public a perspective that many scholars share–namely that there is a vast difference between the message Jesus preached and “Jesus as the message,” as touted by later “orthodox” Christians shaped by the visions of Paul. Sinead seems to have tapped into that in an extraordinary way, but without any reference whatsoever to the “person” of Jesus per se, or anything one could recognizably call distinctively “Christian,” in the later dogmatic sense of the term. I noticed that Christianity Today eagerly latched onto Sinead for an interview when the album came out, but I sensed in reading it that the content must have been quite disappointing to those who might have hoped for something more along Christian evangelical lines. Sinead clearly values her Catholic upbringing on a cultural level, and she “loves Jesus,” as a “spiritual energy,” but she is sharply critical of orthodox Christianity and clearly rejects any kind of exclusive views of Jesus.
There are two discs with eleven songs each, with mostly the same songs recorded in different settings. The first, “The Dublin Sessions” is more acoustic and simple; the second, “The London Sessions,” has a full instrumental arrangement. I much prefer the former for its vocal intimacy and expression. Each disc ends with an interview with Sinead where she talks freely about how she came to do this particular album and what it means to her. You can listen to samples at Amazon.com.
One of the more extraordinary results of the release and translation of the entire Dead Sea Scrolls corpus is our ability to sketch out a rather full and reliable portrait of the community that produced the scrolls, as well as a “life and times” of their otherwise unidentified leader or Prophet: the Teacher of Righteousness. Both Michael Wise, in his book, The First Messiah, and Israel Knohl, in his study titled The Messiah Before Jesus, independently pick up on this subject, but particularly the ways in which the career of the Teacher serves as a precursor for that of Jesus of Nazareth. I highly recommend both books. Of particular interest in this regard is the question of what happens to the community at the death of its leader and how the prophetic vision of the future is maintained despite the failure of apocalyptic expectations–the phenomenon sociologists of religions have come to call “When Prophecy Fails.”
The complicated complex of terminology related to understanding the apocalypticism in the Scrolls–in particular the expectation, appearance, function, and outcome of various “Redemptive Figures” mentioned–has received careful attention by scholars. Among the best studies is that of John J. Collins, The Star and the Scepter. These designations arise, for the most part, directly from the Hebrew Scriptures–Prophet, Priest, Messiahs, Stone, Branch, Prince, Messenger, Servant, Star, Scepter, and so forth. I am using “Messiah” in my title above in the most generic sense–not merely to refer to an ideal Davidic King, but to one who is understood to function as a central figure or chief agent in ushering in and mediating the expected arrival of the Kingdom of God (Dan 2:44). In other words, the Scrolls, as a corpus, do not refer to just one figure but reflect a developing and shifting, even speculative application of the complexity of the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.
In one of the earlier and most foundational texts at Qumran, The Community Rule (1QS), we find no indication that any such messianic figures have appeared on the scene. Rather, the community itself expresses its self-understanding as the new covenant community of the Last Days.
Col VIII: And when these become members of the Community in Israel according to all these rules, they shall separate from the habitation of ungodly men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him, as it is written, “Prepare in the wilderness the way … make straight in the desert a path for our God…”
Col IX: This is the time for the preparation of the way in the wilderness…
Col IX.10ff: They shall depart from one of the counsels of the Torah to walk in all the stubbornness of their hearts, but shall be ruled by the primitive precepts in which the men of the Community were first instructed until there shall come the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.
Here we very possibly have three figures in mind. The Prophet is clearly the “Prophet like Moses” (Deut 18), elsewhere identified as the Star (Num 24:17) or Interpreter (Doresh HaTorah) or Teacher of Righteousness. “Messiahs”, if taken as two, most likely refers to the coming of both a Davidic “Prince of the Congregation” (elsewhere called “the Scepter”; Num 24:17 again), and a Priestly/Aaronic Messiah or anointed one. These are referred to in Zech 4:14 as the two “sons of fresh oil” (b’nai HaYitzhar) “who stand before the “Lord” (Adon) of the whole earth” (Rev 11).
Within the Qumran corpus we can document the appearance of the Prophet or Teacher of Righteousness; however, I find no evidence anywhere in the entire collection of the appearance of his two messiahs. The Damascus Document (CD) is absolutely crucial in this regard. Two manuscripts (A & B) found in the Cairo Geniza by S. Schechter in 1897 were also found in extensive fragments in Caves 4, 5, and 6 at Qumran, inside the very parameters of the settlement. The introductory lines of Col I refer to the appearance of the Teacher 390 years after the Babylonian Exile (586 BCE) and twenty years after the origin of the New Covenant movement:
He visited them and He caused a plant root to spring from Israel and Aaron to inherit His Land and to prosper on the good things of His earth. And they perceived their iniquity and recognized that they were guilty men, yet for twenty years they were like blind men groping for the way. And God observed their deeds, that they sought Him with a whole heart, and He raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the way of His heart.
What I find rather striking is that in CD manuscript A, other than in this introduction, there is no direct reference to the arrival and career of this Teacher. Indeed, in Col VII we find reference to the “Star and Scepter” promise of Number 24 with a decidedly “future” cast to it–as if neither figure had appeared. And in Col VI we read: “He raised up from Aaron men of discernment and from Israel men of wisdom…until he comes who shall teach righteousness at the end of days.”
But in the important fragment we call manuscript B we have two additional references to the community holding fast to its mission “until the coming of the Messiah of Aaron and Israel” And, in contrast to manuscript A, we find direct references to the “gathering in” (i.e., death) of the Teacher of the Community:
Col B19: From the day of the gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the end of all the men of war who deserted to the Liar, there shall pass about forty years.
Col B 20: None of the men who enter the New Covenant in the land of Damascus and who again betray it and depart from the fountain of living waters, shall be reckoned with the Council of the people or inscribed in its Book, from the day of gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the comings of the Messiah out of Aaron and Israel.
What is even more striking is that CD manuscript B recasts manuscript A (Col VII) and quotes Zech 13:7: “Awake O Sword against my Shepherd, against the man who is my fellow, says God–smite the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered, and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.” This “smiting” of the Shepherd, whom I take here to be the Teacher, appears parallel in this fragment to his “gathering in.” At this very point in the text, fragment B edits out the reference in A to the Numbers 24 “Star and Scepter” prophecy–obviously seeing it as in the past.
Here we find a period of “about 40 years” tied to the demise of the Teacher. There is a fragment from Cave 4 (4Q171) that refers to the same period:
“A little while and the wicked shall be no more; I will look towards his place but he shall not be there” (Psa 37:10). Interpreted, this concerns all the wicked. At the end of the forty years they shall be blotted out and not an man shall be found on earth.”
Here things get a bit prophetically complicated, unless one is steeped in the chronological schemes of the book of Daniel (and Ezekiel)– particularly the “70 weeks” prophecy of Daniel 9. The text assumes understanding of a final 490 year period, which the DSS community understood neatly as Ten Jubilees, 49 years each. We then find references in various fragments (11QMelch; 4Q390) that attempt to fit the history of the community within this time scheme. The Teacher himself is to arise, as one would expect, “in the first week of the Jubilee that follows the nine Jubilees” (11QMelch), or just over 40 years from the End. This sort of “pinpointed” chronological placement is rather extraordinary and captures for us a moment in time, not without parallel in the 40 years from the death of Jesus in 30 CE to the “end of the age” associated with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.
In the DSS commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab) we find that the community has obviously lived through and beyond this 40 years “countdown” period with the Teacher long gone and the apocalyptic expectations of the arrival of the Kingdom of God anything but fulfilled. The Romans have by now invaded the country and propped up the puppet priests that the community despised as utterly corrupt (perhaps Hyrcanus II). Col I interprets the cry of the prophet Habakkuk of “How long?” as referring to the “beginning of the final generation.”
This extraordinarily precious text offers a line-by-line interpretation of the prophet Habakkuk, applying his message to the present life of the community. I have put the quotations from Habakkuk in italics, with the interpretation following each line:
…Write down the vision and make it plain upon the tablets, that he who reads may read it, and I will take my stand to watch, and I will station myself upon my fortress speedily [Hab 2:1-2]. [VII] And God told Habakkuk to write down that which would happen to the final generation, but He did not make known to him when time would come to an end. As for that which He said, That he who reads may read it speedily: interpreted, this concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of His servants the Prophets. For there shall be yet another vision concerning the appointed time. It shall tell of the end and shall not lie. If it tarries, wait for it, for it shall surely come and shall not be late. Interpreted, this concerns the men of truth who keep the Torah, whose hands shall not be slacked in the service of truth when the final age is prolonged. For all the ages of God reach their appointed end as he determines for them in the mysteries of His wisdom. Behold, his soul is puffed up and is not upright. Interpreted, this means that the wicked shall double their guilt upon themselves and it shall not be forgiven when they are judged…But the righteous shall live by his faith. Interpreted, this concerns all those who observe the Torah in the House of Judah, whom God will deliver from the House of Judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness. Interpreted, this means that the final age shall be prolonged, and shall exceed all that the Prophets have said; for the mysteries of God are astounding.
I think the evidence is strong, both internally and externally (dating of the texts–paleography/C-14), that the crisis of belief that this text reflects had come to a climax in the mid-first century BCE. In other words, by the time of the Roman invasion of Palestine (63 BCE) and the reign of Herod the Great (37 BCE), such hopes and expectations had been severely tried and found wanting. And yet, the movement as a whole, more broadly speaking, what Eisenman calls “the messianic movement in Palestine,” from the Maccabees to Masada, continues on. Indeed, it seems to find its final expression in the hopes and dreams of the followers of John the Baptist, Jesus, and James. It is against this background that I try to set my own interpretation of the life and times of Jesus the Messiah in my book, The Jesus Dynasty. With the Dead Sea Scrolls we literally have a “trial run” on the Apocalypse, with all the resulting dynamics from “delay of the End of the Age” to the brutal deaths of various leaders and Messiahs.
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