Adam Gopnik has a long, fascinating, and witty, New Yorker-style essay on the search for the historical Jesus. As I began reading it I have to confess, modestly of course, that the opening few paragraphs seemed like a pretty accurate summary of my own book, The Jesus Dynasty (Simon & Schuster, 2006) as Gopnik ticked through his points about John the Baptizer, Sepphoris, and the meaning of tekton. I was pleased to see acknowledgment further along, with my treatment of the theories about Jesus’ paternity and the name Pantera briefly touched upon. All in all though it is really a good piece and I recommend it:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik

When I was at UNC Asheville last February, giving the lecture on “What Kind of a Jew Was Jesus” I did a fairly comprehensive interview for  UNC Asheville TV on that topic but a wide range of related issues. You can listen to it or download at:

http://www2.unca.edu/cjs/pages/taborinterview.html

There is a most impressive new website just up dealing with the Talpiot “Jesus” tomb in all of its aspects at talpiottomb.com. It is sponsored by JTERP (Jesus Tomb Education and Research Project), headed by Jerry Lutgen who works in the informatics health care field. You can read more of him as well as JTERP, its history and its purposes here. Some of my readers might remember Mr. Lutgen from his published article “The Talpiot Tomb: What are the Odds?” published at Bible & Interpretaton, that dealt with why the various studies using statistics differ so wildly in their conclusions. Lutgen also has a most interesting new study titled “Did the Set of Names from the Talpiot Tomb Arise by Chance,” which you can download at this new website.

I must say I am highly impressed. It looks to me like Mr. Lutgen has drawn together just about every major source related to the discussion of the Talpiot tomb since it first caught the public attention in 2006-2007, with all the resulting heat and light that has followed. The site “thick” with information, ranging from a summary of the basic issues to a rich and ever expanding bibliography, with an emphasis on materials that can be accessed on-line. He even offers a “survey” for readers to give their views, a new Facebook group one can join for discussion, and a section where one can use an Excel spreadsheet to turn one’s views of Talpiot (based on seven key arguments) into a quantifiable percentage! I can see how anyone interested in the Talpiot tomb will spend a lot of time at this site, bookmark it, and return often, as Mr. Lutgen promises to keep us up with all the latest–including new research just now emerging that might inform our overall body of evidence.

Was the Last Supper a Jewish Passover Seder? Millions of Christians who are happily and profitably discovering their “Hebraic roots” by studying, participating in, and even reenacting “Passover” services have equated it with the final evening meal Jesus had with his disciples. Indeed, many so-called “messianic” groups have developed an extensive interpretation of the traditional Jewish Passover Seder that finds all sorts of Christological meanings reflected in the ceremonies, including the death and resurrection of Jesus for the sins of humankind.

All four of our gospels report that Jesus ate a last meal privately with the Twelve, on the “night he was betrayed,” as Paul puts it. However, the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew, Luke) and John report things differently in so far as whether this meal took place on the night of Passover, or the night before. Although many have attempted harmonization, the differences in the two reports remain stark and and can not be ignored.  Scholars have exhaustively argued out every possibility pro and con.

I argue in The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 12 “Last Days in Jerusalem”) that the final meal was not a Passover Seder and offer a revised chronology in which Jesus dies on a Thursday, rather than a Friday, with the Passover Seder falling at the beginning of the 15th of Nisan, after sundown, Thursday night with that Friday, in the year AD/CE 30 being a “high day” sabbath, followed by the weekly Sabbath.

In a thoroughly comprehensive general article just published in the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April, 2010) titled “Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder,” Boston University professor Jonathan Klawans explores the issue in a clear and compelling way, concluding that the last meal of Jesus was most likely not a Passover Seder. I am pleased to say you can read it on-line here, but hope you will consider subscribing to BAR magazine as it continues to bring us quality articles of this type.

P.S. I hope my readers notice that I have chosen as a “Last Supper” illustration the etching by the incomparably great Albrecht Dürer in which the “beloved disciple” is sleeping as a small child, next to Jesus.

My interviews on the PBS Series “Closer to Truth,” hosted by Dr. Robert L. Kuhn, have now been posted on line–twelve topics in all on topics ranging from the historical to the theological. This amazing show is in its third season and the new series on  “Cosmos, God, & Consciousness” pulls together top experts from the worlds of science, philosophy, and religion…The site as a whole is well worth endless browsing far beyond my meager contributions…

You can access the following topical clips at the link below:

Does God Know the Future? (James Tabor)
How is God the Creator? (James Tabor)
What would a Judgment be Like? (James Tabor)
Is This the End Time? (James Tabor)
Do Angels and Demons Exist? (James Tabor)
Arguing God from Miracles & Revelations? (James Tabor)
Does God Intervene in the World? (James Tabor)
Authentication and Conflict in Religious Belief? (James Tabor)
A New Heaven & A New Earth? (James Tabor)
Imagining Immortality and Eternal Life (James Tabor)
What is Immortality? (James Tabor)
What is an Afterlife? (James Tabor)

http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/James-Tabor/104

Sometime in Spring, 2006 I was browsing one of the local bookstores here in Charlotte and came across a title that seemed to jump of the shelves–The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity by Jeffrey Bütz. In thumbing through the book I immediately realized that the brother in question was none other than James the Just, head of the Jerusalem Nazarene movement following the death of Jesus. I was aware, of course, of Robert Eisenman’s well known book, James the Brother of Jesus and John Painter’s valuable study, Just James, as well as several edited volumes on James by Craig Evans, Bruce Chilton, and Jacob Neusner. In fact, in our field of Christian Origins it seems that James, marginalized and forgotten for centuries, was having a bit of a renaissance. I had never heard of Jeffrey Bütz but decided to get the book anyway and see what it might offer. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. My own book, The Jesus Dynasty had just been published and dealt substantially with James the brother of Jesus. I quickly realized that Bütz and I had independently come to many of the same conclusions and we began to exchange e-mails, eventually met, and even spent time together in the Jerusalem, digging at Mt. Zion and hanging in the Old City where Bütz was doing research on his next book, just out, with the provocative title The Secret Legacy of Jesus: The Judaic Teachings That Passed from James the Just to the Founding Fathers.

I read the manuscript in draft form and found this latest work by Bütz both fascinating and provocative. On the face of it the thesis of Reverend Jeffrey Bütz’s new book might strike one as far-fetched if not downright absurd, namely that the “true teachings” of Jesus were passed in some underground fashion, down through the ages, and ended up shaping the vision of the Founding Fathers as they forged the principles and ideals of the United States of America. Over the past decade the bookstores have been full of new titles claiming to reveal at last some lost, forgotten, suppressed, hidden, “underground” stream of Christianity, with connections to various esoteric traditions within Western history. The titles speak for themselves: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The DaVinci Code, The Hiram Key, The Templar Revelation. Few of these works have received the attention, much less the academic endorsement, of mainstream historians, and probably for good reason. They are often long on speculation and short on hard evidence. It would be a mistake for readers to classify Bütz’s latest work in this genre. In contrast, it is a serious work, in touch with mainstream scholarship, and characterized by full references to original source materials.

Admittedly the trail Bütz follows, from Jesus to Jefferson, is a faint one, with many dead ends, twists, and turns. After all, groups such as the Ebionites, the Desposyni, the Elkesaits, and the Cathars are hardly household names. Bütz’s imaginative but careful consideration of evidence pays off and results in a fascinating thesis that informs the very roots of our American culture.

The book is divided into three parts. Parts I and II, making up about two-thirds of the whole, deals with the roots and history of what Bütz calls “Jewish Christianity.” The term refers to those original Jewish followers of Jesus, led by James the brother of Jesus, who continued in their Jewish beliefs and practices, rejected Paul and the Nicean Church, and according to most scholars continued into the late 4^th century, particularly in areas east of Palestine. These followers of Jesus valued the royal “bloodline” of the Jesus family, whether that of Jesus himself, if he was married with children, or that of his brothers and immediate family. Indeed, Bütz argues that these successors of Jesus and his brother James can properly be viewed as a type of “Caliphate,” in many ways similar to the Shiite branch of Islam. Bütz further argues that these “Nazarenes” set up a provisional government with their own Sanhedrin led by James as high priest, and the Twelve apostles as a kind of inner ruling cabinet. Bütz further locates the operations of this sectarian “government,” on the southwest hill called Mt Zion where both Armenian and Catholic traditions place the “throne” of James, the “Upper Room,” and the house of Mary and the Jesus family.

By far the majority of scholars who have dealt with this branch of “Jewish Christianity” have tended to trail things off in the late 4^th century where most of our records seem to terminate. Bütz take things much farther, and herein lays the special value and contribution of his work. Not only does he pick up on the “Ebionite” trail through an obscure sect of southern Mesopotamia known to us as the Elkasites, but in Part III of his treatment he convincingly traces the key characteristics of this original “Jewish Christian” perspective into early Islam as well. Although the chapter on Islam is somewhat of an excursus, Bütz returns to his more linear story line as he moves from the Elkasites through the Cathars, and thus to the Templars and earliest roots of Freemasonry. It is these last one hundred pages of his book that Bütz truly offers the reader, and in my estimation, the academic world as well, the skeletal framework of a wholly new perspective on the ideas that were most influential upon our Founding Fathers. Here I have in mind specifically the ways in which they imagined America as a sort of New Jerusalem/Promised Land. Other historians have touched on this sort of biblically based idealism, but I think Bütz might be the first to suggest there is an actual current or stream of influence running back into antiquity. I for one find it rather convincing. The history of ideas always remains a tenuous enterprise with no definable terminia post/ad quem, but as Jonathan Z. Smith, the most eminent history of religions used to put things—even an exaggeration in the direction of the truth is progress. I believe that Reverend Bütz has provided us with new perspectives waiting to be tested with subsequent review and consideration. I for one am grateful to him for the opportunity to consider this innovative approach to understanding the roots of our American founding and its ideals.

There is a most interesting and helpful article on the Talpiot “Jesus” tomb titled “Talpiot Dethroned” by Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliot on the Web site The Bible and Interpretation. Kilty and Elliot have previously  published two papers on the subject of the statistical probabilities of the names-cluster found in the tomb, “Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb,” and  “Inside the Numbers of the Talpiot Tomb,” which can be downloaded as a PDF files here and here respectively. This latest article focuses on some of the more recent academic discussion of the “statistics” related to the Talpiot tomb names and attempts to point our some of the fundamental errors in getting the facts straight that appear to be quite common on a number of fronts, including a fairly extensive treatment of Dallas Theological Seminary professors Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace in their 2007 book, DeThroning Jesus.

One new feature at the Web site The Bible and Interpretation is that “Comments” are open on the various articles and posts. There is a most interesting exchange regarding this present article between Kilty/Elliot and Randy Ingermanson, who has also published work on the statistics related to the Jesus tomb. Ingermanson is a rare breath of fresh air in the discussion, despite my own disagreement with his conclusions, in that he has shown himself to be as open-minded as he is honorable in the way he goes about dealing with this quite controversial topic.

In case you missed it, if you are interested in why all the statisticians seem to disagree on their conclusions when it comes to the Talpiot “Jesus” tomb the article by Jerry Lutgen, “The Talpiot Tomb: What are the Odds” is also posted on The Bible and Interpretation.

I was away in Israel on two separate trips in December, 2009 and want to catch up on quite a few news items, books, and notices that I have not had time to post. Some of this might be old news by now but I wanted to go ahead with a series of posts, for the record, and in case some of you too have been very busy with the holidays and end-of-the-year activities.

The discovery of the 1st century CE ruins of a house in Nazareth on the grounds of the convent near the Church of the Anunciation by the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation directed by Alexandra Yardenna has been up on the IAA Web site for some time but had not yet received much attention. On December 21st a more popular press release was put out with video interviews and photos, and was picked up worldwide–just in time for Christmas. The story in HaAretz is representative of the coverage and has some good pictures and there is a nice MSNBC video report here, plus a Fox News interview with Yardenna here (you have to endure the ads at the beginning). Despite the orchestrated timing, the story is quite important for understanding Jesus and his village background, growing up just outside of Sepphoris, the major urban center of Galilee and capital of Herod Antipas. The discovery also addresses the issue, raised by a few scholars (e.g. Rene Salm and Frank Zindler), as to whether the village of Nazareth even existed in 1st century Roman Galilee. Until now no remains of living areas, preserved to this extent, had been dated solidly dated to the time of Jesus and Josephus does not mention the village in his inventory of Galilean towns.

I was filming in Nazareth in December and was able to see the area firsthand. Both the size and style of the house points to the kind of modest Jewish village typical of the time and fits well with what many of us had postulated regarding Nazareth itself, see Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus (chapter 2) and my own discussion in The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 5). Nazareth was a very small hamlet, perhaps sheltering a few dozen families, and its significance and name might well derive from its inhabitants laying claim to Davidic lineage–the Hebrew word netzer, meaning “branch,” from which the name is taken, is used in Isaiah 11 to refer to the royal house of David. The presence of stone vessels, found in the excavation, also indicate its inhabitants were observant of ritual purity laws of the Torah.

As it turns out, the drawing that the artist Balage Balogh, who was commissioned by Crossan and Reed in Excavating Jesus, and by me for illustrations in The Jesus Dynasty, seems to have captured pretty accurately how such the village might have looked in the time of Jesus. This latest discovery, along with the tombs and agricultural remains, seems to reflect a coherent picture of a rather typical 1st Jewish century village located near a natural spring in the valley surrounded on hills, with Sepphoris just to the northwest. This location also fits our early Christian tradition of Miriam, mother of Jesus, growing up in the outskirts of Sepphoris where her parents Joachim and Anna lived.

One might hope that further archaeological investigation of such a significant site might be undertaken in the future but unfortunately this excavation was a “rescue” operation in a very densely populated area surrounding the Church of the Annunciation. It appears unlikely that much more than this area will be exposed, at least in the near future.

Tis the Season” love it or not but for an alternative take on Jesus’ birth, December 25th, and a different kind of “Silent Night” see my essay, just up on the Web at Bible&Interpretation, a site well worth a bit of browsing:

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/xmas357921.shtml

I love this wonderful Armenian portrayal of the meeting of Miriam with her kinswoman Elisheva in the region of Ein Kerem in the “hill country of Judea,” west of Jerusalem. Note that the unborn babies are shown in situ as if by ancient ultrasound. According to Luke’s gospel the women were separated in their pregnancies by six months and Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, implying that she was attending at the birth of John/Yehochanan.

Here is the link to the academic peer-reviewed paper that can be dowloaded as a PDF or printed, that has generated the various news stories about the Akeldama “Tomb of the Shroud” around the world. Although much of the media focus has been on the “shroud” material and how it differs from that of the Shroud of Turin, which though important and interesting was reported some years ago, and was discussed last year at the Boston Society of Biblical Literature Meeting by Antonio Lombatti and elsewhere. This paper is not about the shroud, but the skeletal remains of the one shrouded, who suffered from Hanson’s disease as well Tuberculosis, and also represents perhaps the first attempt to provide DNA profiles of an entire population of an ancient Jewish tomb from the Herodian period. The C-14 dating of the shroud material (early to mid 1st century CE), carried out by the University of Arizona lab under UNC Charlotte auspices, is accordingly relevant, as it places the organic material in the tomb, in temporal situ with the skeletal remains.

Molecular Exploration of the First-Century Tomb of the Shroud in Akeldama, Jerusalem

Carney D. Matheson1,2,3*, Kim K. Vernon3,4, Arlene Lahti1,5, Renee Fratpietro1, Mark Spigelman3,6, Shimon Gibson7, Charles L. Greenblatt3, Helen D. Donoghue6

1 Paleo-DNA Laboratory, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada, 2 Department of Anthropology, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada, 3 Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel, 4 Department of Anthropology, Department of Zoology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, 5 Department of Biology, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada, 6 Department of Infection, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 7 University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America

Abstract: The Tomb of the Shroud is a first-century C.E. tomb discovered in Akeldama, Jerusalem, Israel that had been illegally entered and looted. The investigation of this tomb by an interdisciplinary team of researchers began in 2000. More than twenty stone ossuaries for collecting human bones were found, along with textiles from a burial shroud, hair and skeletal remains. The research presented here focuses on genetic analysis of the bioarchaeological remains from the tomb using mitochondrial DNA to examine familial relationships of the individuals within the tomb and molecular screening for the presence of disease. There are three mitochondrial haplotypes shared between a number of the remains analyzed suggesting a possible family tomb. There were two pathogens genetically detected within the collection of osteological samples, these were Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae. The Tomb of the Shroud is one of very few examples of a preserved shrouded human burial and the only example of a plaster sealed loculus with remains genetically confirmed to have belonged to a shrouded male individual that suffered from tuberculosis and leprosy dating to the first-century C.E. This is the earliest case of leprosy with a confirmed date in which M. leprae DNA was detected.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008319