God and weather permitting I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening (Thursday, February 11th), at the Center for Jewish Studies, UNC Asheville, titled “What Kind of a Jew Was Jesus: How Texts and Archaeology Tell us a New Story.”

What I want to try to do is place Jesus within the parties and politics of his time (thanks to Morton Smith’s rubric here) in terms of what Michael Stone so aptly called “Scriptures, Sects, and Visions” within Late 2nd Temple Judaisms of his time. I am a historian not an archaeologist, so I want to mostly deal with texts, but texts within a context, such a Qumran (which combines site and texts!) and Mt Zion, that has every bit to do with material evidence as well–based on some of my experiences in the field. My intention is to highlight several of what I consider to be the most telling archaeological discoveries

Here is a press release and a news-story in the local Asheville paper, most of which I would own up to:

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20100207/LIVING/302070018/1311/ADVERTISING

http://www.unca.edu/news-events/news/2010/2/tabor

Maybe I will see some of you there.

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