I find it somewhat amazing that so many freely expressing opinions on the controversial Talpiot “Jesus” tomb and/or the “James ossuary” have not kept up with even the most minimum of the latest research on the topic. I find this is the case even with all too many of my academic colleagues, not to mention a host of others, most with an evangelical Christian bias, who regularly “trash” the idea that this tomb might arguably be that of Jesus of Nazareth. It seems everything but the facts are brought into play here.

I was reminded of this today with the publication of the excellent article by Prof. Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliot of the University of Wyoming, reviewing the latest published views of my colleague Jodi Magness. In her latest book, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, Prof. Magness offers a spirited argument that there is little to no likelihood that the Talpiot tomb, or the James ossuary, have any connection with the Jesus movement. The problem is, as Kilty and Elliot so clearly demonstrate, is her argument and even her information is as flawed as it is outdated.

Most of what Prof. Magness argues has been addressed previously, see for example my exchange with her now archived at the SBL Web site: http://sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=651.

No one can keep up with everything in our rich and ever complex field of biblical/archaeological studies but on a subject as controversial and as potentially important as this, it seems a minimum expectation for those wanting to engage in discussion would be to be up to speed on at least the basic research. Lamentably, such is not the case.

Here are a few of the basic articles, all readily available at the Web site bibleinterp.com, that are fundamental to any informed discussion of these subjects. If one is not willing to spend an hour or so reading through these I have to honestly question to what degree such a person is interested in a high level and informed discussion based on facts. As I say to my students on any topic we cover–read, read, please read–then express your views!

M. Elliott and K. Kilty, “Inside the Numbers of the Talpiot Tomb.”  http://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/tomb2.pdf

M. Elliott and K. Kilty, “Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb.” http://www.lccc.wy.edu/Media/Website%20Resources/documents/Education%20Natural%20and%20Social%20Sciences/tomb.pdf

Jerry Lutgen, “The Talpiot Tomb: What Are the Odds?”http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tomb357926.shtml

M. Elliott and K. Kilty, “Talpiot Dethroned.” http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/talpiot357921.shtml

Eldad Keynan, “Jewish Burials.” http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/burial357907.shtml

Oded Golan, “The Authenticity of the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet Inscriptions.” http://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/Authenticity_Letter.pdf

A. Rosenfeld, C.Pellegrino, H. R. Feldman, and W.E. Krumbein, “The Connection of the James Ossuary to the Talpiot (Jesus Family Tomb) Ossuaries.” http://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/JOTalpiot3.pdf

M. Elliott and K. Kilty, “The James Ossuary in Talpiot,”  http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/kilell358029.shtml

Eldad Keynan, “Obscurities Around the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher” http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tombs358017.shtml

I got the sad news last night at 7:51pm. It beeped in as a CNN bulletin on my iPhone. Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple computer, and inspiration behind Mac computers, the mouse, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, the AirBook, and most recently the iPad, had died of pancreatic cancer at age 56.

Friends began to shoot me e-mails and text messages. Posts began to appear on Facebook and Twitter and last night Twitter was so jammed, with people posting tributes, you could not get on for over an hour. Steve’s creative genius and love of elegance, his independent spirit and commitment to “whole earth” thinking, his hard work and determination, has truly transformed our world. From music, to photos, to the Web, to writing, e-mail, and a host of amazing “millennial” applications, my world intersects with Steve Job’s creations every day. I wrote all my books on my MacBook and can hardly remember what life was like without these Apple products that have so enriched our pleasure in using technology and brought it to our desk, lap, and hand in such a lovely and convenient way.  Even the PC/Microsoft users, Android people, and a host of other knock offs are largely using products adapted and copied from the original Macintosh, iPhone, or iPod. Jobs was neither engineer or technician. He was a dreamer. But he combined those dreams, and their elegant sense of “taste” and beauty, with hard work, persistence, and a self-demanding style that would never give up. His life, like all of us, was a complex tangle of starts and stops, of breakthroughs and disappointments, but always his bright spirit prevailed in the end.

We will all miss him and I believe our new millennial world will continue to be transformed by his innovations in ways we can only dream of today.

The NYTimes has some amazing coverage this morning if you want to browse a bit, beginning with the front page story by John Markoff. There is lots more in the links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html?_r=1&hp

James, signing off on his MacBook Pro

I wrote my dissertation on the apostle Paul back in 1982 when I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. I had the privilege to study with the late Norman Perrin in New Testament, Robert M. Grant for History of Christianity, and Jonathan Z. Smith for ancient Mediterranean Religious. Smith directed the dissertation. I published it in 1986 in Jacob Neusner’s Series, Studies in Judaism, under the title: Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise.  In that book I tried to offer my analysis, at age 33, of my own take on Paul having studied him closely through college and graduate school.

Now, thirty years later, I have just completed a new study of Paul, one I hope will stand the test of time and offer new insights and understanding of his message and his mission. He has been called, rightly so in my view, the “founder” of Christianity. I know of no other book on Paul like this one. The interpretation it offers is in the tradition of F.C. Baur and Albert Schweiter (whose Mysticism of Paul the Apostle remains in my view the best book ever written on Paul), but the advancement of our understanding since these 19th and early 20th century scholars is considerable. That said, this is to announce that Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, to appear in Fall 2012, is available for pre-ordering on Amazon.

In 2010, in a sealed tomb in Jerusalem, I was involved, along with Emmy award winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and archaeologist Rami Arav, in an unprecedented set of new discoveries. We immediately called in James Charlesworth and a number of other prominent scholars as consultants. This tomb, less than 200 feet away from the controversial Talpiot “Jesus Family tomb,” the subject of the 2007 Discovery television documentary, a best-selling book, The Jesus Family Tomb, and treated in my own 2006 book, The Jesus Dynasty. The trade paperback of The Jesus Dynasty was published in 2007, after the airing of the Discovery film, so that it includes updated material as well as an Epilogue on the Talpiot Jesus tomb. For that reason, if you are interested in this book it is better (and cheaper) to get the paperback.

What we discovered, through a sophisticated remote camera probe, is evidence of the earliest faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but in a family tomb adjacent to one in which the bones of a “Jesus” and his family were put to rest. The Jesus Discovery puts together the entire story of these two Talpiot tombs and the potential implications for our understanding of the earliest days of the Jesus movement. The book is scheduled to come out in Spring 2012 and is now available on Amazon for pre-ordering: The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find that Reveals the Birth of Christianity. The discoveries themselves will also be part of a special two hour documentary on Discovery Televison that will feature a panel discussion with major scholars in the field discussing their significance.