UPDATED:

I am adding here a link to a most moving and personal tribute to Jane by our friend Prof. April DeConick of Rice University in the form of a letter:

http://forbiddengospels.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/memorial-service-for-jane-schaberg.html

I was terribly saddened to read that Jane Schaberg, a beloved friend and colleague, has died of cancer. Jane was an amazingly brilliant, gifted, poetic, sharp-tongued, humorous, and wonderful human being. There is a moving tribute by Kathy Schiffer here. Jane and I became quite close via e-mail, various rendezvous at the annual SBL meetings, and a most wonderful time at the Princeton Talpiot Tomb conference in Jerusalem in 2008. We hung out with Alan Segal, April DeConick, Ann Graham Brock, Val Hemingway, and a slew of other cool people the whole four days. It was marvelous. She was very excited about the new excavations at Midgal and we always planned to go together.  I was there this past October and missed her terribly as she was not up to travel. Here are some of the main links to posts I have done on Jane and her work over the years, including a review of her book on Mary Magdalene and a paper I gave on a panel devoted to her work at the SBL in San Diego in 2007 when she was too sick to come to respond. In one of her last e-mail to me she wrote: “Dear James, long time no hear. I thought I had offended you by saying “f**k” over the microphone at my paper.” It was a private joke, since Jane did regularly say “f**k” but she surely knew I was not one of those offended, and coming from her thought it was rather effective–usually aimed at various historical suppressions of justice and human dignity.

Here are some posts on this blog that deal specifically with Jane’s work on Mary Magdalene. I highly recommend her book, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, as well as The Illegitimacy of Jesus. They are both classics to any library on Christian Origins.

http://jamestabor.com/2007/03/30/the-resurrection-of-mary-magdalene/

http://jamestabor.com/2007/05/20/sifting-traditions-mark-and-john-jesus-son-of-mary/

http://jamestabor.com/2007/11/21/san-diego-and-resurrecting-mary-magdalene/

http://jamestabor.com/2007/11/24/mary-magdalene-as-first-witness/

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

This fascinating piece by Bruce Feiler is well worth reading and including in your family Thanksgiving table discussion today…Best wishes to all!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-feiler/how-moses-created-thanksg_b_787077.html?ref=fb&src=sp

Hollywood is rediscovering the Bible.

Two rival films about Moses, both by established producers, are vying to become the next chapter of the century-long love affair between the merchants of sin in Tinsletown and the prophet of hope in Israel. But no matter how far the filmmakers stretch their story, there are unlikely to reach the least known but perhaps most influential impact of Moses today: He is the Patron Saint of Thanksgiving.

The real story of Thanksgiving has surprising biblical roots. A few years ago, I set out on a 10,000-mile journey through the hidden symbols of American life that became the basis for my book, America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America. My journey began on a visit to Plymouth, Mass., where I boarded a replica of The Mayflower. A re-enactor was reading from the Bible. “Exodus 14,” he explained. “The Israelites are trapped in front of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians are about to catch them. ‘Hold your peace!’ Moses says. The Lord shall fight for you.’ Our leader read us that passage during our crossing.”

I hadn’t ever associated the biblical prophet with this most American holidays, but his fingerprints are all over our turkeys. How did this happen? How did a 3,000-year-old story become the inspiration for a contemporary American national holiday?

The answer begins with the Protestant Reformation. All through the Middle Ages, Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible directly, but the Reformation, coupled with the printing press, brought vernacular Bibles into the hands of everyday believers. Many of those believers were Protestants who felt oppressed by the Church. They related to the story of the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham who were enslaved in Egypt around 1200 B.C., were set free by Moses, then set out for the Promised Land.

The Pilgrims, a band of Protestant outcasts, saw themselves as fulfilling this biblical story. In coming to the New World, they, too, had to cross a tumultuous sea, arrive in an untested wilderness and create a new “Promised Land.” As a result, when they set sail on The Mayflower in 1620, they described themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. On the Atlantic, their leader, William Bradford, proclaimed their journey to be as vital as “Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.” And when they got to Cape Cod, they thanked God for letting them pass through their fiery Red Sea.

The pilgrims were so enamored of Moses, the Bibles they brought with them were emblazoned with pictures of Moses on the title page, and they named their children biblical virtues like Fear, Patience and Wrestling, as in “Wrestling with God,” the English translation of Israel.

As Peter Gomes, the preacher of Harvard told me, “They weren’t trying to recreate the biblical narrative. They were trying to fulfill it.” Because of them, the story of Moses became the story of America.

And because of the biblical roots of this most secular of American holidays, if your gathering threatens to descend into a familiar fracas among different faiths, factions and political persuasions, Moses, precisely because he has been used by believers and non-believers alike, Republicans and Democrats, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, may be the one figure who can unite the family and allow them all to enjoy their pumpkin pie.

This entry is part of a series, “This Month in Moses,” chronicling the 400-year relationship between the United States and “America’s Prophet.” For more information, and to read the entire series, visit Bruce Feiler’s website, or follow him on Twitter.

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

I have an guest Op-Ed essay titled “Older is Not Always Better” Remembering Wescott & Hort” up on the Bible & Interpretation Web site for October, 2009. If you don’t know this site, recently revived and expanded, you should add it to your regular “stops,” RSS feeds, or general browsing. It has a wealth of information on biblical studies, including archaeology.