Today is my birthday and I am in a “thinking back” mood. Let’s just say I can now sing the lovely Beatles song, “When I’m Sixty-Four.” So looking back…

I published my first book back in 1986: Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in its Graeco-Roman, Judean, and Early Christian Contexts (University Press of America). It was in the Brown University Studies in Judaism series, and was recommended through the good agency of Jacob Neusner. The book is essentially my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, written under the esteemed and legendary Jonathan Z. Smith with the equally illustrious Robert M. Grant as a reader and co-director. I graduated from the Humanities in the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature–look it up, it was quite a place in those days, outside the Divinity School, but thriving with its own purposes and emphases, headed by Prof. Grant.

I was incredibly proud of that book, dedicated it to my late father, Elgie Lincoln Tabor, and I would still stand with most of the positions I take in that book, even after nearly 30 years (Ph.D. 1981 so I wrote it in 1980).  The Journal of Religion, in reviewing books on Paul during the decade of the 1980s, put my book in the top ten. My new book on Paul with Simon & Schuster (publication date yet to be determined) will make some huge advances beyond what I knew and understood in 1986, but it absolutely builds on the former.

The book has been long out of print and regularly sells on Amazon for $200-700–which seems pretty ridiculous. Over the years I have had hundreds of requests for copies and I only own two or three myself. I recently authorized Genesis 2000, one of my publishers, to issue an unbound edition, autographed, with color cover (8.5 x 11) for $25.00. It is not a photocopy of the book (hey that’s illegal, right!) but an actual printout of the page poofs from the original disk–which now belongs to me. If you are interested you can order through Amazon.

I have taught Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism the past 20 years in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte, a North Carolina state university. Prior to that I taught in the Dept. of Religion at the College of William and Mary,  a Virginia state school. Even earlier, my first job was teaching in a Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Although some of the methods and approaches to the study of early Christianity are the same, what goes on in the distinctive field we call “Religious Studies” is quite different from that of Theology. I studied and wrote my dissertation under Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago, who perhaps as much as anyone one single person of our generation has contributed to the developing enterprise we call “Religious Studies” in our various state and private schools throughout America.

Our UNC Charlotte Department of Religious Studies was recently profiled in a very nicely done cover story in UNC Charlotte Magazine, which is a nice slick color publication for alumni and friends of the University, but fortunately also appears on-line. I highly recommend this insightful article and I am honored to serve as Chair, for the past six years, of this wonderful and thriving department with such a great history. I think what is said about us can be rightly said for many such departments around the country, and indeed for the study of Religion in the academic study of the Humanities in general.

You can read the story here or download as a PDF file:

http://www.publicrelations.uncc.edu/resources/pdfs/magazine/uncc_magazine_q42009_updated.pdf

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

I think Robert Eisenman’s perceptive editorial in the Jerusalem Post on “Herod’s Temple,” i.e., the 2nd Temple (really the 3rd), destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, has much good to ponder. As he notes, there is surely a place with Judaism and Jerusalem for a “Temple” if understood in terms of a mishkan, i.e. dwelling place for the divine Presence, or as Isaiah put it, “A House of Prayer for all peoples,” but in my humble opinion much of what is propagated today regarding “rebuilding the Temple” is modeled much too much upon what I would call “2nd Temple fantasy,” confusing the “3rd Temple” that Herod built with anything Holy or worthy of recovering, and thus trading a legitimate Jewish nationalism for an era that can in no way be a model for the future in our modern world.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256557977301&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull