It has become common to read the Gospel of John, with its theology of Christ as the heavenly Messiah, its attitudes toward the Torah, and its “othering” reference to “the Jews,” as elements of an emerging anti-Judaic, or even anti-Semitic, stage of the developing Jesus movement. Years ago James McGrath…
Legendary stories of gods fathering humans, so common in Greco-Roman culture, may well have contributed to accounts of Jesus’ miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke but I would suggest an alternative. I am convinced that the idea of Jesus’ birth from a virgin–without a human father–implicitly goes back to the…
The investigative task of the ancient historian is by definition an interpretive one and no interpretation is without predisposition or even prejudgment stemming from known or unknown proclivities of both a personal and contextual nature. Add to this the paucity of our incomplete evidence, whether textual or material, and there…
There is a very intriguing story, unique to the Gospel of John, about a wedding attended by Jesus and his disciples at the Galilean village of Cana (John 2:1–11). Within the Gospel of John the story functions in a theological and even allegorical manner—it is the “first” of seven signs,…
The influential Israeli newspaper HaAretz offers a nice profile of our 2016 Mt Zion excavation highlighting some of our new finds and offering a summary of past seasons and what we are concluding. Archaeologists excavating in the heart of ancient Jerusalem have begun to uncover the neighborhood that housed the elite…
According to the Jewish historian Josephus (Jewish War 7:389-406), when the Roman Tenth Legion finally captured the desert fortress of Masada in the spring of 73 CE, bringing a tragic end to the Jewish Revolt, 960 Jewish defenders of Masada–men, women, and children–perished at their own hands the night before…
They sent over a young archaeologist by the name of Amos Kloner. He climbed into the tomb and came out literally shaking. I’ll never forget. I asked him what he saw and he repeatedly muttered ‘I never saw such a thing….I never saw such a tomb.’ Last year Simcha Jacobovici…
The magazine Popular Archaeology has just done a very nice cover story feature on our Suba “John the Baptist” cave excavation for their Spring issue. We conducted from 2000-2011—overlapping with our Mt Zion dig. Even though that excavation is largely finished Shimon Gibson and I are bringing to completion our academic…
I have been thinking lately about the essential differences between Judaism and Christianity, or more properly, the kind of religion reflected in the Hebrew Bible and that of the Greek New Testament. In terms of definition and label I am neither a Jew nor a Christian — by that I…
One of the most fascinating interviews I have ever read is one conducted by Biblical Archaeology Review editor Hershel Shanks with Jewish thinker and Holocaust surviver Elie Wiesel and renowned Harvard Biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross (BAR July/August, 2004). In one short but significant section Professor Cross comments on how…
