On August 17, 2004, the New York Times devoted an entire column in its A section to the discovery of a cave with a pool near Jerusalem that, it said, John the Baptist may have used to baptize early converts to what later became known as Christianity. The following day, Doubleday released a nearly 400-page book by the cave’s excavator, Shimon Gibson, entitled The Cave of John the Baptist. The book jacket announced that this discovery was “as momentous and far-reaching in its implications as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The title page declares that the discovery […]