Queries & Comments

008

“Prehistory” Is Impossible

As a new subscriber to your magazine, I have enjoyed some good articles and interesting reports. However, in your report on digs ’97, your mention of a prehistory dig was erroneous. There will be no “prehistory” dig in 1997. This year marks approximately 6,000 years since the world’s history began, when God created the heaven and earth (Genesis 1:1). The terms “prehistory” and “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic” are a mockery of God’s word, the Bible.

Recycle Those BARs

I am a fairly recent subscriber to your magazine, but I must say that I enjoy it very much and look forward to each issue.

I have always been troubled at having to discard the magazine after I finish reading it. As much as I would like to keep all the issues, space limitations prevail. However, I came up with a great solution. I am an aide in our local middle school, and I asked the librarian if she would like to have the magazines. She was very grateful to have them, as they have a limited budget and cannot subscribe to every magazine they would like to have.

So, both students and teachers have your issues to use for research or pleasure. Perhaps some students will be interested enough to consider archaeology as a career.

The Value of Volunteers

Thanks for publishing the letter from Don Mook (Queries & Comments, BAR 23:01) describing his experiences with our excavation at Tell al-’Umayri last summer. Don is the type of volunteer every dig director hopes for. He is a retired forester and therefore has a natural affinity for outdoor adventures. He has a bouyant curiosity about life that made him interested even in the strategy discussions among the supervisors. At one point, he timidly asked if he could make an observation and then proceeded to interpret a particularly difficult phenomenon in his square so well that he convinced all of us. We had been debating this phenomenon for two years.

Volunteers, don’t be frightened. Jump right in and make a contribution.

Junk Scholarship

Thiede Defends His Claims on New Testament Fragments

In your January/February editorial, you endorse “The Battle Against Junk Scholarship” and conclude that “unfortunately, there is no certain litmus test” on what it is. Admittedly, some “far-out theories” may sometimes later be proved correct. But there is sufficient certainty to rule out others, simply because the facts that do exist refute them conclusively. Thus (to quote from your examples), Jesus cannot have been an Egyptian, or a “pagan,” or crucified at Qumran, etc. On the other hand, you seem to be convinced that claims about two New Testament papyri, the Oxford fragments of Matthew’s gospel and the Qumran fragment of Mark’s gospel, belong to the category of “the wildest contentions.”

As one of the two scholars concerned (the book to which you refer, Eyewitness to Jesus [Doubleday, 1995], was co-authored by the British historian Matthew d’Ancona), I beg to differ.

You allude to Time with its Easter 1996 page about our book, and you state that they were not able “to come up with a single scholar other than the author (sic!) who had a good thing to say about the book’s argument.” Well, they could easily have found such scholars. To give you just a few names across the international field of classical studies: the American textual critic and papyrologist Philip Comfort, the Swedish New Testament scholar and papyrologist Harald Riesenfeld, the French Hebraist Jacqueline Genoth-Bismuth, the German classical philologists Ulrich Victor, Heinz-Lothar Barth and Manfred Erren, the 010Italian papyrologist Orsolina Montevecchi, and the British church historian Henry Chadwick. They, and others, would refute your claim that the author’s “contention regarding the Oxford fragments had already been convincingly demolished by leading scholars.” Far from it.

When we say in our book that the Oxford fragments of Matthew’s gospel were written before 70 A.D., we move well within the world of accepted paradigms. It is standard fare of papyrological literature that there were Christian codices with abbreviated “holy names” (nomina sacra) before 70 A.D. Only those New Testament scholars and theologians who are convinced that the Gospel of Matthew was written as late as the eighties of the first century cannot accept the possibility of such early papyri. But to the professional historian, the question is not if there were such early papyri (there certainly were!)—the question is whether the Oxford fragments are the missing link. Needless to say, “the world of Biblical scholarship” is very much settled in a cozy corner of late gospel dates; sharp and polemical reactions were, and are, to be expected.

As to the fragment of Mark’s gospel, found in Qumran Cave 7, you seem to think that 20 letters (on five lines!), half of which are incomplete, with only one complete word (kai, “and”) rule out an identification. Much smaller fragments have been identified by classical scholars under equally surprising circumstances. Who would have expected the oldest papyrus of Virgil’s Aeneid to be discovered at the fortress of Masada? Just one line, with fourteen letters, two of them incomplete—and yet no one objected to their identification as Aeneid 4.9. If we leave prejudice behind (there cannot have been a gospel scroll at Qumran) and look for contextual explanations instead (how could Virgil get to Masada, and Mark to Qumran?), we achieve progress. After years of critical analysis (the papyrus was first identified in 1972), leading papyrologists, among them the editor of the journal Aegyptus, have demanded repeatedly that Qumran fragment 7Q5 be given a New Testament papyrus number.

Hershel Shanks responds:

Carsten Peter Thiede’s claims may well be among those “far-out theories [that] are sometimes later proved correct,” as I recognized in my editorial. The problem is that to listen to Thiede—or to read about his claims in Time magazine—one gets no real understanding of just how far-out the scholarly community considers his contentions to be. The nonexpert public needs to know this when considering such far-out ideas. Thiede’s letter hardly helps this process. It brings to mind the young barrister’s boast in Iolanthe: “I’ll never throw dust in the juryman’s eyes / Or hoodwink a judge who is not overwise.”

Thiede throws the names of eight experts at our readers without actually quoting them or giving citations for their praise. I was able to contact two of them. One was Philip Comfort, who told me, “I don’t agree with Thiede’s early dating [of the papyrus fragments of Matthew’s gospel to before 70 A.D.] … There is no way to look at these manuscripts [as Thiede has done].” Comfort says he even told this to Thiede: “I told him, ‘[In this book] you’ve gone too far.’”

I also talked to the distinguished church historian Henry Chadwick, on whom Thiede also relies. Disclaiming any expertise as a papyrologist, Chadwick told me, “He [Thiede] overstates his case. I was not persuaded. Oxford is fairly thick with papyrologists, and they all disagree with Thiede. He is a bit of a nuisance.”

I was directed by other scholars to a recent comprehensive study of the papyrus fragments that Thiede dates to before 70 A.D. Written by the man many consider the world’s greatest living papyrologist, T.C. Skeat, formerly assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum and now retired, the study concludes that “the only real difference of opinion regarding the dating [of these papyrus fragments] is whether they are to be described as ‘late 2nd century’ or ‘circa 200.’ The difference between these two assessments is very small” (“The Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels?” New Testament Studies 43 [1997]). Obviously, Skeat does not think much of Thiede’s views; they are not even in the purview of serious scholarship regarding these gospel fragments.

The scholarly world has taken note of Thiede’s book in a scalding review by Professor J. Keith Elliott of the University of Leeds, published in Novum Testamentum [NovT] 38:4 (1996). In his letter printed above, Thiede identifies his co-author Matthew d’Ancona as a “British historian.” In Elliott’s review d’Ancona is identified as “a newspaper reporter … a political columnist with the British weekly broadsheet the Sunday Telegraph.” Elliott conjectures,

“My guess is that the whole [book was] actually written up by the journalist,” and he notes that Thiede’s theory about the gospel fragments “has attracted extremely little support from responsible scholars.” Indeed, Elliott characterizes Thiede’s scholarship as “irresponsible,” his claims as “illusory.” Thiede’s description of the letters on the disputed papyri “is simply not true.” According to Elliott, the book gives a “false description of the photograph [of a critically important fragment].”

Thiede compares the handwriting on his fragments with the handwriting on another papyrus—Papyrus Oxrhynchus 246, dated 66 A.D.—and claims that the Oxyrhynchus papyrus matches his “almost like a twin.”

A copy of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus is not included in Thiede and d’Ancona’s book, however. When Elliott looked at the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, he was shocked: “Even a casual glance reveals that it bears no significant or distinctive relation whatsoever to the [gospel fragments Thiede claims to date to before 70 A.D.]”; the book is “tendentious, pompous, carelessly executed and flawed.”

Elliott explains why he is reviewing such a worthless book: “We are dealing here with a type of publication normally wisely ignored and avoided in the pages of NovT. This reviewer apologizes for drawing attention to a book of this character, but feels a review is necessary, given the vast publicity it and its views have generated … The facile acceptance by the uninformed of the authors’ views … require[s] to be addressed.”

Our own treatment of Thiede’s arguments appeared in our sister publication, Bible Review, in an article titled “A Gospel Among the Scrolls?” BR 11:06, by Graham Stanton, to which readers may repair for a more substantive consideration of Thiede’s claims. The gaps in Thiede’s arguments left Stanton “baffled, as are other leading specialists.” Stanton’s judgment: 011“[Thiede’s claims] would not merit serious discussion by specialists.”

We also reviewed Thiede and d’Ancona’s book in Bible Review (see “Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels by Matthew d’Ancona and Carsten Peter Thiede,” BR 12:04). Our reviewer, Bruce Metzger, is probably the leading American New Testament textual critic. According to Metzger, the book is characterized by “dubious … slack scholarship” mixed with “journalistic sensationalism.”

Thiede may well be proven right in the end, but until that time the public should know the judgment of the scholarly world.

As we go to press, we have also received the comments of Orsolina Montevecchi, a leading Italian papyrologist on whom Thiede relies. Professor Montevecchi states that, while Thiede’s comparison of the Oxford fragments with the Oxyrhynchus papyrus dated 66 A.D. is useful, “it does not prove with any certainty that [the Oxford fragments] date to the 1st century [A.D.], as Thiede affirms, much less to before 70 A.D.” While “the book is rich in interesting suggestions and ardently held hypotheses, not all shared [by Prof. Montevecchi],” she nevertheless found that the book “indulges in sensationalism, which is not appropriate for these serious questions … In this field,” she adds, “we must proceed step by step with great prudence.”

Qumran

Misleading Drawing Obscures the Comparison with Qumran

In “What was Qumran? Not a Country Villa,” BAR 22:06, Jodi Magness need not have used so many words trying to refute the Donceels’ interpretation of Qumran as a winter villa. It would have been sufficient to place Leen Ritmeyer’s reconstruction drawings of Qumran and Hilkiah’s palace on opposing pages: The difference is striking. If Hilkiah’s palace is a villa, then Qumran is not. Even at a casual glance, the red tile roof is dominant in Hilkiah’s palace and absent at Qumran. Qumran is portrayed as a heavy, austere-looking, flat-roofed “medieval estate.” Hilkiah’s villa rustica is an airy, three-storied spacious building with a colonnaded Pompeian-style atrium and a peristyle court with lots of red clay-tiled sloping roofs. Thus presented, the issue is decided; verbal arguments are redundant.

For the trained eye, however, incredulity creeps in. The drawings are misleading. My first feat in archaeology, back in 1971, was drawing the balks of the excavation of the Philistine temple in Tel Qasile. Amihai Mazar, the director, was frequently standing “behind my shoulder.” I remember his words: “You are drawing the stratigraphic interpretation of the site; I want it to agree with mine.” The late Professor Avi-Yonah put it in other words: “You can blah-blah as much as you want; when you have to draw a line, you have to make a decision.” My rule of thumb is, “A drawing is always an interpretation and therefore is as good as the archaeologist behind it.”

Regrettably, Leen Ritmeyer, who is perhaps the finest archaeological reconstruction draftsman of our generation in Israel, and also an old friend with whom I have collaborated on several ancient synagogue reconstruction drawings, seems not to have had an archaeologist “behind his shoulder” in his drawing of Hilkiah’s palace (I trust my friend Jodi Magness did not have a hand in this). This outstanding but unfortunate site was poorly preserved (note the many restored walls on the plan), poorly excavated, questionably interpreted, succinctly discussed and never really published. Ritmeyer took his drawing from the plan, a schematic architectural section drawing (obviously wrong) and the published photographs (Qadmoniot [1982], pp. 118–119).

As it happens, not a single piece of a clay roof tile (from which these sloping roofs were usually made) was retrieved 012from Hilkiah’s palace; nor were clay roof tiles recovered in Second Temple (early Roman) period sites such as the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, Gamla, Masada, Jericho or Herodium, to name but a few. In fact, the skeptical reader could have compared (in that very issue of BAR) Ritmeyer’s drawing of Hilkiah’s palace with the drawing of Herod’s palace in Jericho by Ehud Netzer and wonder why, in Netzer’s drawing, the roofs are consistently flat, over rooms and colonnades alike (see also Netzer’s Masada III restoration drawings), and clay roof tiles are conspicuously absent. It seems, therefore, that these popular, Greek-Roman, reddish clay-tiled sloping roofs were not used in Judean sites in the Second Temple period. They were first introduced in Jerusalem by the Tenth Legion after 70 C.E. These tiles are abundant, of course, in late Roman and Byzantine synagogues and churches. The restoration of the palace of Hilkiah is therefore wrong and misleading.

If you visualize this building as only one story high (the wall thickness, which often determines the height of a structure, is similar to that at Qumran), with flat roofs everywhere, Hilkiah’s palace would look more like Qumran and other similar sites of the period.

A tower is also common to both Hilkiah’s palace and Qumran (as well as Herodium), a telltale sign that the sites have much in common.

As in Hilkiah’s palace, what we have at Qumran is basically an alignment of rooms around a court, a tower, reservoirs and mikva’ot [ritual baths]. None of these architectural elements is unique to Qumran. Indeed, the place may have served originally as a military fort (as Roland de Vaux, the site’s first excavator, believed) or a fortified private estate (as the Donceels argue) that might have been taken over later by a group such as the Essenes.

The lack of a peristyle court, a Roman-style bath or fancy decoration in Qumran is due perhaps to economic measures or to taste and therefore cannot constitute any counter-argument. Most mansions excavated in the Upper City of Jerusalem also lack peristyle courts. Some display no decor, and none has a bath. The same is true for Masada, where the palaces lack peristyle courts. Many large residences there lack decoration or baths. Qumran, therefore, even as a private estate, is not exceptional for the period and region. The Donceels are right in claiming that no public hall can, beyond all doubt, be identified in Qumran. To put it bluntly, it would be nice if we had a synagogue there! Its absence, however, cannot be used as an argument against the theory that Qumran was an Essene community.

Unfortunately, architecture alone cannot decide the function of Qumran. The above discussion should therefore not be misread as final judgment on the nature of Qumran. I am far from coming to a conclusion myself. These thoughts are offered in an attempt to put aside one irrelevant, not to say obscuring, argument in this lively debate. One hopes for the arrival of an impartial scholar to clear up the rest of the mess and lead us to the Promised Land.

Jodi Magness responds:

I would like to thank Zvika Ma’oz for his comments, and I hope that he will accept my response in the friendly and collegial spirit in which it is offered.

As for the reconstruction of Hilkiah’s palace, with which I was not involved, I agree with Ma’oz’s observations regarding the roof tiles; however, Emmanuel Damati’s reconstructed section of the building (in Qadmoniot 60 [1982], p. 118) does depict a sloping, tiled roof.

I disagree with Ma’oz’s statement that I “need not have used so many words trying to refute the Donceel’s interpretation of Qumran … [V]erbal arguments are redundant.” I imagine that not all BAR readers are experienced field archaeologists like Ma’oz, trained in the reading of site plans and reconstructions. Some may also be unfamiliar with such terms as “peristyle” and opus sectile. My article was therefore partly intended to acquaint BAR readers with some characteristic features of Greek and Roman architecture, and in so doing to highlight the differences of the settlement at Qumran.

More importantly, Ma’oz seems to have missed the main point of my article. While I note that “Qumran does share some features of plan and decoration with contemporaneous palaces and villas … [such as] the extensive water system, the courtyards and the large dining room,” these features, like the tower at Hilkiah’s palace, “are too utilitarian to support the identification of Qumran as a villa.” This is because “the inhabitants expressed themselves in the architectural vocabulary of their environment.” What is most important is not the similarities between Qumran and these other sites, but the differences. I note that only one of the mansions in the Jewish Quarter has a peristyle courtyard, and none has a Roman style bathhouse. But all of the mansions published by Nahman Avigad (Discovering Jerusalem [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983]) contain some sort of interior decoration, such as frescoes, stucco and mosaic floors. Hilkiah’s palace, which has a tower and dining room similar to those at Qumran, had lavish interior decoration as well as a Roman-style bathhouse. Ma’oz acknowledges that “architecture alone cannot decide the function at Qumran,” but he then ignores the pottery evidence I discuss. Unlike the other sites, there are no imported amphoras at Qumran and very little fine ware, even of local manufacture. If, as Ma’oz says, “this is due to economic measures or taste,” how can one interpret the site as a villa?

Ma’oz’s assertion that Roland de Vaux believed that the site originally served as a military fort is misleading and incorrect. Before excavating at Qumran, de Vaux accepted an earlier interpretation of the site as a fort, but after excavating there he never interpreted the site as anything but a sectarian settlement. So, whereas de Vaux originally believed that the site was a fort, he never believed that the site was originally a fort!

One of the things that makes archaeology so exciting is the fact that the remains we uncover can be interpreted in different ways. The trick, I believe, is to come up with the interpretation that makes the most sense; to take the path of least resistance. Not only do the architecture, interior decoration, and material culture of Qumran differ in significant ways from those of the other sites, but advocates of the villa theory also have to account for the cemetery next to the site; 013moreover, they are forced to deny any connection between the site and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I realize that de Vaux’s interpretation is not perfect, but I cannot accept the villa theory because it creates even more problems. If, as Ma’oz says, an “impartial scholar” comes up with an interpretation that solves all of the problems, I will be glad to follow him or her to the Promised Land!

Leen Ritmeyer responds:

Zvi Ma’oz confuses reconstruction drawings with balk and survey drawings. These types of illustrations require very different techniques: Reconstructions allow for some interpretation, but balk and survey drawings must be as objective as possible. Of course, it is possible to impose an interpretation on a balk drawing, but it requires falsifying the evidence. It is therefore easy to imagine that both Ami Mazar and Michael Avi-Yonah made sure that drawings produced by Ma’oz reflected the proper interpretation of the site.

My own experience with Mazar was quite different, however. For many years I worked with him and George Kelm at Tel Batash (Philistine Timnah). They relied on me, when drawing balks, to draw only what I saw. My drawing was discussed by the archaeological team, corrected as necessary, and then used as the basis for the stratigraphical interpretation of the site. Mazar never imposed his interpretation on my drawings.

Archaeological reconstruction drawings should be based on the following elements: (1) the remains in situ, (2) excavated architectural elements, (3) architectural composition, (4) historical information (such as contemporary descriptions, ancient maps and recordings of previous expeditions) and (5) the study of comparative architecture.

While I lived in Israel, I always visited a site with the archaeologist in charge before attempting to make any reconstruction drawing. After producing my first pencil sketch, I returned to the site and discussed the results with the excavator. In the case of Hilkiah’s palace, however, that was not possible (see First Person, BAR 23:01). All I had to work with were the plans and photographs published in Qadmoniot.

I cannot judge whether the site was badly excavated, as Ma’oz claims. From the published photographs it appears, however, that the published plan is fairly accurate and that the “many restored walls on the plan” do not exceed 10 percent of the excavated remains. Dotted lines are often drawn on plans to indicate the possible layout of the building.

As for the sloping roofs, the absence of roof tiles does not preclude their existence: The tiles could have been reused elsewhere in a later period. Ma’oz claims that there are no sloping roofs in Ehud Netzer’s drawing of Jericho, but, if he looks more carefully, he will notice that the roofs over the porticoes of the two courtyards of Jericho’s Northern Palace do slope (“What Was Qumran? Not A Country Villa,” BAR 22:06)! Ehud’s drawings of the northern palaces of Masada also show sloping roofs on the two lower palaces (see Netzer, Masada III [Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1991], figs. 62, 63 and 64). So, who is misleading whom?

In the case of Hilkiah’s palace, I agree that the upper roofs might have been flat, but, like the excavator, I firmly believe that at least the atrium and the peristyle court had sloping roofs. This can be deduced from the way these courts were drained. A continuous channel ran around the inner colonnade to catch rainwater from the roofs. This sort of drainage system only works if the roofs over the colonnades slope so that the rainwater falls straight into the channel! The atrium, too, has a drainage channel leading from the open area.

Ma’oz further suggests that Hilkiah’s palace was only one story high. (If all reconstruction drawings were not to exceed one story, this discipline would be greatly impoverished.) But an internal staircase next to the atrium indicates that the building had an upper story. To say that the thickness of the walls in this palace would not be able to support an upper story is completely ridiculous. The walls of the outer ring of rooms are about 5 feet thick!

Even “with flat roofs everywhere,” this building could never be compared with Qumran. The sophisticated stucco remains in situ show that this building was decorated in a style comparable only to palaces built by Herod and to the Palatial Mansion excavated by Nahman Avigad in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The many remains of mosaic floors further indicate the well-developed architectural style of this building. Contrary to Ma’oz’s opinion, the excavator of Hilkiah’s palace found remains of a Roman bath in the first phase of the building. It is also wrong to say that no baths were found in Avigad’s excavations in the Upper City of Jerusalem: Avigad wrote, “Several private buildings [in the Upper City] were even equipped with steam baths, besides the ordinary bathrooms. These were a Roman innovation, and had hypocausts (heating chambers) beneath the mosaic floors” (Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983], p. 142).

Ma’oz remarks that “a drawing is as good as the archaeologist behind it.” I always appreciate reliable archaeological advice, but I also believe that some archaeologists could benefit from the study of ancient architecture.

004

A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors, are the alternative designations for B.C. and A.D. often used in scholarly literature.

“Prehistory” Is Impossible