Queries & Comments

008

A Minister Who Prefers C.E. to A.D.

I see that you are yet again chastised for using B.C.E. and C.E. (Queries & Comments, BAR 27:01). As I have been an ordained minister since 1977 and have studied the Bible in depth from my childhood, perhaps I can put an end to this.

The use of B.C. and A.D. supposes that Jesus was born in year 1, which he was not. Even if he had been, we must keep in mind that “Christ” means “anointed one.” As Luke tells us, Jesus was not anointed with the holy spirit until his baptism at about age 30 (Luke 3:21–23). Even if Jesus had been born in year 1, the designations B.C. and A.D. would still be inaccurate by 30 years.

Should this matter of accuracy be important to those Christians who chastise you? Yes. In John’s gospel Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that all the faithful must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). As it would not be true to say that Jesus was born in the year 1 nor that he was Christ at his birth, for many decades now I have used the designations B.C.E. and C.E.—the C standing for “common.”

I hope that fellow Christians will appreciate these arguments and that BAR will enjoy the C.S.E.—Common Sense Era.

Cultural Vandalism

In recent days we have been hearing quite a bit about the Taliban in Afghanistan and their destruction of statues of Buddha. Protests by various groups, including the United Nations, described destruction of world treasures and historical artifacts as a tragedy.

If the international community is so against the destruction of these historical monuments, why don’t we hear a loud cry of objection against the destruction of other important historical and archaeological sites—specifically the willful destruction that is being perpetrated on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? [See, most recently, “Temple Mount Update,” Strata, BAR 27:02.—Ed.]

Worthless Letters

I have been a subscriber to BAR for many years and love the magazine. But I am dismayed at many of the letters you publish.

Many subscribers are so self-centered and self-righteous that they immediately ask to have their subscription canceled when they find something in the magazine that they don’t agree with. These individuals have no idea what archaeological scholarship is and believe they are subscribing to a fundamentalist Christian journal.

I propose that you cease publishing whining and complaining letters—they are not of the slightest benefit to your readers—and confine letters to questions of scholarship or interpretations of findings.

Cave of Letters

Cave Coins Don’t Prove Excavators’ Case

I want to congratulate Richard A. Freund and Rami Arav on their wonderful article, “Return to the Cave of Letters,” BAR 27:01. They conclude 010that the Cave of Letters was probably a place of refuge during both the first and second centuries C.E. However, I must disagree with their assertion that they have strong numismatic evidence to support their claim. They state that they found a silver coin of Vespasian, a coin from the second year of the First Revolt against Rome, a Nabatean coin dating to 106 C.E. and a Trajan coin from 113 C.E. These finds still very much support the view that the cave was occupied in the second century C.E.

It is important to understand how the rebels of the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135 C.E., also called the Bar-Kokhba Revolt) minted their coins. They did not smelt new coin flans from which to strike new coins—they reused old Roman coins and hammered and filed them down to get rid of the Roman images. Often the old Roman images are still visible beneath the face of the Jewish coins. According to Leo Mildenberg, perhaps the leading authority on coins of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, a considerable portion of Bar-Kokhba silver was overstruck upon issues from Nero to Nerva. Those of Trajan are ubiquitous, and those of Hadrian are rare. With this in mind, it is not very surprising to find coins of Vespasian interspersed among Bar-Kokhba silver. Perhaps the rebels were hoping to turn it into a Jewish coin at the next opportunity.

Freund and Arav also go on to question how likely it is for a coin 65 years old to still be in use. The numismatic evidence indicates that it was highly likely that coins 65 to 300 years old were still in use during this period. Ya’akov Meshorer, in his landmark book, Ancient Jewish Coinage, volume 2, records a Bar-Kokhba coin that was overstruck on a coin from Ptolemy II—which means this coin was in circulation for more than 300 years before it was restruck. Minting coins was a time-consuming and expensive proposition, and the life span of a coin tended to be much longer than that of modern coinage.

It is entirely possible that Freund and Arav’s finds correlate with two separate occupation levels. However, the numismatic evidence for their theory may not be as strong as they indicate. That being said, let me add that I applaud their efforts and fine work to date.

Richard Freund responds:

Mr. Berrol is correct about the restriking of coins by the Bar-Kokhba rebels. A bronze Bar-Kokhba coin that we found in 1999 in the Cave of Letters was restruck over a Vespasian coin, and the head of Vespasian was still visible! When one understands just how desperate the rebels were for bronze, it further strengthens my theory that the bronze hoard of artifacts that Yadin discovered in 1960 (and which he thought had been buried there by the Bar-Kokhba rebels) was deposited in the cave before the rebels arrived. If the Bar-Kokhba rebels had known that the bronze hoard was there, they would have simply melted them down for the valuable bronze. Since they did not melt them down, the rebels either thought the artifacts were very important religious objects or did not even know they were there.

Bar-Kokhba’s restriking of Jewish coins over Roman coins is clearly an ideological attempt to demonstrate Bar-Kokhba’s assertion of power over the Romans, at least symbolically. The oddity here is the finding of a First Revolt (68 C.E.) coin. Bar-Kokhba did not overstrike Jewish coins, and the First Revolt coin would not have been used over the 65-year span between revolts. I could argue that the coins show us an equal occupation of the cave in the first and second centuries. We have the same number of non-Bar Kokhba coins in the cave as Bar-Kokhba coins. We have other evidence for a first-century occupation as well: limestone vessels that are very similar to the ones from 012Qumran and Jerusalem, manuscripts that clearly date to the early first century and pottery. We plan to present this evidence in an upcoming episode of NOVA and in a book that we are preparing.

Holy Targets

One-Sided Report on Today’s Conflict

Yes, I too was saddened to read of “Holy Targets” being ransacked (“Holy Targets: Joseph’s Tomb Is Just the Latest,” BAR 27:01). I found it ironic that in the same issue BAR gave us a careful geopolitical analysis of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, Hershel Shanks did not do the same when reporting on the Palestinian attack on the traditional Tomb of Joseph. He completely failed to set it in the broader context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, neglecting to mention, for example, attacks on Palestinian homes and orchards.

It is easy to present dispassionate, scholarly articles on ancient conflicts, but very difficult, it seems, to give an even-handed view of modern conflicts when people disagree about what is holy.

Jerusalem Siege

One Author, Many Styles

I enjoy reading BAR very much, but I have always been perplexed by the long-entrenched idea among scholars that maintains that any difference in literary style automatically indicates different authors. (Specifically, I am referring to the latest such assertion, in Mordechai Cogan’s article about the siege of Jerusalem.)

If scholars are to be consistent, they should insist that the differences in style within, for example, Moby Dick, are the result of collaboration between different authors. The hyper-imaginative critic might even go so far as to suggest that Herman Melville’s neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, is responsible for large parts of the book. The alternative is to admit that one author can be responsible for more than one style, even in one book. My ability to see one author use more than one style helps me to smile away the critical attempts to take such magnificent works as Isaiah (to choose a Biblical book at random) and divvy them up between different authors and different epochs.

First Person

An Editorial Mugging

I am dismayed by your First Person column (“First Person: Ruminations on Scholarly Animosity,” BAR 27:01). I began it with a little doubt—everyone knows about the antagonism of small differences—and ended it with a big disappointment—everyone now knows about one more sore and whiny loser.

Not only was the column your forum for score-settling, but your posture was disingenuous in trying to represent the score-settling as something other than what it was. Your concluding paragraph suggests quite clearly that you knew as much.

I suggest an apology to your readers, who not only expended time and effort to no good purpose, but also found themselves implicated in your editorial muggings of others.

Broshi Gets His Say

Magen Broshi is former curator of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem (where the intact Dead Sea Scrolls are housed) and often writes about the scrolls. As the following correspondence reveals, he feels deeply aggrieved at BAR and its editor. While we would normally not print such a rehashing of old slights that involve other scholars (both living and dead), we feel compelled because of Mr. Broshi’s position as a scholar, and out of fairness to him, to publish the correspondence as he submitted it. We do agree with Mr. Broshi on one matter: Jonas Greenfield and Shemaryahu Talmon are both superb scholars. Jonas Greenfield has passed away (see obituary in BARlines, BAR 21:03), but Professor Talmon is still very much with us. He and the editor of BAR enjoy a warm and friendly relationship (as does the editor with Professor John Strugnell). We only hope that these relationships are not marred by Mr. Broshi’s remarks.—Ed.

I do not know why Mr. Shanks should bother his readers with the trivial fact that he is the only person on earth Magen Broshi would not talk to (“First Person: Ruminations On Scholarly Animosity,” BAR 27:01). Being an accomplished editor, he must know what he is doing, but I would like to set the record straight. Our strained relations started much before the Qimron affair and for more than one reason. After being on BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board for a few years, I resigned because I have found its editor’s policy to be aggressive (which he admits in his column). To my taste, it bordered on bullying. Then I imprudently published a review of his contribution to a book called The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years (reviewed in the Jerusalem Post, June 29, 1991). This was followed by an angry letter from Shanks telling me that he feels free to settle accounts with me, and the settling has been carried out for a decade. In the pages of BAR one can read critiques of my civility and of my scholarship. For instance, take Shanks’s review of the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in ReViews BAR 27:01. Of all the articles in this 1,132-page encyclopedia, the one singled out is Broshi’s on the archaeology of Qumran. Broshi is accused of listing five “nonconsensual” theories “somewhat insultingly in the alphabetical order of their proponents” (should they have been arranged by their age? color of eyes?); Shanks also says that Yizhar Hirschfeld’s theory is “summarily dismissed” (are not 18 lines sufficient for a theory not backed even by one colleague? See the pertinent paper by Jodi Magness and David Amit in the forthcoming issue of Tel Aviv). The most ridiculous accusation is that “deviant” scholars were not given room to make their cases. What encyclopedia does it? By the way, Shanks, being a clever editor, does not give room in his journal to most of these “nonconsensual” scholars.

A few months ago, I suggested that we bury the hatchet, but on one small condition: Let Shanks declare that calling two 013outstanding scholars “leeches” was a mistake. For those who do not know, in the July/August 1994 BAR, Shanks published an interview with Professor John Strugnell (Yigael Yadin: “Hoarder and Monopolist,” BAR 20:04). The interviewer made the trip all the way from Washington to Boston in order to get a juicy piece on Yigael Yadin, but as a lagniappe (bonus) he also obtained a nasty remark about Professors Shemaryahu Talmon and Jonas Greenfield: “I saw them as the two daughters of the leech in the Book of Proverbs. It says there that the leech, the blood-sucking animal, has two daughters crying: ‘give,’ ‘give’” (Proverbs 30:15), Strugnell said. It is nice to quote the Bible, but to liken two superb scholars and perfect gentlemen to the blood-sucking leech is undoubtedly the acme of bad taste, to put it mildly. In case the reader might have missed the remark, a photograph of those scholars was printed on an earlier page with a caption repeating the nasty remark. Shanks made it clear more than once that he regards Strugnell, a manic-depressive (by his own admission), and rabid anti-Semite, with utmost contempt. Is it too much to admit that it was poor judgment to quote this ugly remark?

Shroud of Turin

Shroud Authors Respond to Bryant

For the review of Shroud of Turin-related material, BAR has once again sought out a skeptic who has seen little if any of the primary data. I am referring to Vaughn Bryant’s “Does Pollen Prove the Shroud Authentic?” BAR 26:06, a purported review of the book Flora of the Shroud of Turin that I coauthored with Avinoam Danin, professor of botany at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Uri Baruch, palynologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority; and my wife, Mary.

Bryant, a professor of anthropology, has set up some “straw men,” which he then proceeds to demolish. The first of these is that he writes as though the pollen studies are the main thrust of the book, which they are not. The book is primarily a floral, or botanical, study. The palynological studies, while important and relevant, are secondary. The major thrust of our book is that there are on the shroud the images of many flowers and of other botanical materials that are quite recognizable in high-quality photographs when carefully examined by an expert in the taxonomy of these particular plants. As indicated in the book, the plant images are variably visible on the 1898 Pia negatives, the 1931 Enrie prints and negatives, the 1978 Miller color prints and fluorescence photos and on direct examination of the shroud itself.

A second “straw man” is Bryant’s use of the word “prove.” This word never occurs in our book. Science does not “prove” anything—rather, ideally it provides a framework for gathering the best available data and encourages the researcher to propose hypotheses consistent with the data. It deals with probabilities, not “proof.”

In our book, it is quite clear that there are recognized limitations to our studies of the pollen grains, but we felt that a review was called for to see what of past studies 014could be confirmed and what additional information could be found, and to counter misinformation that has been circulated about Max Frei’s examinations. Frei was, and Baruch is, quite knowledgeable and experienced in the accepted procedures of pollen-grain identification, but since the book was not primarily about the pollens, this was not detailed, nor did we include a considerable amount of other data having to do with the Frei tapes and procedures.

Another “straw man” is the question of whether “pollen alone can be used to verify that the shroud was ever in the region of Jerusalem.” This was never claimed in the book. The findings that indicate clearly that the shroud originated in Jerusalem are the identifiable floral images on the shroud. The pollen findings happen to be strongly supportive of the image findings, but are not determinative.

Strangely missing from the 13 photographs in the BAR article was any photograph of the floral images on the shroud, which was the main thrust of our book. Of the 27 photographs in our book, 17 deal with the botanical images on the shroud. Bryant indicates that the only evidence the authors provide for the floral images consists of “some faint black-and-white pictures,” which do not impress him. Our goal is not to impress but to present complex data as clearly as possible.

In addition, there are important errors in Bryant’s article. He cites the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the shroud, which dated the shroud to between 1260 and 1390 C.E., and states that the result was challenged only by the “faithful,” whatever he means by that. The result was actually widely challenged. He speaks of small “portions” of the shroud being removed and these “fragments” carbon dated. Contrary to the generally circulated idea, there was actually only one specimen removed and a small section of this single piece of linen was given to three laboratories, who did the same test on the same single specimen. This was in total violation of the original protocol. What archaeologist or other scientist, whatever their religious viewpoint, would accept the results of a radiocarbon dating of a single sample from a rather obviously contaminated area in one corner of a huge piece of linen as giving a valid result for the whole cloth?

Bryant erroneously states that the Vatican never challenged the carbon-14 dating result. In fact, in 1990 the Vatican publicly repudiated the radiocarbon dating result, appropriately terming it “strange” and indicating that further studies should be done.

I hope that BAR will be a more open forum for continuing dialogue between various viewpoints on this controversial but intriguing archaeological artifact.

Vaughn M. Bryant responds:

I do not consider myself to be an authority on the Shroud of Turin even though I have read much of the literature on it, I have spoken with people who have viewed and worked on the shroud, and I have attended lectures by people who claim to be authorities on the subject. Rather, I am a palynologist (someone who examines pollen) with more than 30 years of experience. I have published my pollen research widely in professional journals and in books, and I have visited Israel and have conducted pollen studies there. I also do pollen forensic analyses, which require precise techniques and careful pollen identifications.

015

My article in BAR focuses on the purported pollen identifications from the Shroud of Turin and the claims about what the pollen evidence means. Those various pollen studies began in the late 1970s and continued through the late 1990s. As noted, I believe that the collection of the pollen samples was flawed, that the samples may have been contaminated and that many of the pollen types were misidentified or identified beyond the resolution capability of light microscopy. I do not believe that any of the current pollen data from the shroud can be trusted and none of it could withstand the rigorous requirements needed in forensic work. I believe that new pollen samples should be taken from the shroud using rigorous standards common in forensic work, and that the pollen samples should be examined using the precision and resolution possible with scanning electron microscopy. Even so, the exposure of the shroud to ambient pollen in the air over the centuries may have already contaminated it with sufficient modern pollen to make any studies problematic. Until new pollen samples are taken, I will continue to believe that all of the existing pollen data collected and examined from the Shroud of Turin are flawed.

I admit that my only knowledge about the purported floral images on the shroud come from photographs I have seen in several books, including the Flora of the Shroud of Turin. I still question how those images were photographed, how the negatives were used to produced the photographs shown and why this technique hasn’t been validated. Validation could be achieved by replicating the procedure of placing floral parts on a linen cloth, then removing the floral parts and finally trying to capture the floral images present on the linen on film. In science one confirms something by showing that a procedure can be repeated over and over again and still obtain identical or similar results each time.

I would welcome an opportunity to examine pollen that has been collected properly from the Shroud of Turin. At this point, however, I have an obligation as a palynologist to point out the flaws in the current pollen research associated with the Shroud of Turin.

Tall Tale

The figure on the Shroud of Turin is about 5 feet 11 inches tall. Typical adult men during the time of Jesus were slightly over 5 feet. If Jesus had been 5 feet 11 inches, his stature would surely have been noted somewhere.

Books

Wrong Man for Scrolls Review

We are delighted that the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we edited, was reviewed by Hershel Shanks in BAR (ReViews, BAR 27:01). A review in BAR is especially appropriate because it played a significant role in making the unpublished Qumran texts available and because it is read by so many people who are interested in the scrolls. We recognize that authors or editors of books do not usually respond to reviews of their work; they tend to be too closely tied to their efforts to be able to see them objectively. That may be especially a problem in a case like ours, in which the work was some eight to nine years in the planning, writing and editing stages. But in this instance, rather than following the practice of letting a review stand however much we disagreed with it, we thought we should 058set the record straight on a few points.

Shanks notes the difficulty of finding an appropriate reviewer for the Encyclopedia. After all, the academic study of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a small field, and most scholars in the field contributed to the Encyclopedia. Shanks wrote: “Since I am not a scholar (and therefore not a potential contributor) but have a passing familiarity with the subject matter, I may be the only person qualified and unbiased enough to review this two-volume set.” Of course, we all know that Shanks has done much to make all of the Qumran texts accessible, a fact noted several times in the Encyclopedia, but, as he admits, he does not do technical scholarly work in the field and thus reviewed the work at a considerable disadvantage. But we did wonder whether his claim to be “unbiased enough” would stand up to closer scrutiny.

We did not have to wait long. Unabashedly, Shanks first turns to a discussion of how he and his own name appear in the Encyclopedia. If that is not the start of an objective, unbiased review, it is hard to imagine what is!

Shanks has clearly approached the Encyclopedia with little sense of what an encyclopedia is. That is the only way to explain why so much of his review is taken up not with the substance of the articles, but with the more general question: Why were the scholars who have formulated the various unusual theories about Qumran not included in the lengthy list of contributors? We would like to place this question in its proper context. When we sat down with the staff of Oxford University Press and with the area editors in 1993 to organize the Encyclopedia, we agreed that we wanted to have the range of views about the scrolls represented, and that the work would not be devoted to pushing an “orthodox” point of view. Scholars were invited to write the articles based on their expertise and were given the freedom to formulate their articles as they wished, so long as they covered the data relevant to the topic. If writers thought the Qumran community was not Essene, and the issue was pertinent to the subject matter of the article, we left it to their discretion to discuss the question.

Shanks’s approach to these questions indicates that he doesn’t seem to realize 060that an encyclopedia is a work that presents a broad sense of the status of scholarship on a given field, as it is understood by those scholars who edit and write its articles. An encyclopedia is not the place for articles expressing an idiosyncratic viewpoint, that is, a point of view that no one but the author accepts. An encyclopedia should be a place to which a person can turn for the evidence on a topic and for a balanced presentation of what scholars have said about it. We think the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls succeeds in doing that. Given the number of times the position of Norman Golb, for example, is mentioned, we can hardly be accused of excluding the presentation of different opinions; but it is only fair to the reader to indicate that Golb’s viewpoint is hardly representative and has repeatedly been rejected by those who work in the field. Further, while the writers of encyclopedia articles are obligated to discuss and evaluate other views, contrary to Shanks’s assumptions, the holders of those views do not have the right to respond in the encyclopedia as they would in a magazine like BAR. Idiosyncratic views may sell magazines, but they have no place in an encyclopedia.

Shanks’s review shows that he is still fixated on the “liberation” of the scrolls, on the scandals that preceded it and on the hype that surrounds one-author theories. He seems to have little knowledge of or interest in the actual contents of this momentous hoard of manuscripts that he worked so hard to “free.”

How can anyone write, “This is largely a summary of past scholarship; it does not pretend to break new ground,” with no realization that most of the texts reported on in the Encyclopedia have never even been mentioned in a work aimed at a wider audience? Further, on virtually every topic, synthetic articles consider the entire corpus of Qumran texts as well as the other Judean Desert materials, a task that authors could never have done before the scrolls became available. With so large a project, it is inevitable that there be some unevenness in the quality (and, at times, in the consistency of style) of the articles, but we think it is justified to say that the Encyclopedia makes available to the reader—indeed even to the popular audience—an enormous amount of information and new levels of synthesis never before available and provides several tools for accessing it.

Incidentally, we are sorry that despite the correct spelling elsewhere, we misspelled Shanks’s name on p. 558. We proofread the articles several times, and those amazing professionals at Oxford University Press did so as well. Alas, we did not catch everything, despite our best intentions.

Shanks shows in his review, if anyone didn’t know it, that he is, as he himself admits, “not a scholar” and that he is not unbiased. We think that a work of this significance, a collaborative effort by so many of those who are responsible for finally fulfilling the task of publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls, deserves to have been reviewed by a scholar in a related field. In this respect Shanks has done a great injustice to the editors and contributors to the Encyclopedia and has failed in his responsibility to his readers.

Hershel Shanks responds:

1) Alas, my dear friends Larry Schiffman and Jim VanderKam seem to have lost their senses of humor. Of course I’m biased—like everyone else. I twice refer to three major criticisms, all of which are obviously picayune. Must I directly admit my biases to get my point across?

2) Of course I am not a scholar in the sense that “I do not do technical scholarly work in the field.” But that does not mean I cannot review a scholarly work aimed at a popular audience.

3) I took the occasion to discuss deviant views, including Schiffman’s own. “If you give some minority views a voice, where do you stop?” I asked in the review. The editors themselves refer to the “danger that selection of the contributors will reflect the biases of those who organized it.”

4) As for the misspelling of my name, I was just kidding. Don’t we all first turn to the index to find our names?

An Excavator’s Gratitude

Many heartfelt thanks for mentioning in your review of the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls that the editors forgot to allow me to write on my interpretation of the site of Qumran.

… And Furthermore

It is again necessary to correct one of your misrepresentations. In your review of The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you write that I said certain new 061material about the history of Jesus is found in the scrolls “when read carefully.” I did not say that. I said that when the pesher technique [of Biblical interpretation, a technique employed in the Dead Sea Scrolls—Ed.] is applied to the Gospels, Acts and Revelation of the New Testament, the material about Jesus comes to light.

My views are currently being discussed in an internet discussion group at http://qumran.com/DSS2/. Please publish a correction of this error, which has been repeated extensively by less responsible scholars.

Potpourri

Old Kings for New Bottles

Regarding the question asked by Ellen R. Epstein (Queries & Comments, BAR 27:01) regarding how Jeroboam and other Biblical names came to denote the sizes of wine bottles, Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable (HarperCollins, 2000) provides the explanation:

“Jeroboam: Large bowl or wine bottle. The reason for the attribution of this biblical character’s name is usually put down to the Bible describing him as a ‘mighty man of valour,’ presumably capable of downing capacious quantities of wine, but this is wholly unsatisfactory if for no other reason than the Bible’s marked reluctance to associate courage and valour with drunkenness. Far more likely an explanation is to be found in 1 Kings 11:29–40, which recounts that Jeroboam was leaving the city of Jerusalem when accosted by Ahijah, the Prophet of Shiloh, who removed his new robe and tore it into twelve strips. These were intended to represent the twelve tribes of Israel; only ten of them were handed to Jeroboam, Ahijah explaining that he would have control of ten of the tribes but the entire kingdom of Solomon would not pass to him, two tribes would be withheld. This explanation would also account for the divided opinion as to whether a Jeroboam contains ten or twelve normal bottles (one for each piece of cloth from the robe). Once the biblical pattern was set in the early 1800s, other names such as Rehoboam and Methuselah were applied on a random basis with no numerical significance whatsoever.”

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.

A Minister Who Prefers C.E. to A.D.