Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2004
Features
Many people may be turning their attention to the classical world of ancient Greece this August, when the Olympic Games convene in Athens, but those of you who sign on this summer as dig volunteers in Israel or Jordan may well find yourselves handling artifacts that 044were already ancient when the first Olympics were […]
Sorbonne paleographer André Lemaire recently analyzed in these pages the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) report that declared the James ossuary inscription (“James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”) to be a modern forgery.a Lemaire considered various aspects of the IAA report, such as paleography and orthography, and convincingly found the report deeply flawed. As […]
Perched precariously on a steep, barren slope overlooking the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, I found the remains of what had once been elegant stone buildings—walls, pieces of metal and glass, tiny mosaic cubes and pottery sherds. It was 1986 and I was conducting a survey with Canadian excavator Burton MacDonald. The […]
Scholars have been cautious about drawing a direct line between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians. Indeed, perhaps the most criticized sentence in the vast literature about the Dead Sea Scrolls is one penned by the great American literary critic Edmund Wilson. Based on the conclusions of the French Dead Sea Scroll scholar […]