|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
IAA handling James ossuary case very poorly |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Friday, 15 October 2004 |
Oct 8, 2004
By CALEV BEN-DAVID
Two years ago, Hershel Shanks, editor of the popular bimonthly journal Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), announced to the world the discovery of a first-century CE Judean ossuary (burial box) bearing the Aramaic inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."
The announcement generated international headlines. Since then, an official commission of inquiry by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has determined that the "Jesus inscription" is a fake; the ossuary owner Oded Golan has been accused of forgery; and Golan is now the subject of a police investigation relating to those accusations.
Shanks in turn has accused the IAA inquiry of being seriously flawed, and refuses to accept its findings. He has also charged IAA director Shuka Dorfman with conducting a personal "vendetta" against him that includes refusing financial help from BAR for IAA-supervised excavations.
On a recent visit to Israel, Shanks talked about the ossuary and other matters.
Two years after you first presented the "James ossuary" to the world, have any of the doubts raised about it altered your opinion as to its authenticity?
Well, I don't know for sure if it's a forgery or not. But I do know for sure that the IAA is handling the matter in an embarrassingly poor way, producing deeply flawed reports. And I do know for sure that what they have produced has not proven the inscription on the ossuary to be a forgery.
But given the murky facts surrounding its discovery, shouldn't the burden of proof be on those like yourself arguing its authenticity?
I question this "burden of proof" remark of yours. You do have to be careful. There are forgeries, and there are some pretty good ones, but I don't think the burden of proof is one way or another. I think that what we need, what we always had, is a presentation of scholarly views, and an openness to these views – not a court that comes down and declares something as forgery or authentic. This is the first time in the history of the country that a committee has been appointed to determine the authenticity or forgery of an antiquity. And if anything, I think it will never be done again. The proper way is to allow scholars to speak and not be intimidated.
Didn't you make any effort to check the background of Oded Golan, the dealer now accused of forging the inscription, before announcing to the world the discovery of the ossuary?
No, I did not; the question from my viewpoint is the object. It could be a forgery for all I know, but that doesn't mean that everything is a forgery.
The government of Israel and the police have treated Golan horribly. The pressure put on him was ghastly. They shackled him. They team-interrogated him without his lawyers for 30 hours. Everybody thinks he's been indicted, but they didn't charge him. They rushed him off to jail with rapists and murderers. They threatened him, I won't tell you how. Then, after four days, they released him. And now everyone says he's on bail, when he's never even been charged. This is not the way the State of Israel should act.
Your critics charge that another problem with promoting "finds" such as the ossuary – that enter the market through antiquities dealers like Golan rather than being found in situ at excavations – is that it encourages archaeological looting.
Looting is a terrible problem. I hate looters. I want to see them captured and put in jail. But there is an enormous amount of looting, and when valuable, informative, important items are found [that way], I don't ignore them. I want to look at them and I want to learn from them and so do most scholars.
The archaeological establishment in many cases is so against the market that they won't look at it. I am deeply opposed to that policy, and so is every expert in inscriptions, every epigrapher, every paleographer. Because you cannot be an epigrapher or a paleographer without looking at the inscriptions that come from the antiquities market.
Many archaeologists I speak to say that's exactly the problem; that the paleography field has become corrupted because so much of the scholarship is based on fakes, and this leads to embarrassments like the James ossuary inscription being certified as authentic by so-called experts in the field.
I'm a journalist, not a scholar. I don't make these judgments myself. I have only two choices. To publish, or not. Now when Professor Andr Lemaire of the Sorbonne – one of the most distinguished paleographers in the world – agrees the ossuary inscription is authentic... that's all the authority I need. The voice of a man with such magisterial authority is sufficient.
In the case of the James ossuary inscription, I realized its importance and I consulted obviously with other paleographers. I went so far as to ask the Geological Survey of Israel to study it. All gave it good marks. I had two choices – publish, or not publish.
As a result of that, this guy that now heads the IAA – Shuka Dorfman – gets mad at me. Now if he's just mad at me, that's okay. But he has gone further. He has made this a vendetta.
No one, but no one, has been able to explain why he [Dorfman] is mad at me. There are suppositions, and the best that I can tell you is that when the press came to him and said tell us about the ossuary inscription, he didn't know anything about it. Yet the IAA had given permission to export the ossuary to be exhibited, and in the application it quotes the inscription, and Dorfman didn't see it. He let this thing out of the country, and I could understand why he was embarrassed.
Let's assume the James ossuary is authentic. If so, it is surely a relic of great importance to Christians. But given the fact that even those who dispute the Gospels as history concede the likelihood that there was a first-century Judean prophet named Jesus, what is the ossuary's actual archaeological value?
Firstly, to find an inscription that mentions Jesus is of enormous importance in itself. Just that. Secondly, I've heard many times what you've said. So, what do we want it for, when we all know he existed?
It is valuable if it refers to Jesus of Nazareth – and you can argue about this – and it dates to about 62 or 63 CE, when James was stoned to death while he was still the head of the Jerusalem Christian community. If his [James's] bones were put in an ossuary at this time, we've learned that as late as 63 CE members of the Jesus movement were still following Jewish customs of burial. This is certainly a very significant finding.
Given the enormous public interest in archaeological artifacts directly connected to the Bible, isn't there dangerous temptation in the media and even among archaeological professionals to exaggerate any possible connection with Old and New Testament stories – as perhaps was recently done with the so-called "John the Baptist" cave found outside Jerusalem?
There is no question that what you say is true. For example, Newsweek just did a cover story on antiquities looting in Iraq and in Israel, and the illustration was a 17th-century painting of Jesus that had nothing to do with the story. And yes, [archaeologist] Shimon Gibson excavated this cave and drew some potential relationships with John the Baptist, and that is no doubt what lit a fire and gained it enormous publicity.
Now, as you point out, many, many archaeologists think this is an exaggeration, though Gibson himself presents it only as a possibility. However, there is as well as a countermovement among archaeologists who really don't want to get involved with the Bible, and certainly not with anything linked to Jesus.
Isn't that because many archaeologists today say the evidence increasingly points to the historical unlikelihood of much of the biblical accounts, even those previously deemed historically accurate by previous generations of scholars? Israel Finkelstein, for example, argues that incorrect dating of archaeological remains mistakenly led Yigael Yadin and others to overestimate the size of the David and Solomonic kingdoms. Do you see an ideological motivation behind these revisionist views?
In the case of Israel Finkelstein, I have no reason to doubt his integrity. But I think there is a little modishness in finding flaws with the biblical account. We need to do that, but we also want to see if we can identify a historic core to the Bible. Today [biblical archaeologists] are almost considered to be non-professional.
To take one well-known example, not one piece of real archaeological evidence has been found to support the story of a mass Israelite slave exodus from Egypt.
Well, non-literal biblical scholars would agree that contrary to the Bible – which says that 600,000 Israelite men left Egypt, and if you add women and children, you get to two or three million – it [the Exodus] wasn't a matter of that many people. However, the circumstantial evidence is quite strong of an Israelite presence in Egypt. Moses happens to be an Egyptian name. We know there were slaves in Goshen, where the Bible places the Israelites. We've found an Israelite-type house there. We know the route they would have taken, because other slaves have escaped along this route. And we have a hieroglyphic inscription from the late 13th century BCE about Israelites already being in Canaan.
But if there were any kind of sizable Israelite slave exodus, wouldn't you expect to find an inscription relating to it either in Egypt or elsewhere in the ancient world?
I would be pleasantly surprised to find something like that. You're suggesting something very dangerous – that is, to say that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The general rule is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.... unless the evidence can be expected, and you're saying it would be expected, and I'm saying it would not.
Biblical archaeology was something of a national Israeli pastime in the glory days of Yadin excavating at Masada and unveiling the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's definitely been a lessening of public interest here in the field over the years. What can and should be done to spark popular imagination in the subject?
There is no easy answer, no quick solution. I certainly think that the press could do more. I think that the burden is on the Israeli media to cover it in a better way. You have the chicken and the egg problem. Does the Israeli press not cover it well now because people are no longer interested in it, or are people uninterested because it's not covered well?
I also think that archaeologists could do more. It is really a failure on the part of most archaeologists to understand that their support often comes from the public. The public has a right to be informed, and informed in terms that they can appreciate.
Even if it means sensationalizing the subject, especially its links to the biblical narrative?
To a certain extent it's legitimate, and to a certain extent it's illegitimate. Some people may think that Shimon Gibson hyped this cave thing with John the Baptist. I think that's probably true, and some people say that I hyped the ossuary too much, which I think is not true. You have to make these kinds of judgments.
I am in the business of trying to present the findings of the scholarly world to a broader audience that won't read academic reports. I have wonderful relations with so many archaeologists who do work successfully to bring the material to a wider audience. I don't think that the general press and the archaeologists themselves do enough of this.
The IAA declined to react to the comments made in this interview. The Israel Police told The Jerusalem Post that they have concluded their investigation into Oded Golan, and have passed their findings to the State Attorney's Office, which is now weighing whether to file charges against him.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1097217813457&apage=1 |
|
