jkdoyle.com

  News of an early Roman period house that has been excavated in Nazareth.  This is the first residential building in Nazareth from the time of Jesus that has been excavated.  

An archaeological excavation the Israel Antiquities Authority recently conducted has revealed new information about ancient Nazareth from the time of Jesus. Remains of a dwelling that date to the Early Roman period were discovered for the first time in an excavation . . .

. . . 

According to Yardenna Alexandre, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nazareth and thereby sheds light on the way of life at the time of Jesus. The building that we found is small and modest and it is most likely typical of the dwellings in Nazareth in that period. From the few written sources that there are, we know that in the first century CE Nazareth was a small Jewish village, located inside a valley. Until now a number of tombs from the time of Jesus were found in Nazareth; however, no settlement remains have been discovered that are attributed to this period."  

Read the entire press release from the IAA here.

Todd Bolen quoting Joe Lauer:

This morning the IAA's Spokesperson circulated a notice to journalists inviting them to a Press Conference to be held tomorrow morning, December 21, at which "The IAA will Reveal a New Archeological Find in Nazareth". The meeting point will be behind the Church of the Annunciation, next to the upper entrance to the old school of Saint Joseph at 10:20 AM.

The notice does not give a hint of what that "New Archeological find" is, although I suspect that some list recipients are in the know (and some might think that it may have something to do with a fast-approaching date on the calendar).

So, stay tuned.

Hmmm . . . nice timing for an announcement from Nazareth.

Latest News:

Many are concerned about the effects of deforestation and global warming on the little known Tiger Woods rain forest, a favorite retreat in the Middle East for American VIPs:  executives, investors, mortgage brokers.  Located on the West Bank, many of the water sources in Tiger Wood have dried up, much like the waters of the Dead Sea.  The issue has added to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Previously, many in the Jordan-River valley regularly went to bail-out water from these sources as the springs were thought to have medicinal properties.   People from other nations--as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan--used to flood the area like a Tsunami for their own health-care purposes.   Strikingly, many ailing alcoholics drinking from the springs for healthcare reform their ways afterward.  Now that the springs are going dry, there has been a large-scale pullout from the area and retailers have seen a devastating economic downturn as a result. 

Scientists from major Pharmaceutical companies had previously tested the water sources, which were discovered to originate from under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  The results of the tests  were inconclusive, but scientists did discover a rare hominid fossil.  The discovery of the fossil fuels the ongoing debate concerning evolution.

Concerning the state of the rain forest itself, one Jewish-Arab scientist, Obama Madoff, has commented:  "The welfare of Tiger Woods is at stake.  The endangered species that have evolved here will not survive without a solution and creation science will have to provide that positively impacts climate change."

Philip Davies, a Biblical scholar,  denied that Tiger Woods rain forest has ever existed, but was most likely the remnant of several Babylonian hanging gardens or (more likely) simply a literary construct. 

I'm sure the dilettantes will have a heyday with this.  I'm off to read Calvin and Hobbes while the search engines do their thing.

(Bibliobloggers:  Please note that I write this with full awareness that I only made the Top 50 Biblioblogs by writing two posts addressing the Barack-Baraq lightning issue.)

The press release from ITSEE at Universitiy of Birmingham:

New Papyrus of Acts
Volume 74 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, recently published, contains David Parker's edition of P127, a fifth-century papyrus containing parts of Acts 10-12 and 15-17.
According to the introduction it is "the most significant new addition to the Greek evidence since ... 1927... It offers a new free version of Acts. Although it differs greatly from Codex Vaticanus, it also presents a strikingly different version from that found in Codex Bezae".

I woud love a chance to see it and compre it to the Bezae and Vaticanus texts.