A controversial tunnel under Jerusalem has been extended in a move
that is angering Palestinians, Sky News can exclusively reveal.
Footage filmed on a mobile phone shows the extent of the excavations
Mobile phone footage proves that archaeologists, funded by
Jewish settlers, have excavated a tunnel well over a hundred yards long
under one of the most sensitive areas of Jerusalem.
The steps leading up the tunnel are believed to be the flagstones of
a road that once led all the way to the Second Jewish Temple.
The road would have been one of the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem
at the time of Jesus and represents a significant archaeological
discovery.
But the excavations in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan
have provoked fierce protests from Palestinian residents who say they
have caused cracks in the roads, homes and schools above. <Read More>
This exciting news was announced by the Israeli Antiquities Authority this past week:
Photo: Skyview Company, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority
A synagogue from the Second Temple period (50 BCE-100 CE) was exposed
in archaeological excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is
conducting at a site slated for the construction of a hotel on Migdal
beach, in an area owned by the Ark New Gate Company. In the middle of
the synagogue is a stone that is engraved with a seven-branched menorah
(candelabrum), the likes of which have never been seen.
. . .
According to the excavation director, Dina Avshalom-Gorni of the Israel
Antiquities Authority, “We are dealing with an exciting and unique
find. This is the first time that a menorah decoration has been
discovered from the days when the SecondTemple was still standing. This
is the first menorah to be discovered in a Jewish context and that
dates to the Second Temple period/beginning of the Early Roman period.
We can assume that the engraving that appears on the stone, which the
Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered, was done by an artist who saw
the seven-branched menorah with his own eyes in the Temple in
Jerusalem. The synagogue that was uncovered joins just six other
synagogues in the world that are known to date to the SecondTemple
period”.
. . .
Photo: Moshe Hartal, Israel Antiquities Authority
The synagogue is located in Migdal (‘Magdala’ in Aramaic), which is
mentioned in Jewish sources. Migdal played an important role during the
Great Revolt and was actually the main base of Yosef Ben Matityahu
(Josephus Flavius), commander of the rebellion in the Galilee. Migdal
also continued to resist the Romans after both the Galilee and Tiberias
had surrendered. ‘Magdala’ is mentioned in Christian sources as the
place whence Mary Magdalene came, one of the women who accompanied
Jesus and the apostles and who Christian tradition has sanctified.
After it was conquered by the Romans, the city was destroyed and many
of its residents were killed. At the end of the Second Temple period
Migdal was an administrative center of the western basin of the Sea of
Galilee. Until the founding of Tiberias in the year 19 CE, Migdal was
the only important settlement along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
The largest cache of rare coins ever found in a scientific excavation from the period of the Bar-Kokhba revolt of the Jews against the Romans has been discovered in a cave by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University.
I'm working as an assistant in Dr. Dennis Smith's Social World of Early Christianity class. He has posted many of his own narrated videos and slide-shows from Greco-Roman sites such as Pompeii. In addition to these, this week he had me provide links to the following clips on YouTube for the students in the class.
The first clip is from The Godfather and serves as an example of the Patron-Client and Honor-Shame realities that dominated first century Roman culture and continue to exist in some Mediterranean cultures (such as Mafia culture) to this day. The second is a sketch from Life of Brian that humorously points out the both anti-Roman attitudes in 1st century Palestine and the benefits of living under Pax Romana.
I don't know anything about the site, but Bible Study Magazine provides a chart of different canon lists for Jews and Christians. Click the image below to see it:
For the record I'm okay with President Obama (or any U.S. President) speaking to children in public schools about the importance of education, as long as it is possible for children (and their families) to opt out. I think it can be inspirational, educational, and discussion provoking for children to have a President speak to them, and I look forward to talking with my children about their thoughts on it. After all, this is the leader of our nation, and it is probably good to teach children to pay attention to what the President says, whether we agree with the individual holding the office or not. For some children it might actually introduce and create an interest in politics beyond the common American adult model of simply listening to talk-radio and watching sound-bite entertainment news reports (imagine that).
However, as we all know there really is very little difference between the Republicans and Democrats. A guaranteed consistency is that each will always blame, accuse, and deried the opposing party for acting exactly as they would if the shoe was on the other foot. This was true for the bail-out and it is true on this school speech issue. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post article back in 1991 when the first President Bush wanted to broadcast a speech to schools (it could almost be run today, just replace the names of Democratic players with Republican ones):
House Democrats criticized President Bush yesterday for
using Education Department funds to produce and broadcast a speech that
he made Tuesday at a Northwest Washington junior high school.
The Democratic critics accused Bush of turning government money for
education to his own political use, namely, an ongoing effort to
inoculate himself against their charges of inattention to domestic
issues. The speech at Alice Deal Junior High School, broadcast live on
radio and television, urged students to study hard, avoid drugs and
turn in troublemakers.
“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political
advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce
smarter students,” House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.)
said. “And the president should be doing more about education than
saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’ ”
Two House committees demanded that the department explain the use of
its funds for the speech, an explanation that Deputy Secretary David T.
Kearns provided late in the day in a letter to Rep. William D. Ford
(D-Mich.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was out of town. [...]
Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), chairwoman of the Select
Committee on Children, Youth and Families, said it was outrageous for
the White House to “start using precious dollars for campaigns” when
“we are struggling for every silly dime we can get” for education
programs.
How cool it would be to make such a find! News of the discovery can be found here. Here's the intro snippet:
A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world's oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book.
Nikolas
Sarris spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus,
which dates from about AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of
manuscripts in the library of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt.
The
Codex, handwritten in Greek on animal skin, is the earliest known
version of the Bible. Leaves from the priceless tome are divided
between four institutions, including St Catherine's Monastery and the
British Library, which has held the largest section of the ancient
Bible since the Soviet Union sold its collection to Britain in 1933.
JERUSALEM (CNN) -- An archaeological dig in Jerusalem has turned
up a 3,700-year-old wall that is the largest and oldest of its kind
found in the region, experts say.
Standing 8 meters (26 feet) high, the wall of huge cut stones is a marvel to archaeologists
. . .
"The new discovery shows that the picture regarding Jerusalem's eastern
defenses and the ancient water system in the Middle Bronze Age 2 is
still far from clear," Reich said. "Despite the fact that so many have
excavated on this hill, there is a very good chance that extremely
large and well-preserved architectural elements are still hidden in it
and waiting to be uncovered."
0125 Papyri (including the latest 1 Peter fragment but not the Hebrews MS)
0320 Uncials
2897 Minuscules 2438 Lectionaries 5780 TOTAL
Manuscripts (MSS) are hand-written documents. The earliest Greek NT MSS were written on papyrus and are referred to as "papyri." Papyrus texts of the NT begin dating from the early 2nd century. However, they are often fragmentary in nature, and there are far fewer papryi than other MSS. Uncials (written in an upper-case script) represent a later development in the text around the 3-4th centuries. Our earliest "complete" New Testament collections are Uncials which date from the 4-5th centuries. Minuscules represent MSS that were written in a flowing, lower-case script. These minuscules typically date from the 9th-10th centuries onward. Minuscules also represent the "majority" of our NT MSS, but it is important to remember they date considerably late in the textual process. Lectionaries are collections of NT textual references which also typically date from the 9th-10th centuries onward and were used as reading guides for Christian worship and reading.
The large number of NT MSS is important for evaluating both the development of the text and the textual consistency throughout the scribal process. Basically, the greater number of textual witnesses allows comparisons which provide a broad range of data for tracing the textual lineage of the New Testament. This provides textual critics with the evidence they need for (re)creating the eclectic Greek NT texts upon which modern translations are based. Since we have no documents containing the "autographs," or original copies, of the texts, text critics have to make their best educated guesses on what the earliest texts might have contained. If we only had a few MSS to compare, this process would be more difficult. It may surprise some that the critical Greek texts underlying English translations doesn't actually exist in any NT MSS. Critical texts are a mixture of the best readings from a large number of MSS. The good news is that the number of catalogued MSS continues to grow.
It terms of numbers of MSS, no other classical work comes close to the number of textual witnesses or MS support of the Greek NT has as a whole. However, it should be noted that until the 4th century the textual evidence for individual works within the NT (each Gospel, each Epistle, etc) is often fragmentary and may be more comparable to other classical works. The table below shows the contents of all the pre-4th century catalogued papyri.1 Note that in this table the chapter content is "rounded" and not all references contain complete chapters. A complete list of references in early papryi follows the table.
The content of the earliest papyri is represented as follows:2
Matt 1:1-26:53; Mark 4:36-12:28; Luke 1:58-24:53; John 1:0-21:25; Acts 2:30-26:20; Rom 1:24-16:27; 1 Cor 1:0-16:24; 2 Cor 1:0-13:13; Gal 1:0-6:18; Eph 1:0-6:24; Phil 1:0-4:23; Col 1:0-4:18; 1 Thess 1:0-5:28; 2 Thess 1:1-2:12; Titus 1:7-2:8; Phlm 1:13-25; Heb 1:1-13:25; Jas 1:10-5:4; 1 Pet 1:0-5:14; 2 Pet 1:0-3:18; 1 John 4:11-17; Jude 1:0-25; Rev 1:4-17:2
1 Modified from content found at: “List of All Registered New Testament Papyri,” http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri# List_of_all_registered_New_Testament_papyri (accessed September 4, 2009).
It's difficult to capture the "feel" of a translated text. This is as true for popularly published English translations of the Bible as any other translation. The tension of literal vs. "dynamic equivalent" translation, mixed with often overly homogenized attempts to both provide "proper grammer" and navigate the changes in popular language get in the way of capturing the style/feel of the individual text in in the original language. The end result in most English New Testaments is that Mark reads just like Luke who also happens to read just like Paul (who even strangely reads like the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures). This is not, however, the sense one gets when reading the text in the original languages. As I'm working my way through the synoptics in Greek, what I'm actually finding is that it is almost the opposite effect, as Matthew and Luke clearly have their own voices in their modification of the Marcan narrative. As John Hobbins at writes:
What would happen if the
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek of the Bible were translated with the goal
of
transferring to a receptor language the flavor of its various parts in
terms of
style and register? If that were done, the gospel of Mark would come
across as plain-speaking
and a bit choppy, the gospel of Luke as relatively refined, Isaiah and
Job as
magnificent poetry, Qohelet as written in a style that gives form to
its
writer’s dyspepsia, the letters of Paul, as replete with difficult,
dialectical
argument. Revelation would come across as borderline ungrammatical in
several passages; the rough patches in Ezekiel, too, would stand out in
translation.
According to a 
=
It's difficult to capture the "feel" of a translated text. This is as true for popularly published English translations of the Bible as any other translation. The tension of literal vs. "dynamic equivalent" translation, mixed with often overly homogenized attempts to both provide "proper grammer" and navigate the changes in popular language get in the way of capturing the style/feel of the individual text in in the original language. The end result in most English New Testaments is that Mark reads just like Luke who also happens to read just like Paul (who even strangely reads like the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures). This is not, however, the sense one gets when reading the text in the original languages. As I'm working my way through the synoptics in Greek, what I'm actually finding is that it is almost the opposite effect, as Matthew and Luke clearly have their own voices in their modification of the Marcan narrative. As John Hobbins at writes:
