Posted on 11/01/2002 10:45:35 AM PST by Polycarp
COMMENTARY
A Discovery That's Just Too Perfect
Claims that stone box held remains of Jesus' brother may be suspect.
By Robert Eisenman Robert Eisenman is the author of "James the Brother of Jesus" (Penguin, 1998) and a professor of Middle East religions and archeology at Cal State Long Beach.
October 29 2002
James, the brother of Jesus, was so well known and important as a Jerusalem religious leader, according to 1st century sources, that taking the brother relationship seriously was perhaps the best confirmation that there ever was a historical Jesus. Put another way, it was not whether Jesus had a brother, but rather whether the brother had a "Jesus."
Now we are suddenly presented with this very "proof": the discovery, allegedly near Jerusalem, of an ossuary inscribed in the Aramaic language used at that time, with "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." An ossuary is a stone box in which bones previously laid out in rock-cut tombs, such as those in the Gospels, were placed after they were retrieved by relatives or followers.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Hey guys, check out some of the OTHER things your hero Eisenman believes!!!!!!!!!!!!
...In support of Islam, some Muslims have recommended "James the Brother of Jesus The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls" by Robert Eisenman, Publisher: Vicking, and brought this blurb:
Mail on Sunday, 30th March 1997, London (UK) Books of the Week, Murray Sayle Robert Eisenman's "James the Brother of Jesus" makes a penitenitial read, but he brings together much new evidence, from textual analysis and archeology, about this purely Jewish kind of Christian revelation. This kept to Judaism's strict monotheism, austerity, dietry laws and circumcision - teachings which its earliest members must have heard from the Master himself. The Christianity of James died out or was supressed but a faith spiritually descended from it is still alive. Its followers call it Submission (to the will of God) or, in Arabic, Islam.
Another very important part of Eisenman's reconstruction is that James was the high priest after the death of Jesus. Two things here. First, Eisenman holds that, if Jesus was even historical (which he is not at all sure about), the earliest Christians believed that he died a normal death (i.e., no ideas about Jesus not being crucified but only made to look that way).
Finally, since Eisenman sees the New Testament as a result of Paul's rewrite of nascent `Christianity', he also does not believe in the miracles associated with the life of Jesus. For example, in his new book he says that the virgin birth is a legend. So if you want to believe that somehow the Gospellers got this bit of data correct in spite of what Eisenman says (e.g., that, because of Paul, the Gospel communities grafted pagan myths onto the original Jewish memories), what (other than Qur'an) keeps you from thinking that they may also have gotten this piece right?
This has been disproven so many times on the Religion Forum that it simply is not worthy of further debate.
I was wondering what you were getting all foaming at the mouth about.
Now that I realize the tack you were taking, I must admit I'm disappointed.
I was hoping for something substantive.
I should have known better and stuck to my guns and continued to ignore you.
You're certainly good for fundie entertainment if nothing else though...
(what's that you say? its' a Christian hoax? OH! in that case, nevermind!)
Eisenman doesn't believe the miralces of Jesus or that Mary was even a virgin when she gave birth to Him!!!!!!!!!!!
Heeee heee heee!!!!!!!!!!!!
Check THIS out: Here's Eisenman's "take" on things!!!!
The New Testament contains strong indications that that the most basic doctrines of modern Christianity were promulgated by the evangelist Paul, over the strenuous objections of Jesus's original followers. In this book, Robert Eisenman looks closely at this struggle. His work dissolves away some of the comforting features of modern Christianity and uncovers a skeleton: James "the Just", brother of Jesus, and an apocalyptic, xenophobic, fundamentalist agitator. The unstated but overwhelming implication is that Jesus was not the inoffensive love-preacher of subsequent tradition. That figure is a creation of the dominant Graeco-Roman culture of the time. Jesus, it seems, was Ayatollah Khomeni not Ghandi; Elijah Muhammed not Martin Luther King. In essence, Jesus was the brother of James. Here's the link!
http://www-ctp.mit.edu/~alford/james.html
P>Bwa-haaaa haaaaaaa!!!!!!!
For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, that is unsettling to me.
This is because the Mary who visited Christ's tomb at earliest possible time is described as "Mary the mother of JAMES AND JOSES".
Exactly, berned, exactly. NOT as "Mary, His mother" or "Mary, mother of the Lord" ... because she wasn't that person. She was the "sister" of "Mary, his mother" identified as "Mary, wife of Clopas" in John 19:25.
And, incidentally, your claim that Catholics believe that "[the Blessed Virgin] Mary 'dropped Jesus like a hot potato' when she saw he was dead" is, without any question, doubt, or equivocation, the dumbest thing you have ever posted here.
And that's saying a whole lot.
Thank you.
Unfortunately, all this has been explained to Berned so very many times that one can only draw one conclusion about Berned, i.e. re:
Catholic liars like Polycarp CANNOT admit this
Folks try to "see" in others that which they despise about themselves.
Very slow day at the office...
Exactly who is the Christian trying to pull the hoax here? What did I miss?
Ossuary was genuine, inscription was faked
I'm an expert on ancient scripts and I'm here to report that the "James ossuary" was genuine, but the second part of its inscription is a fraud.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rochelle I. Altman/Special to Jewsweek Magazine
Jewsweek.com | As an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems, I was asked to examine this inscription and make a report. I did.
JESUS IN A BOX: An ancient limestone burial box recently discovered in Jerusalem bears the Aramaic inscription - "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Could this lunchbox really belong to the son of God?
The bone-box is original; the first inscription, which is in Aramaic, "Jacob son of Joseph," is authentic. The second half of the inscription, "brother of Jesus," is a poorly executed fake and a later addition. This report has already been distributed on at least two scholarly lists.
Please note that the fraud is so blatant that I did not bother to go into extreme detail on whether the faked addition is supposed to be Hebrew or Aramaic. (If that's a vav, -- then it's Hebrew, not Aramaic; if it's yod, then it's says 'my brother', not 'his brother' or 'brother of'. By no stretch of the imagination can one claim this to be in Aramaic... 'of' in Aramaic is 'di'.)
You have to be blind as a bat not to see that the second part is a fraud.
Here is the report:
Report on the "James" ossuary inscription I carefully checked many photos and writings on ossuaries and covenants before sending you my report. I make no claim to be an expert on ossuaries, but inscriptions and scripts are another story. It might be in order to warn you that I have a great deal of experience at spotting ancient frauds and forgeries.
There are a few things we have to bear in mind about ossuary inscriptions.
First, according to Rahmani (1981, 1982) on Jerusalem burial practices, most ossuaries are from the period between 30/20 BCE-70 CE -- but by no means all.
Second, human remains are not dug up and displaced without very good reasons. Ossuaries show up in quantity when burial space is at a premium.
Solutions to the burial space problem are quite varied. In Classical Greece, for example, low status people were buried in space-saving one-person shaft graves (with a tiny round marker on the spot with the necessary data). The Keramikon in Athens is full of these. In Italy, from the Renaissance until the late 19th-century, after 3 years, unless a family could afford an ossuary or pay another three years rent, the bones were dumped in a mass grave site -- usually a convenient quarry or crevice or what have you, filled with dirt layer by layer. In Athens, ossuaries are still used (metal boxes nowadays); again, that three-year rent period runs. Even in modern Louisiana, along the Mississippi water seepage makes it impossible to dig graves of a reasonable depth; burials are in family mausoleums and bones are pushed down to make way for the latest arrival.
As ossuaries, after all, contravene the normal rules for Jewish burial, the appearance of so many ossuaries in the period before the destruction of the Temple is strong evidence that the cemeteries around Jerusalem were in a space-crunch. (The post-70 reduction in ossuaries follows naturally enough from the removal of enough people from the area to reduce the need for bone-boxes.)
It is not a question of "popularity" at all (which when one thinks about it, is a most peculiar way to think about the subject), but a lack of burial space... which also gives us information about population density of a given area. (Oddly enough, there does not seem to be very much in the literature that addresses this point for the relevant period; yet the correlation between the space constraints indicated by the rise in ossuaries and the density of the population of a given area is rather obvious.)
Third, while today, grave markers are carved by pros, this was not the case in these Jewish ossuary inscriptions. The apparently wide variations in ossuary inscriptions come from a simple fact: these ossuary inscriptions are covenants, vows to affirm continuing respect for the deceased in spite of having disinterred his/her remains. As any other vow, the text must be in the hand of the one making the vow. Thus (as is noted in the literature), a surviving member of the family painted on, or scratched into, the (usually) limestone box the memorial data. In some cases a professional would carve over the handwriting exactly as written. (By the way, this is the standard practice for all professionally carved covenants.)
In other words, all those ossuary inscriptions are holographs. Needless to say, in such a mass of individual writing, literacy varied tremendously from semi-literates who wrote only upon occasion to school-boys to scholars. [What is relevant to sorting out the apparent lack of relation between status and ossuary is not the wealth or social status of the individual(s) (up to three sets of same-family bones can show up in an ossuary), but the level of literacy and status of the survivors. Thus, there is a relationship between status and inscription... but we would need information on the "survivors" in each case to know who, what, when, how, and why.]
From the writing on the ossuary inscriptions, some are clearly written by youngsters and semi-literates who did not have complete control of graph sizes and could not hold a straight line. Others are clearly the holographs of literate people.
James inscription was written by two different people The inscription on the "James" ossuary is a bit more complicated. First it has been gone over by a professional carver; the words are excised (not incised). Second, it was written by two different people.
Translated, with the amendments to the original spelling as given in the article, the inscription reads:
Jacob son of Joseph brother of Joshua.
The emended translation does not indicate the way the words are actually written, which is in two distinct groups:
Y(KOBBRYWSF )XWW(Y#W(
[Editor's note: the transliteration provided by the author is in accordance with the Michigan-Claremont Encoding System for ASCII]
Nor does the translation give any indication of the change from the carefully executed and expertly spaced *inscriptional* cursive -- including careful angles and the cuneiform wedge on the bet's, the resh, and the yod -- in
Y(KOBBRYWSF
[Jacob son of Joseph]
to the less than expertly executed *commercial* sans-wedge cursive in
)XWW(Y#W(
[brother of Joshua]
While it is customary to dismiss such differences as unimportant ("scribes are not typewriters"), here the differences between the two parts are glaring and impossible not to see.
In the first part, the script is formal In part 1, the script is formal, the ayin has an acute angle, the bets, resh, and yod have the cuneiform wedge, and the yods are consistent in size and cannot be confused with the vavs.
The person who wrote the first part of the inscription [ Y(KOBBRYWSF ] was necessarily a surviving member of the family. He was fully literate; he clearly was familiar with the formal square script (those cuneiform wedges), the writing is internally consistent, and this part of the inscription is his expertly written holograph.
In the second part, the script is informal In part 2, the script is informal, the two ayins are completely different from each other and differ yet again from the ayin in part 1. When we compare the yod in Y(KOB with the (amended) three yod's in )XWW(Y#W( we immediately can see that this is a different person writing. First of all, the yod in 'brother of' and the first yod in W(Y#W( are written as vavs. With the model of the correct way to write the yod-ayin [ Y( ] right in front of his nose on 'Jacob', there is no reason at all for the extended vav or the extra vav in what should be Y(#(. Then, the yod in the peculiarly misspelled W(Y#W( does not resemble the yod in Joseph [ YWSF ] as written in part 1 which also has a wedge. The shin in W(Y#W( [damned if I can figure out how to trans-literate this abhorrent spelling of Joshua] is wedgeless and does not accord with the first part of the inscription... but then, none of the forms in the second part agree with the script of the first part.
The person who wrote the second part [ )XWW(Y#W( ] may have been literate, but it is doubtful that he was literate in Aramaic or Hebrew. Again, aberrant spelling is dismissed as dialectic. True, there are dialectic variants, but there is always some linguistic logic behind these variants. There is nothing logical about these misspellings. They smell of someone guessing how the words "brother of" and the name "Joshua" would have been spelled a couple, three hundred years earlier. Once again, the writing in this part is internally consistent in its semi-literacy. Part 2 has the characteristics of a later addition by someone attempting to imitate an unfamiliar script and write in an unfamiliar language.
There is yet another tell-tale sign of fraud here. As noted, the text is excised. (Which indicates a wealthy family.) Nobody excises an entire block of stone to raise the text; not even the Yadi stele is entirely excised. In "name" plates or other small inscriptions, if excised rather than incised (cheaper), the normal practice is to excise the text and a frame, which frame itself is excised by incised limits but never beyond them. Only the area within the frame will be excised; the rest of the block will be left alone. Far too much here has been excised from around the names. More to the point, where is the original frame?
Second part of inscription added later Well, to anybody who knows something about anti-fraud techniques as practiced in antiquity, it is rather obvious. The frame was removed to add the second part of this inscription. The original frame would have been the barest minimum distance from the text and have appeared something like this:
|-------------------|
|Y(KOBBRYWSF | )XWW(Y#W(
|____________ |
If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine, then somebody has to explain why there are two hands of clearly different levels of literacy and two different scripts. They also have to explain why the second hand did not know how to write 'brother of' in Aramaic or even spell 'Joshua'. Further, they had better explain where the frame has gone.
The ossuary itself is undoubtedly genuine; the well executed and formal first part of the inscription is a holographic original by a literate (and wealthy) survivor of Jacob Ben Josef in the 1st century CE. The second part of the inscription bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition and is questionable to say the least.
*** ***
{ Rochelle I. Altman is co-coordinator of IOUDAIOS-L, a virtual community of scholars engaged in on-line discussion of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. She is an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems. }
You know, berned, that's calumny which is quite sinful! And it's plain unchristian!
Is that what you are saying? Are you committing to that?
BTW, what do you think of your boy Eisenman believing that Mary wsa not a virgin when she bore Jesus?
And then "miraculously" appeared "Mariolatry"?
The word does not imply exclusivity. The Greek phrase you refer to is "ide o uios sou," with "o" being translated "the". In Matthew I find this: "Jakobos o tou Zebedaiou," "James the son of Zebedee". Since John was also a son of Zebedee, "o" clearly doesn't mean "only".
Unfortunately, Eisenman is not the only critic. In fact, I think the others make the stronger case, which you have not refuted either:
Dr. Rochelle Altman is another critic of the recent findings. An historian of writing systems and an expert on scripts, Altman writes that while the ossuary itself is genuine, the second half of the inscription -- "brother of Jesus" -- is a poor imitation of the first half of the inscription, one that must have been added later. [i.e., a hoax]Her reasons sound pretty convincing (though I claim no expertise in that area).
According to Altman, inscriptions on ossuaries were covenants made by the dead person's family members, pledging that they would continue to revere their deceased loved one. As was the case with all such solemn vows, the covenant had to be written in the hand of the person making it. Thus, while professional masons might have "touched up" the inscription later, the original inscription had to be made by the family member.
Obviously, not all family members were literate, so their inscriptions might have been a little shaky. Either way, it would have all been done in the same hand. However, Altman argues that the inscription on this particular ossuary was written by two different people. [i.e., a hoax]
How does she know? Well, the first group of words -- "Jacob son of Joseph" -- was written by someone who was fully literate (she could tell by the consistency of the lettering and the formal script).
After the author carved the initial lettering, a professional excised the text (meaning that the stone around it was carved out to make the letters raised) and enclosed the words in a kind of frame -- a common practice when excising an inscription.
All of this appears legitimate to Altman. But, she says, that's not true of the second half of the inscription -- "brother of Jesus." Apparently, there are a few strange misspellings in this second part, as if the person writing it had little grasp of either Hebrew or Aramaic, and was trying to copy a script and language unfamiliar to him. [i.e., a hoax] Altman also points out that the script is informal, as compared with the formal lettering of the first section.
But that's not all. She additionally notes that there's no excised frame around the words. Since it was a normal practice to excise both the words and a frame, she concluded that the second writer removed the original frame so he could add his own words. [i.e., a hoax]
Her final verdict? The box is real; the inscription is not. [i.e., a hoax] "If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine," she says, "then somebody has to explain why there are two hands of clearly different levels of literacy and two different scripts. They also have to explain why the second hand did not know how to write 'brother of' in Aramaic or even spell 'Joshua' [the Hebrew form of Jesus]. Further, they had better explain where the frame has gone."
i.e., ITS A HOAX.
You can't carbon date a stone box--only organic material. And there's not much debate as to whether the box itself is that old--apparently ossuaries from that period are a dime a dozen in Israel. It's the date of the inscription that's in question.
The speaker, In addressing the issue, of what is so important or special about Jesus....
first says....he's just a carpenter ,He's Mary's son,
and he's the brother of James,Joses,Juda,& Simon and at least 2 sisters. (Thats at least six siblings.)
However I have never seen mention in the scriptures while speaking of the nativity story, that it mentions anything about Joseph and Mary trekking across the desert to the Bethlehem version of the Motel 6 looking for accomadations for the 2 of them plus six other kids. Perhaps Thats because they werent born yet? But in the Bible it does say that Jesus was Mary's firstborn son.
They are going to Bethlehem for a census , they are married, but Joseph isnt going to count "his other kids" from his supposed first marriage in the census?
In Mark 6:3 Starting with the mother they then name the rest of the family of Jesus that all of these people present can identify with.
At face value, any one without an agenda would say that the speaker just named off members of the same family.
But if you put on the special glasses, suddenly these words take on an entirely different meaning and you have a first century Brady Bunch with a widower and his sons and daughters marrying a perpetual virgin.
If we all agree that the Bible is the word of God and divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, why would we think that we are supposed to take these words at anything other than face value?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.