Friday, March 30, 2007

Today on Talpiot

In The Aramaic Blog, Steve Caruso has an update on the reading of the "Jesus, son of Joseph" inscription on one of the ossuaries in the Talpiot Tomb:

The Jesus Son of Joseph Inscription Part 2

and

The Jesus Son of Joseph Inscription Part 3

These posts are follow-ups to The Jesus Son of Joseph Inscription, mentioned here last week, Talpiot Tomb: Does it say Jesus?. Ed Cook commented on that post, and I added the comments in an update to the main post, and Steve Carruso now responds directly to those comments. As before, Steve has some useful illustrations.

Also this morning, Steve Goranson draws attention to a review of The Jesus Family Tomb by Joseph Fitzmyer, in America: The National Catholic Weekly:

Together at Last?
Joseph Fitzmyer

Fitzmyer focuses mainly on difficulties over the alleged MARIAMHNOU H MARA reading, and draws attention to issues also discussed here, especially in relation to Jacobovici's identification this character with Mary Magdalene on the basis of the Acts of Philip (Mariamne, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany and related posts).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fr Fitzmyer's claim that the authors have established that the James ossuary came from the Talpiot tomb seems rather too generous to me. At the moment there is in circulation at least as much evidence against that claim as there is in favor of the claim, and no one datum is especially more compelling than the others. At best we might say that the jury is still out. Others would not be going too far to say that the claim should be rejected on the merits of the data in consideration.

Mark Goodacre said...

Greg,

Yes, I wasn't sure what to make of that. I wondered whether Fitzmyer was in that paragraph trying to explain what the book claims, only to begin the criticism in the next paragraph with the comment about the Da Vinci Code. Notice, for example, that he does focus in on the IAA and the Golan trial. So is he being sarcastic?

Anonymous said...

Hello,
A question out of context. If you were to write a dissertation on JOhn what are some of the number of issues that will be of interest to you?

From a reader who reads your blog frequently and is passionate about John's Gospel.

Thanks