gregoryjenks

Category: Archaeology

  • Study Leave—Week Five

    This has been a quieter week in some ways, but quite a productive one as well.

    The weekend part of the week saw an overlap between the Western Easter and the final days of the Pesach holidays. The country seemed to be on holiday mode pretty well much of the time, although I was challenged by the inability to buy anything with yeast: including (of course) pita bread, beer, and pasta. It is not just that observant Jews do not buy such products. Rather, the stores will not allow anyone to buy them, irrespective of your religious outlook. Consequently great sections of the stores are covered in plastic sheets to indicate that these items may not be purchased. Even the British Pub themed restaurant where I ate on Saturday night was not serving beer. Must be tough on their core business. (I have since learned that locals stock up with these items in advance of the holy days.)

    With so many holidays to be observed there were opportunities to visit some beautiful places, such as the Lake Huleh wetlands and the Banias Springs. There were also opportunities for lunches with friends in Nazareth, where the quantity of food served far exceeds my capacity to devour it (although I try), and is always spectacular.

    One of the highlights of the week was the opportunity to visit the small chapel where Charles de Foucauld spent many hours in prayer during the two years he spent in Nazareth. The friend who took me there prays in this chapel every day, and it was a privilege to be given that glimpse inside his private life.

    Last Saturday I had an opportunity to walk through the excavations at Tiberias itself. This is a city founded by Herod Antipas in 20 CE and continuously occupied ever since. The excavations have revealed a first century theatre as well as a Late Roman bath house that features in some of the rabbinic texts. The ruins are adjacent to the main road and close to a popular beach area. Most passers-by seem entirely unaware of the history so close at hand.

    While visiting Nazareth on Wednesday I called by the Sabeel office and happened to be there at the same time as a group of 15 or so Swedes, all members of Friends of Sabeel in Sweden. It was lovely to cross paths with them, and kind of fun to be partly in the position of welcoming them to Nazareth.

    In between all the sight-seeing and the lovely meals there has even been some opportunities to work. I have been able to track down quite a bit of literature related to the current book project, and by week’s end to complete another chapter for the book. This is the chapter that looks at Galilee in the time of Jesus, and at a few of the key places he visited. In particular, it has a couple of pages on the archaeological evidence for Nazareth during the first few decades of the first century. I may need to revise a few sentences in light of some places I am yet to be shown (although I think not), but at least the chapter itself is now done. In the week ahead I will shift my focus back to the coins project, not least because the next chapter I want to write will deal with the coins that are relevant to my study of Jesus in first century Galilee. This is certainly a good place to be located while working on such a project.

    On Thursday evening I had an opportunity to meet up with the Australian tour group led by David Pitman, from Brisbane. It was good to do that, and quite a tonic to hear their Aussie accents. Even better was the chance to see some familiar faces of friends from home. Still, it was a wicked pleasure to say as I left them , “Well, I am heading home to Tiberias now!”

  • The myth of final security

    Jesus may have seemed not much more than an irritation to the Roman rulers.

    How wrong they were.

    Just yesterday I was walking through the impressive ruins of a 13C fortress high on a mountain near the Israel/Lebanon border.

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
    More pictures at my Flickr album.

    At the time the people who invested energy and funds into creating this military-industrial complex, must have felt they were now secure. No one could touch them now. How wrong they were. Today it is a tourist park.

    House built on sand, anyone?

    Towers built without counting the cost?

    Armies sent to war before assessing the chances of victory?

    Is the Pentagon listening?

    Is North Korea listening?

    Are we listening?

  • Study Leave — Week Three

    Tiberias, Israel
    Friday, 22 March 2013

    A sunny morning in Tiberias catching up on reading

    It is now three weeks since I arrived in Israel for my sabbatical, and the place is abuzz with preparations for Passover and—for the Western Christians in Jerusalem—Holy Week.

    For the local Christians, Easter will be observed on the first weekend in May and outside Jerusalem all the Christian communities have agreed to observe the Orthodox calendar this year. This creates some liturgical dissonance for visitors such as myself, but I welcome the grassroots collaboration between often competing Christian communities and rejoice in the messiness of it all.

    The shops have been crazy; like a pre-Christmas shopping frenzy back home. And I am told the traffic will be chaotic after the weekend as people take advantage of the holidays to visit family and friends.

    During this third week of my study leave I seem to have settled into more of a pattern. I went to Jerusalem on Sunday, without needing to use the GPS (despite taking at least one wrong turn in the process). Not long after arriving at St George’s College I ran into John Stuart, an Australian serving as chaplain to SGC this year, and we made arrangements to celebrate St Patrick’s Day at a nearby Irish Pub in West Jerusalem. O’Connells did not offer Irish Stew (despite it being on the menu), so we settled for “Australian Burgers” and Guinness. It was lovely couple of hours, and we found that we have so much in common. Finding such interesting people in unexpected places is one of the joys of travel.

    Monday and Tuesday were spent in the coin department at Israel Antiquities Authority beneath the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Some real progress has been made with the coin database project, although at times it seems that really just means I am getting a clearer sense of the mess I am seeking to clean up.

    The other major project on my agenda is beginning to call for my attention. Before my study leave is finished, I need to have the first draft of a new book for Polebridge Press. This will be the long-awaited (by me, at least) ‘Jesus book’ and it will draw together some of my work at Bethsaida, as well as other historical Jesus projects and biblical studies. The last few days I was able to spend some time on questions around the towns Jesus visited and avoided, including what we now know about Nazareth in the first couple of decades of the Common Era.

    While at a wonderful concert in Nazareth on Wednesday evening, I met a local gentleman with a deep connection to Nazareth Village project. We soon discovered that we hold very different views on the size of Nazareth in the first century, and the date of its founding as a Jewish village. He has offered to guide me through some of the local archaeological sites not open to tourists, and I am very much looking forward to that. In the meantime I have done some further reading on the key archaeological investigations at Nazareth so I am well prepared for our discussions (and re-assured in my existing opinions!).

    It has been good to have a break from the obsession with coins, although it was a real thrill to hold in my hands this last week a coin minted by Cleopatra during her ill-fated relationship with Mark Antony, as well as a coin of Agrippa II (who crossed paths with Paul of Tarsus according to Acts 25) dated to 82/83 CE. This date is about 10 years after the end of the Jewish War, while Agrippa continued to reign—and around the time that Josephus was sending Agrippa drafts of his own book project, The Jewish War, for comment and correction. Both coins were found at Bethsaida in 2012.

    With the imminent holy days I am planning to take a break from the research and enjoy time with friends here. I suspect the highlight 0f the next few days will be a visit to the Herod exhibition at the Israel Museum on Sunday. I have walked past it several times already, so now I plan to go and see the exhibition for myself. From all reports it is definitely well worth seeing.

  • Study Leave — Week Two

    After the excitement of the first week—with my arrival in Israel, settling into the house and the first trip to Jerusalem to work in the coin department at IAA—this has been a much quieter week.

    My first excursion at the IAA coin department was so productive there was no need to return to Jerusalem this week. I had more than sufficient material to keep me going all week. Instead of returning south, I remained in Tiberias and worked away at the task of checking that all of the information on each of the 350+ index cards has been included in the Excel spreadsheet that serves as a temporary database file. As I write I am within sight of the end of that task, and should have it done by this evening.

    One result of staying in Tiberias was that I have had considerable solitude. That is a very different reality than my usual work and life context, but an interesting set of dynamics to experience. I am rarely alone with my thoughts and never find myself feeling lonely, but at times this week it has felt very lonely.

    The highlight of the week on a personal note was my birthday on Monday, with greetings from family and friends around the world.  I was treated to a lovely dinner at a local Chinese restaurant by the lake in Tiberias.

    On Wednesday I was finally able to visit the Bethsaida site, which looks so very different in its Spring greenery. We were having another Khamseen event that day, so the sky was filled with dust and there was limited visibility. It still made for some lovely photographs of the site.

    The long days sitting at the laptop and checking the index cards given me a good sense of what coins are in the collection at this stage, and where we have gaps in the recorded information. I still find myself surprised to be dealing with coins from Alexander the Great, Herod, Claudius, Trajan, and the like. Some of them minted right here in Tiberias, all of them in circulation here at some stage in the past—and now recovered from the dig at Bethsaida.

    I am finding that my Hebrew cursive skills are developing as this project proceeds. I am now recognising the names of mints, denominations, etc even though they are only recorded in hand written modern Hebrew. Doubtless this will also assist with the challenge of  grocery shopping when all the labels are in Hebrew.

    Next week I will be spending a few more days in Jerusalem to push into the next phase of the coin project. This will involve tracking down published descriptions of the coins, as well as descriptions of similar coins, so these can be prepared for inclusion in the database. Along with the images of the coins, these technical numismatic records will add real value to the database as a research tool for my colleagues in the Consortium for the Bethsaida Excavations Project.

    However, in the meantime we have the Jewish weekend (Friday/Saturday), so it is almost play time for me …

  • Re-dating the Galilean synagogues

    Interesting to see Jodi Magness is now arguing that the Galilean type synagogue was not developed until a couple of hundreds year later than most scholars had previously proposed:

    Christian and Jewish scholars tend to like dates as early as possible, as that suggests greater historicity for the biblical narratives as well as the traditional accounts of Jewish and Christian origins. While the hermeneutic of suspicion (in this case, suspicion of self-serving early dates) cannot be invoked too readily, I find it intrinsically probable that the development was slower than the traditional stories want us to think.

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