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geebob
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 94
 
   Posted 11/18/2002 4:09 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
This fella says that the ossuary was real but the words "brother of Jesus" were added.

http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en.jsp?enZone=Views&enDisplay=view&enPage=ViewsPage&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article^l1569

Is this yet the scholarly consensus or is the jury still out?

I will gladly pay you teusday for a hamburger today.

-Wimpy
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¡Que Payaso!
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 108
 
   Posted 11/21/2002 5:05 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
geebob,

As far as I've been able to find, this is the only report which seeks to deny the authenticity of the inscription. The consensus seems to be that the inscription is genuine. We'll probably just have to give this more time as other scholars check the inscription for themselves.

Payaso

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." - Bilbo Baggins
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Springs
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 636
 
   Posted 11/21/2002 5:45 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
I heard they were going to have the ossuary at the ETS.

We can get an authenticity opinion from our local theologians when they return.

-S

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Tom
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   Posted 11/21/2002 7:38 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
quote:

I heard they were going to have the ossuary at the ETS.

Yeah, I heard that too. They were gonna try to inscribe the phrase "God possesses Exhaustively definite foreknowledge" on the side and hope scholars woulod mistake it for an authentic piece of evidence that EDF was believed in by the early church. Of course, somebody leaked the plot and now that's off. Instead, I heard they were gonna see if ossuary is large enough to fit Boyd, Sanders, and Pinnock in with the lid sealed.

Tom

"No one's ever eaten a donut hole because they don't exist." Starkman
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kerygma
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Date Joined Aug 2002
Total Posts : 45
 
   Posted 11/23/2002 11:19 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
quote:

This fella says that the ossuary was real but the words "brother of Jesus" were added.

Is this yet the scholarly consensus or is the jury still out?


More like a lone Jew wishing the inscription weren't so. This guy is alone, out on a limb. The inscription has been twice verified scientificially by independent labs to have a patina consistent with it's age. All of the inscription.

In His peace,

Scott

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:5
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Electra
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Date Joined Feb 2002
Total Posts : 611
 
   Posted 11/26/2002 5:23 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Modes, Meph, and I saw the ossuary. It was a small, stone box with writing scratched on the side. We didn’t attend the AAR discussion about its authenticity, but apparently it became very heated. Here's what the newspaper (Toronto Globe and Mail) said about it the next day:

Experts disagree about authenticity of ossuary

Toronto attracts international academics for hot debate on origin of limestone box

By MICHAEL POSNER
ARTS REPORTER
     

Monday, November 25, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A6

TORONTO -- At times, it seemed more like a boxing match than a scholarly debate.

The ring was the Canadian Room of Toronto's Royal York Hotel, and the unlikely pugilists were academics, arrayed on either side of a tantalizing archaeological question: Did a 2,000-year-old limestone ossuary once contain the bones of James, brother of Jesus?

The ossuary, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, carries an Aramaic inscription "Ya'akov, [James], son of Yosef [Joseph], brother of Yeshua [Jesus]."

If it refers to James, leader of the early Christian church in Jerusalem and the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, it would be the first major archaeological evidence for the existence of the Christian Messiah.

But as yesterday's lively exchange demonstrated, there is no clear consensus on that issue, or even on whether the inscription is wholly genuine. Detailed analysis of the script leads some epigraphers to think it probable that the second, less formal half of the inscription was carved by a different hand and at a different time than the first half.

If that's the case, as York University professor Steve Mason said, "All bets [as to its being the James] are off."

"To say the least, I have a very bad feeling about the whole matter," Duke University professor Eric Meyers told a crowd of about 500 people. "I have misgivings about the authenticity" of an object that was not scientifically excavated.

But Sorbonne professor Andre Lemaire, one of the world's ranking experts in Aramaic inscriptions from this period, insisted that the inscription was done bya single hand. "It looks to me very probable," he said, "that we have here the first epigraphical reference to Jesus of Nazareth."

The ossuary's owner, Tel Aviv entrepreneur Oded Golan, has said that he purchased the relic from a Jerusalem antiquities trader for $200 (U.S.) about 25 years ago. He said he kept it in various places during this period, never realizing its possible significance.

"Nothing would delight me more than to be convinced that this was the ossuary of James," said John Painter, theology professor at Canberra's Charles Sturt University and the author of Just James, a book about the brother of Jesus. "But I confess I am worried. I don't think the database of names from that era is big enough to give a proper sample. It's possible, but I don't think the evidence says it's probable."

Hershel Shanks, publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review, the magazine that broke the ossuary story last month, excoriated Dr. Meyers for his refusal to countenance discussion of unprovenanced finds.

"Of course we'd be delighted if it had been properly excavated," Mr. Shanks said. "But that isn't the choice. The choice is whether we will try to get some information from it or ignore it. How can we avert our eyes just because it came from the antiquities market?"

If that were the right approach, he said, the world would know nothing today about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which surfaced in 1947 in a similarly illegal manner.

"Questions and caution are legitimate," he said. "What isn't legitimate is to vilify those who try to add to our understanding."

Tel Aviv University's Camil Fuchs, a professor of statistics, has added what is bound to be more fuel to the debate. In a paper to be published soon, Dr. Fuchs has made a more thorough study of the demography of first-century-AD Jerusalem, with a view to determining "how many other . . . persons called James, whose father was named Joseph and had an older brother called Jesus."

His estimate of the probability of such a configuration: 0.0155 per cent or approximately one in 6,400.

In other words, says Dr. Fuchs, not factoring in the relative rarity of an ossuary containing any reference to a brother, "we can state a 93-per-cent confidence level that . . . there were no more than three such individuals" in Jerusalem in 62 AD, the time James is widely thought to have died.

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Matt. 10:8
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