Stay tuned for Joe’s reports of News, Archeology, Opinions, Essays, and Reviews.
Archaeologist sees proof for Bible in ancient wall
JERUSALEM – An Israeli archaeologist said Monday that ancient fortifications recently excavated in Jerusalem date back 3,000 years to the time of King Solomon and support the biblical narrative about the era.JERUSALEM – An Israeli archaeologist said Monday that ancient fortifications recently excavated in Jerusalem date back 3,000 years to the time of King Solomon and support the biblical narrative about the era.
More here.
Israel discovers large Byzantine-era wine press
more here.
More Archaeology stories: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Joe just recently received his M.A. from Villanova University. Here’s a book he recommends:
Codex Sinaiticus
Joe Reports a New Discovery:
Here is a leaf from Codex Sinaiticus, a fragment of which was just found. It had been recycled to form the binding for another book.
How the Ancient Greeks Chose Temple Locations:
The Greeks built temples where their respective gods and goddesses would feel right at home:
For example, Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility, and Dionysos, the god of wine, both were venerated on fertile, well-structured soils called Xerolls, which are ideal for grain cultivation.
Artemis, the virgin huntress, and her brother Apollo, the god of light and the Sun, were worshiped in rocky Orthent and Xerept soils suitable only for nomadic herding.
And maritime deities, such as Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Poseidon, the sea god, were revered on Calcid soils on coastal terraces too dry for agriculture.
Oldest Hebrew Inscription found (Oct 29, 2008)
Some Opinion Journal articles I missed; old but still good:
Bullying the Pulpits
The IRS threatens church leaders who talk about politics.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Planting Hope
Gardening in times of war.
BY JANE GARMEY
Misplaced Faith
BY WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY
Equal Before God
Why did masters want their slaves to be Christians?
BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
In 1978, scholar Albert Raboteau published “Slave Religion,” a groundbreaking book that set out to explain “the invisible institution in the Antebellum South.”
“From the very beginning of the Atlantic slave trade,” Mr. Raboteau writes, “conversion of the slaves to Christianity was viewed by the emerging nations of Western Christendom as a justification for the enslavement of Africans.” But there was also a recognition of the danger that could accompany such transformations. “Masters understood,” Mr. Raboteau told me in a recent interview, “that there was something subversive about the whole notion of fellowship, brotherhood and sisterhood [in Christianity] that would lead slaves to think more highly of themselves.”
August 29, 2008: ATHENS, Greece – A priceless gold wreath has been unearthed in an ancient city in northern Greece, buried with human bones in a large copper vase that workers initially took for a land mine. Yahoo News.
By VESELIN TOSHKOV, Associated Press Writer Veselin Toshkov, Associated Press Writer – Thu Aug 7, 8:24 am ET SOFIA, Bulgaria – Archaeologists have unearthed a 1,900-year-old well-preserved chariot at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, the head of the excavation said Thursday. Yahoo News.
August 4, 2008 Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
LiveScience.com robin Lloyd
livescience Senior Editor
livescience.com – Mon Aug 4, 9:21 am ET
A mummy of a middle-aged woman dating to Ancient Greek times has been discovered in a lead coffin inside a marble sarcophagus, the first clear indication of embalming in Greece from the era when the Romans ruled there. Yahoo News.
- Sara Goudarzi
- For National Geographic News
March 14, 2008
- Experts have digitally reconstructed Rome‘s earliest major temple, the Temple of Apollo, built by the first Roman emperor, Augustus (more; photo)
Ancient Brain Surgery
Thessaloníki, Greece; March 12, 2008—Greek archaeologists believe a large hole in the skull of a third-century A.D. skeleton is rare evidence of ancient—and failed—brain surgery. The patient, a young woman, is believed to have died during or shortly after the operation. (more from National Geographic)
SCIENCE | February 12, 2008
5200 B.C. Is New Date for Farms in Egypt
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
A new discovery may provide insights about the farmers and some answers to the questions of how, why and when Egyptians adopted farming.
A Rabbi Who Talks With Jesus
By Dinesh D’Souza
Monday, February 11, 2008
From Townhall
Pope Benedict has a favorite rabbi, none other than the distinguished Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner. At first glance this is a puzzle. Many years ago Neusner wrote a book called A Rabbi Talks With Jesus. In it, he noted, “I explain why, if I had been in the land of Israel in the first century, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus’ disciples.” (More)
SCIENCE | February 5, 2008
An Altar Beyond Olympus for a Deity Predating Zeus
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Archaeologists say they have found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion in Greece
Future Farmer (Wall Street Journal Online)
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
January 30, 2008; Page A16
History records that previous commodity booms were not followed by mass starvation, resource wars and the end of civilization. John Atkin is out to make sure it doesn’t happen again. An agricultural zoologist by training, he serves as chief operating officer for crop protection at Switzerland’s Syngenta, a competitor to the U.S. giant Monsanto in the controversial business of agricultural technology.
Of the recent surge in prices for all manner of foodstuffs, he says don’t blame biofuels. Coffee and frozen orange juice are up, and they don’t go into your gas tank or compete for land with ethanol-related crops. (more)
Jan 17, 2008 1:26 | Updated Jan 17, 2008 15:21
First Temple seal found in Jerusalem
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
Jerusalem Post Jan 17, 2008
A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem’s City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.
The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name “Temech” engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.
According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
A challenge to believers — and non-believers
By Dinesh D’Souza
Monday, October 8, 2007
My new book What’s So Great About Christianity starts hitting the stores this week. It’s the first comprehensive answer to the atheist books out there, such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. I’m debating Hitchens in New York on October 22, and if you’d like to attend the details are at http://www.tkc.edu. I’d also like to kick some of the atheists off the bestseller lists. You can help by ordering my book online or asking for it at your local bookstore. But first let me tell you why I wrote the book and what it is about.Christians are called upon to be “contenders” for their faith. This term suggests that they should be ready to stand up for their beliefs, and that they will face opposition. But in order to give reasons, you must first know what you believe. You must also know why you believe it. And you must be able to communicate these reasons to those who don’t share your beliefs. In short, you must know what’s so great about Christianity.This is the arena in which many Christians have fallen short. Today’s Christians know that they do not, as their ancestors did, live in a society where God’s presence was unavoidable. No longer does Christianity form the moral basis of society. Many of us now reside in secular communities, where arguments drawn from the Bible or Christian revelation carry no weight, and where we hear different language from that spoken in church.Instead of engaging this secular world, most Christians have taken the easy way out. They have retreated into a Christian subculture where they engage Christian concerns. Then they step back into secular society, where their Christianity is kept out of sight until the next church service. Without realizing it Christians have become postmodernists of a sort: they live by the gospel of the two truths. There is religious truth, reserved for Sundays and days of worship, and there is secular truth, which applies the rest of the time.This divided lifestyle is opposed to what the Bible teaches. The Bible tells Christians not to be of the world, sharing its distorted priorities, but it does call upon believers to be in the world, fully engaged. Many Christians have abdicated this mission. They have instead sought a workable, comfortable modus vivendi in which they agree to leave the secular world alone if the secular world agrees to leave them alone. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the terms for the treaty in his book Rocks of Ages when he said that secular society relies on reason and decides matters of fact, while religious people rely on faith and decide questions about values. Many Christians seized upon this distinction with relief. This way they could stay in their subculture and be nice to everyone.But a group of prominent atheists—many of them evolutionary biologists—has launched a powerful public attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular; they have no interest in being nice. A new set of antireligious books—The God Delusion, The End of Faith, God Is Not Great, and so on—now shapes public debate.
These atheists reject the Gould solution. They say that a religious outlook makes specific claims about reality: there is a God, there is life after death, miracles do happen, and so on. If you are agnostic or atheist, you have a very different understanding of reality, one that is formed perhaps by a scientific or rationalist outlook. The argument of the atheists is that both views of reality cannot be simultaneously correct. If one is true, then the other is false.
The atheists have a point: there are not two truths or multiple truths; there is one truth. Either the universe is a completely closed system and miracles are impossible, or the universe is not a closed system and there is the possibility of divine intervention in it. Either the Big Bang was the product of supernatural creation or it had a purely natural cause. In a larger sense, either the secular view of reality is correct or the religious view is correct. (Or both are wrong.) So far the atheists have been hammering the Christians and the Christians have been running for cover. It’s like one hand clapping.
This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather, it is a time to drive the money-changers out of the temple. The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control the school curricula, so that they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion—and especially the Christian religion—disappear from the face of the earth.
Christians must confront the challenge of modern atheism and secularism. This book provides a kind of tool kit to meet this challenge. The Christianity that is defended here is not “fundamentalism” but rather traditional Christianity, what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” the common ground of beliefs between Protestants and Catholics. This Christianity is the real target of the secular assault.
I have written What’s So Great About Christianity not only for believers but also for unbelievers. Many people are genuine seekers. They sense there is something out there that provides a grounding and an ultimate explanation for their deepest questions, yet that something eludes them. They feel the need for a higher sense of purpose in their lives, but they are unsure where to find it. Even though they have heard about God and Christianity, they cannot reconcile religious belief with reason and science: faith seems unreasonable and therefore untenable. Moreover, they worry that religion has been and can be an unhealthy source of intolerance and fanaticism, as evidenced by the motives of the September 11 terrorists. These are all reasonable concerns, and I address them head-on in this book.
This is also a book for atheists, or at least for those atheists who welcome a challenge. Precisely because the Christians usually duck and run, the atheists have had it too easy. Their arguments have gone largely unanswered. They have been flogging the carcass of “fundamentalism” without having to encounter the horse-kick of a vigorous traditional Christianity. I think that if atheists are genuine rationalists they should welcome this book. It is an effort to meet the atheist argument on its own terms.
Nowhere in this book do I take Christianity for granted. My modus operandi is one of skepticism, to view the claims of religion in the same open-minded way that we view claims of any other sort. The difference between me and my atheist opponents is that I am skeptical not only of the irrational claims made in the name of religion but also of the irrational claims made in the name of science and of skepticism itself.
Taking as my foil the anti-religious arguments of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the others, this book will show the following—1) Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization, the root of our most cherished values. 2) The latest discoveries of modern science support the Christian claim that there is a divine being who created the universe. 3) Darwin’s theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it. 4) There is nothing in science that makes miracles impossible. 5) It is reasonable to have faith. 6) Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. 7) Atheism is often motivated not by reason but by a kind of cowardly moral escapism. I end this book by showing what is unique about Christianity and how our lives change if we become Christians.
Bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book What’s So Great About Christianity has just been released. His book The Enemy at Home will be published in paperback in February.
Be the first to read Dinesh D’Souza’s column. Sign up today and receive Townhall.com delivered each morning to your inbox.
A challenge to believers — and non-believers
By Dinesh D’Souza
Monday, October 8, 2007 (Townhall)
My new book What’s So Great About Christianity starts hitting the stores this week. It’s the first comprehensive answer to the atheist books out there, such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. I’m debating Hitchens in New York on October 22, and if you’d like to attend the details are at http://www.tkc.edu. I’d also like to kick some of the atheists off the bestseller lists. You can help by ordering my book online or asking for it at your local bookstore. But first let me tell you why I wrote the book and what it is about. . . .
Instead of engaging this secular world, most Christians have taken the easy way out. They have retreated into a Christian subculture where they engage Christian concerns. Then they step back into secular society, where their Christianity is kept out of sight until the next church service. Without realizing it Christians have become postmodernists of a sort: they live by the gospel of the two truths. There is religious truth, reserved for Sundays and days of worship, and there is secular truth, which applies the rest of the time. (More)
The Well Spring
Maybe Christianity in Europe hasn’t run dry.
From the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal
BY KYLE WINGFIELD
Friday, November 23, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
BRUSSELS–Old ladies sitting in otherwise empty churches. That’s the picture most of my American friends have of spirituality in Europe. Well, that or a continent being overrun by jihadist Muslims. It’s not an entirely incorrect picture (the empty churches, not the scimitar-wielding immigrants). How is it, then, that a guy like me, Bible Belt-born and -bred, lifetime churchgoer, has found spiritual renewal in this pit of secularism? And am I the only (More)
Mesopotamian sculpture sells for record 57 million dollars
NEW YORK (AFP) – A tiny and extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia sold for 57.2 million dollars in New York on Wednesday, smashing records for both sculpture and antiquities.
The carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over eight centimeters (3 1/4 inches) tall, was described by Sotheby’s auction house as one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands.
(Yahoo News . . . more)
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