You can find full details at my Blog Site:

http://jamestabor.com/2011/02/21/prof-tabor-to-lead-israel-tour-october-21-30-2011/

Oldest Portrait of Paul in Catacombs

I “went underground” from about June 17 through August 17 writing almost nonstop to complete  my new book on Paul, with trips to Rome and Jerusalem included. As some of you know, Paul has been in the news of late, with stories about his tomb in Rome being validated, as well as the newly uncovered portrait of Paul in the catacomb of St. Tekla. I have been working on the Paul book since late 2008 when I signed a contract with Simon & Schuster. There was a time when I expected it might be out by Spring, 2010 but as I got deeper into my work I began to develop my ideas in directions I had not originally anticipated, so I have ended up taking most of 2010 to complete the manuscript. The book has been listed on Amazon now for over a year with the fetching title: Paul Untitled and still no cover image. I know many of my readers have pre-ordered it, and I appreciate your patience. The pre-orders do count, and when the book is released they can give it a great send-off, so if any of you are willing to “stand in that Amazon line,” I thank you for it. My editors and I are still talking about a final decision on a title, as well as the cover art, and I hope it will appear soon. I will let everyone know.

What I think I can safely say is that the book will be worth the wait! I don’t know of another book on Paul by a scholar in the field that is like this one, either in ideas, approach, or style. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul at the University of Chicago (1982), directed by the incomparable Jonathan Z. Smith. It was published as a monograph in the Brown University Judaic Studies series in 1985 titled Things Unutterable. It has long ago gone out of print though an unbound facsimile edition is available on Amazon. For the past 30 years, teaching at three universities (Notre Dame, William & Mary, UNC Charlotte) I have continued to think deeply about Paul, covering him in my courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

So far as books on Paul go, I think they must outnumber the books on Jesus, but almost without exception the academic study of Paul is pretty much an “in-house” enterprise with most of the scholars who specialize and write about Paul producing endless books primarily intended for their colleagues.  Most of the writings on Paul are highly technical, very theological in orientation, and full of jargon particular to the field. “Pauline Studies,” is such a vast field right now it is impossible for all but the most devoted, who rarely work on anything else, to keep up. I am not one of those people and though I have published and written about Paul along the way.  My concentration has been much broader–namely trying to analyze the many ways of understanding “salvation” in ancient Mediterranean religions, particularly in late 2nd Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity–with apocalypticism as my main focus. Such a general description certainly pulls in Paul, but in a broader way that most Pauline scholars deal with him.

What I hope I have produced is a readable and accessible book on Paul, but one that offers an analysis of his mission and message that I have not seen anywhere else. Mine is neither a Paul-bashing nor a Paul-applauding book. I guess you might call it “Paul in His Own Words,” in that I try as best I can to let Paul speak for himself, based on the seven “authentic” letters we have from his hand. And speak he does! I think I have succeeded, at least on an introductory level, to offer readers a clear, refreshing, and provocative look at the Apostle.

I thought I would paste the Table of Contents in here, just to whet a few appetites, and I plan to begin a series of blog posts over the next few weeks that will explore various aspects of Paul and his thinking at my TaborBlog, if any of you are interested. You can find it at http://jamestabor/blog and subscribe there to a mailing list as well.

Some of that material I want to also post here at the United Israel blog as well, because when all things are factored in, no one in human history, including Jesus of Nazareth, has had such an influence on the history of Israel–and for that matter the world–as the apostle Paul. The consequences have been dire and incalculable. Understanding his contribution, however one evaluates it, is critical to charting our course for the future.

Here is the Table of Contents for my book:

Preface: Discovering Paul

Introduction: Paul and Jesus

The Quest for the Historical Paul                                                           

Chapter 1: After the Cross

Chapter 2: Reading the New Testament Backwards

Chapter 3: A Forgotten Brother, A Lost Christianity

Chapter 4: A Cosmic Family and a Heavenly Kingdom

Chapter 5: A Mystical Union with Christ

Chapter 6: Already but Not Yet

Chapter 7: The Torah of Christ

Chapter 8: The Battle of the Apostles

Conclusion: Does God Care for Oxen?



See the Eureka press release with photos here.

The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence

Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy
Dec. 15, 2009

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich , THE JERUSALEM POST
DNA taken from the shrouded remains of a man discovered in a tomb next to the Old City of Jerusalem shows him to be the first human proven to have suffered from leprosy, according to Hebrew University researchers and North American and British collaborators. They published their findings in the December 16 issue of the PLoS One – the US Public Library of Science journal.

Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at HU in Jerusalem, along with Prof. Carney Matheson and Kim Vernon of Lakehead University in Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London performed the molecular investigation. The archeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The burial cave, known as the Tomb of the Shroud, is located in the lower Hinnom Valley near the Jaffa Gate and part of a first century CE cemetery known as Akeldama, or “Field of Blood” (mentioned in the Book of Matthew 27:3-8, and Acts 1:19 in the Christian Bible). It is located adjacent to the spot where Judas is said to have committed suicide.

The tomb of the shrouded man is also located next to the tomb of Annas, the high priest (6 CE to 15 CE), who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. It is thus believed that this shrouded man was either a priest or a member of the aristocracy. Gibson suggests that the view from the tomb would have looked directly toward the Second Temple.

The tomb is very unusual because it is clear that this man, whose remains are dated by radiocarbon methods to 1 CE to 50 CE, did not receive a subsequent burial. Secondary burials were common practice at the time, when the bones were removed after a year and placed in an ossuary (a bone box made of stone). In this case, however, the entrance to this part of the tomb was completely sealed with plaster. Spigelman believes this is because the man had suffered from leprosy and died of tuberculosis, as DNA of both diseases was found in his bones.

Historically, disfiguring diseases such as leprosy led to the sufferer being ostracized from their community. However, a number of indications – the location and size of the tomb, the type of textiles used as shroud wrappings, and the clean state of the hair – suggest that the shrouded individual was a fairly affluent member of Jerusalem society, and that tuberculosis and leprosy may have crossed social boundaries at that time.

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, until now assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as textile historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to demonstrate.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The excavation also found a clump of the shrouded man’s hair, which had been ritually cut before he was buried. These are both unique discoveries because organic remains are only rarely preserved in the Jerusalem area owing to the soil’s high humidity levels.

Spigelman and Greenblatt state that the origins and development of leprosy are largely obscure. Leprosy in the Jewish Bible may well refer to skin diseases such as psoriasis. The leprosy known to us today was thought to have originated in India and brought over via bacteria to the Near East and Mediterranean countries during the Hellenistic period. The results from the First Century Tomb of the Shroud fill a vital gap in our knowledge of this disease, they said.

Furthermore, the new research has shown that molecular pathology clearly adds a new dimension to the archeological exploration of disease in ancient times and a better understanding of the evolution, geographic distribution and epidemiology of disease and social health in antiquity.

The co-infection of both leprosy and tuberculosis here and in 30 percent of DNA remains in Israel and Europe from the ancient and modern period provided evidence for the postulate that the medieval plague of leprosy was eliminated by an increased level of tuberculosis in Europe as the area urbanized.