This is a short note. One of the suggestions of the special is that a missing ossuary in the tomb is the James Ossuary about which there was so much discussion a few years ago. Two points here: The keeper of the warehouse where these ossuaries are stored has said tomb 10 is not lost but is housed outside the warehouse in a distinct locale. Second, despite the claim in the Special, the catalogued tomb sizes do not match, being 10 cm off in one of the key dimensions. Thanks again to Jack for this one. So that element appears to be off as well.
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Dr. Darrell Bock is Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He also is Professor for Spiritual Development and Culture there. He is an Editor at Large for Christianity Today and is a Past President of the Evangelical Theological Society (2000-2001). He is the author of over twenty books and is a New York Times Best Selling author. He has been blogging on this site since May, 2006.
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Dr. Bock,
I may be mistaken, but wasn't the ossuary supposedly containing the bones of James, the Lord's brother, discovered to be a hoax?
Greg:
It is debated still. The IAA (Israeli Antiquities Authority) has not liked the find because of the way it surfaced. However others continue to say it is authentic. Another option is that the second half of the inscription is not authentic. So the jury is still out on this ossuary.
Dr Bock
I appreciate the work youve put into this blog- and I'm grateful yourself and other scholars have taken to mobilizing the troops to defend the faith against this obvious financially motivated scam.
Its a somewhat sad state of affairs to see Christian money not flowing as freely as it should when such an attack is mounted.
Please keep up the good blogs. My understanding from Kloner was the ossuary wasnt the right size, and he himself mentioned the lost ossuary had no inscriptions, thta the one under investigation was doctored. The James ossuary will no doubt be utilized for statistical purposes should it be deemed authentic.
Rahmani's report gave the length of the 10th Talpiot ossuary as 60 cm. In Biblical Archaeology Review, the measurement of the length is 50 cm, BUT that is the length at the base. The ossuary is flared, and has a trapezoidal shape. As a result, the longest upper edge is 56 cm long. (This is all stated plainly in the Nov./Dec. 2002 issue of BAR.) That's still a difference of more than an inch, though.
Tabor insisted that he's got re-measurements that confirm that the dimensions are the same. Maybe he thinks that a misreading of an archaeologist's handwriting occurred, so that what was intended to mean "50 cm" as the length of the 10th ossuary was interpreted, and typed up as, "60 cm" by the time Rahmani made his catalogue. (That's not what Tabor seemed to claim in the show, though.) Anyway, it would be nice if the tenth ossuary -- which, contra Tabor, is mentioned in Rahmani's catalogue, and is described as "plain" and "broken" -- was located and photographed.
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