Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Forgeries business in the biblioblogs

As I mentioned in a previous post (Hypotyposeis 2004 Retrospective), one of the encouraging things for me about the proliferation of biblioblogs (and related) is that I find myself increasingly at liberty to blog on the areas of my own competence and focus, or, in other words, not needing to blog on everything that is NT-related myself. One particular example of this is the excellent coverage of the fascinating and deeply troubling area of the recent indictments for forgery of biblical artifacts. Ed Cook in Ralph the Sacred River has posted some fascinating material in relation to the news, and Jim West in Biblical Theology is doing a useful job in keeping up with all the latest news. In particular, I am grateful to Jim for his references to the ANE list, which has featured lots of interesting material of interest on this business, including comments from Joe Zias and Robert Deutsch. I subscribe to the digest of this list but regularly forget to check it out, or don't have time. You can view recent contributions here.

Paleojudaica, Hypotyposeis and Serving the Word are also keeping up to scratch with some interesting material.

I have little to add to all of these fascinating contributions. One thought does occur to me in relation to the calls for Hershel Shanks to make a statement and that would be that I would be interested to hear what Ben Witherington III now feels about the James ossuary. He has, after all, been very public in his support of the authenticity of the ossuary, co-authoring a book with Shanks and discussing the issue prominently on the web, e.g. on Beliefnet and Christianity Today, including a comment in the latter suggesting that we "stay tuned" for analysis of the DNA of bone fragments found in the ossuary alongside the blood of the Turin shroud.

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