Jerusalem Archives - Page 164 of 199

Mary’s Gate Renovation

In a follow-up to the previous posting on the IAA’s work on the western gate (“Mary’s Gate”) of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Craig Dunning sends along a few photos.

The first photo shows the gate at the beginning of the month. Note the stone on the bottom right (with a blue stripe).

The photo below was taken last week and shows the area with construction work underway. The stone shown above has been removed.

In this photo, you can see the stone being transported by the authorities.

Evidence supporting the Jordanian official’s claim that the gate has been opened is lacking.

Tagged Jerusalem

15th Annual Conference: New Studies on Jerusalem

Joe Lauer has sent along notice of this conference which will be held in Tel Aviv on December 24, with lectures in Hebrew.

The Ingeborg Rennert Center The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology The Faculty of Jewish Studies Bar-Ilan University

Invite you to

The 15th Annual Conference of
The Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies
“NEW STUDIES ON JERUSALEM”

8:20 gathering

8:45 opening remarks:

Prof. Joshua Schwartz, Director of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies

Prof. Avraham Faust & Dr. Eyal Baruch, conference organizers

Session 1 – 9:00-10:55

Chair: Eyal Baruch

09:00 Ronny Reich & Eli Shukron- Channel II in the City of David, Jerusalem: Technical Details, Date and Function

09:20 Avraham Faust- King David’s Palace, a Hellenistic Structure or a Jebusite Fort: A Reexamination of the Large Stone Structure Unearthed by Eilat Mazar in the City of David

09:40 Moshe Garsiel- The Book of Samuel: Compilation Stages and Historical Value for Describing David’s Kingdom and His Capital in Jerusalem

10:05 Ehud Netzer- An opus reticulatum Structure, West of the Old City, Jerusalem

10:25 Ram Bouchnick, Omri Larnow, Guy Bar-Oz & Ronny Reich- Jerusalem Fish Menu from
the Late Second Temple Period

10:45 Discussion

10:55 Break

Session 2 – 11:20-13:10

Chair: Joshua Schwartz

11:20 Michael Ben-Ari- Simchat Beit Sho’eva – The Origins of the Custom.

11:40 Varda Sussman- Shaving/paring of Herodian Oil Lamps

12:00 Ze’ev H. Erlich (Jabo) – What is the ‘Kotel ha-Katan?’

12:20 Amos Kloner- The Damascus Gate

12:40 Yoav Farhi & Oded Lifshitz– A Unique Bulla from the Ramat Rahel Excavations Bearing the Name of Hadrian

13:00 Discussion

13:10 Lunch Break

Session 3 – 14:20-16:30

Chair: Josef Drory

14:20 Yehoshua Peleg- Were the Temple Mount Gates Reconstructed in the Second Century CE?

14:40 Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig- A Roman Period Centaur Relief from the Temple Mount

15:00 Perez Reuven- A Decorated Beam from the Roman Period in the Temple Mount

15:20 Bat-Sheva Garsiel- The Status of Jerusalem in Early Islamic Theological Writings

15:40 Michael Ehrlich- The Southern Quarters of Jerusalem during the Medieval Period: A Multi-
Periodical Overview

16:00 Oded Shay- The Contribution Made by the Jerusalem-based Monk Father Antonin, to Jewish
Studies and to the Research of the Material Culture of Palestine in the Final Years of the Ottoman
period

16:20 Discussion

16:30 Break

Session 4 – 17:00-18:30

Chair: Boaz Zissu

17:00 Amos Frumkin & Boaz Lengford- The Research of a Karstic Cave Used for Refuge in the
Jerusalem Hills

17:20 Boaz Zissu & Roi Porat- A Hoard of Coins and Other Finds from the Bar-Kokhba Period,
Recently Discovered in a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills

17:40 Guy Stiebel– “On the Edge” – Military Equipment from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills

18:00 Hanan Eshel- New Discoveries from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills, and their
Contribution to the Study of the Bar-Kokhba War

18:20 Discussion

The conference proceedings (app. 300 pp. including 17 articles in Hebrew, with English abstracts)
will be on sale during the conference

For additional information, please contact the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies (see
email address at bottom of this page) or Avi Faust (email address here).

Previous conference proceedings are available for purchase here.

Tagged Jerusalem, Lectures

Leper Wrapped in Cloth Buried in Jerusalem

The headlines on the web this morning are a little more sensational:

Burial cloth found in Jerusalem cave casts doubt on authenticity of Turin Shroud (Daily Mail)
Jerusalem tomb discovery casts further doubt on Turin Shroud (Telegraph)
Jesus-era leper sheds light on Turin shroud mystery (Haaretz)
Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy (JPost)
‘Jesus-era’ burial shroud found (BBC)

The tomb was found nearly a decade ago, and all of the sensational results have been known for years. Two of the excavators, Gibson and Tabor, have both written extensively on this discovery in books they have published.

What is new is the publication of an article in the US Public Library of Science Journal, with the finding that this was evidence of the first human known to have leprosy. That’s good, but it’s not news. Maybe the news is buried in the details, and the publication of this article provides an opportunity to review an important discovery. That’s fine, but it should be noted that news outlets lead you to believe that there are more discoveries than they actually are because they report the same items time after time, particularly during the Christmas and Easter seasons.

If you read only one article, I’d suggest the one in the Jerusalem Post. But the best photos are in the Daily Mail. Here are the important facts:

A man was buried in this tomb between AD 1 and 50.
The rock-hewn tomb was located on the south side of the Hinnom Valley, in a cemetery used by the wealthy.
The man was wrapped in a burial shroud with a different weave from that of the Shroud of Turin.
The deceased suffered from tuberculosis and leprosy. (Apparently even the rich got sick.)
A significant portion of the dead man’s hair was recovered and analyzed (it was clean, short, and lice-free).
The man did not receive a secondary burial in an ossuary, as was typical at the time.

Here’s an important statement in the JPost article:

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.

That gives you the basis for the researchers’ conclusion that the Turin Shroud is fake. As long as there was only one shroud maker in town in the first century, we can be absolutely sure that the Turin Shroud is from the medieval period. (I have no interest in or knowledge about the Shroud, but I do care about assumptions necessary for conclusions. The conclusions are in the headlines; the assumptions are always buried if not omitted.)

You can read the rest in the articles linked to above. The books that I alluded to by the archaeologists are these:

Shimon Gibson, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence
James Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity

UPDATE (12/17): James Davila at Paleojudaica responds to the Jerusalem Post statement quoted above:

That’s not quite what it says in the Daily Mail article quoted in my post yesterday. The claim there is that “[i]t was made with a simple two-way weave – not the twill weave used on the Turin Shroud, which textile experts say was introduced more than 1,000 years after Christ lived.” That is a more general claim that ought to be verifiable or falsifiable based on the reasonably ample surviving textile evidence from antiquity. If it is true that this type of weave is only attested much later, that would severely weaken any case for the genuineness of the Shroud of Turin. Are there specialists in first-century textiles out there who would like to speak up?

Tagged Analysis, Jerusalem

Jaffa Gate Renovations

The Jaffa Gate area is set to be the focus of extensive renovations over the next year and a half. This may be of particular interest to those who are planning to visit Jerusalem in 2010 or 2011. According to a flyer distributed by the municipality, the project includes:

Restoring infrastructure
Improving pedestrian access
Installing “street furniture”
Restoring facades of buildings in the square inside Jaffa Gate

They predict that visitors will be inconvenienced for 18 months, with work proceeding “24 hours a day.” In particular, the following changes will be made:

Vehicular traffic will be one-way from Jaffa Gate to Zion Gate
Loading and unloading access will be restricted
Pedestrian traffic and “access to shops will not be impeded in any way”

Work has already begun and Jerusalem resident Craig Dunning has visited the area and sends some photographs with permission to post them here. He notes that until today work has primarily consisted of the removal of paving stones, and traffic continues to move in both directions.

Work begins in front of Tourist Information Office

Enclosed area next to covered suq

Removal of paving stones next to taxi stand; photo taken this afternoon

Tagged Jerusalem, Tourism

Weekend Roundup

The “Hall of Ages” in Jerusalem was opened recently after new techniques were developed to prevent the room from collapsing during excavation. This room is located in the Western Wall Tunnels area and gets its name because the hall was used by various people groups over the centuries.

You can now visit Pompeii with Google Street View. The idea is very impressive, though execution was (for me) slow, perhaps because of a slew of excited visitors. Here’s a direct link.

A reconstruction drawing of the Aramean siege of Gath in the 9th century is posted on the Gath Weblog.

The officials at the Megiddo prison are still planning to relocate the inmates in order to open a visitor’s center focused on the early Christian place of worship.

Tagged Italy, Jerusalem, Shephelah, Technology

IAA Work on Mary’s Gate Makes Jerusalemites Upset

From the AFP (HT: Paleojudaica):

Jordan summoned Israeli ambassador Nevo Dani on Thursday to demand a halt to “unilateral” work carried out by the Jewish state on the outer walls of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
“The ambassador was summoned today to the foreign ministry where he was handed an official letter of protest expressing deep concerns and rejection of unilateral measures in the outer western walls of the church,” a senior official told AFP.
The Jordanian government demanded Israel “immediately halt such actions and restore the status quo,” according to the letter.
“Israel’s measures are illegal and violate international laws because Israel is the occupying force in the West Bank and east Jerusalem,” the official said.
Another Jordanian official said the Israeli authorities “have removed iron bars around a gate in the walls that has been sealed since the British mandate of Palestine (which ended in 1948) and opened the gate.”
The official, who declined to be named, said that the Israelis “claimed that they were doing renovations but nobody asked them to do anything”.
“This is unprecedented and dangerous,” the official said, noting that anything to do with the Holy Sepulchre is “very sensitive.”
[…]
“The work presently being carried out by the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) on the ancient sealed door known as Mary’s Gate, which is located on Christian Quarter road in the Old City of Jerusalem, is the sole and entire initiative of the same Israeli Antiquities Authority,” it said in a statement.

If you read Middle Eastern news the way you should read Middle Eastern news, then you’re not believing everything in that article.

Here’s a photo of the gate, taken last night.

Mary’s Gate, December 4, 2009
Photo by Craig Dunning

The iron bars have indeed been removed. This has allowed the IAA to patch the gate so that it will not further deteriorate. They didn’t open the gate; they sealed it further shut.

A friend spoke with a few people and learned that:

The WAQF (Muslim authorities) is protesting out of some claim to the iron bars.
The Greeks are protesting because they weren’t consulted and status quo is in jeopardy.
The Catholics are protesting because the blocked up gate is theirs.

However, the Israel Antiquities Authority was given permission to make the repairs by a Catholic official. This official believes that since the iron gate was under the authority of the British Mandate, it now falls under the authority of the current government, Israel.

Tagged Jerusalem