You all may have heard this now, but it got a lot less fanfare than the first wave of publicity. Evidently the first-century ossuary that recently surfaced, was cracked in transit from Israel to Canada, did not belong to James the brother of Jesus.
This frisson of excitement helps illustrate one reason that (textual) biblical scholars shy away from grounding their arguments more richly in material archaeological evidence. Textually-oriented scholars see the material remains that archaeologists vaunt as real-er than texts (after all, anyone could fake up an documentary account of Sennacherib besieging a city--but a monument that narrates such an event would be intrinsically more reliable) turn out themselves to entail every bit as many complications and ambiguities as texts themselves.
It’s all a hard job, at high stakes (albeit mostly abstract stakes, for us practitioners), and the archaeologists’ complaint that textualists don’t pay them enough attention hits some sound points. But the textualists aren’t simply closed-minded, fearful, under-experienced library potatoes. We’ve seen enough frauds, enough ambiguous evidence, that we stick with our field of specialization.
Well, most of us do, the sensible ones; others write about buying used cars on the internet, digital identity, metaphors for the Web, and MUD performance art.
Posted by AKMA at November 10, 2002 10:42 PM | TrackBack