066 A book that will soon be available in the United States was recently published in England under the title The Dead Sea Scroll Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (Jonathan Cape, 1991).1 The book’s thesis is that the Vatican...

026 In all the hubbub and flurry of the verdict last March in the “forgery case of the century,” one question—the central question—seems to have gotten lost: Is the ossuary inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” genuine or not? And...

069 I. A Cold Boston Night It is after 8 at night. I am sitting in the reception area of a Boston law firm. The attorneys are still arguing in a conference room. I have been here with our Israeli attorney, Dov Frimer, since 10 in the morning. We...

065 The Jerusalem court has spoken: Elisha Qimron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev owns the copyright on the reconstructed text of MMT, one of the most important, and still unpublished, Dead Sea Scrolls. Now the scholarly community will have...

050 The Middle East “peace process”—may it be thy will, O Lord—has raised two thorny archaeological issues. Both have recently been in the news. The first concerns archaeological finds recovered in territories taken in war and later ceded—or to...

034 Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a...

020 021 News of our exclusive cover story in the last issue about the bone box inscribed “James, the son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” has reverberated around the globe. The day after we...

026 Italian archaeologists claim to have discovered the house were Jesus stayed in Capernaum. Proof positive is still lacking and may never be found, but all signs point to the likelihood that the house of St. Peter where Jesus stayed, near...

046 047 An east-west city wall built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century cuts a jagged, horizontal line across the bottom of this photo; from our vantage point in the north, we look...

020 021 It should have been the jewel in Israel’s archaeological crown. In fact, Israel’s excavation of the area adjacent to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, on the south and southwest sides of the...

015 For eight seasons Yigal Shiloh directed excavations in Jerusalem—the heart of the Biblical world. And not simply any place in Jerusalem. He dug in the oldest inhabited part of the ancient site, the section known as the City of David, the area...

040 Harvard professor John Strugnell was chief editor of the official Dead Sea Scroll editorial team from 1987 until he was dismissed in late 1990, after giving an anti-Semitic interview to Israeli journalist Avi Katzman, in Ha’aretz,...