032033 Of the Roman emperors after Constantine, only Julian (331–363) rejected Christianity in favor of the pagan gods. A nephew of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Julian incurred the...

030031 031 Archaeological artifacts do not interpret themselves. Here’s a case in point: Some 40 relatively small altars were found in at...

042 In some ways—oddly enough—the more than 200 biblical manuscripts in Hebrew found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have elevated the authority of the Greek Septuagint at the expense of the Masoretic text, the received Hebrew version preserved by the...

026 The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early...

036 On December 24, 1994, the Times of London ran a front-page story entitled “Oxford papyrus is ‘eyewitness record of the life of Christ.’” The article reported the claim that three papyrus fragments of Matthew’s Gospel in Magdalen...

His curved tail tipped with a poisonous barb, the scorpion signals peril in Scripture as in life. The word for scorpion (akrab) appears nine times in the Old Testament and five times in Greek (scorpios) in the New Testament. It occurs dozens of times in the rabbinic writings of the...

018019 019Try to imagine flying to a non-existent island on an airplane that has not yet been invented. Even if this impossible trip were to...