028 Scholars have long theorized that collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated in the decades following his death and that therefore they would be among the earliest witnesses to his message. Modern critical scholars have even been able to...

034 The Lost Gospel. The very concept provokes a flood of questions. If it is lost, how do we know it ever existed? How do we know what was in it? Who lost it? And how was it lost? Perhaps most intriguing of all: Will it ever be found? A new book...

039 Eta Linnemann’s article on the Q hypothesisa takes Burton Mack and me to task not only for our scholarship, but also for what she takes to be our attack on traditional Christian beliefs. It’s a clever exercise in apologetics. However, this...

038 One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel...

033 Poor Pilate. If ever a man was caught unwittingly in the net of historical circumstance, it was Pilate. A simple Roman governor just doing his job, he could see that Jesus wasn’t the villain the Jewish crowd thought him to be. In the end, he...

030 Professor Maier’s extensive rebuttal of my earlier essay is a most welcome engagement from an authority who has written widely on the figure of Pilate.1 I am happy to offer a reply. First, however, a word on name-calling. Professor Maier’s...

15 Thirty years ago, the historical Jesus was dead. By 1975, it was clear that scholars had very little to say about him. If students were assigned anything to read on the subject, it was usually Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth from...

066 When you look at a map of the Near East, you notice many place names that include as their element the word “tell.” You can find names beginning with “tell” in Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. In Arabic and Hebrew the word “...

050 The first time I took my children on a dig, they were 13 and 11. Usually, you don’t find many children on a dig because there are no facilities for them and they might be out-of-place. Nevertheless, I thought they might be old enough to enjoy...

058 Some people think of archaeology—incorrectly—as a treasure hunt. Not many archaeologists are as lucky as Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of King Tut with all its glorious treasures. More often than not, archaeologists find neither gold...

042 Many people do not realize that archaeology is destructive. Unlike experiments in physics or chemistry, which can be repeated in the lab, once a site has been excavated it cannot be re-excavated. The archaeological remains are gone forever...

067 “The remains of the city were found buried under a heavy layer of ash and destruction debris … ” “ … ovens and grinding installations were found in many of the rooms … ” “ … a large cemetery was discovered on a hill facing the tell on the...

073 “Walk about Zion … number her towers, consider well her ramparts, go through her citadels … ” (Psalms 48:12–13) What distinguished an ancient village or town from a city? One thing, perhaps the most important, was fortifications. Fortifying a...

074 On January 29, 1935, during the third season of excavations at Tell ed-Duweir, a site thought to be Biblical Lachish, archaeologists discovered a collection of 18 ostraca, or inscribed potsherds. The ostraca had been covered by a thick layer...

058 Sometimes we make discoveries not by digging in the ground, but by digging in the records of past excavations. So it is with Masada, Herod’s nearly impregnable palace-fortress in the Judean wilderness, occupied and defended by Jewish Zealots...

038 Four miles east of Jerusalem on a hilltop in the Judean desert on the road to Jericho sits Ma‘ale Adummim, a modern city of over 20 thousand people. In its midst is one of the largest, most important and most elaborate ancient monasteries in...

038 Everyone wants to know who lived at Qumran, the settlement adjacent to the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. And sometimes it seems that everyone has a different opinion. With hopes of helping to solve the riddle, I’d like to...

040 040 This is the story of how the puzzling inscriptions on some ancient oil lamps illuminate an entire era. These modest artifacts offer us a vivid picture of the spiritual life of the...

046 In the decades before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 C.E., Jews gave a new and heightened emphasis to ritual purity. In fact, purity laws may have been interpreted more strictly at this time than at any point before—...

032 032 Archaeology is full of surprises. Sometimes we don’t find what we had expected to find. Or we find something we never expected to find. Either way, the experience is always exciting—and...