• ca. 245 A.D. -- birth of the future emperor-for-a-little-while Galba

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:41:42 AM::

Okay ... I don't subscribe to the Economist, so I can't get more of this article than this:

IN A remote village of western China, high on the dusty pastures that stretch toward the Qilian mountains, the local branch of the Communist Party is finishing off a new headquarters that stands out from the local buildings, all built of compacted earth. This building has a classical Roman portico, made of concrete, at the entrance. The local party chief and his deputy both think they are the descendants of Romans.…

What a great tease! It comes from the December 16th print edition ... might be worth tracking down amidst your last minute shopping today.

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:20:43 AM::

New Testament Scholar and 'relic hunter' Carsten Thiede has passed away ... here's his obituary from the Telegraph:

The Reverend Professor Carsten Thiede, who died on December 14 aged 52, was one of the foremost New Testament scholars of his era and a true pioneer in his field.

As conscientious in his methods as he was controversial in his claims, Thiede issued a magnificent challenge to the liberal orthodoxy which had prevailed in his field for generations. He will be remembered for his dramatic re-dating of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark, his insistence that certain Christian relics merited serious scientific analysis, and - most recently - a dramatic archaeological find in the Holy Land.

Thiede's ambition was to lay the intellectual foundations of what he called a "new paradigm" in Gospel scholarship, as simple in its arguments as it was provocative to the academic establishment. He was fond of quoting the distinguished classical scholar of late antiquity, George Kennedy: "Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said, and occasionally even knew what they were talking about."

Thiede felt that the Gospel authors deserved to be read in a similar spirit. In this context, his most influential book was The Jesus Papyrus (1996), co-written with Matthew d'Ancona, which examined the evidence of the earliest surviving New Testament papyri and argued that these fragments - of St Mark and St Matthew - could be dated, using revolutionary forensic technology as well as traditional techniques, to the early Sixties AD, and perhaps earlier. It followed that the so-called "tunnel" separating Jesus's life from the work of the Gospel writers was short - possibly years, rather than generations. This radical analysis meant that the recollection of the Evangelists could no longer be assumed to be faulty or folkloric, and that the first readers of the Gospels could, quite conceivably, have heard the sermons recorded in them.

To advance such claims was to threaten a long-established orthodoxy: that the Gospels are late creations, that two or three generations stood between them and the events they portrayed, that the texts were, in fact, the collective work of Second Century Christian communities, rather than the accounts of individual authors, and that they have almost no claim to historical authenticity.

The Jesus Papyrus, which was a bestseller around the world, caused a firestorm of debate; it was reported in a Time cover story and inspired a lengthy television documentary. Perhaps uniquely, a book responding to Thiede's argument appeared before his own was actually published.

Four years later, he re-entered the scholarly lists with The Quest for The True Cross, an exploration of the holy relics and sites of early Christianity, which focused on the Titulus, or crucifixion headboard, at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome. This largely-forgotten artefact, allegedly unearthed in the fourth century by Constantine's mother, Helena, had long been dismissed as a quaint forgery. Thiede showed that the more the Titulus was analysed, the less reason there was to suppose it was the work of a Constantinian or medieval fraudster. This book - which also led to a Channel 4 documentary - sought to demonstrate the critical importance in early Christianity of sacred sites.

Thiede's final major project was his most secret, and probably his most important: the location of Emmaus, the ancient village mentioned in Luke Chapter 24, where the resurrected Christ dines with two of His followers and reveals His true identity ("their eyes were opened and they recognised Him"). The site of the village has foxed biblical detectives for centuries, and the trail had run cold until Thiede's remarkable excavations in the Holy Land with his students from the Independent Academy of Theology in Basle, where he held a chair in papyrology. The full fruits of this archaeological work will be published next year in a book he completed shortly before his death.

Carsten Peter Thiede was born in West Berlin on August 8 1952, and studied Comparative Literature at university in the city of his birth. In 1976 he went as a German National Scholarship Foundation Research Fellow to Queen's College, Oxford, and forged a life-long connection with the university.

In 1978 he became a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Geneva, beating 200 other candidates, and was inspired in his new post by his fellow "comparativist", George Steiner. He was drawn to the subject of early Christianity as a linguist and an expert in medieval Latin philology, and the study of the origins of the faith became his life's work.

Having entered the field by this route, rather than as an academic theologian, he was dismayed by what he found - in particular, what he regarded as the closed-minded refusal by historians of early Christianity to import the methods of other disciplines, especially the forensic techniques of the laboratory. He was as much at home with an electronic microscope analysing a letter from a manuscript found at Masada as he was trawling the most ancient archives in the world (he even invented a new kind of laser microscope in collaboration with George Masuch, professor of biology at Paderborn, which enabled him to examine manuscript writing in three dimensions).

Although much of his academic life was consumed by work on papyri, Thiede did not describe himself as a "papyrologist", regarding this as only one of the many intellectual hats he wore.

He was director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research, in his home town of Paderborn, Germany, and then professor at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba, southern Israel, a chair he held in addition to his professorship at Basle. For the last seven years of his life, he oversaw the analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

He seemed perpetually itinerant, firing off e-mails to friends and colleagues from all over the world, and worked astonishingly long hours. He wrote many articles for The Church of England Newspaper, and was invariably at work on several books, including texts on Europe and other themes that he was commissioned to write by the German Government. Weeks before he died, yet another book, The Cosmopolitan World of Jesus, was published by SPCK.

In his youth, he had been an outstanding volleyball player, playing in the national league, and gave it up only when it was clear that he could not combine the demands of athletic training with his scholarly research.

One television crew was so impressed by Thiede's industry and resilience that they nick-named him "Cast-Iron". That was typical of the affection he inspired. Even those who took issue with his scholarly claims often became his friends.

A walk through an ancient city in his company was a rare and unforgettable experience, so great was the range of his knowledge: he was happy to play Virgil to another's Dante.

Instantly recognisable with his shock of silver hair and ready smile, he would know where to find a church in Jerusalem, where Assyrian - a close relative of ancient Aramaic - is still spoken, and how to get a table at the best Jewish restaurant in Rome. His genius for companionship has left his many friends shocked at his sudden death from a heart attack.

Faith was at the heart of Thiede's life - ever the Anglophile, he was a member of the Church of England - and none who knew him well was surprised when he was ordained priest by the Rt Rev John Kirkham, Bishop to the Armed Forces, in 2000. His pastoral work with British troops at Paderborn and the 14,000-strong British community in the town long preceded his ordination, and he and his family devoted countless hours to this task, especially when soldiers from the garrison were in the line of fire in the Balkans.

Thiede's personal beliefs were profoundly practical in their application. Even so, he was adamant that faith and scholarship were separate, and he rejected attempts by Christian fundamentalists to recruit him to their cause. When he was promoting the American version of one of his books, he was amused during an interview with a Christian cable channel to find that the reporter had brought cue cards with the answers he wanted read out.

The most powerful emblem of his Anglophilia - and the most important thing in his life - was his marriage to Franziska Campbell in 1982. He is survived by her, a daughter and a younger twin son and daughter.

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:17:30 AM::

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:13:54 AM::

More coverage of the discovery of sites of Jesus' miracles; this time, the pool at Siloam (which actually was first reported months ago). This report from the Independent tags on the Wedding at Cana stuff on too:

Israeli archaeologists have unveiled two sites in Jerusalem and Galilee where Jesus is said to have performed miracles: one where he gave sight to a blind beggar, the other where he turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

An excavation led by Professor Ronny Reich, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, claims to have uncovered the Pool of Siloam where, in the Gospel of St John (Chapter 9:6-7), Jesus is said to have given sight to a man who had been blind from birth.

The find is at the bottom of a steep valley below the southern wall of Herod's Temple which was destroyed by Roman legionaries in AD70. Under the rubble and detritus, Professor Reich found a water tunnel, stone steps and paving.Much has still to be excavated, but corner stones indicate that the pool covered 2,500 sq m.

According to scripture, when confronted with the blind man Jesus "spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam'. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing."

A combination of the site's topography, Herodian-era coins found on the new site and the way the stones are dressed have convinced the archaeologists that this was where the miracle took place.

The other find unveiled yesterday was in the Arab village of Cana, near Nazareth, long thought to be the site of Jesus's first miracle described in John (Chapter 2:1-12) when Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding feast. Yardena Alexander, a London-born archaeologist who led the excavation, uncovered buildings, clay ovens and grinding stones, as well as a Jewish ritual bath. The dig also turned up fragments of stone vessels of a kind used by Jews in purification rituals.

Although there have been other claimants to the water-into-wine location, including an American excavation several miles to the north, Ms Alexander is convinced that this is the one."With all these," she concluded, "you don't need any more evidence."

More coverage of both of these in this weekend's Explorator, of course ...

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:10:41 AM::

It appears that Oded Golan is going to be charged after scholars have finally determined that the James Ossuary is a hoax. There's piles of coverage of this one, but the salient details are most clearly stated in the Times. Here's the incipit:

AN ISRAELI collector of antiquities who stunned the world with a find that he said was the burial container of Jesus’ “brother”, James, is to be charged with forgery.

Justice Ministry officials said last night that Oded Golan would be indicted next week on a range of charges that would include forgery over an inscription on the stone container that carried the script in Aramaic reading: “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”.

Six others are also to be charged.

The discovery of the ossuary in October 2002 was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the age as it demonstrated a physical connection between the modern world and the Bible.

But suspicions were raised after experts were not given sufficient time to examine the ossuary properly before it was put on public display.

Closer inspection of the 50cm (20in) by 27cm (11in) container showed that the first section of the inscription was straight while the second section, “brother of Jesus”, was crooked.

Israel’s Antiquities Authority has concluded that the markings on the burial box, which dates from about 2,000 years ago when they were common, was an elaborate hoax. Part of the carving cut through the patina. [more]

FWIW, when I first saw a photo of the inscription back in October 2002, I was on record as saying there was something wrong with the patina. It seemed kind of 'obvious' even to someone with no training in the language of the inscription. When Rochelle Altman pointed out the problems in the 'straightness' of the inscription on the ANE list and elsewhere, that also seemed to cast major suspicion. Why has it taken so long to figure it out?

::Friday, December 24, 2004 8:02:10 AM::

Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia.

J. Fugmann, M. Janka, U. Schmitzer, H. Seng, Theater, Theaterpraxis, Theaterkritik im kaiserzeitlichen Rom.

Jason Moralee, "For Salvation's Sake": Provincial Loyalty, Personal Religion, and Epigraphic Production in the Roman and Late Antique Near East.

William Stenhouse, Ancient Inscriptions = The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonne.

::Friday, December 24, 2004 7:43:32 AM::

A review in the Concord Monitor of an exhibition of Jan de Bray's work at the Currier Museum incipits thusly:

Like many of the artists of his time, Jan de Bray -a Dutch painter from the classic 17th century Haarlem school - found inspiration in the fantastic tales of history. "Jan de Bray and the Classical Tradition"- a small, focused show at Manchester's Currier Museum - offers insight of how de Bray took those tales and incorporated them into his unique, vibrant and passionate visions on canvas.

"De Bray is not a man whose art gets discussed as much as it should - we're fortunate through this show to be able to illustrate the Dutch classical tradition and how de Bray made it all his own,," said Kurt Sundstrom, associate curator at the Currier. "Using his passion for family, de Bray embraced the tradition and then made it his own, with great effect."

After closing at the Currier in late February, the show will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

De Bray - the child of artist Salomon de Bray who trained many of the era's painters, including his sons - painted what are known as portraits historié. These paintings were all the rage in the 1600s among the Dutch. Usually they were scenes in which hired models posed as historical figures as the artist used image and allusions to tell a story. Challenging himself to move beyond this sometimes dispassionate framework, de Bray incorporated his great love for family into his works.

In The Odyssey, for example, Homer tells the story of the warrior Ulysses, who left home to fight the Trojans and did not return for 20 years. In his absence, his wife Penelope had to fight off suitors, and to do so she devised a master plan - she would choose a suitor just as soon as she finished weaving a cloth. So each day she would do a little work on the fabric, and each night, in darkness, she would unravel all the work she had done. In that way, Penelope and Ulysses retained their fidelity and their love until the time that Ulysses - recognized first by his very ancient and very faithful family dog, Argus - returned home.
De Bray apparently learned the Homeric tale from his father. And when he decided to complete a painting celebrating his 1668 marriage to Maria van Hees, the result was "A Couple Represented as Ulysses and Penelope," in which de Bray and van Hees play the roles of Ulysses and Penelope on the canvas. With bright color and warm texture, de Bray is able to offer dual tales of love. As Ulysses and Penelope, de Bray and his bride sit recently reunited, with de Bray's hand extended toward van Hees. In her hands van Hees holds the hand loom with which Penelope held off her suitors; her other hand sits over her heart. Completing the portrait is brown and white dog about to climb into de Bray's lap.

De Bray also simultaneously honored his family - and offered an interpretation of the story of Antony and Cleopatra - in "Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra." This visually stunning, complex, and oversized work from 1669 is one of at least two that incorporate affectionate images of de Bray's mother and father, who had perished in the plague that swept Haarlem in 1664.

Adapted loosely from the works of Dutch moralist Jacob Cats, de Bray used his parents as stand-ins for Antony and Cleopatra in a convoluted tale of grandiosity and buffoonery based on a pearl earring. In de Bray's rendering, though, his parents are less foolhardy and more virtuous than Antony and Cleopatra. In the painting the young de Bray stands off to the left side, barely visible, while his father and mother study her pearl earring and other members of the family -including some siblings who may also have died in the plague - gather round and look on. [more]

As a Christmas bonus, here's Debray's Tony and Cleo mentioned above:

::Friday, December 24, 2004 7:40:16 AM::

Wow ... Guy MacLean Rogers seems to be a rising media darling as he is getting more press coverage, this time from the Wellesley Townsman:

Guy MacLean Rogers has pursued Alexander the Great for three decades as a classical scholar and across ancient empires that no longer exist.
     He first read of the legendary warrior-king as a 6-year-old in a book from his parents. Now, the Wellesley College professor has written an insightful biography that explains the enigmatic Macedonian conqueror to modern readers.
     Rogers' just-published "Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness" probes through 23 centuries of myth and misunderstanding to rediscover a "unique" man of his times bred to extraordinary accomplishments.
     "When I first got to know Alexander as a young boy in children's books, he was portrayed as a heroic figure. Over the last 50 years, a much less favorable view has emerged, comparing him to Hitler or Stalin," he said recently. "I didn't think the historical sources supported such a strong view. I wanted to interrogate the sources and write a clear, fair, accurate portrait based on what he did."
     The man known to historians as Alexander III of Macedonia was a towering figure for any age.
     Born in 356 B.C. of royal parentage, he conquered the known world from Greece to India - never losing a battle - before his mysterious death at the age of 32.
     Rogers takes a chronological approach to Alexander's life, pausing like an archaeologist to sift through critical events to suggest what really happened and why.
     Was he a military genius or lucky to fight a weakened Persian empire? Was he a civilization builder or a rapacious plunderer? Was he gay, straight or a metrosexual in shining armor?
     Rogers compares his subject's virtuosity as a youthful soldier and statesman to Mozart's musical precocity, a rare amalgam of breeding, training and temperament.
     "What explains how some people achieve so much at such a young age? My conclusion: It's everything, partly his genetics, his environment and growing up with a king for a father and a princess for a mother. Alexander learned the art of war at a very young age," he said.
     Rogers concludes Alexander "was a genius who defeated our modern categories." "It's ineffable. You can't explain it. You have to accept it," he said.
     Like Alexander, Rogers' timing has been prescient.
     After devoting several years to his biography, his book came out just as filmmaker Oliver Stone's $150 million epic, "Alexander," opened to mixed reviews and controversy over its hero's confused sexuality.
     Rogers credits Stone for accurately depicting the broad outlines of Alexander's career, including the tensions that shaped his relationships with his father, Philip II, and his mother, a princess with political ambitions.
     "In the movie, Stone took some liberties with historical facts," he said. "On the whole, I was pleasantly surprised how closely he followed the historical sources."
     But Rogers feels actor Colin Farrell misrepresented Alexander's erotic drives.
     In Stone's film, the Irish actor portrays Alexander as torn between homosexual relations with a close companion and a servant and several women.
     Rogers said Stone's movie imposes modern sexual values on a society that did not have categories like "gay, straight or bisexual."
     He cautioned viewers against "slotting Alexander into certain modern categories" based on reports of affairs with several men.
     "If we look at the evidence, the vast majority of Alexander's relations were with women. He had three wives and several mistresses. He inherited a harem with 365 concubines. Just looking at the film, people would have a misconception about Alexander's sexuality," Rogers said.
     He gives mixed reviews to actress Angelina Jolie's overheated portrayal of Alexander's mother Olympias as a snake-handling schemer. "Maybe it was a little bit overdrawn," he said. "But Olympias was an active participant in Macedonian politics. She was a princess and clearly had not read the page in Greek culture that says women are not supposed to be involved in politics."
     While early writers characterized Alexander as a hero of divine dimensions, Rogers believes 20th-century historians revised his legacy "under the dark shadows" of 20th-century genocide. "The Alexander that emerged had more in common with a mass murderer and ethnic cleanser than an ancient god," he said.
     So Rogers revisited the original chroniclers of Alexander's 13-year conquest of the known world. And he followed his subject's footsteps, journeying to Turkey, Syria, Israel and Egypt to explore the battlegrounds where he fought and the cities he founded.
     He recalled standing by the Granicus River in modern-day Turkey where the 22-year-old Alexander with 40,000 men defeated a Persian army that outnumbered them more than 10-to-1.
     Rogers draws a vivid picture of Alexander that day "conspicuous by his gleaming armor and the large white plume attached to his helmet's crest."
     Citing the historian Diodorus, he recounts Alexander, astride his favorite horse Bucephalas, leading the cavalry charge and killing an enemy with a spear thrust through his breastplate.
     Standing on the banks of the Granicus, Rogers sensed Alexander's presence across 23 centuries.
     "It's a very evocative landscape. I don't want to say I had any General George Patton moments. But, I think, ultimately, to understand Alexander, the best thing is to go to the battlefields," he said.
     Rogers' biography his earned critical praise from classical scholars.
     Donald Kagan, a professor of history at Yale, said "Rogers has written a lively account of the amazing career of Alexander the Great. ... (His) judgments are more balanced and marked by common sense than many modern treatments."
     And historian Robert Conquest called Rogers' biography a "thorough and deeply researched book.' "Guy Rogers gives us the astonishing and highly important relevance - to our whole history, including recent times - of this almost incredible career."
     Rogers has written and edited several other books. He authored "The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City" and co-wrote "Roots of the Western Tradition" with C. Warren Hollister and edited "Black Athenea Revisited."
     For Rogers, Alexander's triumphs reveal the brutal Realpolitik of ancient life.
     But as American troops battle insurgents in lands Alexander once conquered, his story offers hard lessons for modern times.
     In his book and during a recent lecture at Wellesley, Rogers urged modern readers to view Alexander through the prism of ancient times and not judge him by contemporary values.
     "In Alexander's world, war was considered the natural state of mankind. People in those times believed mankind was by nature bellicose and brutal. We can't judge Alexander by our own morality," he said.
     Rogers believes Alexander's victories and later problems in Asia Minor, offer important lessons about U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
     He said Alexander used "brutal force" against insurgents in the area now called Afghanistan only to recognize later that winning hearts and minds produced better long-term results.
     "Alexander understood even the most effective counter-insurgency tactics could not produce strategic victory," Rogers wrote in a recent column published in the L.A. Times. "... Although he might conquer the world with his sword, to rule it he needed to wield a far more devastating weapon: the revolutionary idea of sharing his empire with his former enemy."

::Friday, December 24, 2004 7:31:09 AM::

An excerpt from a book about J. Robert Oppenheimer at some techy site (Informit.com) has an interesting paragraph which shows how different things were for the Classics veteres:

Economic conditions at home and his uncles' financial success in New York surely encouraged young Julius to accept his uncles' invitation to seek his fortune in the New World. But emigration is not an easy choice for anyone. Aside from leaving one's home, culture, and language, much depended upon opportunity and ability. The father of another famous physicist, Werner Heisenberg, provides a revealing cultural counterpoint. Like Julius, Heisenberg's father, August, was an ambitious young man eager for success and social advancement. Like Julius's father, August's father was a small businessman, a master locksmith in Osnabrück, in northern Germany. He too felt the economic pressure of population growth and rapid industrialization. August, born two years before Julius, decided, together with his father, to break the family tradition of skilled tradesmen and attempt to reach the next social stratum through the surest route then open in Germany to non-Jewish young men of the middleclass—through academic achievement, in particular attainment of a doctorate and a university professorship, preferably in classical studies. Owing to academic lobbyists, German society already regarded professors, the producers of new knowledge and the purveyors of culture and learning, as highly as other meritorious aristocrats–judges, bankers, and military officers. Their status was just below that of the landed aristocracy.

::Friday, December 24, 2004 7:27:38 AM::

4.00 a.m. |HISTC| Line of Fire: Disasters of Athens
dna

7.00 p.m. |DTC| Princess and the Pauper
The discovery of thousands of skeletons in the heart of London astonished archaeologists. It looks like hundreds of people were struck down by something deadly and dumped in a mass pauper's grave, along with the body of a young Roman in a sarcophagus.

7.00 p.m. |HISTU| The Real King Herod
One of the most fascinating and appalling biblical figures, King Herod remains an enigma--the cruel king portrayed in countless Christmas plays as the monster that slaughtered hundreds of babies in an effort to kill the infant Jesus. But who was Herod? We draw physical evidence from current excavation of Herod's magnificent port Caesarea, written accounts of Josephus, and scrolls newly unearthed at Petra. In a startling development, a reexamination of historical texts shows that in old age, Herod suffered from chronic kidney disease. Was his "evil" life a physical manifestation of the illness that tormented his body? Did he order the murder of children in a paranoid attack? And why did the Romans create the title "King of the Jews" specifically for him?

7.00 p.m. |HINT| Julius Caesar: Master of the Roman World
Profile of one of the world's greatest military minds, ancient Rome's Julius Caesar, who romanced Cleopatra, invented the 12-month calendar, and expanded the boundaries of the empire, before being assassinated by senators fearful of his growing power. 

8.00 p.m. |HISTU|  The Lost Youth of Jesus
Thousands of Christians make pilgrimages to the Holy Land yearly to visit sites connected to Jesus. But are they authentic? The search for the historical Jesus began with the first pilgrim--Constantine the Great's mother Helena Augusta. Scholars have been trying to prove--or disprove--her amazing claims ever since. Traveling to Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Sepphoris in the footsteps of Jesus, we run into heated debate about where he was born, baptized, and grew up, and reveal startling new discoveries. 

9.00 p.m. |HISTU|  From Galilee to Jerusalem
Following in the footsteps of Jesus, we dig for the truth behind "accepted" Holy Land sites and review archaeological controversy about these important religious places. We examine: an Israeli scholar's 1987 discovery of the lost city of Bethsaida, where Jesus called his first disciples, healed a blind man, and fed the multitudes; a boat on the Galilee's shoreline dating to the time of Jesus; a house in Capernaum that may have belonged to St. Peter; and the possible grave of Lazarus. 

10.00 p.m. |HISTU| The Way of the Cross
The search for evidence of Jesus's life moves to Jerusalem and the traditional sites associated with his final days. Deep beneath the city, we explore the buried remains of Herod's temple and tread a pavement where Jesus may have walked. Delving into the mysterious histories of the Cenacle Room, Gethsemane, and the Roman Praetorium, we investigate the latest archaeological theories concerning probable sites of Jesus's last supper, arrest, and trial. Does science support or refute biblical accounts?
 
11.00 p.m. |HISTU| The Mysteries of Golgotha
Recounting the final footsteps in the life of Jesus, we explore the traditional sites of his crucifixion and burial. Does the Church of the Holy Sepulcher truly contain the Rock of Calvary and the tomb of Jesus, or could the Garden Tomb be the authentic site? We investigate the most recent archaeological evidence and learn how it may finally answer this fascinating question.

Channel Guide

::Friday, December 24, 2004 7:22:30 AM::