Richard Bauckham, www.richardbauckham.co.uk
Preamble: I should first explain that in the autumn of 2011 I took part in a lengthy email correspondence about this inscription with James Tabor, Greg Snyder and Jim Charlesworth. It was a profitable conversation in which we made real progress in both reading and interpreting the inscription, though we certainly did not reach full agreement, especially on the interpretation. (Tabor’s references to me in footnotes to his article, ‘A Preliminary Report …,’ recently published on the internet, reflect that conversation.) We were all bound by a non-disclosure agreement until last week, when the material was made public. At that time Greg Snyder and I had not seen the so-called ‘Jonah’ image and we did not discuss it until much more recently and then much more briefly. Our efforts were focused intensively on the inscription, for which we had the benefit of a number of photos, not only those that have now been published in the book (Tabor and Jacobovici 2012) and on the internet. My own interpretation of the inscription developed through that conversation, but I have modified it very recently (so that some of my argument in what follows is not already known to Tabor, Snyder and Charlesworth).
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issue of Near Eastern Archaeology (NEA 69:3/4 [2006]) available for free on JSTOR for the next month. This issue of NEA contains articles by leading scholars that examine the hypothesis that a Talpiot Tomb belonged to Jesus’ family. The issue contains articles by Eric M. Meyers, Shimon Gibson, Sandra Scham, Christopher Rollston, and Stephen J. Pfann. The issue also contains an extensive response by James D. Tabor.
