godfry n. glad

Apikorus did state:

I know how the first claim is being supported, but I fail to understand how the second, that it can be placed to the "Jerusalem area", has been supported. Could you please elucidate? Cites to support this contention would also be appreciated.

godfry n. glad

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: godfry n. glad ]</p>

Toto

Back to the geology, someone on the Jesus Mysteries list emailed a question to a source in Israel, who forwarded it to the scientists who had examined the ossuary. It turns out the ossuary is chalk, not limestone (unless there is a translation problem).

Amen-Moses

It isn't really a translation problem because chalk and limestones are closely related and created by similar depositional mechanisms. The question of when chalk becomes limestone is a sticky one and there is a grey area where one geologist migh call it chalk and another call it limestone and both are basically correct.

I notice that your quote backs up everything I said earlier, this deposit is indeed present at many locations in Israel so they cannot say for definite which mine it came from. They appear to be assuming though that based one the archeological assumption that it was found locally that it most probably was mined locally so this cannot then be used to back up the "found locally" claim without being circular reasoning.

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses

This link gives some example of what I have been on about!

<a href="http://www.hants.gov.uk/museum/geology/periods/senonian.html" target="_blank">http://www.hants.gov.uk/museum/geology/periods/senonian.html</a>

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses

btw, I suppose my Geology credentials are now adequately established?

Amen-Moses

godfry n. glad

Much earlier in this thread, CX replied to Layman:

As noted by Dr. Ilani, it is impossible to identify any chunk of chalk as coming from a specific geographic location. Nobody can locate that ossuary as coming from "the Jerusalem area". The limestone/chalk strata from which the stone of the ossuary was hewn _may_ have come from any site where there are outcroppings of the strata, which from my understanding is the entirety of the Middle East. There is, from my understanding, no way to distinguish an ossuary that was fashioned by artisans in Damacus, or Babylon, or Palmyra and then carried to Jerusalem, either by pious relatives of the deceased or by nefarious antiquities dealers looking for a better price. Chalk excavated from the same strata hundreds of miles away from Jerusalem would be indistinguishable from chalk excavated in Jerusalem.

As for the fabrication of stone ossuaries from chalk/limestone in ancient Judea, I can atest to have seen excavations and a tomb for placement of bodies after death and prior to placement of the remains in ossuaries in Bet Guvrin, some 80 to 90 miles southeast of Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities indicated that the community was active between the mid-first century and the mid-third century and that ossuaries were produced by the community during that time. The problem here is that the limestone/chalk in the Bet Guvrin area is a different strata than the source of the James ossuary....but...it does attest to the fact that Jewish communities were using the funeral method of ossuaries at a distance from Jerusalem into the third century CE _AND_ fashioning their own ossuaries from local rock.

Jerusalem was NOT the only source of chalk for ossuaries.

The question remains, "What evidence is there of the manufacture of stone ossuaries from this particular strata, outside of Jerusalem in the 1st century."

Can anybody answer it?

godfry n. glad

(and yes, Amen-Moses, I've been with you since the beginning on this issue....)

Sauron

Yes, Layman, you are. You flung accusations at Michael re: Crossan. Having been caught red-handed, you are now trying to distance yourself from them.

The "issue that was not there" was your strawman claim, Layman. Remember? When you said that Michael thought Crossan put his faith over his scholarship? When Michael said no such thing?

That's funny - earlier you said that vendettas were a waste of bandwidth.

Now you seem to think that they're worthwhile after all, providing that they target the people *you* think need to be targeted.

Perhaps you'd have more people rushing to help you out on such an endeavor, if you could ever show the intellectual honesty to admit your own mistakes.

Sauron

It seems like the IGS here decided that the presence of both chalk and quarry was consistent with manufacture in Jerusalem, so they assumed that must be the case.

But there is no chemical fingerprint in the chalk that would identify it as belonging exclusively to Jerusalem.

Is there any other place that has (or, had) both chalk and quarries?

Rahmani discusses several finds - was all the ossuary production in 1st century Israel centered solely on Jerusalem? Or was chalk ever removed (carted away, etc.) to be quarried at some other location?

Sauron

To everyone except Layman, who prefers to stick to a BAR pamphlet.

Layman

You are misrepresenting me yet again. I never accused Michael of directly calling Crossan a liar. It did not happen. What I did do was respond to Michael's claim that BAR was "lying" because of their "faith commitment" by pointing out that many others shared BAR's opinion. Crossan was one such scholar.

You are misrepresenting me yet again. I never accused Michael of directly calling Crossan a liar. It did not happen. What I did do was respond to Michael's claim that BAR was "lying" because of their "faith commitment" by pointing out that many others shared BAR's opinion. Crossan was one such scholar.


Actually, I was making sure I covered myself from people like you. Michael changed his post in a substantive manner after I responded to it. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that I had not lied about his statement. Rather, he changed it 15 posts after we had exchanged arguments over it.

Poinint out that Michael had altered significantly one of his posts AFTER I had already quoted it and responded to it is NOT carrying out a personal vendetta.

Actually, Michael has already apologized. But I suspect that the only way I will get people "rushing to help" me is if I rencounce Christianity and become an hard-nosed anti-Christian skeptic.