The authenticity of a burial box purported to have been for the “brother” of Jesus Christ remained shrouded in mystery on Wednesday after a Jerusalem court acquitted an Israeli private collector of charges he forged the artifact.

The court, in finding Oded Golan not guilty, noted that expert witnesses could not agree on whether an inscription on the 2,000-year-old limestone box which reads: “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”, was genuine or had been forged.

The authenticity of the so-called “James ossuary” will likely “continue to be investigated in the archaeological and scientific arena, and time will tell”, the court said.

The decade-long mystery has haunted archaeologists and religious scholars worldwide. It has focused on what could be the earliest, most concrete evidence of Jesus’s life in Jerusalem and suspicions of the most sophisticated of forgeries.

The saga began in 2002 when Golan, supported by Andre Lemaire, a renowned French scholar of ancient texts, said the ossuary, a limestone box for storing bones of the dead, had on its side the inscription “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”.

James, who was believed to have been stoned to death in 62 AD, is mentioned in the Gospels as Jesus’ brother. But the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches believe Jesus had no siblings.

Read the full story here. . Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld

Could two of the nails used to crucify Jesus have been discovered in a 2,000-year-old tomb in Jerusalem? And could they have mysteriously disappeared for 20 years, only to turn up by chance in a Tel Aviv laboratory?

That is the premise of the new documentary film”The Nails of the Cross” by veteran investigator Simcha Jacobovici, which even before its release has prompted debate in the Holy Land. The film follows three years of research during which Jacobovici presents his assertions — some based on empirical data, others requiring much imagination and a leap of faith.

He hails the find as historic, but most experts and scholars contacted by Reuters dismissed his case as far-fetched, some calling it a publicity stunt. Many ancient relics, including other nails supposedly traced back to the crucifixion, have been presented over the centuries as having a connection to Jesus. Many were deemed phony, while others were embraced as holy.

Jacobovici, who sparked debate with a previous film that claimed to reveal the lost tomb of Jesus, says this find differs from others because of its historical and archaeological context.

“What we are bringing to the world is the best archaeological argument ever made that two of the nails from the crucifixion of Jesus have been found,” he said in an interview, wearing his trademark traditional knitted cap. “Do I know 100 percent yes, these are them? I don’t.”

Read the full story here.

.

Using the Bible as its guide, Texas-based energy company Zion Oil and Gas has searched for oil in the Holy Land for a decade. The company uses a map of the 12 ancient tribes of Israel and the biblical assertion – “the foot of Asher to be dipped in oil on the head of Joseph” – as an unlikely guide to help it decide where to drill.

Sitting beneath an 18-storey rig in northern Israel, Zion’s CEO Richard Rinberg translates that reference by pointing to an area on the map where the territory of Asher – long and thin and shaped like a leg – once pushed into the land that belonged to Joseph’s sons.

“It’s exactly where we are,” said Rinberg, a good-humoured Orthodox Jew with a background in accounting and a belief that this biblical prophecy is backed by concrete scientific data. Founded by John Brown, a Christian Zionist who believes the Bible prophesied the discovery of oil in Israel, Zion is just one of a pack of energy companies that has spent years, even decades, surveying and drilling around Israel and its territorial waters. Like many, Zion has yet to find commercial amounts of oil or gas.

But faith runs deep in this part of the world, and Zion and its fellow prospectors were emboldened by the discovery last year by Texas-based Noble Energy of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the offshore Tamar field. “There’s little doubt that optimism in oil and gas exploration, both offshore and onshore, has increased,” said Rinberg.

Read the full report here. Also check out a letter the company’s chief explorer wrote to the famous Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in which he discusses his inspiration and how he thinks the Bible and Jewish commentary describe the fundamental principles of modern petroluem geology.

This is an interesting combination, the Bible and oil in Israel. What are the underlying motivations in an industry that is otherwise obsessed with striking it rich. Is the issue making money? Is it making the modern Jewish state energy independent? Or is it the simple pleasure of fulfilling a prophecy?

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

Israeli authorities have charged the imam of a mosque in Nazareth with inciting violence against Pope Benedict and supporting al Qaeda and “global jihad,” the justice ministry has said.

The indictment said Nazim Mahmoud Salim, who was arrested by police a month ago, led a group of about 2,000 worshippers, and had also preached at the flashpoint al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest shrine.

Salim is charged with inciting violence against Pope Benedict during his visit last year to Nazareth, the town of Jesus’ boyhood in the heartland of Israel’s minority Arab population.

In his sermons and on his website over the past decade, the indictment on Sunday said, Salim preached “an ideological world view identical to that of global jihad” and wrote “publications that supported and identified with the terror organisation al Qaeda.”

Read the full story here.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

A new Jerusalem exhibit displaying a million years of history in the Holy Land offers Bible buffs and skeptics alike a chance to say: “I told you so!”  The Israel Museum, fresh-faced after a three-year, $100 million upgrade, offers an unparalleled look into the development of monotheistic religions, while leaving plenty of room for both science and faith.

The museum’s more devout visitors may feel vindicated by a collection of three-thousand-year-old weapons used by ancient warriors in the Battle of Lachish, verifying the fighting as depicted in the Bible.  The scientifically minded can point to a set of 1.5 million year old bull horns on display around the corner, by far predating Earth’s creation as described by the book of Genesis.

A new exhibit features the reconstruction of a church originally built about 400 years after the time of Jesus. It has daunting similarities to a synagogue of the same period reconstructed alongside.  The influence can also be seen in later Islamic relics on display nearby.

Read the full story here.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

There have been a series of significant and highly publicised events recently in Vatican-Jewish relations.

Pope Benedict put his predecessor Pius XII along the road to Roman Catholic sainthood last month, angering many Jews who accused the wartime pope of turning a blind eye to the Nazi Holocaust.  Benedict defended the move this week during his first visit to Rome’s synagogue, which prompted Israel to ask the pope to open up the Vatican archives covering Pius’ reign between 1939-1958.

But behind the scenes, out of the spotlight, the Catholic church and Jewish state have restarted efforts to put to rest a property dispute in the Holy Land that goes back much further than World War Two or Israel’s founding in 1948. Churches acquired large amounts of land around Jerusalem as the Ottoman empire went into decline from the early 19th century. Today, many official Israeli buildings sit on leased church land. But agreement on the legal status of these properties has evaded governments and popes for decades.

After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office early last year, his Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was made pointman in a push to settle the decades-old  debate.  Ayalon was at the Vatican last month to try to narrow divides over six religious sites, including what is believed by Christians to be the Cenacle of the Last Supper, whose future status remains uncertain. Negotiating teams held a meeting again this month, which ended with the vague statement that they “did useful work in atmosphere of cordaility” and that they would meet again. Ayalon heads to the Vatican again in May.

The Vatican got some unexpected support last week from a prominent rabbi who is active in Christian-Jewish dialogue and attended the pope’s visit to the Rome synagogue. Rabbi David Rosen, the British-born international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel’s behaviour toward the Vatican since they agreed to diplomatic relations in 1993 has been “outrageous.”

“Any (other) country would have threatened to withdraw its ambassador long ago over Israel’s failure to honour agreements,” he  said.  Rosen said the Vatican agreed to diplomatic relations after Israel said it would  recognise the legal status of Catholic institutions and exempt their property in Israel from taxes.

This was supposed to take about two years, he said, but this has not still not happened. Rosen told Haaretz the  Vatican wanted its local hierarchy to be recognised under Israeli law and treated as a whole organisation, rather than treating each Catholic church as a separate nonprofit organisation as is now the case. Israeli bureaucrats wore down the Vatican by negotiating every tax clause separately instead of granting a general concession, as the Vatican expected them to do, Rosen said.

Israeli companies will unveil this month an array of new technologies that will save and maximize use of the world’s most valuable resource… water.The systems range from a drone that flies 300 metres (900 feet) above ground to fight water leaks– described this week in a recent Reuters article on fighting global leakage – to a petroleum gas storage system that sits on the ocean floor. Arad Technologies’ water meter-reading drone takes off near Tel Aviv and then parachutes down after completing its flight. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen

  Water technology is one of the things Israel does best. Two thirds of the country is arid, and its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously declared that Israel would only survive if it could “make the desert bloom”.Since then, Israeli companies have been pioneers in the field and many of of their developments have penetrated the global market.You can take a look at some of the more intriguing systems to be exhibited at the government-sponsored WATEC conference in Tel Aviv on Nov 17-19 by clicking here.

(Photo: Posters for protest in Jerusalem against parking lot open on Sabbath, 8 July 2009/Baz Ratner)

In a move that may literally take the breath away from many of the world’s Orthodox Jews, a group of Israel’s top rabbis recently ruled that riding in what for decades have been designated as “Shabbat (Sabbath) elevators,” is  against Jewish law. This decision — already been opposed by other leading rabbis – could force many Jews who live in apartment buildings to sweat their way up staircases once a week.The Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat, is meant to be a day of rest. Observant Jews refrain from working, traveling in vehicles, spending money and from using electricity.In modern times, it’s tough to imagine going 24 hours without using anything electric. So gadgets have been invented to allow the use of certain appliances without physically turning them on. Like timers for lights, called Shabbat clocks. Or special cookers for stove tops. Or elevators for Shabbat.The Shabbat elevators, which are ubiquitous in Israel and fairly common in Jewish neighborhoods around the world, are designed to stop automatically at every floor, so passengers are guaranteed to (eventually) make it to their destination without having to activate anything electrical.But in a surprise decision, a group of top rabbis ruled that riding these elevators was not kosher.The decision, published as a  small notice (shown below) in a religious newspaper last week, decrees that due to changes in the technology of the elevators, based on information provided by elevator technicians and engineers, riding up or down in the elevator indeed breaks the laws of Shabbat. It was signed by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, a top leader in the ultra-Orthodox community, and others. It follows discussion over the direct impact on the elevator because the weight of passengers may determine the amount of electricty used.Other senior rabbis have already come out against the ruling, and Israel’s Haaretz newspaper interviewed some unhappy and disagreeing citizens.“This is an edict that will not work,” one resident of a Jerusalem retirement home was quoted as saying. “If we all adhere to it, not only will we not leave our rooms on Shabbat, but life in places like Manhattan will come to a standstill.”

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

With more and more libraries digitising their archives, academics have a growing number of texts they can access without having to get on a plane and journey to distant continents. Perhaps in the near future, researchers will be able to simply log on from their office to view a database of a nearly infinite number of ancient texts, prayers or whatever writings have been handed down by our ancestors.

Of course, problems arise with digitising thousands of years of handwritten documents. Making a digital copy is the easy part. Helping the computer understand what is written, well, that is a tough one.Gideon Ben-Zvi, who has founded a couple companies in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), told me that: “The eyes outperform even the best OCR software by magnitude, although the speed achieved by OCR is far faster than humans.”That means a researcher can sit for hours in front of a page of text and will always emerge with a better understanding of the words written. However, once a computer program can discern words, phrases and even handwriting in the most highly degraded texts, you can then search through millions of pages almost instantaneously.Historians will be able to find pages from books that may have been scattered across the globe simply by searching for key words, sentence structures or handwriting styles.A team of researches at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University has developed an algorithm that could be an important step in achieving such a database. Uri Ehrlich, a liturgist at the university, explained how it took a few years of research to locate a single page stored in a different library that matched a ancient page of text he had been studying. If the research team indeed creates a user-friendly computer program, and libraries agree to centralise these archives in one, giant digital database, imagine the secrets of our past we have yet to discover!