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More on Mariamne March 14 from Pfann and Tabor (Updated March 16)

Dr. Stephen Pfann, whose audio taped interview can be found here, is arguing the Mariamne inscription has been misread. Here are parts of the story.

 

JERUSALEM (AP) – A prominent scholar looking into the factual basis of a popular but widely criticized documentary film that claims to have located the tomb of Jesus said Tuesday that a crucial piece of evidence filmmakers used to support their claim is a mistake.
Enlarge this Image
Jesus Family Tomb
(Photo: AP / Kathy Willens)
Investigative journalist, director, producer and writer Simcha Jacobovici, left, points to an ossurary – a small casket to store bones — he and others say may have once held the remains of Mary Magdalene, beside another that may have held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, right, during a news conference in New York, Monday, Feb. 26, 2007.

 


Dr. Stephen Pfann, whose audio taped interview can be found here, is arguing the Mariamne inscription has been misread. Here are parts of the story.

 

JERUSALEM (AP) – A prominent scholar looking into the factual basis of a popular but widely criticized documentary film that claims to have located the tomb of Jesus said Tuesday that a crucial piece of evidence filmmakers used to support their claim is a mistake.
Enlarge this Image
Jesus Family Tomb
(Photo: AP / Kathy Willens)
Investigative journalist, director, producer and writer Simcha Jacobovici, left, points to an ossurary – a small casket to store bones — he and others say may have once held the remains of Mary Magdalene, beside another that may have held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, right, during a news conference in New York, Monday, Feb. 26, 2007.

 

Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar and paleographer at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said he has released a paper claiming the makers of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" were mistaken when they identified an ancient ossuary from the cave as belonging to the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene.

 

Before the movie was screened, Jacobovici said that particular inscription provided crucial support for his claim. The name Mariamene is rare, and in some early Christian texts it is believed to refer to Mary Magdalene.

 

But having analyzed the inscription, Pfann, who made a brief appearance in the film as an ossuary expert, published a detailed article on his university’s Web site asserting that it doesn’t read "Mariamene" at all.

 

The inscription, Pfann said, is made up of two names inscribed by two different hands: the first, "Mariame," was inscribed in a formal Greek script, and later, when the bones of another woman were added to the box, another scribe using a different cursive script added the words "kai Mara," meaning "and Mara." Mara is a different form of the name Martha.

 

According to Pfann’s reading, the ossuary did not house the bones of "Mary the teacher," but rather of two women, "Mary and Martha."

 

"In view of the above, there is no longer any reason to be tempted to link this ossuary…to Mary Magdalene or any other person in Biblical, non-Biblical or church tradition," Pfann wrote.

 

In the interest of telling a good story, Pfann said, the documentary engaged in some "fudging" of the facts.

 

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My comments. Speaking with Tal Ilan yesterday. She insists this inscription is not two names. So this one will be debated. It just shows how complicated all of the details are. This is why work like this takes time.

(Update): To this we can now add the response of Jim Tabor, the advisor on the special, who has done his own reasearch. He notes the folowing in his own investigation:

“Immediately after reading Pfann’s paper I met with Prof. Michael Stone, who is our distinguished visiting professor of ancient Judaism here at UNC Charlotte this year, and who happens to have been Pfann’s teacher. I asked him for his opinion, and quite modestly he said, I have no expertise in ancient Greek epigraphy so I would not dare to say, but if you check with Leah Di Segni you will get a view that should settle things for all of us. I was impressed with Michael’s modesty since those of us who know him know that his Greek is as good as it gets, as are all his languages, but he still knows that technical training in epigraphy is quite different from one of us who reads Greek texts taking a turn at such things.

I contacted Dr. Di Segni, hesitant to impose on her time, but she graciously said she would take a look. I just heard from her today. She contextualized her view with a statement of how highly she regards Rahmani and expressed surprise that anyone proposing to “correct” him would not ask him, his “eye” being as good today as it ever was. Dr. Di Segni recalls that she was consulted by Rahmani when he prepared the Greek inscriptions and she writes: “I well remember that, while here and there I had some suggestions about interpretation of a particular form (for instance, Mariamenon being an hypochoristic form of Mariam), I could not but confirm all his readings. I have not changed my mind now.”

Di Segni’s conclusion then and today: She reads the inscription as a double name, Mariamenou/Mara, both being personal names, as indicated by the use of the signum (ho kai or he kai so-and-so), thus one woman with a double name. She is not of the view that Mara is an epithet, “Mistress Mariamenon”: if so, it would precede the name of the lady. She notes that this use of the signum became common only in the late first century, so this would be a rather early occurrence, if one accepts the reasonable surmise that secondary burial in ossuaries in Jerusalem ended with the destruction of the city in 70 CE.

I pass this on to readers here and colleagues and I hope it will get posted on the SBL site and on some of the more responsible Blogs, to offer some context to Dr. Pfann’s paper. How one might contact the hundreds of papers or the TV programs that have carried the Rahmani “correction” around the world I have no idea.

In the meantime, back to the discussion of this ancient lady, Mariamne also know as Mara.”

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My comments:

It is hard to sort this out on the fly in public. Debate is likely to continue on some of the finaer points. The likelihood, however, that we have one person, having two names, one of which is Mariamne.

 

 

 

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