" Sacred relics lie scattered beneath the deserts of

the Middle East. In Iraq, our religious history is

being obliterated; in Israel, it's a question of faith.

BY MELINDA LIU AND CHRISTOPHER DICKEYBEGINNING IN

, ,,'the world of the Bible, is what there was inthe!and now caIled Iraq. There is nothing leftof the Gardeaof Eden, no artifact atthe confluence of the Tigris and Euphratesrivers where myth has placed the Temptation

c and thecFaIl. But the great cities and empiresfrom the BookS of Genesis and Kings ~ndChronicles have left theirtraces.: Ur,where Abraham was born; rap~ciousAs~a with itscapi-~,N l.nevech, and Babylon, wherethec anclent..Israel.ttes were

~~AUGUST 30, 2004 NEWSWEEK 33

some 10,000 scientific excavations in Iraqand innumerable ones in Israel.

Across the Middle East, the quest for sa-cred artifacts and for the lessons they canteach us is taking on new urgency. Archeolo-gy is growing more sophisticated; the tech-nology of dating relics is improving. Drivenby curiosity and faith, ambition and some-times avarice, diggers yearn to unearth theBible, to try to solve its mysteries and revealits secrets.

It is the most challenging of archeolog-ical obstacle courses. In Iraq, the fall ofSaddam Hussein raised hopes that newmoney and new freedoms would help openup many sites to more scientific investiga-tion and restoration. But the ravages of~'ar are clouding that prospect. In Israel,a rising tide of funds for Bible-relatedprojects is flowing into Jerusalem and itsenvirons, but archeology is an overlookedcasualty of the intifada: the violencehas cut down the number of active digs.

carried into captivity and wh(~re, as thepsalm tells us, they wept when they re-membered Zion.

Beneath the sands and silt of Iraq, formillennium after millennium, truths havewaited to be pieced together about theselegendary places that loom so l~Lrge in thefaith and culture of Jews, Christians andMuslims. "This is where the first 'mting be-gan, where the first ideas of law and religionswere written down," says archeologist Mc-Guire Gibson at the University of Chicago.Golden calves, winged bulls and rampantlions have emerged from the dU/;t, helpingexplain the consequential joum~r from theopulent polytheism of Mesopotalnia to themore ascetic monotheism of the PromisedLand. It is a story that has emergro slowly,painstakingly, over the past century from

~ ~::=~~~~I~I Wednesda¥, Aug. 25, at rulon, ET.

34 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 30, 2004

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Indeed the hunt for treasure and truth igrowing ever wilder and more worrisome. hthe lawless deserts of occupied Iraq, history-both of the Bible and of the larger ancient world that scriptures only hint at -ilbeing pillaged on an epic scale for a blac1market where irreplaceable fragments of OUIpast are sold to sophisticated collectors, 01just to the highest bidder on eBay. "It's wip-ing out a whole field of knowledge, of socialand cultural history," says Gibson, 'just sosomebody can have a beautiful object sittingon the mantelpiece:'

In Israel, much care is taken to preservethe slightest trace that might reveal literaltruths about the mystical teachings of scrip-ture. The tragedy of Iraq is that contexts aredisappearing as fast as the objects them-

created an international sensation as Ameri-can troops were accused of standing by whilemore than 100,000 artifacts were stolen.Those numbers were inflated. But more than8,000 pieces are still missing, of which al-most 30 are considered of unique historicaland artistic importance. Col. Matthew Bog-danos, a Marine reservist and Manhattan as-sistant district attorney who led the investi-gation of the museum theft last year, believesthat most of this hoard is being held off themarket by organized gangs waiting for pricesto rise. In New York. Middle East scholarand author Joseph Braude pleaded guilty this

~ until June. The thieves no longer waitfor the cover, or even the cool, of the night.One day last week a portly 35-year-old whosaid his name was Hassan clawed the earthwith a pickax and shovel in 120-degree heat.When asked why, his answer was simple."We are poor people," he said. According toDonny George, director of the Iraqi Nation-al Museum, laborers like Hassan sell thepieces they find for, as little as $10 to $15.Those same artifacts may be sold for thou-sands, even tens of thousands of dollars inEurope, the unitec<i States or Japan.

The looting of the museum itselflastyear

selves. Archeologists are like crime-sceneinvestigators trying to discover how ~'holesocieties lived and died. And to do that theyneed to know when, how-and espet:iallywhere-each clue is found. "You take an ob-ject out of context, you are losing abont 80percent of the information it can give you,"says Gibson. Near Nasiriya, in sou1herniIraq, a 2,700-year-old Sumerian site kI1Ownas Urn AI Agareb, "Mother of Scorpions," iscrisscrossed by 1he tire tracks of loJters'trucks. Holes are everywhere. "It makes youcry;' says John Russell, an American arche-ologist who advised 1he Iraqi Culture Min-

. AUGUST 30, 2004 NEWSWEEK 35TOP ROW FROM LEFT: WEST SEMITIC RESEARCH-DEAD SEA SCROllS IOUNOATION-CORBIS: COURTESY OFTHE ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM(2)

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month to smugg1.ingthreedelicatelyetChed ancient seals into the UnitedStates. He said he pairl O1Jly $200 for thethree of them together..Thc~cylinders weremarked with thel~tters~lV[, for Iraqi Mu-seum,as well as WlthsenalnuWbers fromthecoIl~on. Braude's .la'yY~r,B7njaminBrafman,tells NEWSWEEI;:hIS checnt had.no Partin anylootin g ..'-'

'll-ecasure8 stOlen from thegrqundCan't be ~~ily"-'ifc

...at all. "If ~uare a badguyn)Ot-

ing adig],~urchances ofbt:ingcaught gQ~y,way down;' !:a~Bo~os.. Artifacts Can make,theirwaytb hi~-end boutiques, ~along \Vith papecrs ftom JJnc :

cdscrupulous dealers "p~~~g'!;

theywere!ounda~n~ago.. IOn the ground mIraq the]>i1- c claging is all but ~possibleto Stop;Earliecrthis month Ameri~ jQurnalist MicahGaren wasabdu~WhiIewQr~g Qt1 a dQC-

umen~abouteffortstQProl:ect Iraq's trea-s~...Hiscaptbrs havec~t!~ned tob,ehead~..Wjththefutureof~q so uncertain, theprotectionQf itS buried past is not~yapriority of thecoccupation trOOps or the newlysovecrecign cregizneQf ~e IoiirustercA-radAllam. "Ther(:alityis,~ putlraqi ~ onmany of the moSt in1portant~ites \Vithlittletrairiing,a,ndat first they W!:ren'tarmed;'sa~ Bo~os. "Four men pull up in a pick-up truck, and they are armed: What are you~ing to do? Is the gUard goin,g'td lay downhis :life for antiquities? Do ~u putan Ameri-

I ' ~"canp atoon on every Site.As.r th Coaliti 'ffii1'ta. cenmI lS,eon .l"rySO~ c ~

makes rnattersworse. WhenO)IUnibla Um-c

v7~ityprofes&Qr zainab B~piVisited :theSIW °.rBa~on.1aw la$~ spnn~,..:sge ~stunned to see an AmenCan military baseSpreading acrosscthe hallovred ground. .c cWorkers scooped up earth potentially rich inrelicstbwake blast walls, BUU(lozerscarv~:out helicopWr landing pads, a11d the Vibr;l,-'

tioriSfromthec ch()p~~thems(:lVes didsiiUc.. ,more damage. Portions of two anctenttem...

pIes have collapsed and Nebuchadriezzar H'spalace is threaWned. "We're very worriedabout the palace walls;' said Bahrani"They're made of brick. They rattle when thehelicopWrs take oft:"

For believers contemplating the rise ofthe looters; lines ftom the Revelation of SaintJohn the Divine maycometontind:"Baby-Ion the great is fallen, is fallen:' Fbr archeolo~gists, for the faithful, for all of U:" the.lossofthis past impoverishes the future. Rippingartifacts ftom their contexts takes a~y.the Ilast chalice we have to know those Clviliza-tions~fromtheworld of Abraham to that ofNebuchadnezzar ~ that gave us OlJr own.

With BABAK DEHGHANPISIIEH i~ Baghdad

36 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 30, 2004

;;it:.

A FEWmiles down the road from Jerusalem toward Tel AViv,mostly justw~ttobe "left alone in their own little patch;'YaelJ(erem$a~apologeticany. She ought to know, asfuark~tingdir~ctorfQr the ~esthouse with which thekib-buti$upplemen~itSmainbusinesses, a fruit and dairy

£ d Al l £~ th _1. b -cl l tp f . dhi Ids V.,.i- ~~an asmcu t~~LOry at m~es Ul e roo WIn s e ". .lCL even

as she spoke last week, herceUpl1one was burbling as requests pouredin for to~ andi~*rviews:a group of monks fromjerusalem,tivebus-

..loads of Visitorsffo~~rkey, reporteJ;S~ thU ',,;..1 Sd E hlcom e nl~ tateSan uro~: Segestures expansively toward a stand of 0 livetrees, "We might havew pave over thisarea:' she says, "so we c~ parkthebuses."

Jsrael, it has been said, is a place of toomu<;:hh.iswryand toolittle geogr:aphy.The

tarine trees hides the walls of settlements~ingb~kto the dawn of civiJi1'atio?, ~-terns and caves used by wanderers ill thetime of Jesus, Wanderers very much like theBi~licalJoh?~e Bal?tist, who, according to'i\'r1ttentradition dating to the fourth centu-ry,wasbornjust tWo mile~from here. Thatdi ° o t 1°tt1 thhti °ll tstinction mean 1~, 'o~ ' un as

FROM LEFT GEMAELOEGALERIE ALTE MEISTER, DRESDEN-BRIDGEMAN ART UBRARY,

PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATNAN TORBOYNIK FOR NEWSWEEK AUGUST 30, 2004 NEWSWEEK 37~

fessor emeritus at the University of Arizonaat Thcson and one of America's leading au-thorities on Near Eastern archeology, callsthe situation in his discipline "a cl1sis." AndJews and Arabs are both wary and solici-tous of the powerful American Christiangroups who support research aimed at vin-dicating the Gospels, for which tlJere is vir-tually no surviving physical evidence. Forall that his words did to change history,during Jesus' time on earth he was but oneman among 300 million, his tracks longsince covered by the dust of the centuries.

The quest for artifacts relatecl to JesusChrist spans virtually the entire history ofthe church, from the fourth cenblry, whenSaint Helena is said to have retrieved apiece of the Thue Cross, to two years ago,when an Israeli antiquities collector pro-duced a stone box with an inscription sug-

scholar at Duke. The Israeli police haveconfiscated the box from the owner, whoclaimed to have bought it for $200. A mi-nority, though, holds to the view of HershelShanks, editor of Biblical Archeology Re-view, and co-author of a book on the os-suary, that the inscription may be genuine.

In any case, serious scholars rarely both-er with religious relics that turn up inchurches or dealers' shops, removed from

38 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 30, 2004

gesting it had held the remains of Jesus'brother James. Each era sees in these relicsa reflection of what it values most. Thetouch of the Cross was believed able tobring back the dead; the owner of the so-called James Ossuary valued it at $2 mil-lion. The magic powers of neither were putto the test, however, because both are nowconsidered forgeries. Just two years ago thefragment of the Cross supposedly found byHelena-she said it was a part of the Titu-Ius, the headboard with its famous inscrip-tion ("Jesus of Nazareth, King of theJews")-was dated by scientists to be be-tween the 10th and 12th centuries. As forthe inscription on the ossuary (a limestonebox in which fitst-century Jews stored thebones of their dead), "the overwhelmingscholarly consensus is that it's a fake," ac-cording to Eric Meyers, a Judaic-studies

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fessor emeritus of religious studies at De-Paul University and former co-chair of theJesus Seminar, can read volumes into asimple signpost in the Biblical town ofEphesus. "There's a gate to the market thatPaul would have walked under:' Crossanrelates. "On top, it says Caesar is the son ofGod. When Paul applies that name to Jesus,it's not just a nice title. It's the title of Cae-sar. That is known as high treason."

Even more evocative to Crossan is afishing boat discovered in the Sea of Galileein 1986: a sturdy workhorse of a vessel withtwo oars on each side, a keel and mast, verylikely the sort of boat on which Jesus him-self might have set out. Crossan is intriguedby signs that the boat's owner fell on hardtimes, patching it over and over and finallyremoving the nails before pushing it out tosea. To Crossan-although other scholarsdispute the point-this suggests that hardeconomic times had befallen the Galileefishermen. Against this backdrop he setsthe Biblical account of fishermen leavingtheir nets and following Jesus. "Did theyjust drop everything and take off after Je-sus? Well, maybe. But maybe there werehuman reasons. Life was getting tougharound the lake:'

Perhaps the most revealing Biblical siteexcavated in recent years has been Seppho-ris, five miles from Nazareth, which hasbeen under excavation since 1985. Al-though not mentioned in the Bible byname, Strange believes it was the "city on ahill" Jesus had in mind in Matthew 5:14. It

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take their money," says James Strange of theUniversity of South Florida, Tampa, whodirects one of the excavation teams at thefirst-century city ofSepphoris, the capitalof lower Galilee. "They say, 'Would youhelp me find the giants of Genesis 6?' A se-rioUs archeologist can't expend his credibil-ity on that:'

The value of archeology is not in vali-dating scripture, but in providing a histori-cal and intellectual context, and the occa-sional flash of illumination on crucialdetails. An ossuary' containing the onlyknown remains of a victim of crucifixionsuggests that artists may have erred in theirdepictions of Christ on the cross; this vic-tim's feet were not nailed one on top of theother, but positioned on either side of thecross and fixed with a horizontal spike.Scholars like John Dominic Crossan, a pro-

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the vital archeological "context" that situ-ates them in a time and place. "Even if theUames] Ossuary is genuine, it providt:s nonew information;' says Andrew Ovennan,head of classics at Macalester College. Nordo archeologists generally set out to prove,or disprove, a point of scripture, althoughthere are fundamentalist groups that try toenlist them in that quest. "They've got bigcheckbooks, but they can't get anyone to

AUGUST 30, 2004 NEWSWEEK 39"'OM TOP, ARCHIVD ICDNDGRAFICD-CDRBIS: COURTESY OF TilE ISRAEL MUSEU'. JERUSALEM

was razed by the Romans right around thetime of Jesus' birth, and reconstructed af-terward, and it's not unreasonable to thinkJesus himself might have worked there. But.more important than the chance of findingJesus' tool belt is what it tells us about hismilieu. "Jesus has a lot to say about the rich,and most of it is not good;' says Strange."This is where he would have encounteredthe rich, not in Nazareth." Archeologistshave excavated three villas with interiorcourtyards, richly frescoed walls and luxurygoods similar to those found anywhere inthe Roman Empire-but unmistakably thehomes of Jews, with ritual baths and inhab-itants who obeyed Jewish dietary laws. (Atleast until the fourth century, when Chris-tianity became the official religion and pigbones make a sudden appearance in thegarbage.) "It gives us an entirely new way of

riod when the minimalists deny that Jewseven lived in the Holy Land. This particularquestion is so politically fraught, accordingto Claire Pfann, a New Testament scholarin Jerusalem, that minimalists have ac-cused their opponents of forging evidenceto bolster the Zionist case.

So the territory on which Gibson hasembarked is a treacherous one, both politi-cally and geologically, but for good or ill hehas jumped in with both feet. Gibson, 45,was born in England to a mother whomoved the family to Israel when he was 9,and he studied archeology at London'sprestigious Institute of Archaeology. Hispeers consider him an outstanding archeol-ogist in the field, but his decision to publi-cize his cave finding in a popular book be-fore publishing in a scientific journal hasraised some eyebrows. "I don't want tospoil the celebration;' says Ronnie Reich, arespected archeologist with the Israel An-

patriarchal stories aren't historical." l\nd, infact, current scholarship is not eslleciallycongenial to Old Testament literalists.There is, essentially, no evidence for the ex-istence of Abraham and the other patri-archs, and-despite more than a cen"tury ofintensive study of Pharaonic Egypt-onlythe barest wisps of support for the E:!:odus,the central event in Jewish theology. Thereare accounts of Egyptian raids into Pales-tine that brought back captives, pr.esurn-ably as slaves, and a dispatch from a llOrderguard in the early 12th century B.C., r.~port-ing that two people had escaped from

40 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 3D, 2004

Egypt into the Sinai. On the basis of whathas been found so far, "there was no Exo-dus, at least not of hundreds of thousandsof people making a miraculous I escapeacross the desert," Dever says. "And therewas no conquest" of the land of Canaan byJoshua. "There are several chapters inJoshua on Jericho," says Carol Meyers, aprofessor of Biblical studies at Duke, "butJericho wasn't even inhabited at the ti~e."Some things do check out: an Egyptianartifact, the Merneptah stele, refers to a vic-tory by Pharaoh's Army over the Israelitesin about 1200 B.C. That date faIls in the pe-

tiquities Authority, "but I'm skeptit;al."He first crawled inside the cave, Gibson

writes, in 1999, brought there by a :lcib-butznik who had discovered it years e;irli-er. On a wall he saw an incised drawing ofa crude stick figure holding a staff: ,/'lithone arm raised upright as if in blessin~;; herecognized it immediately as an icoJIl ofJohn the Baptist. That meant two thinl~s tohim: that the cave was worth excavating,and that with the right connections, nlon-ey would be available to help excavat:e it.He contacted an archeological enthusiastfrom Texas, Joseph Peeples, who nusedfunds from donors including John C.Whitehead, a wealthy New York bankerand former deputy secretary of Stat~: un-der President Ronald Reagan. Whitehead,on a trip to Israel, visited the cave withGibson and, after one look at the draw-ings, agreed to bankroll the excav;ationalong with his friend and fellow financier

AUGUST 30, 2004 NEWSWEEK 41

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RogerC. Altman. "You can't help but be alittle tingly about what might have takenplace there," White~d recalled last week.What neither of th~ men apparently re-alized-and what Gibson himself deniesknowing-is that Peeples, who died in2002, served time ~ prison on two sepa-rate federal fraud convictions. But there isno evidence that his connection to Gibsonhad any sinister puqiose.

Peeples's other coptribution was to putGibson in touch With James Tabor, profes-sor of early Christi~ity at the University ofNorth Carolina at Charlotte, who agreed tohelp With the dig -a role that included sup-plying students to Wield the shovels. On aMarch day in 2000 two of those students,Lee Hutchison and]effPoplin, reached thefloor level of a shelf on the right side of thecave. For days, ilie team had been un-earthing pieces of t:l1ick, gray pottery fromthe fourth and fifth Centuries. Gibson had

already concluded that Byzantine monks,the ones who had engraved the icons on thewall, had probably established a shrine toJohn in the cave. At their feet, the studentssaw something new, a delicate red shard ofpottery. They took it to Tabor, who showedit to Gibson, who at a glance pronounced it"First-century Roman."

And that put an entirely new face onthings. As Gibson dug down, he foundthousands of these shards, suggestive, tohim, of pottery that was intentionally shat-tered, as if in a ritual. He uncovered a stonewith an indentation in the shape of a hu-man foot, linked by a channel to a smallbasin: it looked to him like a kind of font foranointing the foot with oil. And armed withthose archeological clues, and the oral andwritten traditions linking John to the re-gion, he makes what some of his colleaguescall the stupefyingly audacious leap to theconclusion that John himself may haveused the cave to baptize believers.

"In archeology," Gibson admits, "noth-ing is certain, not even written evidence:'But, he says, the evidence that the cave wasused by John "is as strong as you can get interms of archeological remains. Of course itwould be nice to have an inscription saying,'I, John the Baptist, was here and my disci-ples are using it as a ritual site.' But youusually don't get that."

Few of his colleagues, even the few whohave seen the cave, go along with him."Maybe Gibson and the kibbutz want to at-tract tourists," says David Amit, a seniorarcheologist with the antiquities authoritywho describes himself as a friend of Gib-son's. "It's pure fiction. It's not archeology."Even Tabor, who agrees with Gibson thatthe cave was undoubtedly used for ritualpurposes in the first century, concedes that"you can't prove John was there." Amongother objections to Gibson's theory, there isnothing in scripture to suggest that Johnbaptized believers anywhere except in theJordan River. And there is little more thanconjecture for a scenario sketched in Gib-son's book by which John "might very wellhave sent Jesus intentionally to visit thescene of his early baptism activities ...andour [Thuba] was just that place:'

In any case, unless someone comesalong with conclusive evidence to refuteGibson, for better or worse the cave will beattracting tourists for a long time to come.Thro thousand years ago, Jesus, John andthe disciples changed human destiny forev-er, and then disappeared into history. Oneway or another we have been trying tobring them back into our lives ever since.

With DAN EPHRDN and JOANNA CHEN in Israel,EMILY FLYNN in London, JULIE SCELFO,

MARY CARMICHAEL and CLAIRE SULMERS