oeco:
David writes: "The visible ruin dates from the fourth century B.C., but beneath it you can see the foundations of a first-century synagogue, believed to be where Jesus taught."
That's quite an engineering feat!
Anyway, as a Christian minister, I find your writing on the Bible refreshing and always a fun read. Where you get things wrong, it's still marvelously quirky. Your account of the strange warmth that came over you at the Western Wall moved me.
Thanks for doing this project, David. Can't wait for the book.
If I remember from reading Biblical Archaeology Review, the top ruins are actually from the 4th century Anno Domini; "B.C." (Before Christ, which incidently is politically-incorrect these days) was probably a typo.
Once I pointed out in a letter to the editor that the "masoretic" [traditional] Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible can't be dated back to earlier than around A.D. 700*, but the magazine printed that as 700 B.C., apparently because people think that it's earlier than it is.
*The masoretic text is the Hebrew text read in synagogues, and the one that forms the basis of Jewish and Christian translations, but (as an appendix to the Good News Bible ponts out) the New Testament quotes the standard Greek translation of the time, the "septuagint", and (as the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal) back in the First Century there were Hebrew scrolls that followed the septuagint rather than the masoretic where there was a difference. Not that such slight differences should bother us: I read once in a book about Bart Ehrman, the author of Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities, while discovering that there were typos in the early gospel manuscripts, and that what he called the "proto-Orthodox" decided which manuscripts, and books, to accept as authoritative, lead him to lose his Fundamentalist faith, Ehrman's wife--still goes to Mass.
