Stick Man Jonah More Unprecedented Than Previously Realized

Talpiot fish whale Jonah

Beginning with the first publication of James Tabor’s B&I piece on Talpiot Tomb B, the Tabor/Jacobovici theory that this is the tomb of the earliest Christian disciples has hinged in large part upon their identification of the “sign of Jonah,” a nose-down fish spitting out a stick-man Jonah, on the front of one of the [...] Read more »

Jacobovici and Team Don’t Understand Religious Studies, Don’t Do Their Research

Photo courtesy of John McGinley, the Publicity Graphics guy from the Talpiot TV show.

Simcha Jacobovici and now two people from the production team behind the TV show about the Patio Tomb Ossuaries keep insinuating that the only reason scholars are not convinced by their conclusions is due to the various scholars’ theological biases or desires. For example, a few years ago, in his defense against critics of the [...] Read more »

Talpiot Tomb B: On Connected and Unconnected Lines

The blogosphere has yet again been in quite good form with lots of folks demonstrating the numerous problems with the latest claims about the presence of the name “Yonah” (Jonah) etched in the supposed stick-man at the bottom of the vessel fish at the center of the discussion of the Talpiot Tomb B ossuaries. Bob [...] Read more »

Major Problems with the SBL Paper Submission System

Like many others, I submitted two paper proposals for the 2012 Annual Meeting in hopes that at least one of them would be accepted. Of the two, one was especially important for this year, as I have been waiting over six years for a call for papers that matched a particular article in progress that [...] Read more »

The New Talpiot Tomb: An Observation on the Patio Tomb and Resurrection

Many scholars have responded to James Tabor’s report (and new book) on the so-called “Patio Tomb” at Talpiot, which he and Simcha Jacobovici claim to be the grave of early (as in first-century) Christian disciples, complete with a “sign of Jonah” (which looks like a poorly-cut nefesh to me, especially since it was vertically oriented; Eric [...] Read more »