The IHT:

An Israeli archaeologist on Tuesday said he has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land - a potentially major discovery that capped a 35-year quest for the researcher.

This is a major find indeed if it is confirmed. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod and the gospel also says that Herod ordered the slaughter of every boy aged two years or less in an attempt to snuff out Jesus’ life. By then, however, Jesus and his parents had moved to Egypt.

Herod is a very significant figure in the history of the Jews and the Jewish nation. Herod ruled the Roman province of Judea, corresponding roughly to the old Jewish kingdom of Judah. The Romans did not rule Judea directly until after Herod’s death. Herod was a very brutal king, not hesitating to have executed even some of his own sons when he thought they were plotting to dethrone him. Caesar Augustus then remarked that it was better to be Herod’s pigs than his sons. Herod ordered major building projects in Jerusalem and Judah, many of which survive today.

The Herod whose tomb is claimed found is not the same man who refused to judge the grown Jesus and sent him back to Pontius Pilate. That was Herod Antipas, son of the Herod referenced in the find.

Dr. Ben Witherington is professor of New testament studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is also a world-recognized biblical scholar. He writes,

Having now scrutinized the book The Jesus Family Tomb book which accompanies the show there are further things that need to be stressed that are wrong with this whole theory and its varied speculations. I will list them seriatim as bullet points.

And he does. I urge interested parties to read his work; he is far more erudite than I on the technical matters related to first-century Judaism and Christianity and has a extensive Rolodex of other experts to call upon and cite as well. RTWT!

See also his current op-ed piece at OpinionJournal.com

Anti-Judaism in Britain is at an all-time high:

A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.

The findings prompted the report’s authors to warn of a “wave of hatred” against Jews.

The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.

Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005. …

• An Orthodox Jew punched in the face and almost pushed off a Tube platform by an Arab man who screamed: “Get back to Stamford Hill, I want to kill you all”

• A Jewish man walking to synagogue with his two young sons suffered a broken leg after being punched and kicked by a white man shouting “f***ing Jew”

• Seventy incidents of desecration and damage to synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish schools and private homes with attacks including swastikas daubed on walls

• Savage assault of a 12-year-old Jewish girl Jasmine Kranat, who was beaten unconscious on a north London bus by two teenage girls who asked her first if she was Jewish.

Here is the USA, the number of anti-Semitic incidents actually declined, though slightly, in 2006 from the year before. But 2004 saw the highest number of anti-Jewish incidents since 1994.

OpinionJournal cites one Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, in which he “argued that the world’s major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization.”

Well, where’d ya park your squad car, Dick Tracy?

Let’s review some basics. There are, in a very fundamental sense, two kinds of religions. One is revealed religion, wich asserts that knowledge or even awareness of the deity is possible only because the deity has communicated with human beings. The basis of the religion is this communication. Examples: In Judaism, God giving the Law to the children of Israel at Sinai; in Christianity, the embodiment of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; in Islam, the giving of the Quran to Mohammed by Allah, through the intermediary of an angel. In all three religions, if the revelations are removed, the religion is gutted of its very essence. (Zoroastrianism was also a revealed religion, but has passed from the scene).

Please note that at this time I am not assessing the truth of the claims of revelation, but only the claim that the heart of the religion’s beliefs are said to have been revealed by the deity, and that absent that revelation, the religion would not exist. The defining event for Judaism was Sinai, for Christianity the death and resurrection of Jesus and for Islam the coming of the Quran.

All other religions do not make such a claim. In fact, not all other religions even posit the existence of a deity at all. Buddhism and Confucianism do not, for example. Simply using a sacred text does not make a religion a “revealed” religion; Taoism does not consider its Tao Te Ching to have been revealed by a god, but a collection of wisdom teachings and philosophy of its founder, Laozi. The Greek religions of Jesus’s day were based on pagan ritual on the one hand (practiced by the non-elites) and rationalistic philosophy on the other (practiced by the educated elites).

At the minimum, religions try to explain human beings’ place in creation, what kind of life we are to lead and what is our ultimate destiny. It is simply a blinding glimpse of the obvious for Mr. Harris to observe that “the world’s major religions are genuinely incompatible.” Honestly, this strikes me as the sort of thing a man would say who never gave religion a thought at all until now. It’s intellectually akin to saying that football and baseball are pro sports but behold!, they are not the same.

Yet even the three revealed religions do not agree on central particulars. At stake between Judaism and Christianity is whether Jesus was God incarnated. And at stake between both Judaism and Christianity on the one hand and Islam on the other is the reliability of their respective sacred texts. Islam formally recognizes that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are somewhat revelatory of Allah, but that neither set of Scriptures is reliable. Both sets are incomplete, corrupted and rife with errors. Muslims regard the Christian New Testament, for example, as mainly the invention of Paul, not divinely sourced.

Hence, Muslims claim that the Quran was dictated to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel (Arabic: Jibreel) intermittently over 23 years and that there is no error whatsoever in the text received. The words of the Quran are the very words of Allah, perfectly revealed and perfectly recorded.

There is broad agreement among the three religions that God created the cosmos, that God is the ultimate moral authority for human beings and that human being’s ultimate/eternal destiny is determined within this present life. But there are crucial differences within these main concerns as well.

As for Mr. Harris’s lament that the world’s main religious differences “prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization,” well, I’ll shed no tear over that unless the “viable, global civilization” is closely akin to the Anglosphere. But I suspect that what Mr. Harris means is a viable global government. Just take a look at the United nations are think that one through. For that matter, take a look at the US Congress . . .

Update, 9-19: Australian Archbishop of Sydney George Pell writes:

Two misleading stereotypes of religion need to be abandoned. First, that all religions are basically the same: either all good or all bad.

In fact, the great religions differ mightily one from the other in doctrine and in the societies they produce. Religions can be sources of beauty and goodness and they can be, through corruption, sources of poison and destruction. I do not exempt Christianity from this.

Second, that religions are the cause of all wars or that religion never provokes war.

The worst evils of the 20th century were provoked by anti-religious men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Religion is more often used as a pretext for war or as a symbol of division, for example in the IRA’s armed struggle in Ireland, but religion can directly contribute to and has been used to justify armed conflict and aggression.

RTWT.

I wrote on Aug. 28 on gunpoint conversions to Islam. Speaking of conversions under duress, here are two vignettes, the first humorous and the second from a play by Elie Wiesel.

A Jewish man moves into a Catholic neighborhood. Every Friday the Catholics go crazy because, while they’re morosely eating their Friday fish, their Jewish neighbor is outside cooking steaks on his grill. So the Catholics work on the Jewish man to convert him. After several weeks, by threats and pleading, the Catholics succeed. They take the him to a priest who sprinkles holy water on the him and intones:

“Born a Jew
Raised a Jew
Now a Catholic!”

The Catholics are ecstatic. No more delicious, but maddening smells every Friday evening! But the next Friday evening, the scent of grilling beef wafts through the neighborhood. The Catholics all rush to the Jew’s house to remind him of his new religion and its tradition of meatless Fridays. They see him standing over the cooking steak. He is sprinkling barbecue marinade on the meat and saying:

“Born a cow
Raised a cow
Now a fish!”

In Elie Wiesel’s play of the Holocaust, “The Trial,” a man named Berish is a survivor of a pogrom in which most of the Jews had been killed in the village of Shamgorod. Afterward, Berish and some Jewish actors stage a trial of God, with Berish acting as the prosecutor. He speaks as witness for all the slaughtered: “Let their premature, unjust deaths turn into an outcry so forceful that it will make the universe tremble with fear and remorse!” Berish’s play is interrupted by the news that the murderers are returning to finish the job. The village priest offers to baptize Berish so he can truthfully claim to be Catholic. Berish refuses, saying, “My sons and my fathers perished without betraying their faith; I can do no less.” He insists that this decision does not suggest a reconciliation with God. “I lived as a Jew,” he exclaims, “and it is as a Jew that I shall die – and it is as a Jew that, with my last breath, I shall shout my protest to God! And because the end is near, I shall shout louder! Because the end is near, I’ll tell Him that He’s more guilty than ever!” Berish dies in faithful defiance and defiant faithfulness.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper offers a, “Postwar self test: Are you an anti-Semite?” Two of the 10 questions:

One of the more fruitless debates between critics and supporters of Israel, is where to draw the line between candid criticism of Israeli policy, and anti-Semitism.

As a public service, we present the following post war self-test, to assist readers in placing themselves along the continuum which stretches from taking rational issue with Israeli policy, and ends in Jew-hate. …

2. You are handsome, famous and inebriated when you are stopped driving in Malibu, California by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. Suspecting the arresting officer of Judaism, you consider informing him that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

You would take this course of action:

A. Over your dead body.
B Only after 6-8 drinks.
C Cold sober.

_______

3. You are CNN. When Lebanese civilians are killed, injured or rendered homeless in Israeli air strikes, you identify the victims as Lebanese civilians and elaborate on their suffering. When Israeli civilians are killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks, you should:

A. Identify them as Israeli civilians and elaborate on their suffering.
B. Identify them as Israelis, thus calling into question whether they are civilians.
C. Omit them, and elaborate on the suffering of Lebanese civilians.

Then we have a certain Lebanese perspective:

Translation: “Smile son, or they might think we are anti-Semitic”.

Translation provided by my distant relative, Todd Sensing.

Anti-Semitism is one thing, and to be condemned wherever found, but are some Israelis guilty of anti-Christianity? Consider the recent experience of the bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem:

I was scheduled to leave Tel Aviv on Swiss Air flight number 255D at 15:55 this afternoon [Aug. 7 - DS]. I proceeded as usual to the baggage and security clearance area. After asking me both relevant and non-relevant security questions, the young woman security officer concluded by questioning why I did not have an Israeli visa even though I was carrying an Israeli passport!!

Then she let me put my bags on the conveyor belt so that they could be screened, after decorating both bags and my passport with blue and green stickers. Then I saw her rushing to a supervisor who ordered the belt stopped. Approaching me he asked, “English or Hebrew?” I responded, “Please, Arabic”. Arabic is one of two official languages of the State of Israel and I knew that it was my right in this “oasis of democracy” to make that official request.

Because I refused to speak other than Arabic, because I informed them that I am an Arab-Palestinian-Christian, and because down deep I knew that their behavior was designed to humiliate me, I insisted in conversing with them in the language I master which is Arabic, my mother tongue. At that point, Tal Vardi, the Security Duty Manager also showed up and insisted on speaking in any language other than Arabic. I refused. An Arab from Nazareth who happened to be present offered to translate when Mr. Vardi turned his back and turned toward me only to say, “You will not fly today!”

I called Mr. Caesar Marjieh, Director of the Department for Christian Communities who tried his best to assist me, but he did not succeed. I waited two hours thinking that someone with enough courtesy and good judgment would come, but to no avail. I had no alternative but to return to Jerusalem and inform my friends who were expecting me in Geneva today and London tomorrow of the situation. Later in the week I will file a suit in the High Court against the Security Duty Manager and his staff for violating my civil rights without cause.

My indignation is not for me, but it is for all people in occupied territories who face this kind of oppression and humiliation every day of their lives. This happened to an Anglican Bishop with special identification given him by the Department of the Interior and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. What do you imagine happens to others?

And that is an excellent question.