Hershel Shanks: Sean, I take it you've come to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL]?

Sean Freyne: That's true, Hershel, but also I'm retracing my footsteps of 30 years ago and more, when I taught here in New Orleans at Loyola University. My first daughter, Bridget, was born here. So I have very special memories of New Orleans.
I'm glad to be able to talk to you. My only fear is that our typist won't be able to understand your thick Irish brogue.

No, no, I speak very clearly. I speak slowly and clearly in my best Americanese. [laughter]

You're a senior scholar. What do you get out of the...]]> Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered only 62 years ago, much of their early history has been shrouded in obscurity. Details of persons and places were compromised by focus on the scrolls themselves, and on occasion deliberate deception facilitated the continuation of illegal, but highly profitable, excavation. In 1998 Marcel Sigrist, OP, suggested to Weston Fields, Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation in Jerusalem, that the only way to acquire clarity would be to record critically the testimony of the original eye-witnesses. Some had already died, others were getting old, and this would be the last opportunity.

Fields took up the challenge, and the thoroughness of his oral history is illustrated by the fact that he even gives the number of sheep (about 55) in the car...]]> By Jonathan Klawans, for Biblical Archaeology Review

Many people assume that Jesus' Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. And indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark 14:12, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the "first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb." If Jesus and his disciples gathered together to eat soon after the Passover lamb was sacrificed, what else could they possibly have eaten if not the Passover meal? And if they ate the Passover sacrifice, they must have held a Seder.

When visitors to Jerusalem are shown a large cave called "Gethsemane" on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, they usually give a perfunctory look and hurry on to the famous Garden of Gethsemane, the small garden of olive trees adjacent to the Church of All Nations. Here pilgrims can sit and reflect on the momentous events of Jesus' arrest in what seems a more appropriate, if less authentic, environment.

Most of these pilgrims are never told that the New Testament does not mention a "Garden of Gethsemane." The Cave of Gethsemane, on the other hand, is very probably a genuine Biblical site-the location of Jesus' arrest-unlike so many of the "traditional" holy sites of Christianity that have little or no claim to authenticity.

The cave, within a property now owned by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, certainly looks unimpressive. Enclosed in a flat-roofed, semicircular building, the cave is reached by a long corridor to the right of the courtyard leading to the traditional Tomb of the Virgin. Its placement makes it seem an afterthought, though in fact it was a Christian holy site long before anyone thought to place the To...]]>