Jean Freyne is director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, as well as emeritus professor of theology, at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the integration of literary and archaeological sources for understanding the social and religious world of Galilee in Hellenistic and Roman times. Editor Hershel Shanks sat down with Professor Freyne in New Orleans to discuss what archaeology and Biblical studies can tell us about the historical Jesus.

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 these meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature?

Well, I found coming to the SBL was a very stimulating experience even as a young scholar. I had been trained in Europe, of course, in Rome and Jerusalem and then subsequently in Germany. And when I came to teach in the Sta

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 care of Muhammed ed-Dib the day he threw the stone into what became Cave 1. The surviving actors were all happy to cooperate, and a number revealed that they had extensive private archives that had never been exploited. These amounted to tens of thousands of pages of precise written and photographic docum

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 Tomb of the Virgin Mary beside it. The interior of the rather spartan cave has traces of two levels of Byzantine (fourth-sixth-century) mosaics, intriguing medieval ceiling and wall decorations, and modern altars on a modern stone floor. These features, however, do not seem too inspiring to most visitors