Post by timoneill on Aug 24, 2012 13:58:03 GMT
I put this together in a thread on the James Randi forum where some Mythers tried the "Nazareth never existed" tack. After this post, they totally abandoned that line of argument. It refers to other, earlier posts but you should get the idea:
"davefoc": Evidence has been put forth for and against the existence of Nazareth. Maybe the two sides could be left to resolve that issue to the degree possible before we start rehashing every HJ thread that has come before this one?
Okay, then let's actually look at the evidence of archaeologists, then consider the armchair objections of the piano teacher from Oregon named Rene Salm and let objective sceptics decide who is more likely to be correct.
Firstly, I should note that I was mistaken in a previous post in a couple of my characterisations of the current position of the piano teacher, Salm. Since I was travelling at the time and it's been some time since I checked Salm's website, I recalled that he had actually accepted the dating of some of the agricultural terraces at Nazareth and of the recently excavated house there. I was wrong - Salm is much more intransigent than that. And without good reason, as we'll see.
Reading Salm on this subject reminds me of the days, many years ago, when I actually used to bother reading Creationist material so I could debate Creationists. Salm's book, The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, bears many similarities to Creationist classics like Duane Gish's Evolution? The Fossils Say No!. You have an amateur with no training in the relevant field. You have them desperately trying to critique published work by actual specialists and experts and nitpick at it to find reasons for doubt. You have triumphant leaping on the smallest error (eg a mislabeled diagram) as evidence of incompetence if not outright fraud. You have an assumption that the experts secretly know they are wrong and are trying to deceive laypeople for nefarious reasons. And you have a driving ideological bias motivating all of the above, but masquerading as objective critical analysis for the public good. The resemblance is uncanny.
But since Hans seems (what a surprise!) as wholly convinced by the piano teacher as he is by any amateur hobbyist who confirms his prejudices, let's look at some things he's had to say to support the idea Nazareth didn't exist in the early First Century. In response to the idea that some of the agricultural terraces found at Nazareth date to the early First Century and before, Hans declares, with his usual bombastic faux-authority:
My, that does sound very impressive. They are "impossible to date" apparently. And apparently there "isn't ANY base (sic) for that dating whatsoever". Which kind of makes you wonder where those silly old archaeologists got the idea they could be dated to before the early First Century. Are these archaeologists incompetents, as Hans suggests, or do they know a thing or two that Hans doesn't?
Not surprisingly, they do.
The claim that structures like these are "impossible to date" is nonsense. Archaeologists date structures with no clearly determinant architectural or construction features all the time using find stratigraphy. Even Hans' favourite piano teacher knows this, which is why he leapt on the initial report of a surface survey of the site by the Israeli Archaeological Authority's (IAA) Dr Mordechai Haiman in April 1997, noting that it made no mention of finds indicating early First Century habitation (finds from the "Early Roman Period" and "Hellenistic Period"). Actually, Haiman's surface survey did turn up some finds from those periods, which is why the brief initial report on his findings used the word "mostly" when noting that it had been mainly Late Roman Period sherds found in his work. Unfortunately for Salm, that preliminary survey and GPS mapping was not a full excavation. The excavations and more extensive analysis that followed turned up much more of the material he insists can't be there. More importantly, the excavated material was able to demonstrate that several of the terrace sites excavated clearly dated to the Early Roman and Hellenistic Periods by means of find stratigraphy.
S. Pfann, R. Voss, Y. Rapuano, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report”, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society vol. 25 (2007) pp. 19-79 details these finds in the extensive "Appendix 2" by Jewish archaeologist Yehuda Rapuano. Ten pages of the 61 page archaeological report detail the finds from a number of sites, giving diagrammatic drawings of many and assessments of the nature of the item the (usually) fragmentary items and estimates of their date provenance. This is all standard stuff as any archaeologist would expect to find in any peer-reviewed journal report of this kind.
Rapuano notes that the finds ranged from a single potsherd from an Early Bronze Age III Period platter (an intrusive incidental find, since there is no other indication of settlement on the site in that period) up to an entirely intact "Black Gaza Ware" bowl from the Ottoman Period. Rapuano summarised the finds saying:
The earliest occupation seems to have occurred in the late Hellenistic period of the first and second centuries BC. Examples dating to this period were primarily the jar and jug sherds discovered in Area B-1. A single jug base of this period was also found in Area A-2 (Fig. 38.5). The horizontal handle of the krater (Fig. 38:6) may derive from this period as well. A small amount of material dated to the Early Roman period of the first century BC to first century AD was found in Areas A-1, A-2 and C-1. The best represented pottery at the site was dated from the Late Roman to the early Byzantine period of the third to fourth or fifth centuries AD. The only area in which pottery from this period was not found was Area B-1.
(Rapuano, p. 69)
Again, this is all standard stuff with appropriately cautious language in places ("may derive from this period as well") and a clear indication of the relative volumes and general distributions of the finds. The problem for Salm is the stuff about the Hellenistic and Early Roman period finds in areas B-1, A-1, A-2 and C-1 of the dig, which according to his armchair theory should not be there. The fact that they were found in situ and, as Rapuano notes elsewhere in reply to Salm "in definable archaeological contexts" also sinks Hans' hopeful claim that these terraces are "impossible to date". This is nonsense. The cluster of Hellenistic finds in Area B-1 while there are no Late Roman to the early Byzantine finds in the same area gives a clear indication of the date of that part of the site. So does the grouping of Early Roman finds in the three distinct areas Rapuano indicates.
Rapuano then goes on over the following pages to detail the finds from each location on the site. For example:
Fig. 38:3 is the folded, everted rim and short, cylindrical neck of a storage jar that may date to the Herodian period, and Fig. 38:4 is the rim of a storage jar of the Late Hellenistic period. The base of a jug, Fig. 38:5, could date either to the late Hellenistic or Early Roman period.
(Rapuano, p. 71)
Again, Rapuano expresses himself with the usual caution required of a professional archaeologist, while at the same time giving his trained assessment of their dating provenance. Even excluding finds where Rapuano's date range estimates cover the early first century AD but extend into later periods, I counted no less than 20 finds in his report that he judged to be from the period in which the piano teacher Salm claims there was no settlement there.
So how does Salm deal with all this? Badly. Given that he has no training in the discipline and so has never analysed an artefact in his life, he can hardly dispute Rapuano's assessment. And he's never even seen the finds in question and only seems to have visited Nazareth once as a tourist (as far as I can tell). So he's reduced to nitpicking. He leaps on what he claims is evidence of incompetence, saying the report’s authors give two different dates for the same artefact. Actually, as Pfann and Rapuano were later able to confirm, the mistake was made by the article's editors - they simply mislabeled a diagram drawing of the find.
Apart from this Salm has pretty much got nothing. Faced with multiple finds at several locations on the site, all from the very periods he claims Nazareth was uninhabited, he simply declares the archaeologists wrong on the weird grounds that only 15 of the finds in the report are noted with a typological parallel. Rapuano refers to examples in Adan-Bayewitz's Common Pottery in Roman Galilee (1993) in several places, but Salm declares that because he doesn't do this for all the finds (which is in no way standard in any archaeological report), his estimates can be rejected:
"Put bluntly, the NVF evidence for Nazareth in the time of Jesus rests on no more than Y. Rapuano’s opinion."
Put bluntly, this is ludicrous. The report is by three qualified archaeologists and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal of archaeology which is used by other qualified experts. It is absolutely standard in the way it reports the finds and that supposedly mere "opinion" is exactly the opinion that counts - one by several qualified experts who have excavated many sites and reported many, many other such finds in precisely this way. To dismiss the "opinion" of a qualified expert is breath-taking. Whose opinions are we meant to rely on then? Bee-keepers? Accountants? Apparently only the opinion of all-knowing piano teachers count when it comes to this matter.
Back to Hans' claims:
E.g., the pottery from that farm is mis-represented as "early to late Roman" or "helenistic", but actually the Israel Antiquities Authority dated those strictly to late Roman, i.e., 2nd to 4th century. Widening it as "early to late" is as misleading as saying that cars existed in the 2nd millennium CE. I mean, sure, the real dating does fall into the enlarged interval, but there is nothing that requires such a misleading widening the claimed interval backwards.
This is a pack of nonsense. The wording of the initial survey by Mordechai Haiman did not date the finds of the surface survey "strictly to late Roman" at all - the word Haiman's brief initial report used was "mostly". Which was true. As Pfann and Rapuano responded to Salm on this point:
Haiman was correct to note the predominance of ‘Late Roman’ second- to fourth century pottery scattered on the surface. He was careful to use the word ‘mostly’ and did not say that the surface finds were limited to that period. To mention this in his report was peripheral to the GPS survey itself. To have provided any more detail than that would have been out of keeping with the parameters of a GPS survey report.
S. Pfann, Y. Rapuano, “ON the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm”, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society vol. 26 (2008) pp. 105-108, p. 105)
Hans continues:
The coins in question included Hellenistic, Hasmonean and early Roman coins found by Yardenna Alexandre in 1997 and 1998. Pfann and Rapuano note that the following sentence in their report was provided to them by Dr. Alexandre herself:
In addition,165 coins were uncovered by Yardenna Alexandre in the 1997–1998 excavations at Mary’s Well, Nazareth. The coins were overwhelmingly Mamluk, but also included a few Hellenistic, Hasmonaean, Early Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad and Crusader coins.
(Pfann and Rapuano, p. 106)
They go on to note that Dr. Alexandre will be publishing more on her dig and these finds, with analysis of the coins by Ariel Berman. The piano teacher Salm has made a big song and dance about the fact that this report has yet to appear and (bizarrely) had strongly implied that Pfann and Rapuano are stupid enough to simply lie about these coins in print and in a peer reviewed journal. But archaeologists are notoriously slow to publish and it will be interesting how Salm will spin this again when the report appears and wipes egg on his face. Given his past form when new evidence has turned up, I'm sure he'll find a way.
The point is that kokhim are a type of tomb used by upper socio-economic groups, not peasant farmers who are first settling a new area. If these kokhim appeared in the mid First Century, this means there must have been settlement there before this period, which must have then grown to the point where it could support people rich enough to afford to have kokhim constructed. Therefore these tombs imply settlement earlier than the mid-First Century. Which pushes settlement back into the period the piano teacher is so desperate to avoid.
But it’s actually much worse for Salm than that. Because some of the lamp and other pottery finds in the tombs and burial caves on the site found by Bagatti (1969) and Feig (2000) also date to the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods. Salm makes a great deal of the fact that the "Herodian" or "Bow Spout" lamps found in several of these burials have had their probable dates revised in recent decades. Back in the 1960s archaeologists considered this distinctively Jewish style of artefact to begin appearing as early as 75 BC. More recent work has brought that forward and Salm quotes Varda Sussman dating their first appearance to "the reign of King Herod" (ie 37-4 BC) and then in a later article as saying "‘Recent archaeological evidence suggests that their first appearance was somewhat later, after the reign of Herod" (Sussman, Varda. “Lighting the Way Through History.” Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr 1985).
The only problem here is that this estimate of this kind of lamp's inception, which is the latest Salm can find in the literature, still doesn't help him, because it actually places this kind of lamp smack bang in the middle of the period he desperately needs to avoid - the early First Century AD. But Salm is nothing if not resourceful:
Thus, we can now date the first appearance of the bow-spouted lamp in Jerusalem to c. 1-25 CE. Because a few years must be allowed for the spread of the type to rural villages of the north, c. 15-c. 40 CE is the earliest probable time for the appearance of this type in Southern Galilee. Accordingly, we shall adopt 25 CE as the terminus post quem for the bow-spouted oil lamp at Nazareth.
(Salm, 2008, pp 168-69)
By this bit of fancy-footwork, Salm manages to take Sussman's "somewhat later, after the reign of Herod", tack on a whole quarter of a century to get these lamps a mere 150 kilometres north to southern Galilee and thus at least edge the terminus post quem for these artefacts a bit further away from the time of Jesus. Exactly how he came up with the figure of 25 years or why it would take 25 years for a lamp which became common precisely because it was so easy to make to spread a couple of day’s walk northwards he never bothers to explain.
Is anyone else reminded of Creationist tactics at this point?
Now Hans departs from the tendentious and contrived fiddling of the facts of his only prop, the piano-teaching armchair contrarian, and bravely strikes out on his own, in his inimitably bold and hilarious style:
As I note above, settlements established enough to sustain families who can have rock-cut kokhim built for them don't pop up out of nothing. They grow from smaller, poorer, earlier settlements. So the kokhim on their own imply a smaller, poorer, earlier settlement on the site. And that's precisely what the other archaeological evidence from the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods indicate, both by their nature (low status items, roughly made), their distribution and their number. We know there was a larger, richer town there later, the evidence indicates that clearly too.
As for his confused comments about about lack of water, this too is contradicted by all the evidence. Zvi Gal's Lower Galilee in the Iron Age (Eisenbrauns, 1992) notes that the site would have been attractive precisely because of its abundance of springs:
The area around the city (of Nazareth) consists of limestone formation. There are several springs within this small Nazareth valley. The topography of the area and the fact it has many surrounding springs, proves that it was occupied during ancient periods.
(Z. Gal, p. 15)
Dr Ken Dark also notes the hydrological evidence that this would have been a site well watered both from these springs and from seasonal rain collection in the (now filled in) wadi that existed at the time. Exactly how your "barely got enough water to even survive the summer" nonsense squares with the fact of a much larger town there in the Middle Roman period and beyond (which even your piano man admits) I have no idea. Perhaps they didn't use water.
More utter nonsense. What Dr Alexandre said was while tombs had been found in the valley area (and tombs always imply a settlement) this house represented the first settlement remains that confirmed this. She is not saying that there are no other remains in the area that also imply a settlement (eg the farm terraces etc) and given that she has consulted with and corresponded with Pfann and Rapuano about their digs, to pretend otherwise is simply ludicrous fantasy.
It's amazing the level of crap people will resort to when their emotionally and ideologically founded positions are countered by experts with evidence. The piano teacher is now pooh-poohing Alexandre (despite citing her before - he changes his allegiances to suit his agenda) and claiming there is no evidence the house in question comes from his early First Century danger zone. Once again, the experts disagree.
So I'll ask objective readers (if they have made it this far) - who should we believe here? The amateur armchair contrarian with an axe to grind or a string of mainly Jewish archaeologists publishing in peer reviewed journals?
The answer is clear to any rationalist.
"davefoc": Evidence has been put forth for and against the existence of Nazareth. Maybe the two sides could be left to resolve that issue to the degree possible before we start rehashing every HJ thread that has come before this one?
Okay, then let's actually look at the evidence of archaeologists, then consider the armchair objections of the piano teacher from Oregon named Rene Salm and let objective sceptics decide who is more likely to be correct.
Firstly, I should note that I was mistaken in a previous post in a couple of my characterisations of the current position of the piano teacher, Salm. Since I was travelling at the time and it's been some time since I checked Salm's website, I recalled that he had actually accepted the dating of some of the agricultural terraces at Nazareth and of the recently excavated house there. I was wrong - Salm is much more intransigent than that. And without good reason, as we'll see.
Reading Salm on this subject reminds me of the days, many years ago, when I actually used to bother reading Creationist material so I could debate Creationists. Salm's book, The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, bears many similarities to Creationist classics like Duane Gish's Evolution? The Fossils Say No!. You have an amateur with no training in the relevant field. You have them desperately trying to critique published work by actual specialists and experts and nitpick at it to find reasons for doubt. You have triumphant leaping on the smallest error (eg a mislabeled diagram) as evidence of incompetence if not outright fraud. You have an assumption that the experts secretly know they are wrong and are trying to deceive laypeople for nefarious reasons. And you have a driving ideological bias motivating all of the above, but masquerading as objective critical analysis for the public good. The resemblance is uncanny.
But since Hans seems (what a surprise!) as wholly convinced by the piano teacher as he is by any amateur hobbyist who confirms his prejudices, let's look at some things he's had to say to support the idea Nazareth didn't exist in the early First Century. In response to the idea that some of the agricultural terraces found at Nazareth date to the early First Century and before, Hans declares, with his usual bombastic faux-authority:
the terraces are presented as proof that the village was there at the time, but they're essentially impossible to date. The stones wouldn't look any different if they had been from before the Assyrian invasion or from the Byzantine era, or anything in between. There's a certainty claimed about exactly when it's from, when actually there isn't ANY base for that dating whatsoever.
My, that does sound very impressive. They are "impossible to date" apparently. And apparently there "isn't ANY base (sic) for that dating whatsoever". Which kind of makes you wonder where those silly old archaeologists got the idea they could be dated to before the early First Century. Are these archaeologists incompetents, as Hans suggests, or do they know a thing or two that Hans doesn't?
Not surprisingly, they do.
The claim that structures like these are "impossible to date" is nonsense. Archaeologists date structures with no clearly determinant architectural or construction features all the time using find stratigraphy. Even Hans' favourite piano teacher knows this, which is why he leapt on the initial report of a surface survey of the site by the Israeli Archaeological Authority's (IAA) Dr Mordechai Haiman in April 1997, noting that it made no mention of finds indicating early First Century habitation (finds from the "Early Roman Period" and "Hellenistic Period"). Actually, Haiman's surface survey did turn up some finds from those periods, which is why the brief initial report on his findings used the word "mostly" when noting that it had been mainly Late Roman Period sherds found in his work. Unfortunately for Salm, that preliminary survey and GPS mapping was not a full excavation. The excavations and more extensive analysis that followed turned up much more of the material he insists can't be there. More importantly, the excavated material was able to demonstrate that several of the terrace sites excavated clearly dated to the Early Roman and Hellenistic Periods by means of find stratigraphy.
S. Pfann, R. Voss, Y. Rapuano, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report”, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society vol. 25 (2007) pp. 19-79 details these finds in the extensive "Appendix 2" by Jewish archaeologist Yehuda Rapuano. Ten pages of the 61 page archaeological report detail the finds from a number of sites, giving diagrammatic drawings of many and assessments of the nature of the item the (usually) fragmentary items and estimates of their date provenance. This is all standard stuff as any archaeologist would expect to find in any peer-reviewed journal report of this kind.
Rapuano notes that the finds ranged from a single potsherd from an Early Bronze Age III Period platter (an intrusive incidental find, since there is no other indication of settlement on the site in that period) up to an entirely intact "Black Gaza Ware" bowl from the Ottoman Period. Rapuano summarised the finds saying:
The earliest occupation seems to have occurred in the late Hellenistic period of the first and second centuries BC. Examples dating to this period were primarily the jar and jug sherds discovered in Area B-1. A single jug base of this period was also found in Area A-2 (Fig. 38.5). The horizontal handle of the krater (Fig. 38:6) may derive from this period as well. A small amount of material dated to the Early Roman period of the first century BC to first century AD was found in Areas A-1, A-2 and C-1. The best represented pottery at the site was dated from the Late Roman to the early Byzantine period of the third to fourth or fifth centuries AD. The only area in which pottery from this period was not found was Area B-1.
(Rapuano, p. 69)
Again, this is all standard stuff with appropriately cautious language in places ("may derive from this period as well") and a clear indication of the relative volumes and general distributions of the finds. The problem for Salm is the stuff about the Hellenistic and Early Roman period finds in areas B-1, A-1, A-2 and C-1 of the dig, which according to his armchair theory should not be there. The fact that they were found in situ and, as Rapuano notes elsewhere in reply to Salm "in definable archaeological contexts" also sinks Hans' hopeful claim that these terraces are "impossible to date". This is nonsense. The cluster of Hellenistic finds in Area B-1 while there are no Late Roman to the early Byzantine finds in the same area gives a clear indication of the date of that part of the site. So does the grouping of Early Roman finds in the three distinct areas Rapuano indicates.
Rapuano then goes on over the following pages to detail the finds from each location on the site. For example:
Fig. 38:3 is the folded, everted rim and short, cylindrical neck of a storage jar that may date to the Herodian period, and Fig. 38:4 is the rim of a storage jar of the Late Hellenistic period. The base of a jug, Fig. 38:5, could date either to the late Hellenistic or Early Roman period.
(Rapuano, p. 71)
Again, Rapuano expresses himself with the usual caution required of a professional archaeologist, while at the same time giving his trained assessment of their dating provenance. Even excluding finds where Rapuano's date range estimates cover the early first century AD but extend into later periods, I counted no less than 20 finds in his report that he judged to be from the period in which the piano teacher Salm claims there was no settlement there.
So how does Salm deal with all this? Badly. Given that he has no training in the discipline and so has never analysed an artefact in his life, he can hardly dispute Rapuano's assessment. And he's never even seen the finds in question and only seems to have visited Nazareth once as a tourist (as far as I can tell). So he's reduced to nitpicking. He leaps on what he claims is evidence of incompetence, saying the report’s authors give two different dates for the same artefact. Actually, as Pfann and Rapuano were later able to confirm, the mistake was made by the article's editors - they simply mislabeled a diagram drawing of the find.
Apart from this Salm has pretty much got nothing. Faced with multiple finds at several locations on the site, all from the very periods he claims Nazareth was uninhabited, he simply declares the archaeologists wrong on the weird grounds that only 15 of the finds in the report are noted with a typological parallel. Rapuano refers to examples in Adan-Bayewitz's Common Pottery in Roman Galilee (1993) in several places, but Salm declares that because he doesn't do this for all the finds (which is in no way standard in any archaeological report), his estimates can be rejected:
"Put bluntly, the NVF evidence for Nazareth in the time of Jesus rests on no more than Y. Rapuano’s opinion."
Put bluntly, this is ludicrous. The report is by three qualified archaeologists and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal of archaeology which is used by other qualified experts. It is absolutely standard in the way it reports the finds and that supposedly mere "opinion" is exactly the opinion that counts - one by several qualified experts who have excavated many sites and reported many, many other such finds in precisely this way. To dismiss the "opinion" of a qualified expert is breath-taking. Whose opinions are we meant to rely on then? Bee-keepers? Accountants? Apparently only the opinion of all-knowing piano teachers count when it comes to this matter.
Back to Hans' claims:
E.g., the pottery from that farm is mis-represented as "early to late Roman" or "helenistic", but actually the Israel Antiquities Authority dated those strictly to late Roman, i.e., 2nd to 4th century. Widening it as "early to late" is as misleading as saying that cars existed in the 2nd millennium CE. I mean, sure, the real dating does fall into the enlarged interval, but there is nothing that requires such a misleading widening the claimed interval backwards.
This is a pack of nonsense. The wording of the initial survey by Mordechai Haiman did not date the finds of the surface survey "strictly to late Roman" at all - the word Haiman's brief initial report used was "mostly". Which was true. As Pfann and Rapuano responded to Salm on this point:
Haiman was correct to note the predominance of ‘Late Roman’ second- to fourth century pottery scattered on the surface. He was careful to use the word ‘mostly’ and did not say that the surface finds were limited to that period. To mention this in his report was peripheral to the GPS survey itself. To have provided any more detail than that would have been out of keeping with the parameters of a GPS survey report.
S. Pfann, Y. Rapuano, “ON the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm”, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society vol. 26 (2008) pp. 105-108, p. 105)
Hans continues:
coins are often cited as evidence, but the IAA seems to know nothing and never claimed anything about coins there earlier than Byzantine coins.
The coins in question included Hellenistic, Hasmonean and early Roman coins found by Yardenna Alexandre in 1997 and 1998. Pfann and Rapuano note that the following sentence in their report was provided to them by Dr. Alexandre herself:
In addition,165 coins were uncovered by Yardenna Alexandre in the 1997–1998 excavations at Mary’s Well, Nazareth. The coins were overwhelmingly Mamluk, but also included a few Hellenistic, Hasmonaean, Early Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad and Crusader coins.
(Pfann and Rapuano, p. 106)
They go on to note that Dr. Alexandre will be publishing more on her dig and these finds, with analysis of the coins by Ariel Berman. The piano teacher Salm has made a big song and dance about the fact that this report has yet to appear and (bizarrely) had strongly implied that Pfann and Rapuano are stupid enough to simply lie about these coins in print and in a peer reviewed journal. But archaeologists are notoriously slow to publish and it will be interesting how Salm will spin this again when the report appears and wipes egg on his face. Given his past form when new evidence has turned up, I'm sure he'll find a way.
about the tombs, the claim isn't that they suddenly appear in the second half of the second century, but that the TYPE of tomb didn't appear anywhere in the area until circa 50 CE and was used until the 5th century CE. So while maybe 24 tombs wouldn't appear over night, but they also didn't accumulate before that type of tomb was in use.
The point is that kokhim are a type of tomb used by upper socio-economic groups, not peasant farmers who are first settling a new area. If these kokhim appeared in the mid First Century, this means there must have been settlement there before this period, which must have then grown to the point where it could support people rich enough to afford to have kokhim constructed. Therefore these tombs imply settlement earlier than the mid-First Century. Which pushes settlement back into the period the piano teacher is so desperate to avoid.
But it’s actually much worse for Salm than that. Because some of the lamp and other pottery finds in the tombs and burial caves on the site found by Bagatti (1969) and Feig (2000) also date to the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods. Salm makes a great deal of the fact that the "Herodian" or "Bow Spout" lamps found in several of these burials have had their probable dates revised in recent decades. Back in the 1960s archaeologists considered this distinctively Jewish style of artefact to begin appearing as early as 75 BC. More recent work has brought that forward and Salm quotes Varda Sussman dating their first appearance to "the reign of King Herod" (ie 37-4 BC) and then in a later article as saying "‘Recent archaeological evidence suggests that their first appearance was somewhat later, after the reign of Herod" (Sussman, Varda. “Lighting the Way Through History.” Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr 1985).
The only problem here is that this estimate of this kind of lamp's inception, which is the latest Salm can find in the literature, still doesn't help him, because it actually places this kind of lamp smack bang in the middle of the period he desperately needs to avoid - the early First Century AD. But Salm is nothing if not resourceful:
Thus, we can now date the first appearance of the bow-spouted lamp in Jerusalem to c. 1-25 CE. Because a few years must be allowed for the spread of the type to rural villages of the north, c. 15-c. 40 CE is the earliest probable time for the appearance of this type in Southern Galilee. Accordingly, we shall adopt 25 CE as the terminus post quem for the bow-spouted oil lamp at Nazareth.
(Salm, 2008, pp 168-69)
By this bit of fancy-footwork, Salm manages to take Sussman's "somewhat later, after the reign of Herod", tack on a whole quarter of a century to get these lamps a mere 150 kilometres north to southern Galilee and thus at least edge the terminus post quem for these artefacts a bit further away from the time of Jesus. Exactly how he came up with the figure of 25 years or why it would take 25 years for a lamp which became common precisely because it was so easy to make to spread a couple of day’s walk northwards he never bothers to explain.
Is anyone else reminded of Creationist tactics at this point?
Now Hans departs from the tendentious and contrived fiddling of the facts of his only prop, the piano-teaching armchair contrarian, and bravely strikes out on his own, in his inimitably bold and hilarious style:
Also, I would add myself, I don't really see how, if those were luxury tombs for the RICH, they require a tiny village of up to 50 POOR families cramped in a small place with barely enough water (i.e., the last place that someone wealthy would want to live in), to explain. Because the latter is the only thing that has actually been supported in Nazareth. That's like trying to explain the pyramids at Giza by arguing it was the poor from a nearby village buried there. Not literally as preposterous as the pyramids, mind you, but you can't really have it both ways that it was both something for the rich AND actually belonging to some poor peasants in a tiny village that barely got enough water to even survive the summer.
As I note above, settlements established enough to sustain families who can have rock-cut kokhim built for them don't pop up out of nothing. They grow from smaller, poorer, earlier settlements. So the kokhim on their own imply a smaller, poorer, earlier settlement on the site. And that's precisely what the other archaeological evidence from the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods indicate, both by their nature (low status items, roughly made), their distribution and their number. We know there was a larger, richer town there later, the evidence indicates that clearly too.
As for his confused comments about about lack of water, this too is contradicted by all the evidence. Zvi Gal's Lower Galilee in the Iron Age (Eisenbrauns, 1992) notes that the site would have been attractive precisely because of its abundance of springs:
The area around the city (of Nazareth) consists of limestone formation. There are several springs within this small Nazareth valley. The topography of the area and the fact it has many surrounding springs, proves that it was occupied during ancient periods.
(Z. Gal, p. 15)
Dr Ken Dark also notes the hydrological evidence that this would have been a site well watered both from these springs and from seasonal rain collection in the (now filled in) wadi that existed at the time. Exactly how your "barely got enough water to even survive the summer" nonsense squares with the fact of a much larger town there in the Middle Roman period and beyond (which even your piano man admits) I have no idea. Perhaps they didn't use water.
since earlier you were citing the Israeli archaeologists as evidence, if there was earlier evidence of a settlement in that time in Nazareth, someone forgot to tell for example Dr Alexandre, who is responsible for most of the digging there. Because, again, the statement from the IAA about that house says it's the first such evidence.
More utter nonsense. What Dr Alexandre said was while tombs had been found in the valley area (and tombs always imply a settlement) this house represented the first settlement remains that confirmed this. She is not saying that there are no other remains in the area that also imply a settlement (eg the farm terraces etc) and given that she has consulted with and corresponded with Pfann and Rapuano about their digs, to pretend otherwise is simply ludicrous fantasy.
It's amazing the level of crap people will resort to when their emotionally and ideologically founded positions are countered by experts with evidence. The piano teacher is now pooh-poohing Alexandre (despite citing her before - he changes his allegiances to suit his agenda) and claiming there is no evidence the house in question comes from his early First Century danger zone. Once again, the experts disagree.
So I'll ask objective readers (if they have made it this far) - who should we believe here? The amateur armchair contrarian with an axe to grind or a string of mainly Jewish archaeologists publishing in peer reviewed journals?
The answer is clear to any rationalist.
