c. 2006 Religion News Service

BEACHWOOD, Ohio _ Stand as Jews did 2,000 years ago before a stone inscription from the Temple Mount. Imagine the place where priests announced the beginning and the end of the Sabbath with trumpet blasts that could be heard throughout Jerusalem.

Gaze at a large stone table filled with first-century glass and pottery as artistic images through the centuries of the Last Supper are shown on an adjacent wall.

See large first-century urns that bring to life the story of the Gospel miracle of water being changed into wine, and examine a replica created from a heel bone pierced by a nail that is the only tangible evidence of the practice of crucifixion in that period.

“Cradle of Christianity: Treasures From the Holy Land,” an exhibit that opened April 1 and runs to Oct. 22 at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, has the power to excite art lovers, historians and scholars.

The exhibition of major discoveries in biblical archaeology, to be seen here for the first time in the United States, will then travel to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for a stay at The Museum of Art. It will end its U.S. tour with an exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University in Atlanta.

“It makes it very real,” said Sister Diana Stano, president of Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio. “The whole notion … adds to your prayer life.”

Mutual respect between archaeology and religion has not always been the case.

In the beginning, much of biblical archaeology was the province of seminary professors and treasure hunters, some motivated more by faith than science, who used the Bible as their guide for clues on where to dig.

The 20th century saw that approach give way to skeptical scholars who started from a position of distrust of the Bible. By the 1960s, the Bible had become nearly irrelevant to many archaeologists.

But several discoveries in modern times, including some prominent artifacts on display in the “Cradle of Christianity” exhibit, have helped return the pendulum to a place where the historicity of the Bible is not taken on faith, but Scripture is taken seriously as a literary and historical source.

The exhibit at the Maltz Museum, featuring artifacts from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, provides concrete evidence supporting the existence of biblical characters and offers a new window into understanding Scriptural stories and the early development of Christianity and Judaism.

Among the artifacts are a Latin inscription of the Roman ruler who sentenced Jesus to death and an elaborately carved ossuary believed to once have contained the remains of the Jewish high priest said to have delivered Jesus to the Romans.

“The physical in a way is a validation of historically documented facts like the existence of a Pontius Pilate” or the existence of Caiaphas, said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum.

The reality of early Christian and Jewish life, as emphasized in the museum exhibit, is that both faiths shared common roots.

“It sets such a perfect understanding of Jesus’ activities,” said David Mevorah, exhibit curator who also is curator of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Archaeology at the Israel Museum. “It places them exactly in the Jewish setting of the time.”

Early in the exhibit, inscriptions from the period show Jesus and Mary were common names.

Six large stone jars from the first century provide a dramatic showcase for imagining the miracle story in the second chapter of the Gospel of John. In that story, Jesus was said to have changed water from six stone jars into wine when the wine ran out at a wedding in Cana.

Even the story in the Gospel of Matthew of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers is made real with a display of first-century coins. Each year, all adult Jewish men were required to donate a Tyrian half-shekel, a valuable silver coin, to the temple. Most people did not have such a coin, so they relied on the money-changers to provide them with the coin in exchange for an equivalent amount of bronze coins, plus an 8 percent commission.

The museum display shows a Tyrian half-shekel, the 128 bronze coins it was valued at and an additional 11 bronze coins representing the commission.

The second part of the exhibit moves to the fourth through seventh centuries, exploring the concurrent development of Judaism and Christianity through dramatic exhibits such as the full-scale reconstruction of the chancel of a Byzantine-era church and artifacts from the remains of excavated synagogues. The show includes the two largest three-dimensional menorahs ever found in excavation.

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, a professor of religious studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, said as he walked through the “very moving” exhibition, “I felt keenly aware of Christianity’s Jewish roots.”

In a region of the world that has seen so much turmoil in modern times, perhaps an exhibit such as “Cradle of Christianity” can present another perspective on how people of different faiths can share the land and live side by side, Mevorah said.

This summer, thousands of volunteers will join archaeological digs in the Holy Land, getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. to beat the summer heat that easily can rise above 100 to carefully sift the ground for eight hours in the hopes of unearthing objects that might provide clues to a culture that has shaped modern history.

They then might spend afternoons washing and dating pottery, and some will attend archaeological lectures at night.

Many of these volunteers will be motivated by their faith, content to work hard at their own expense for several weeks to be in the land of their spiritual ancestors, where it can be a religious experience to envision biblical figures walking along the paths they are uncovering.

Back in Beachwood, visitors to the Maltz Museum have the opportunity to see some of the most important fruits of nearly a century of labor that has produced what some consider a new golden age of biblical archaeology.

MO/JL RNS END

(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

Editors: To obtain photos of biblical archeology on display at the Maltz Museum, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.