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The real newsy news that one might have expected Newsweek to hang its story on, of course, is Shimon Gibson's claim that he discovered a cave where John performed baptisms. Maybe Newsweek backed off from making the cave too big a part of the story after discovering that "few of [Gibson's] colleagues, even the few who have seen the cave, go along with him." One is quoted as saying, "It's pure fiction. It's not archeology."

In the larger of the two articles, writers Jerry Adler and Anne Underwood note that Scripture repeatedly puts John's baptisms in the Jordan River, never mentioning a cave. "And there is little more than conjecture," they write, "for a scenario sketched in Gibson's book by which John 'might very well have sent Jesus intentionally to visit the scene of his early baptism activities … and our [Tzuba] was just that place.'"

Weblog was earlier somewhat skeptical of Gibson's claims, quoting a few media references to his partner, University of North Carolina's James Tabor. The CBC, for example, had him saying that there's no proof John used the cave.

Last week, Tabor took issue with Weblog's summary. Here's his letter in full:

I thought the sarcastic and cavalier tone of your Weblog entry re: the discovery of the John the Baptist cave was really out of place.

There is no reason to take such an approach and it does your readers a disservice. Gibson is a serious archaeologist, one of the best in the business, and he painstakingly argues in his book the reasons the 1st century pottery evidence and other finds in the cave point in the direction of his hypothesis.

And why poke fun at him for finding the only Jewish first century burial shroud ever discovered? My University had it C-14 dated. It seems the author of your Weblog would be glad to see such valuable material evidence turning up, whether Gibson found it or someone else. That we began to dig the cave in 2000 and only now are publishing the preliminary findings is standard procedure in the business. In fact, publishing within a year of finishing a dig is kind of a record, often it is more than a decade after!

Gibson should be congratulated for his efforts. Obviously the author had not bothered to even look at the book or evaluate any of the arguments or the evidence. Our scholarly academic volume will be out next year published by the Israel Exploration Society, the most prestigious venue in Israel for archaeological publishing. The entire piece was substandard for your magazine, to which I am a subscriber. I see no justification for it at all.

Weblog did say that Gibson is a serious archaeologist and didn't mock his earlier findings. The point was simply that media coverage over the first few days largely accepted the notion that the cave belonged to John the Baptist himself. Amid the ongoing controversy over the James ossuary, however, a healthy amount of skepticism—though not scorn—is in order. In that sense, Newsweek's cover package gets it right: The question isn't whether we have an authentic biblical relic, it's what archaeological finds can tell us about the past. John the Baptist's cave makes headlines and draws pilgrims, but even if it's only valuable for what it tells us about the Byzantine monks who scrawled on the cave walls, it's very valuable indeed.

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48