A Jerusalem judge has asked the prosecution to consider dropping charges against an antiquities collector accused of forging an ancient burial box that was touted as the first physical evidence of Jesus.

Last week, the judge questioned whether the prosecution during the three-year trial had proved "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the artifacts were fakes and whether it had "definitive proof" that Israeli collector Oded Golan faked the archaeological artifacts.

The Justice Ministry has been given six months to decide how to proceed with the case but has not indicated what it plans to decide, the Jerusalem Post reported. more >>

ORANGE, Va. (AP) - It isn't exactly common to make a house two-thirds smaller, or to remove the indoor plumbing. But that's what's been done at Montpelier, the plantation mansion of President James Madison.

The brick Georgian home at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains has undergone a $24 million architectural restoration with a goal of returning the structure to the way it was between 1809, when Madison was elected the nation's fourth president, and 1836, the year he died. Historians view Madison as the architect of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

"We determined at the outset that it would not be a made-up restoration," said Michael C. Quinn, president of the Montpelier Foundation, which operates the 2,650-acre estate. "Every part of it would be accurate and would be authentic, and that we would restore every room in the house, the cellars where the slaves worked and lived, as well as the dining room and all the bedrooms." more >>

Weeks after news broke of the upcoming PBS program “The Bible’s Buried Secrets,” the trailer for the two-hour television special made its YouTube debut Sunday, adding more fuel to a controversy that has already generated a flurry of intense and sometimes heated debates.

“In 1896, near the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt, one of the most important discoveries in biblical archaeology is unearthed,” begins the three-and-a-half-minute trailer.

The program claims to converge science and history “to create an extraordinary new story of an ancient people – a new story of the Bible.” more >>

A group of scholars posted a statement rejecting the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus, a week after a conference in Jerusalem revisited evidence on claims presented in the controversial film "Lost Tomb of Jesus."

In a statement posted Monday on the Duke University Religion Department's blog site, key figures in the discovery of the 1980 Talpoit tomb and other experts who attended the conference agreed that most scholars in attendance rejected the claims that the tomb belonged to the author of Christianity, despite the consensus being represented by the media as otherwise.

"We wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance – including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb – either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly unlikely," reads the statement. more >>

The most hard-core forms of postmodern thought are generally limited to academic campuses, but the postmodern worldview is trickling down in various forms to the popular level. While postmodern literary theorists debate the meaning of "totalizing metanarratives," at the level of popular piety we see the widespread substitution of "spirituality" for biblical Christianity.

In this sense, spirituality is a project centered in the self and constantly negotiable - more about "meaning" than truth. Where does Jesus Christ fit in all this? Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace argue that popular culture is on a quest "to unseat the biblical Christ." They make their case in Dethroning Jesus [Thomas Nelson]..

As Bock and Wallace explain, classical biblical Christianity is being replaced by "Jesusanity." In their words: more >>

Can a world-renowned expert in evolution be a top supporter of the Christian worldview? As a man of faith, Simon Conway Morris, a British paleontologist and professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University, is showing that it can be done.

The leading Christian Darwinist has been a mainstay in the scientific community, especially with his extensive research looking at the Burgess Shale fossil fauna and similar deposits in China and Greenland. Yet at the same time, he understands the merit of theology alongside science. Against what many scientists may think, Morris has stressed that science cannot answer everything, and there is more to the world than what we can just see with our naked eye.

During an interview with The Christian Post, the British professor revealed the limits of science and faith, the problems with materialism, and his thoughts on life in general. more >>