JoeZias.com

Thanks to Jim West on Xtalk for this link to Joe Zias's own web page. It follows the trend noted by Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis recently which sees scholars setting up web sites with their own names:

JoeZias.com

It is headed "Science and Archaeology Group" (and entitled, presumably by mistake, "Curriculum Vitae") but if you scroll down a bit you come to some reproductions of articles by Zias:

Crucifixion in Antiquity: The Anthropological Evidence

The Cemeteries of Qumran, Celibacy: Confusion Laid to Rest?, Dead Sea Discoveries 7 (2000): 220-253

Health and Healing in the Land of Israel: A Paleopathological Perspective, originally in Mikhmanim (Spring 1999) [No further bibliographical details given]

The first of these also appears elsewhere on the web (Century One Foundation and James Tabor's site), so now three versions of the same piece. But on Zias's own site it comes with a new topical postscript very critical of the way crucifixion is depicted in The Passion of the Christ, something Zias has commented upon in various newspaper articles, especially in the week or so leading up to the American release (see older blog entries for details; search on "Zias"):

Postscript – The Mel Gibson Controversy

There is an element here that was new to me, the source for Mel Gibson's depiction of the crucifixion:

One can perhaps ask, why did he with a film budget of upwards of 30 million dollars, be so mistaken. It was not until 2003 that a colleague asked me to take a look at an article (The Jesus War) in the New Yorker (9/2003) that I realized the problem with the historicity of the whole film process. In the interview Gibson tells the author that his source of information for the crucifixion comes from an article “On the physical death of Jesus Christ” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (1986). Apparently Gibson was totally unaware of the fact that the journal, which goes back to the 19th century, had never received in all its history so many negative responses to any other scientific article. This article, full of errors and suppositions along with what one critic called ‘forensic mythology’ thus became the template on which Gibson’s film and all the gratuitous violence is largely based.