Am I the only person who looks at pictures of those big honkin’ ossuaries that purportedly have the bones of the whole Jesus clan and wonders if female ghosts are going to emerge and melt the heads of anyone opening them?
Anyone? Anyone else at all?
In case you’re not up on this, a documentary entitled “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” produced by James Cameron–who is king of the world but not, so I’m told, king of the Jews–details the discovery of some bone boxes bearing the names of Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and…best of all…the latter two’s son. This has resulted in the expected reactions ranging from dispassionate curiosity to outrage over another perceived attack on Christianity, and everything in between. Naturally my own leanings are toward the dispassionate curiosity side: I find it interesting, but I simply don’t see how it’s possible to prove it definitively. Still, I have to admit I was in stitches over the comments of one Rev. David Knapp of Port Jefferson Station in Long Island who asserted:
“This is all hocus-pocus. Jesus died and rose from the dead and left the tomb and went up to heaven–and there were 500 witnesses to that, so there are no bones to be found. This is not going to shake our faith.”
It’s not the sentiment that breaks me up so much as the phrasing. The announcement of a scientific discovery, an archaeological find, is considered “hocus-pocus,” while the notion of rising from the dead, departing your burial place and being transported to heaven…a concept rooted in, at the very least, the supernatural, the uncanny, the magical…THAT he’s got no problem accepting.
I’m just really saddened that Jesus is no longer a character on “South Park.” They’d have a field day with this.
PAD
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Yeah…I find it kind of interesting. Although, I chuckle at the notion that this finding now qualifies in some minds as “indisputable fact”. It’s an intriguing find, though.
And yeah, the Preacher’s comment is rather funny.
As I understand it, all they have is a box inscribed with “Jesus, son of Joseph” – both of which were extremely common names at the time (“Jesus” simply being the Greek version of “Joshua”). I’m not convinced.
Oh, well, if there were 500 witnesses then it’s settled. So what if they’ve been dead for two millenia and some change?
I don’t get it. How can a religionist exhort us to accept his pronouncements based on faith and then try to use “evidence” to prove his beliefs? It’s either about faith or its not.
I am not a religionist myself, but I believe in God. I believe religion and spirituality are not synonymous, and that the former often acts as an impediment to the latter. Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. It’s a big enough world for all of us.
500 witnesses and not a single one of them (except for the ones who already were apostles) wrote about it?
If somebody were to fly up to the skies in times of the Roman Empire, I’d expect lots of scribes telling us stories. Instead all we got is silence.
I’m skeptical about both sides of the story right now, especially coming just a few years after the James ossuary was shown to be a fake. Some archeologists are already saying that the inscriptions aren’t. It really isn’t going to change anyone’s views. If the boxes are fakes, then the faithful will continue to assume that they belong to some other Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The nonbelievers will cite them as counterproof.
Still, the reverand’s statements were funny and shows why so many in the religious community has so much trouble with the scientific method. When you start with the mindset that it’s impossible that a translation of a translation of a translation of a 2000 year old book couldn’t possibly have any innacuracies or exagerations, it’s hard to even fathom the concept of taking a critical examination of the details and seeing if they match up with the real world.
Jose, the answer for that one is simple. All the Romans were too worried about whoever their versions of Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. “Who is the child’s father? Him? Him? The Gorgon? The Minotaur?”
“Although, I chuckle at the notion that this finding now qualifies in some minds as “indisputable fact”. “
It’s a fact that coffins were found and that some names in hebrew/arameic were scratched on them. The interpretation that this is the tomb of the Jesus and his family is the interpretation of the peole who made the movie. Even the archeologist who discovered and published the discovary rejects this interpretation.
“I don’t get it. How can a religionist exhort us to accept his pronouncements based on faith and then try to use “evidence” to prove his beliefs? “
Because the idea of faith as an alternative to evidence only came after people started doubting the evidence. It was only then that people started saying, look, this is not about evidence and reason, it’s about faith.
Jesus no longer a character on “South Park”? When did this happen?
Bill Myers stated: “I don’t get it. How can a religionist exhort us to accept his pronouncements based on faith and then try to use “evidence” to prove his beliefs? It’s either about faith or its not.”
I agree. When I was in college I took a class called “Medieval Art History” to satisfy my art requirement. Basically every piece of art was Christian religious in nature because that was all that was permitted in Europe until the Renascence.
Anyhoo, the prof starts talking about these “cathedral tours” that the emerging mercantilist class would go on during their vacations. Each cathedral they would visit would have this “artifact”, usually a piece of wood from the Cross or Judas’s soup spoon from the Last Supper or some such. In most if not all cases these were not artifacts at all but probably something old that the church was claiming was an artifact to draw a crowd of fat pocketed tourists.
Sitting in class as a forming Christian all I could think was– where is your faith? These 12th century yuppies have so much wealth and power that they need something they can touch to have faith in something bigger than their own pocketbooks and egos.
Even if you don’t believe that Christ rose from the dead, what distinguishes these bones as Christ over any OTHER bones from the first century? I am as skeptical that these are THE bones of Christ as I was at those artifacts meant to draw an ecclesiastical crowd.
–Captain Naraht
(Ray from NH)
Well, rumor has it that at the time the Gorgon was always stoned, and the Minotaur was walking around in a stupor, like he was lost in a maze or something ^_^
Sorry, couldn’t resist 🙂
While I don’t think the finding is a hoax, I also don’t think that they are the actual burial places of Jesus and Company. What gets me is that some are saying that James Cameron faked this entire thing as a devioius attack on Christianity (same as Dan Brown was wringing his moustache evilly planning to destroy Christianity with his book :-).
Captain Naraht, you are looking on 12th century Christian society from the point of view of a 21st century Christian. People in the 12th century lived an a more concrete world, and one in which miracles were common.
“Each cathedral they would visit would have this “artifact”, usually a piece of wood from the Cross or Judas’s soup spoon from the Last Supper or some such. In most if not all cases these were not artifacts at all but probably something old that the church was claiming was an artifact to draw a crowd of fat pocketed tourists.”
Only they were not tourists, they were pilgrims, and they were from all walks of life (see Canterbury Tales). The relics were artifacts, and body parts of saints. I was in a cathedral in Marsailles that had a glass cabinet with the Ossa Sanctorum, bones of the saints, including the skull of Saint Cassiodorus. These relics — Like Thomas Becket’s body for example, performed miracles that were retold in anecdotes. Also, Thomas Becket’s assention to Sainthood was the result of popular pressure. The stories of these miracles, cripples walking blind seeing the wicked punished, were not that different from revival meetings in this 20th century. The True Cross was a very valued relic with a long history before the Saracens took it. The Crusaders carried it into war and attributed victories to it. The king of Jerusalem war a fragment of it around his neck. The relics were valuable enough — both for the money and for the miracles — that people wanted to steal them in times of war. Swearing on relics was a good way to ensure faithfulness. Today a witness swears on a bible in court. In the Middle ages a noble could prove his innocence by swearing on a relic. In the Chanson de Roland one of the characters has a relic in the hilt of his sword which he swears on at one stage. Even the host of the Eucarist has magical properties (it is the body of Christ). That’s why, to this day, the priest puts it in people’s mouths and not hands, so they won’t keep it for magical purposes.
What is it about those dead bodies that is so threatening? Unless they get up and start attacking people (the people they kill getting up to kill as well, forcing those few remaining survivors to move into shopping malls and wear tacky clothes and eat mall food), I don’t see what the issue is.
500 witnesses and not a single one of them (except for the ones who already were apostles) wrote about it?
Maybe they were destroyed at the Library of Alexandria along with the majority of Aeschylus’ plays.
Is this part of the same discovery announced five years ago about James’ casket?
Yeah, I had a Raiders flashback too. If Cameron had just put a light into the box so there was a glow as he opened it at the press conferance it would have been the Greatest Practical Joke Ever.
I’m not to terribly convinced by the evidence. 20 years to translate a few names??? And when they trot out “statistical proof”, well, bells go off.
TransDutch–One account said thatthe filmmakers were including the James casket as part of the same find, which wold seem to raise red flags.
I was at a seminary once where they had, hidden away in the back, a glass case with relics. The priests were sort of embarrassed by the whole thing but one of them would seem to periodically “bleed”. It was not considered a miracle and they kept quiet about it (this was at a time when the Exorcist was coming out and the Church was really uptight about the mystical aspect of things, at least in our neck of the woods). At any rate, the power of relics is almost certainly not in the relic itself but in the emotions they can create in the minds of believers. That’s why, when fighting vampires one should really bulk up on the relics. Me, I’d tattoo crucifixes all over my body, drink Holy water til I burst, and carry a sword with the left knuckle of Saint Mickey attached to the handle. I’d be one vampire killing mofo. (and I’d probably get offed by a werewolf! Ain’t that always the way?)
I might as well toss my $0.02 into the mix. . .
I don’t want to go so far as to see this whole thing as a deliberate hoax (although there is currently an investigation, as Den mentioned, as to whether the James ossuary is a fake), but I do find a lot of holes that don’t add up. I don’t particularly believe that this discovery is going to change anyone’s views, but I think it’s to be expected, and that these challenges should be carefully examined.
The apostle Paul effectively lays down a challenge in 1 Corinthians 15: 13-15a, 17, 19. He says (NIV translation), “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. . . And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. . . If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” This is a statement that without the resurrection of Christ, faith is useless, and Christians should be pitied. This is a challenge that many who disagree with Christianity are more than happy to take up: if Christ’s resurrection can be debunked, Paul believes that Christianity would crumble.
So with the stakes firmly established, let’s now examine the evidence. Several ossuaries with inscriptions were found, one with the name Mariamene (a common translation of Mary Magdalene) was found, and whose DNA was divergent enough from the others to be implicated as being married into this family burial site. Another was labeled Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph). And then there are several other ossuaries including one labelled Joseph which is being implicated as one of Jesus’ brothers. Another intruiging label can be translated as “Judah, son of Jesus.”
Currently there are some concerns over the assetrtations. I’d like to raise a few of them now (in no particular order except how they flow out of my head).
1) This box was found near Jerusalem. If it’s a genuine burial plot for the Biblical Jesus’ family, why would it be in Jerusalem and not in the family’s land in Nazareth?
2) The biggest pieces of evidence that the statistics of finding these common names was estimated as 600 : 1 all in the same location. However, this includes the odds of finding Mary Magdalene’s ossuary as the wife of Jesus, a conspiracy theory that, while gaining popularity after the DaVinci code, has yet to be proven, and would negatively affect the statistical argument.
3) Scholars believe that Joseph died significantly before Mary, who retired to Ephesus, and thus would not be likely to be buried in Jerusalem.
4)
i: If we assume the crucifiction was a hoax, then Jesus would have had to have gone into hiding, which means not being burried on the family plot, and would not be found with his parents and brothers and “wife.”
ii: If we assume the crucifiction wasn’t a hoax but the ressurection was, then he either got his own tomb or was put somewhere else, which again means no family plot, otherwise the fact that the resurrection was a hoax might be debunked.
5) The NT gospels were passed on as oral traditions and have withstood scholarly inquiry for the better part of 2000 years and have not adequately been debunked. The liklihood that we would find something to disprove them now is slim. If the claims were false, wouldn’t they be debunked historically when they were first made? I mean, if someone started telling a story about how your friend was resurrected after his death, and you were at his funeral, wouldn’t you make sure that the lies this person was telling were debunked? Contrary to this expected outcome, what has been demonstrated was that the stories at the time continued to spread, and that the witnesses at the time did not debunk it.
6) No DNA testing to prove whether Judah’s DNA was related to either the Jesus ossuary or the Mary Magdalene box, so it’s possible that Mariamene could have been wife to another member of this family.
7) Since there is only one Joseph box, how can that be asserted to be Jesus’ brother and not father? Wouldn’t one need two Joseph boxes to be able to attempt to make the sorts of statistical claims that are being argued?
I’ve gone on longer than I planned and need to get in to work, but I thought I’d drop my thoughts.
For more information, look into it yourself, a New York Times article on this thing is found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/us/27jesus.html?hp
Chris
“Jesus no longer a character on “South Park”? When did this happen?”
I believe the episode was called “Red Sleigh Down” and it aired a few years ago. Santa’s sleigh was shot down over Iraq. The boys and Jesus went there to rescue him. Jesus died in the attempt. Santa declared that from now on Christmas would not only be a day of giving gifts, it would also be a day for remembering the death of Jesus Christ.
Transdutch: Yes, that assertion has been made, as some type of “fingerprinting” of the residues on the Jesus and James boxes has been matched.
Although that brings up one other point I wish to make, which is that the archaeologists felt that with how much grave robbing had already ocurred, that a lot of the other ossuraies (such as the James box) had already been removed. We will never know, but perhaps these would have had other names which would have either supported or weakened the theories presented here.
Chris
Transdutch: Yes, that assertion has been made, as some type of “fingerprinting” of the residues on the Jesus and James boxes has been matched.
Although that brings up one other point I wish to make, which is (sorry, I guess I should go back to my numberings):
8) The archaeologists felt that with how much grave robbing had already ocurred, that a lot of the other ossuraies (such as the James box) had already been removed. We will never know, but perhaps these would have had other names which would have either supported or weakened the theories presented here.
9) A quick parting thought: If the filmmakers are so confident of their find, why have they not examined the actual bones in the Jesus ossuary and tried to determine whether or not the bones were fractured in places consistent with crucifiction?
Now I’ll really shut up.
Chris
So, I have a question, based on this whole “no bones ’cause Jesus went to heaven” stuff:
A Christian dies, and supposedly goes to Heaven. Yet, if I dig him up, and the bones are still there does that disprove Heaven? Or does that just mean the guy went to Hëll for some reason?
Or is Jesus the only one who gets to have his bones transported to Heaven? 🙂
Micha wrote: “That’s why, to this day, the priest puts it in people’s mouths and not hands, so they won’t keep it for magical purposes.”
Actually, in the Catholic church, the priest _does_ put the host (eucharist) in people’s hands. At least at every church I’ve been to in the last 20 years or so. Before that, the priest (or a lay minister) did put the host in your mouth. I believe it changed for hygiene-related reasons.
And I’ve never heard or read anything so much as hinting that the host could be used for magical purposes. Not at any mass; not at CCD classes as a kid; and not in 10 years of a Jesuit education. But perhaps that mindset comes from a different branch of Christianity than Catholicism.
Yes, we’re told the host undergoes a process of transubstantiation, where it actually (not metaphorically) becomes the body of Jesus (with the wine becoming his blood); but that’s not the same thing as the host having magical properties people can use to their advantage.
Rick
I’ve always had one problem with the N.T..
Jesus was the son of G-d. It was the holy spirit that impregnated Mary.When he died he rose to heaven to be with his holy father.
Hercules was the son of Zeus. He took the form of, (Eagle? I forget) that impregnated his mother. When he died he rose to Olympus to be with his father.
Jesus did miracles, Hercules did Labors.
Since the books of the N.T. were codified by the Roman empire, I wonder how much was changed to ‘convert’ the Roman people.
If this crypt has any chance of validity perhaps we should keep all this in mind.
Of course while I have no hard concrete evidence that there is a G-d, as a Jew I do have faith.
So Xtians should not fear this tomb either way.
Bobb
Craig: According to the story in the Bible, Jesus went _bodily_ into Heaven after his resurrection. If I remember correctly, Mary may have, gone bodily into Heaven, too. And a few others. So, to answer your question, according to the Bible, only a select few get to take their bones (and muscles, and and tendons and veins, and arteries and hair and….) with them into Heaven.
Rick
So, to answer your question, according to the Bible, only a select few get to take their bones with them into Heaven.
Ðámņ elitists. 😉
“Or is Jesus the only one who gets to have his bones transported to Heaven? :)”
Jesus rose from the dead and afterwards physically went to heaven. The prophet Eliaja also went to heaven in a similar way.
The Church should retaliate by sending a robot to the past to kill James Cameron’s mother.
“3) Scholars believe that Joseph died significantly before Mary, who retired to Ephesus, and thus would not be likely to be buried in Jerusalem.”
There’s a church in Jerusalem called the Dormitzion. It’s connected to a story that Mary did not die but fell asleep. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be buried there.
“The NT gospels were passed on as oral traditions and have withstood scholarly inquiry for the better part of 2000 years and have not adequately been debunked. The liklihood that we would find something to disprove them now is slim. If the claims were false, wouldn’t they be debunked historically when they were first made? I mean, if someone started telling a story about how your friend was resurrected after his death, and you were at his funeral, wouldn’t you make sure that the lies this person was telling were debunked? Contrary to this expected outcome, what has been demonstrated was that the stories at the time continued to spread, and that the witnesses at the time did not debunk it.”
Every religion has countless stories of miraculous events taking place and being witnessed. I think when people say that the gospels have been proven historicaly it means that they are not forgeries. There is no real way to proove that what they say is true, except maybe other contemporary sources which are not available. In any case, the gospels were written some time after the events, and they do not always correspond.
“Is this part of the same discovery announced five years ago about James’ casket?”
I think (but I’m not certain) that James’s casket was brought from antique dealers while these were found by reliable archeologists.
“A quick parting thought: If the filmmakers are so confident of their find, why have they not examined the actual bones in the Jesus ossuary and tried to determine whether or not the bones were fractured in places consistent with crucifiction?”
a. According to the archeologist who found the cave, when the bones were found, they were in no condition to find signs of crucifixion.
b. There is an ongoing struggle between archelogists who find bones often and Ultra-Religious Jews who accuse them of desecrating Jewish graves (althogh you can’t always be surethey’re Jewish or even human). The compromise apparently is that the bones are handed over to an Ultra-Religious group for re-burial.
“This box was found near Jerusalem. If it’s a genuine burial plot for the Biblical Jesus’ family, why would it be in Jerusalem and not in the family’s land in Nazareth?”
This point was also made by the archeologist who found the cave. He also said that the cave belongs to more middle class family. However, since the gospels have Jesus buried in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, it is possile that other family members were buried there afterwards. If you really want to get speculative and religious at the same time you can claim that although Jesus rose from the grave, the grave and casket still remained, and certainly the people who witnessed the resurrection (Mary and Mary Magdalene), as well as other family members, were then buried there. Or you can go Da-Vinci Code and suggest that Jesus’s resurrection was a story someone came up with later, and that Jesus and family were buried there, or that Jesus rose from the dead but was married and had an offspring who were buried in the same cave. In any case, at this stage this would be more along the lines of speculation historical fiction, as this documentary seems to be.
One account said thatthe filmmakers were including the James casket as part of the same find, which wold seem to raise red flags.
It’s important to note that no one is really sure where the James ossuary was “found” as it allegedly passed through the hands of several antiquities dealers of questionable reputation. When the police searched the apartment of the one guy who sold it to its most recent owner, they found all the tools and materials one would have needed in order to fake an inscription. It’s highly doubtful that box is real. If the producers are claiming that the James ossuary is part of their find, then it puts their entire claim into doubt.
As for the issue of relics, Micha is correct in that it was common belief in the middle ages that relics (bones and samples of blood being among the most common) associated with saints were imbued with supernatural properties. Churches knew that a good relic attracted a lot of pilgrims (and money), so there was a great deal of competition as to who could come up with the best relics.
I’ve often heard that if you gathered up all the pieces of the “true cross” that are floating around the world today, you’d make one large economy sized cross.
A Christian dies, and supposedly goes to Heaven. Yet, if I dig him up, and the bones are still there does that disprove Heaven? Or does that just mean the guy went to Hëll for some reason?
Again, Craig, we have to compare what many people believed during the middle ages compared to the common beliefs of the modern era. Today, most Christians assume that when you die, your soul immediately goes to heaven. But, it was a common belief in the middel ages that the dead were actually slumbering and would be physically resurrected at the end times. Only Jesus and certain saints were believed have already ascended into heaven. This is why there were so many superstitions about disturbing the dead, because many believed that if the body wasn’t kept whole, they would not be resurrected. Apparently, saints were excluded from this rule.
Today, most Christians still believe in Jesus’ bodily ascension, even as they believe that their own souls will depart from their bodies upon death.
I wonder, if they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was buried in that tomb and his bones were still there, would Christians modify their view and simply assume that Jesus’ ascension was a spiritual one or would that take away too much of his specialness?
One final thought: If the resurrection was a fraud perpetrated by his followers, wouldn’t one of the first things they’d have done was make sure his body would never be found? Why inscribe his name on his ossuary then?
If I’ve read things (and remembered them) right, there were no bones in the oiosuaries – there had been grave robbers before the present day. Some DNA was taken from the containers. It will probably be a topic of discussion until the next big “thing” happens – either war or celebrity related. These ossuaries hit at a slow time, apparently.
“Unless they get up and start attacking people (the people they kill getting up to kill as well, forcing those few remaining survivors to move into shopping malls and wear tacky clothes and eat mall food),…’
Move over Jesus Christ: Vampire Killer. This fall, James Cameron and Chadwick H. Saxelid bring you Jesus Christ: Killer Zombie.
(This film has not yet been boycotted…. er… rated.)
How many things did Jesus do that Firestorm has never done?
And don’t say “rise from the dead,” Firestorm did that.
“And I’ve never heard or read anything so much as hinting that the host could be used for magical purposes. Not at any mass; not at CCD classes as a kid; and not in 10 years of a Jesuit education. But perhaps that mindset comes from a different branch of Christianity than Catholicism.”
I heard about he ned to protect the Eucarist host from my Medieval History professor, Amnon Linder.
About he magical uses of the host I fortunatly have with me here “Magic in the Middle Ages” by Richard Kieckhefer (1990). It seems I need to correct a bit what I said about the relics. Anyway p. 78-80:
“The relics of saints also seem at times to have served as amulets. When Count Rudolf of Pfullendorf brought relics of the biblical patriarchs back from the Holy Land they impated peace, fertility and good weather everywhere he took them. Wax taken from the tomb of St. Martin of Tours and place atop a tree could protect the surrounding vinyard from hail. Carried into battle, relics could secure victory over the foe.Yet it is dangerous to focus on such reports in isolation from other factors in the veneration of saints. These holy persons might work on earth through their physical remains, but their devotees knew that their souls were inheaven interceding before God. …It is thus misleading to assume that their relics were seen as having inherent power,only loosly connected to their spiritual presence. …They may still on occasion have treated their relics as magical amulets, but concrete evidence for this is rare.”
“…The thwelfth and thirteenthh centuries saw escalating devotion to the eucharist, or to the host that the priest consecrated during the mass. This was the age when the theological doctrine of transubstantiation was being refined…. Popular belief soon held that a person who saw the consecrated host during mass would be safe from harm for the res of the day. On the feast of Corpus Christi the host would be carried in procession through town and then out to the fields to ensure fertility of the crops. Laypeople allegedly carried the process further, stealing or otherwise obtaining consecrated hosts to protect themselves against wounding or drowning, to cure their diseases or procure fertility, to prevent storms or to gain riches. At times they might heighten the power of the host by writing Bible verses or magical charms on it.”
“People in meieval Europe who noted and protested against these abuses were not likely to call them magic, but rather superstition, which in this context means the improper use of a holy object. …From the theologians’ and preachers’ viewpoint, relics and hosts were not natural repositories for occult power; they were not analogous to springs of rosmary or organs from vultures.”
Micha:
You say, “Every religion has countless stories of miraculous events taking place and being witnessed. I think when people say that the gospels have been proven historicaly it means that they are not forgeries. There is no real way to proove that what they say is true, except maybe other contemporary sources which are not available. In any case, the gospels were written some time after the events, and they do not always correspond.”
But scholarly evidence I recall hearing (I’m at work and couldn’t pull up a source at this point) indicated that the minor discrepancies between the gospels are actually evidence for their veracity, as, for example, firsthand accounts of a car accident will agree very strongly on the overriding facts of the case (ie-that it happened) but have minor discepancies (ie-the color of a car that ran a red light and precipitated the event). In fact, it’s often a red flag when evidence lines up too much that the witnesses have been “prepped.”
Further, I seem to recall a debate trying to debunk some of the contents of the Bible in the 1800s or such where no evidence had been found for the existence of the Hittites, and that in 1950, archeologists unearthed a tomb which explicitly identified those present by the name Hittites. I just use this as an example. So when the argument is made that the Bible has so far been proven historically accurate, I think it also means that what has been referenced, like any good hypothesis, has so far held up to scrutiny and new evidence continues to support it.
As for James’ casket, yes, it was purchased from antique dealers because the tomb had been ransacked several times and James’ ossuary, for instance, had been removed.
As for the bone evidence, a) the archeologist who found it originally did not agree with the current assertions that this was the biblical Jesus and his family, b) there was DNA evidence from the bones, so I don’t know how exactly the legal balance works, and c) the NYT article indicated that there were plans to pursue the testing I’d mentioned but that they weren’t going to do so yet, which leads me to believe they wanted publicity rather than going thru proper scientific inquiry.
As for your parting thoughts, I agree 100%. My comment had merely been intended as a rhetorical question to articulate my skepticism of these speculations that I believe are a load of BS, which you were able to articulate better than I did.
Chris
Here’s the thing about this: It doesn’t really matter if they’re real or not. Christianity is so far entrenched that Jesus himself could descend from heavan carried by Angels, and there would still be Christians doubting that he was the Real Deal. Because he wouldn’t fit, in some way, their concept of Jesus, so of course he’d have to be fake.
Just like ID, there’s nothing inherant about this finding that, if true, contradicts anything about the crucifiction, resurrection, and ascension. As far as I can remember, there’s nothing in the Bible that says that Jesus ascended into Heavan and STAYED THERE. For all anyone knows, after lifting up to Heavan, he returned to live out his normal human lifespan with his family. Or maybe commuted back and forth.
Or maybe, since the timelines in the Bible are not consistant, his ascension occurred years after his resurrection.
In any case, it’s an interesting find. Maybe we’ll be able to use the recovered DNA to clone him?
You know, it’s funny. Earlier in this thread I said “it’s either about faith or it’s not.” Upon further thought I realize that that’s a false dilemma.
Science to a degree relies on faith. No one has ever seen an atom with their naked eye, but scientists believe they exist based on the available evidence. Granted, there’s dámņ good evidence of the existence of atoms — I mean, look what happens when we split one… KABOOM! Still, there is a leap of faith that must be taken, however small.
Christianity requires a much, much, much, MUUUCCHHH bigger leap of faith, of course. We accept that atoms exist because there is an assload of evidence that has been gathered using the scientific method. Most religions, on the other hand, rely on evidence in the form of ancient texts whose authorship is often in doubt.
I think the difference is one of degree and not kind. But — it’s a HUGE degree of difference. Like the difference between absolute zero and the temperature in the heart of the sun.
Is Christianity “bad” because it has as its basis some ancient texts? I dunno. As I said, I’m not a religionist. But I tend to think if Christianity can make you a better person — kind, generous, non-judgmental, confident, at peace — then Christianity is “good.” If it instead pushes your worst aspects to the fore — intolerance, hypocrisy, hubris — then it is “bad.”
In other words, Christianity is like anything else. What you get out of it is what you put into it. It’s neither inherently good nor bad.
That said, I personally could not return to Christianity without betraying deeply held beliefs I’ve developed over the last couple of decades. I disagree passionately with too many of its precepts — and have found that I can follow the precepts with which I DO agree without having to be a Christian.
Your mileage may vary. Again — it’s a big enough world.
Mr. Myers said:
I don’t get it. How can a religionist exhort us to accept his pronouncements based on faith and then try to use “evidence” to prove his beliefs? It’s either about faith or its not.
Have you read Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God? It very neatly answers this, although I have minor squabbles with her timeline. Basically she argues that for a very long time, the idea of mythos – religion – and logos – the logical world – existed side by side. They didn’t cover the same things, so there was no real conflict. But eventually logos began talking about things that traditionally belonged to mythos, and mythos fought back the only way it knew how – it coopted the writing of logos. (Bear with me, I’m summarizing, and generally.) For Armstrong, this is how mythos, religion and oral traditions, became solidified into fundamentalist writings – because the attitude that once something is written down it’s empirical and concrete was taken from the sphere of logos. So instead of flexibility in interpretation of words to modern situations, you get entire religions frozen at the moment in time they abandoned the realm of mythos for logos.
It’s a good book. Worth reading. 🙂
Mr. Mulligan said:
At any rate, the power of relics is almost certainly not in the relic itself but in the emotions they can create in the minds of believers.
Yep, precisely. Tangible forms of faith to bolster the faithful. I actually got to look at relics last month, when we went to a place that has several relics of St. Peregrine – my mother was blessed by them, and I sort of sideways lurked my way over to the alcove holding them after the service. Kind of interesting little statues – reminded me of little league trophies. But for the people there to be blessed by them, it was confirmation of their faith, of God’s love, of His plan for them, and comforted them in their illness. (Peregrine is the saint of cancer and other nastybad illnesses.)
Although I don’t believe in that particular religion, or even my own when it comes to things like relics inside stupas, I can’t knock the comfort and peace that their presence brings those who do believe. Faith is powerful.
The NT gospels were passed on as oral traditions and have withstood scholarly inquiry for the better part of 2000 years and have not adequately been debunked. The liklihood that we would find something to disprove them now is slim. If the claims were false, wouldn’t they be debunked historically when they were first made?
Er… but in many ways they haven’t withstood scholarly inquiry. We know that they were modified, edited, and we know exactly when the Church met up to do these things.
Given when they were actually written down, and who they were written for, there would really be no one around to “debunk” the story – in many cases, the New Testament was written down decades after anyone involved in the stories were around. They were written for a core group of faithful who would have no reason to doubt. (And there are a lot of those “extra” books that do specifically conflict with the official NT – things that the Church kicked out during their revisionist periods. Y’know, gnostic gospels and such.)
Finally, the notion of debunking itself it something that’s new. You can’t really debunk faith prior to Enlightenment concepts of the scientific process and proof. …these are just some of the problems of looking at history with 21st century assumptions.
I haven’t really paid much attention to the whole thing truth to tell.
James Cameron made a movie about it? Well, as a Christian I could feel a lot better about the whole event if he donated the profit to Christian charities.
I don’t need to know what happened to Jesus’ bones to cement my faith. I would be lying though if I didn’t say I wish the whole matter was treated with a certain amount of reverence in any event.
I‘m not a pious person, nor a big church goer but, the tenets of my faith are a serious thing to me and as such should be shown the same respect others want their beliefs to be regarded in.
I can laugh as much as the next person when I watch South Park but, people’s beliefs are touchy subjects. Wars begin over such things and even while I may not agree with all of the views expressed, I will at least treat them with dignity and not go out of my way to belittle others opinions.
On a personal level, my only reaction to the thing is it does seem a bit creepy and sensationalistic. I do doubt the veracity of any claims of finding the actual remains of Christ and his family. A lot of the discussion on this topic misses the point that this is a bit of a serious subject to quite a few people.
The curious thing is a series of cartoons (about Mohamed) can provoke all kinds of back stepping and riots – if we are going to show a level of sensitivity to one group we should show it fairly to all groups.
“The curious thing is a series of cartoons (about Mohamed) can provoke all kinds of back stepping and riots – if we are going to show a level of sensitivity to one group we should show it fairly to all groups.”
Except that the Mohamed issue isn’t respect, it’s hysteria. We definitely shouldn’t treat everything that way.
Thing that gets me is how poorly chosen the moment was. For the whole resurrection thing, I mean. 2000 years ago, there were already people all over the planet. But methods of communication were very slow and unreliable. Only a very small part of the world’s population would get rumours of the event – ostensibly the most important in the history of Christianity – for centuries to come. So why not delay the coming and death/resurrection until, oh, say at least the 1960s when global communications would have the event be seen by at least millions, if not billions instead of a few handfulls? (500? Where did they get that number? Did someone count heads?) It isn’t as though it really changed much anyway. It was supposed to cleanse Man of sin, but I’d say Man, as a race, is still pretty sinful. So that was a wasted effort anyway.
I’m no scholar (Biblical or otherwise) by any means. I hadn’t even heard about these things (nor the word ossuary, for that matter), until I read about it in PAD’s blog. The debate however does interest me in a rather dispassionate way, and so I’ll throw my opinion in the ring too. I see a lot of interesting things about the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection, and how most historical evidence tends to support the scriptures (Jewish exodus, existence of Hittites, geologic evidence of a flood, etc…). This brings to mind something that I had been mulling over a few months ago, while reading up on a completely different subject. Please forgive me if this gets a little overlong, but it’s a good story, trust me.
In the Summer of 1947, a rancher named Mack Brazel found some debris scattered across a couple acres of his land. Some wierd silvery fabric, struts that resembled balsa wood, and some stuff that “looked like bakelite”. Mack took his find to the local Sherrif’s office, who told him to take it to the Army Air Base near town. Well, he turned it over, and a day or so later there was a radio broadcast about the Army recovering “wreckage” of a flying disc. Now, these flying discs had just started being reported throughout the country, and had the whole nation in something of a tizz. When the Brazel debris came in, one Army general thought he’d make some headlines. This headline was quickly retracted, and the debris packaged up, and sent off to one or more other Army Air bases. A new story was now released that the debris was just from a “weather baloon”. At the time, this was pretty much the end of it.
Now look at the story 30 years later. It’s 1977 and Charles Berlitz publishes the book “The Roswell Incident” with the events I’ve described above, along with many events that almost certainly did not occur. The evidence that Berlitz and his co-author presented? All verbal accounts by “eye-witnesses” to the event. Fast forward another 30 years to today, and look at what Roswell has become. Books, movies, television series, everything imaginable has the stamp of “The Roswell Incident” on it.
But guess what? There was no spacecraft, crashed or otherwise, recovered by Mr. Brazel. Nor was it a weather baloon. The debris was almost certainly from a project called MOGUL, which was testing baloons designed to stay aloft at a constant altitude to monitor for missile launches in Russisa. They used translucent neoprene for the baloons, balsa wood frames for support, and several monitoring instruments whose casings were made of bakelite.
But here in this age of unprecendented age of information available to the public at all times, the actual evidence of what is most likely to have occured is completely ignored in favor of the far more sensationalistic accounts that have cropped up over the last 50 years. All of the other stories about it started with a “witness”, someone supposedly involved in the events at Roswell.
Now consider this: The books of the New Testament were written about 70 years after the Jesus’ death. They were all stories handed down through oral tradition. And the basis for these stories? Eye-witness accounts.
Interesting, no?
(btw, thanks to Karl Pflock for his fantasic book “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe” – highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject of UFOs)
Personally, I think the real story here is not how Jesus’ body has been found, I think the real story is how James Cameron’s swollen ego has somehow caused his head to disappear up his own ášš.
“I found the Titantic, now I’m going to find Jesus, dammit!”
“But, uh, Jim, you didn’t really FIND Titanic, you see–“
“KING OF THE WORLD! WHOOOOO!!! LA LA LA!!”
Hëll, I’m still looking forward to Avatar and Battle Angel, and Aliens is still the greatest movie of all time. But Cameron dictating that he found the body of Jesus cause he said so. Eh, I don’t think so. Which is a shame because when his new movies finally come out, there’ll just be a shitstorm of bad publicity and boycotting surrounding it that’ll drown out the movie. The fact that he’s making the flick entirely in 3-D because he sees himself as the saviour of cinema kinda supports the idea of the messiah complex thing he’s got goin on, though.
Besides, the Reverend quote was basically right: Jesus left spaceship Earth physically so there aren’t remains left. Case dismissed. Everyone go back to your lives. Nothing to see here. Move along. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
But scholarly evidence I recall hearing (I’m at work and couldn’t pull up a source at this point) indicated that the minor discrepancies between the gospels are actually evidence for their veracity, as, for example, firsthand accounts of a car accident will agree very strongly on the overriding facts of the case (ie-that it happened) but have minor discepancies (ie-the color of a car that ran a red light and precipitated the event). In fact, it’s often a red flag when evidence lines up too much that the witnesses have been “prepped.”
That might apply to some parts of the gospels, but there are others that just don’t work if you try to view them as literally describing actual events. (Try reconciling the two Christmas stories–one has Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem from Nazareth and leaving a couple of weeks after the birth, while the other has them living in Bethlehem until Jesus is a couple of years old, then fleeing to Nazareth via Egypt.) The geneaologies in Matthew and Luke don’t agree with each other (or in some cases other geneaologies elsewhere), down to which son of David Joseph is supposed to be descended from and even who Joseph’s father is; to top it off, Matthew apparently couldn’t count to fourteen reliably. That’s well outside the realm of differing eyewitness reports.
(It should also be noted that the gospel of John diverges from the other three because he was drawing from a different tradition. Although some bits from John have beaten the others into the popular realm–three of the gospels say Jesus’ cross was carried by Simon of Cyrene and one by Jesus himself, but the latter is a better image so that’s what most people think of.)
Preface: I am a 4th year PhD student in biblical studies, so I know the issues and texts of the new testament fairly well, but I have no training in archaeology.
The James ossuary was a forgery created to fool scholars and make money, and it successfully fooled Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, probably because he wanted it to be real so much that it clouded his judgment. He crowed about his findings at the Society for Biblical Literature and other conferences and can’t afford to back down, but the ossuary is clearly a fake. This just goes to show that even an intelligent, knowledgeable historian can be taken in by a con man.
Archaelogy in and around Jerusalem and Israel as a whole comes in two varieties: scholarly and sensationalistic. The more potentially exciting the discovery, the more sensationalistic the work becomes; the dead sea scrolls, about which you have heard so much, have _still_ not been published in their entirety, or in an accessible scholarly edition or translation, because it’s to the advantage of the people who found them to let information about their discovery trickle out slowly rather than to share it all with their fellow researchers. The more extraordinary the claim, the less likely the work will be held up to scrutiny.
Is it impossible for scholars to assess the truth of James Cameron’s claims about this tomb because the details have not been published in a journal or anywhere else. I do not believe that the archaeologists involved in the find are as interested in scientific analysis as they are in sensationalism. That said, they are almost certainly not part of the real tomb of Jesus. They are much more likely to be a skilled forgery, or the tomb of another Jesus. The evidence to the contrary would need to be overwhelming, and since the work has not been published in a journal, nobody can really evaluate it.
In reference to the argument above about whether the bible has been “debunked:” Biblical criticism has not, historically, been about trying to poke holes in the biblical narrative, because a cursory examination of the bible shows that it does not provide a single historical narrative, but a wide range of different kinds of truth claims, stories, myths, histories, and testimonies. There have been, as one poster noted, some archaeological finds which have verified that the Bible refers to some real historical peoples who were not previously known to scholarship. This, however, does not verify the rest of the Bible’s historical claims, any more than the discovery of Troy means that Achilles and Hector actually fought there.
The gospels don’t need to be debunked; the argument for their historical accuracy needs to be built from the ground up, and, in my experience, cannot be made convincingly. They are a patchwork of oral traditions weaved together into a group of narratives, each with its own individual biases and purposes. Their sources are unknown and their authors were in the second generation of followers of Christ. The letters of Paul, on the other hand, seem to be genuine (those which are actually by Paul, anyway), are much earlier, and are a far more valuable historical record about early Christian belief and behavior.
Maybe we’ll be able to use the recovered DNA to clone him?
Welcome, to Jesusrasic Park.
(Jew-rasic Park sounds better, but it opens a hole other kettle of gefilte)
Jesus was the son of G-d. It was the holy spirit that impregnated Mary.When he died he rose to heaven to be with his holy father.
Hercules was the son of Zeus. He took the form of, (Eagle? I forget) that impregnated his mother. When he died he rose to Olympus to be with his father.
Shhhhhh…don’t point that out…they hate it when you do that (and it was a shower of gold).
The Church should retaliate by sending a robot to the past to kill James Cameron’s mother.
Ah, there’s the good ol Christian spirit!
The curious thing is a series of cartoons (about Mohamed) can provoke all kinds of back stepping and riots – if we are going to show a level of sensitivity to one group we should show it fairly to all groups.
I don’t know. I think it speaks well of our society that we can face challenges to the orthodoxy of our majority religion in a calm manner with (somewhat) intelligent discussion. The reaction to Mohammed cartoons showed, to be blunt, a lack of maturity on the part of the people who rioted over it. The backstepping in the west was about being sensitive, it was about the fear of being the target of terrorism.
Imagine the reaction in the Moslim world had a group of scholars presented artifacts that cast doubt on a major event in the Koran.
the only reason jesus is no longer a character on South Park is because he died to save Santa. no reason why james cameron couldn’t make a film about how he discovered his tomb… where, presumably, he was buried four years ago.
It’s 1977 and Charles Berlitz publishes the book “The Roswell Incident” with the events I’ve described above, along with many events that almost certainly did not occur. The evidence that Berlitz and his co-author presented? All verbal accounts by “eye-witnesses” to the event. Fast forward another 30 years to today, and look at what Roswell has become. Books, movies, television series, everything imaginable has the stamp of “The Roswell Incident” on it.
I’d be wary of anything with the name Charles Berlitz on it. He’s the guy who made the Bermuda Triangle a household word, mostly by being VERY selective of the facts he presented.
Back to Cameron–I love his work but it occurs to me that he made a big deal about how Titanic should never be disturbed or artifacts taken from it, out of respect for the dead. Now he’s digging up graves. I dunno, seems a bit of a 180.
I wrote:
“The Church should retaliate by sending a robot to the past to kill James Cameron’s mother.”
Scavenger replied:
“Ah, there’s the good ol Christian spirit!”
This is reference to Cameron’s movie Terminator, and has nothing to do with Christian Spirit, especially since i’m not christian.
———————
Tjob wrote:
“I do not believe that the archaeologists involved in the find are as interested in scientific analysis as they are in sensationalism. That said, they are almost certainly not part of the real tomb of Jesus. They are much more likely to be a skilled forgery, or the tomb of another Jesus.”
The name of the archeologist who has found the cave and documented the findings back in the 80’s is Amos Kloner. If you google him you will find him calling the movie nonsense all over he media. In any case, he has nothing to do with the movie. The same articles also claim the the jacob ossuary is a forgery.
———————–
Kelly wrote:
“At any rate, the power of relics is almost certainly not in the relic itself but in the emotions they can create in the minds of believers.
Yep, precisely. Tangible forms of faith to bolster the faithful. I actually got to look at relics last month, when we went to a place that has several relics of St. Peregrine – my mother was blessed by them, and I sort of sideways lurked my way over to the alcove holding them after the service. Kind of interesting little statues – reminded me of little league trophies. But for the people there to be blessed by them, it was confirmation of their faith, of God’s love, of His plan for them, and comforted them in their illness. (Peregrine is the saint of cancer and other nastybad illnesses.)
Although I don’t believe in that particular religion, or even my own when it comes to things like relics inside stupas, I can’t knock the comfort and peace that their presence brings those who do believe. Faith is powerful.”
This is a modern way to make sense of an old ritual. Of course in the past people believed that rituals involving relics had a real, miraculous, physical effect on people’s health. I guess today less people would expect St. Peregrine to heal their cancer, instead they find emotional comfort only.
Kelly also wrote:
“Finally, the notion of debunking itself it something that’s new. You can’t really debunk faith prior to Enlightenment concepts of the scientific process and proof. …these are just some of the problems of looking at history with 21st century assumptions.”
That’s not exactly true. The idea that some things are true and some things are false and should be debunked existed before the Elightenment, even if what constituted scientific analysis changed. For example, in the 12th century the philosopher Abelard got into trouble with the Monks of St Denis for trying to debunk the history of the monastery’s supposed founder St. Denis. The scholastic system which Abelard was involved in developing involved studying religious texts critically and placing side by side different arguments for or against an interpretation. Another scholadtic, Thomas Aquinas, debunked the claims that necromancers controling demons in their magic. The demons, he said, were tricking them.
Kelly also wrote:
“Have you read Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God? It very neatly answers this, although I have minor squabbles with her timeline. Basically she argues that for a very long time, the idea of mythos – religion – and logos – the logical world – existed side by side. They didn’t cover the same things, so there was no real conflict. But eventually logos began talking about things that traditionally belonged to mythos, and mythos fought back the only way it knew how – it coopted the writing of logos. (Bear with me, I’m summarizing, and generally.) For Armstrong, this is how mythos, religion and oral traditions, became solidified into fundamentalist writings – because the attitude that once something is written down it’s empirical and concrete was taken from the sphere of logos. So instead of flexibility in interpretation of words to modern situations, you get entire religions frozen at the moment in time they abandoned the realm of mythos for logos.”
I haven’t read it, so my criticism is of what little I know about it from the internet and Kelly’s post.
It is true that fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity. It is true that in the modern era rationalism and science became idealized and dominant in a way they had not been before. It is also true that rationalism and science cannot address all the psychological needs of humans. I don’t agree with this image of pre-modern society as a society in which Mythos and Logos lived next to each other, happy each in its own place. Nor do we live today in aworld of logos with no Mythos.
Compare for example the Peloponese War by Thucydides with the Illiad or the Bible. Thucydides cross referenced sources and used criticism in order to analyze what happened in the war between Sparta and Athens. The bible is also a history, but the events described in the bible are part of a religious story of god’s power on earth and the process leading toward salvation. So was history logos or mythos?
How about the philosopher Anaxagoras who said that if horses could talk and make statues they would make their gods look like horses. That’s critical thinking. he was thrown out of Athens for saying that the moon is a rock. Is the moon the subject of logos or mythos?
In the extremely religious middle ages Christianity, Islam and judaism had a mixed relationship with philosophy (rationalism). There are books in whch there is a (literary) argument between a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and a philosopher, in which the Christian, or the Jew, tries to debunk the others. At other times religious thinkers tried to use philosophy in the study of religion, and there were times in which such attempts were criticized. In the 12th century the scolastic method taught by people like Abelard was criticized by monks who felt it was too rationalistic, too technical.
———————-
Bobb(In Irving) wrote:
“I’ve always had one problem with the N.T..
Jesus was the son of G-d. It was the holy spirit that impregnated Mary.When he died he rose to heaven to be with his holy father.
Hercules was the son of Zeus. He took the form of, (Eagle? I forget) that impregnated his mother. When he died he rose to Olympus to be with his father.
Jesus did miracles, Hercules did Labors.”
cross religious influences exist in all religions including Judaism. The story of the flood for example appears in the Legend of Gilgamesh.
“Back to Cameron–I love his work but it occurs to me that he made a big deal about how Titanic should never be disturbed or artifacts taken from it, out of respect for the dead. Now he’s digging up graves. I dunno, seems a bit of a 180.”
He didn’t do the digging. The archeological dig that unearthed this burial cave was done in the 80’s by the Israeli Antiquities Agency.
Eyewitness accounts, for all the legal movies and TV play them up, are not really a very reliable means of presenting “fact.” People’s perceptions are very subjective, memory is a spotty thing. People tend to see what they want to see, and the brain actually does it’s level best to translate the sensory input into something it understands.
And as time passes, and memory fades, eyewitness accounts fail even more. Verbal tradition is only as good as the memory of the person doing the reciting.
All of which is meant to say that in any other setting outside of church, written versions of an event based on eyewitness accounts of an event that occurred several decades in the past would have absolutely zero value in any competent court proceeding.
Granted, because of this oral traditions were limited to a select few keepers, and written documents were too valuable to be used for fictional accounts.
Well at least Jesus didn’t died without a use in Southpark.
1. He freed Santa.
2. Santa brought christmas to Bagdad.
3. Kenny came back and he later saved heaven.
But i also miss Jesus on South park. Without his voice of reason the adults became more and more insane (as if this was possible).
“But scholarly evidence I recall hearing (I’m at work and couldn’t pull up a source at this point) indicated that the minor discrepancies between the gospels are actually evidence for their veracity, as, for example, firsthand accounts of a car accident will agree very strongly on the overriding facts of the case (ie-that it happened) but have minor discrepancies (ie-the color of a car that ran a red light and precipitated the event).”
On the other hand, people take as fact various urban legends that are the same base story, have minor discrepancies in the telling and are complete garbage. Saying that the fact that people are describing the same event with different details is actually evidence for their veracity is laughable. In my line of work, when five people are telling a story and key points don’t match up, it’s more often a sign that something is wrong with the story we’re being given then a sign that the story is true.
“Further, I seem to recall a debate trying to debunk some of the contents of the Bible in the 1800s or such where no evidence had been found for the existence of the Hittites, and that in 1950, archeologists unearthed a tomb which explicitly identified those present by the name Hittites. I just use this as an example.”
For the longest time, Troy was believed to be a myth. Then they found it and proved that the City of Troy was a historical fact. Does that mean that all the stories of Troy are true? If so, you’ve just said that a man can be dipped in a magic pool and become 99.9% invincible and that there’s a whole other set of gods out there.
See, the thing with saying that the Bible is historically accurate is a bit of a problem. You can indeed point to places, people and things from the stories in the Bible and show that they did in fact exist. However, that doesn’t begin to support even the smallest of divine “facts” in the Bible. Every religion has used the world around them to craft their tales of the gods. Troy was but one example. Was every volcanic eruption in the Hawaiian Islands proof that the various volcano gods demanded sacrifices on a regular bases? Was the Nile flooding actually because the river gods were ticked off? Was a good hunt because Herne smiled upon his followers? Was a bumper crop or lack thereof a sign of the gods mood toward their followers? Who has the “real” story of the great flood and its cause? Lots of religions have one. Only one group says that it was due to God with a big “G” and not due to a god.
Besides, as I’ve posted here before, there are some stories that history has kicked in the butt. We’ve gone into outer space and we’ve been to the moon. At no time did we pass by Heaven, a host of angels or God himself. Yet, there was such a place as Babel. The Bible says that the tower of Babel was destroyed in part because man was building it high enough to touch Heaven itself. Tiny problem in holding that story of the past to the facts of today.
“Maybe we’ll be able to use the recovered DNA to clone him?”
ST:TNG did that with the Klingons in a story that was an analogy for the belief in faith and Christ. They ran into problems.
“I’d be wary of anything with the name Charles Berlitz on it. He’s the guy who made the Bermuda Triangle a household word…”
Not to mention the Philadelphia Experiment.
“All of which is meant to say that in any other setting outside of church, written versions of an event based on eyewitness accounts of an event that occurred several decades in the past would have absolutely zero value in any competent court proceeding.”
There was a really good book that came out about a year or so ago called Misquoting Jesus. it’s not an attack on Christianity nor any of its followers, but it does point out when, where and how a number of translation errors made their way into a number of translations of the Bible and the Gospels.
There’s also the fact that most of what people know about the Bible is from what is essentially Biblical pop culture. Mary Magdalene was long believed to be a prostitute, the modern version of Satan clashes with what’s actually in the book, most people don’t actually know the Ten Commandments because the ten that get thrown around as what was on the stone slabs that Moses did dictation on aren’t what was on the stone slabs that Moe actually walked down the hill with, etc.
None of this is to say that either faith or the faithful are wrong for their beliefs and it certainly isn’t meant to say that I think James Cameron’s documentary, while I may still watch it just for the hëll of it, has any real weight to it whatsoever. I first got wind of this thing Saturday night and have been poking around to see what I can see about it since then. Lots of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing. Sorry Jimmy, but, unless you’ve got some super-sized bombshell hidden away in the documentary itself that you haven’t let out of the bag yet, you’ve got no “there” there. Move on to Battle Angel and don’t make too great an ášš of yourself with this.
Oh, wait… It’s James Cameron. Never mind. The advice will just fall an def ears.