Many of you no doubt noticed the story about the coming Discovery Channel documentary claiming to find the burial place of Jesus and family. I wasn't even going to write on it, because someone's always coming up with something like this to make some money. Hey, if I lived in Jerusalem I might be tempted to snatch some discarded ossuary (1 year burial box) and carve Jesus' name on it.
But since I rarely pass an opportunity for biting sarcasm, why not write about it? By the way, you can find some good comments on this at
Ben Witherington: http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/02/jesus-tomb-titanic-talpiot-tomb-theory.html
and Scot McKnight: http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=2087
And now, the top 10 reasons why you should laugh really loud when you see this story in the paper:
10. Everyone has DNA. Horrors! They found DNA in someone's burial box and it's related to the DNA on the other burial boxes in the tomb! Wait a minute--most of the people in my home have related DNA too! I must be Jesus!
Seriously, it's not like we have any DNA from Jesus for anyone to be able to link it to the DNA in this tomb.
9. They claim that the DNA in this tomb is related to the DNA in the (discredited) ossuary of James. But wait a minute, in a recent hoax trial on this one, a picture taken in the 70's shows the James ossuary. But this tomb wasn't discovered until 1980. Hmmm. I guess there's a fair chance that both bones were Jewish. That's related, eh?
8. Eusebius and others indicate that the burial place of James was a solitary burial place. That is, no one else was buried at the site where James was--300 years after James' death. I guess the keepers of the grail put his ossuary back in the secret tomb after Constantine suppressed the truth about Jesus and Mary Magdalene... yeah right.
By the way, it is generally accepted that the James box came from a different location than this tomb.
7. How did Joseph's bones get to Jerusalem? My money's on burial in Nazareth. It was the Illuminati who secretly brought it down.
6. Funny how Mary Magdalene, Jesus, his son Jude, his father and mother, and all could be all buried together and no one in the New Testament seems to know about it. They must have kept it all a really good secret.
In fact, the disciples must have been really good liars about where the body of Jesus was hidden. I bet Peter was really regreting that when they were crucifying him. Silly of him not to confess when they were about to kill him. "Just kidding guys. Can I go home now?" Then again, maybe he really believed Jesus rose from the dead. It might explain how he went from running away to dying in the name of the resurrected Jesus.
5. James Tabor, the respectable scholar cameo (he is a respectable scholar), actually published a book last year with a completely contradictory theory. Fickle, thy name is Tabor.
4. This discovery was found over 25 years ago and has been published on (1996) with the Jewish (not Christian) scholar finding no likely connection. Now with Titanic director James Cameron involved, suddenly Christianity is in crisis. Did I mention to you that I was abducted by aliens last week too?
3. The names here "Mary," "Joseph," "Jesus" were extremely common names. On just the names we know, about 21% of women at the time were probably named Mary. Joseph is the second most common name found. Jesus the 6th. Witherington likens the names to Smith or Jones. Assuming that these are all authentic names in an authentic location, it is not at all unlikely to find such a conglomeration (along with about 6 other names) together.
2. I find pretty implausible the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. And it isn't because I think this would be a big crisis for faith. On the contrary, it's precisely because I don't think this would have been a problem at all for the faith of the NT authors that I don't see any conspiracy here. We only find out incidentally that Peter was married. It just wasn't an issue.
1. The empty tomb tradition remains the most likely conclusion of the literary evidence whether one has faith or not. Mark in the earliest form we have dates from the early 70's at the latest and there is no body in the tomb. The earliest tradition of empty tomb denial appears in Matthew--that the disciples stole the body. Yet this non-belief implies that there is no body in the tomb it was expected to be in. To have a family tomb of this magnitude elsewhere requires a conspiracy that is very unlikely given the suffering of the early Christian leaders. Luke and John also point to an empty tomb.
But to me the strongest historical evidence for the bodily resurrection/empty tomb is the way that Paul talks about the resurrection body. It is in continuity with the corpse, which is like a seed planted in the ground that dies before bringing forth life. Since Paul connects Jesus' resurrection with our resurrection, the implication of 1 Corinthians 15 is a continuity between the dead corpse of Jesus and the resurrected, glorious body of Jesus. If there was a conspiracy of this sort, Paul wasn't in on it in the early 50's, less than 20 years after Jesus' death (and he became a Christian within three or four).
Hey, honey, look what the cat drag in with today's newspaper. Just put it in the trash. I'll take the bag out later.
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16 comments:
ROTFLMHO! Thanks for addressing this. Real scholars are chuckling, and, like you say, in a month or two this nonsense will pass, however the small-headed modernists can be easily alarmed. Thanks.
Excellent, Ken! Let me just throw in one more comment. If you are interested in seeing pictures of the ossuaries and drawings of the inscriptions, you can see them in the pdf file of "The Original report on the Talpiot Inscriptions by L.Y. Rahmani in A Catalogue of of Jewish Ossuaries: In the Collections of the State of Israel, 1994" (which can be downloaded from http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tomb/explore/explore.html). If you do this, you will notice something very interesting. All of the inscriptions are fairly legible--Marya; Mariamene; Judah, son of Jesus--all, that is, except one. The inscription which allegedly reads "Jesus, son of Joseph" (which, of course, is the real kicker in all of this) is a mess!! I would probably agree with the reading "son of Joseph" (although it isn't abundantly clear), but to get "Yeshua" out of the first part is quite a feat. This is why, you will notice, that the English translation under the drawing of this inscription reads "Yeshua (?), son of Yehosef." It's interesting how that all important (?) has mysteriously gotten deleted from discussions on this inscription! I would submit that in any other context with any other patronym, any credible paleographer would simply say, "Don't know. We can't read that part of the inscription. It's a mess." But hey, if you are going to guess what it might say, "Yeshua" would probably get people talking, huh? Obviously so...
Oh, and this is a great quote from an article on MSNBC.com: (Although I don't know Joe Zias who is quoted here, the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem is a highly respected scholarly institution.)
His critics are arming themselves for battle. "Simcha has no credibility whatsoever," says Joe Zias, who was the curator for anthropology and archeology at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem from 1972 to 1997 and personally numbered the Talpiot ossuaries. "He's pimping off the Bible … He got this guy Cameron, who made 'Titanic' or something like that—what does this guy know about archeology? I am an archeologist, but if I were to write a book about brain surgery, you would say, 'Who is this guy?' People want signs and wonders. Projects like these make a mockery of the archeological profession." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17328478/site/newsweek/
Posted by: Elaine Bernius
Thanks Elaine for some real scholarship...
This article was good from the New York Times this morning and I wanted to put it here:
"Crypt Held Bodies of Jesus and Family, Film Says," by LAURIE GOODSTEIN
A documentary by the Discovery Channel claims to provide evidence that a crypt unearthed 27 years ago in Jerusalem contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth.
Moreover, it asserts that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had a son, named Judah, and that all three were buried together.
The claims were met with skepticism by several archaeologists and New Testament scholars, as well as outrage by some Christian leaders. The contention that Jesus was married, had a child and left behind his bones — suggesting he was not bodily resurrected — contradicts core Christian doctrine.
Two limestone boxes said to contain residue from the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were unveiled yesterday at a news conference at the New York Public Library by the documentary’s producer, James Cameron, who made “Titanic” and “The Terminator.” His collaborators onstage included a journalist, a self-taught antiquities investigator, New Testament scholars, a statistician and an archaeologist. Several of them said they were excited by the findings but uncertain.
“I would like more information. I remain skeptical,” said the archaeologist, Shimon Gibson, a senior fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, in an interview after the news conference.
In recent years, audiences have demonstrated a voracious appetite for books, movies and magazines that reassess the life and times of Jesus, and there is already a book timed to coincide with this documentary, which will be on the air next Sunday.
“This is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” said Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, in a telephone interview. “One of the problems is there are so many biblically illiterate people around the world that they don’t know what is real judicious assessment and what is what some of us in the field call ‘fantastic archaeology.’ ”
Professor Stager said he had not seen the film but was skeptical.
Mr. Cameron said he had been “trepidatious” about becoming involved in the project but got engaged out of “great passion for a good detective story,” not to offend and not to cash in.
“I think this is the biggest archaeological story of the century,” he said. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt. It’s part of a very well-considered plan to reveal this information to the world in a way that makes sense, with proper documentation.”
The documentary, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” revisits a site discovered by archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority in the East Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980, when the area was being excavated for a building.
Ten burial boxes, or ossuaries, were found in the tomb, and six of them had inscriptions. The Discovery Channel filmmakers say, and archaeologists interviewed concur, there is no possibility the inscriptions were forged, because they were catalogued at the time by archaeologists and kept in storage in the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The documentary’s case rests in large part on the interpretation of the inscriptions, which they say are Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, Joseph and Judah.
In the first century, these names were as common as Tom, Dick and Harry. But the filmmakers commissioned a statistician, Andrey Feuerverger, a professor at the University of Toronto, who calculated that the odds that all six names would appear together in one tomb are one in 600, calculated conservatively — or as much as one in one million.
One box is said to be inscribed “Yeshua bar Yosef,” in Aramaic, an ancient dialect of Hebrew that is translated as “Jesus son of Joseph.” The second box is inscribed “Maria,” in Hebrew. Maria is the Latin version of “Miriam” — a name so common in first century ancient Israel that it was given to about 25 percent of all Jewish women. But the mother of Jesus has always been known as “Maria” (which in English is “Mary”). The documentary says that while thousands of ossuaries have been discovered, only eight have had the inscription “Maria” spelled phonetically in Hebrew letters.
The third box is labeled “Matia,” Hebrew for Matthew, and the filmmakers cite a reference in the New Testament to buttress their claim that Mary had many Matthews in her family and it would make sense to find one in the family tomb.
The fourth box is inscribed “Yose,” a nickname for the Hebrew “Yosef,” or “Joseph” in English. Again, the filmmakers turn to the New Testament Gospels, which refer to four “brothers” of Jesus: James, Judah, Simon and Joseph. Scholars disagree whether these were actual brothers, companions or cousins, but the filmmakers infer that the inscription refers to a brother of Jesus.
Perhaps the most shaky claims revolve around the inscription on the fifth box, which the filmmakers assert is that of Mary Magdalene. It is the only inscription of the six in Greek, and says “Mariamene e Mara,” which the filmmakers say can be translated as “Mary, known as the master.”
I might insert here that Richard Bauckham thinks Mara here is short for Martha
The filmmakers cite the interpretation of a Harvard professor, François Bovon, of the “Acts of Phillip,” a text from the fourth or fifth century and recently recovered from a monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. The filmmakers say that Professor Bovon has determined from the “Acts of Phillip” that Mariamene is Mary Magdalene’s real name.
The filmmakers commissioned DNA testing on the residue in the boxes said to have held Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are no bones left, because the religious custom in Israel is to bury archeological remains in a cemetery.
However, the documentary’s director and its driving force, Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born Canadian, said there was enough mitochondrial DNA for a laboratory in Ontario to conclude that the bodies in the “Jesus” and “Mary Magdalene” ossuaries were not related on their mothers’ side. From this, Mr. Jacobovici deduced that they were a couple, because otherwise they would not have been buried together in a family tomb.
In an interview, Mr. Jacobovici was asked why the filmmakers did not conduct DNA testing on the other ossuaries to determine whether the one inscribed “Judah, son of Jesus” was genetically related to either the Jesus or Mary Magdalene boxes; or whether the Jesus remains were actually the offspring of Mary.
“We’re not scientists. At the end of the day we can’t wait till every ossuary is tested for DNA,” he said. “We took the story that far. At some point you have to say, ‘I’ve done my job as a journalist.’ ”
Among the most influential scholars to dispute the documentary was Amos Kloner, former Jerusalem district archaeologist of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who examined the tomb in 1980.
Mr. Kloner said in a telephone interview that the inscription on the alleged “Jesus” ossuary is not clear enough to ascertain. The box on display at the news conference is a plain rectangle with rough gashes on one side. The one supposedly containing Mary Magdalene has six-petalled rosettes and an elaborate border.
“The new evidence is not serious, and I do not accept that it is connected to the family of Jesus,” said Mr. Kloner, who appears in the documentary as a skeptic.
New Testament scholars also criticized the documentary as theologically dangerous, historically inaccurate and irresponsible.
“A lot of conservative, orthodox and moderate Christians are going to be upset by the recklessness of this,” said Ben Witherington, a Bible scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. “Of course, we want to know more about Jesus, but please don’t insult our intelligence by giving us this sort of stuff. It’s going to get a lot of Christians with their knickers in a knot unnecessarily.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem."
P.S. Let us all take the advice of Ben Witherington and not get our knickers in a knot. Man, I hate it when that happens... ;-)
Thanks for this, Ken. I've enjoyed sitting back and watching the secular scholars point out the flaws in this discovery.
If you are interested in seeing continued scholarly responses to this story, see http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/a-messiah-buried-with-honor-responses-to-the-tomb-of-jesus-and-his-family-story
Some more good thoughts by Darrell Bock:
http://dev.bible.org/bock/node/106
Thank you, Ken, for once again pointing out the obvious inconsistencies and inaccuracies in this tiresome tirade of ambitious archaeoloists attempting to refute the Absolute Truth of Christianity. I feel wholly unenlightened after viewing this documentary. Why was no DNA testing done to prove whether or not James or Judah matched the likes of the alleged "Jesus, Son of Joseph"? Also, no DNA testing to confirm likenesses to "Mary" and Judah, since she and Jesus were supposedly married with children and all. I would think that would be vital in regards to a wholesome, conclusive documentary. Discovery Channel fails us once again, as was to be expected, given these particular circumstances. And what's with all the commercials? :)
Great conclusion on the Discovery Channel piece on Witherington's blog today:
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/03/jesus-tomb-show-biblical-archaeologists.html
It gets even worse. Anyone who reads Aramaic can look at the tracing they give for the "Jesus son of Yosef" box and immediately see that this whole thing is complete rubbish, a pure act of charlatanry, obviously designed to profit in the worst manner from ordinary unsuspecting people. The name "son of Yosef" is clearly discernable towards the left, but where are the letters yod, shin, vav and ayin to be found in the scrawled writing etched into the stone following the big X-like marking on the right?
Indeed, in the Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries where the tracing of the inscription was first published, the transcriber carefully puts a dot over the letters yod and shin, indicating in standard fashion that his reading is conjectural, and he puts a question-mark after the entire name Yeshua meaning that he is doubtful of his own transcription. He was clearly groping, because the letters vav and ayin are also not distinguishable and he should have put a dot over that part of his transcription as well. As everyone knows, there is another ossuary with the name Yeshua bar Yosef legibly inscribed on it, and it seems that the transcriber may have been influenced by that one in trying to figure out what this one says.
As for James Tabor who is promoting this silly film, he is the same character at the center of the claim that an “Essene latrine” has been found near the site of Khirbet Qumran, where so-called traditional Qumranologists (including, it would appear, Tabor himself) continue to insist, in the face of mounting contrary evidence, that a sect of Essenes lived. Tabor is also involved in the current biased and misleading exhibits of the Dead Sea Scrolls traveling around the country.
For details, see http://jesus-crypt-fraud.blogspot.com/ and the other postings published by the authors of that blog.
Professor Jim Davila’s blog (March 6, 2007) http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/ quotes Tabor as asserting to him in an email: “I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such.”
Yet Tabor himself, in an article published in the Charlotte Observer, excerpted on the same paleojudaica blog a year ago (February 13, 2006), wrote: “As an archaeologist, I have long observed and experienced the thrill that ancient discoveries cause in all of us. The look on the faces of my students as we uncover ancient ruins from the time of Jesus, or explore one of the caves where the scrolls were found, is unmistakable.”
Tabor's Ph.D. was awarded to him by the University of Chicago’s Department of New Testament and Christian Literature. (This department is housed in the University of Chicago’s Divinity School building, but it does give academic degrees and its teaching staff are culled from different departments of the University.) The title of his dissertation was “Things Unalterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise”. He clearly has no training as an archaeologist or historian, and we are only left to wonder at the motivations that led him to become involved in these phony scams.
Thanks for this additional information! On a slightly tangential issue you raise, I know there have always been nay sayers to the Essene Hypothesis, but I was under the impression that the Groningen hypothesis was still the solid majority position... Any recent articles or studies you have in mind on this side issue?
Well, as I understand it, the "Groningen" hypothesis is merely a variation on the traditional Qumran-Essene theory. Because the Essenes described by Pliny were, according to him, celibate, and no doctrine of celibacy has been found among the Scrolls, many scholars began proposing alternative "sectarian" identifications years ago. But once it is granted that Qumran is not the place described by Pliny, then the basic premise of the old theory has fallen away. Given that sectarian ideas are only present in a small portion of the 900 scrolls, which were copied by over 500 scribes, the identification of the authors of those few texts as the inhabitants of Qumran or as the authors of the scrolls in their entirety becomes arbitrary.
The Forward site now has a fascinating editorial on this whole business by Norman Golb, the link is http://www.forward.com/articles/take-claims-about-dead-sea-scrolls-with-a-grain-of/
In general, I have difficulty with the idea of a "majority" defining matters in scholarship. A "majority" voted, at a conference held somewhere in Europe (I don't recall the exact details), that Pluto is not a planet, but that doesn't make it so, and many others were indignant that this vote had been taken. In the case of Qumran, most active scholars either based their careers on the old theory or are students of scholars associated with that theory; people who disagree with them are simply exluded from participating in conferences; and major news reports have consistently described a breakdown in "consensus". So I think all a neutral, disinterested party can do is demand that both of the salient views (Jerusalem theory, variations of the Qumran-sectarian theory) be represented in museum exhibits and conferences. That at least seems (at least to my mind) the view that best accords with general principles of academic and scientific freedom, which is a prerequisite if scholarly progress is to occur in any field.
P.s. I inadvertently made an error (or lapsus) in stating the title of Tabor's Ph.D. dissertation--it was Things Unutterable, not Unalterable.
Thanks for this dialog! The data you mention make it clear that the group at the Qumran site near the caves could not have produced all these manuscripts.
However, Golb's hypothesis, as I recall, is that perhaps the scrolls are a temple stash as a group of priests fled Jerusalem around the time of its destruction, right? The problem here is that, while the scrolls do indeed have far more literature than that of the small sect at Qumran, it is not a cross section of all Jewish literature of the time. There is no copy of, for example, the Psalms of Solomon or 2 Maccabees, indeed of many texts we might expect. Nothing is certain, but I personally don't find this theory as likely as, say, that of Boccacini, even if he too is somewhat speculative on the edges.
Thanks again for this fun discussion!
No, that's a common misrepresentation of Golb's theory, disseminated by traditional Qumranologists (in particular by Leonard Schiffman, who began doing this in his book on "Reclaiming the Scrolls"--see the single footnote where he mentions Golb, in the introduction) in an attempt to discredit him.
Golb believes: (1) the scrolls were gathered from various libraries; (2) they must have come from a large, urban center of intellectual activity such as only Jerusalem is known to have been at the time; (3) they are only part of a wider phenomenon (described in the Copper Scroll) of hiding of scrolls and other artifacts from Jerusalem in the desert to preserve them from the Romans, who then sacked the city; and (4) they may or may not INCLUDE scrolls from the Temple library. One can, of course discuss the lack of certain texts such as Maccabees, but it needs to be discussed in the light of the actual theory (see particularly (3) above) and not a deformed version of it. Hope that's useful--I've seen this misrepresentation all over the internet even though Golb is very clear about the matter in his book. One can naturally have an interesting discussion about Golb's theory, but he is far more senstive to the complexities of the evidence than people like to assume. (Other common statements about him are that he believes there were no Essenes, or that none of the scrolls are sectarian: all of this is simply not true.)
P.s. sorry if my tone seemed a bit sharp--had a rough day yesterday, and I've seen this misrepresentation of Golb's view, originally promulgated by Schiffman, so many times now...
I didn't take it that way at all. I appreciate you clarifying these things about Golb's perspective...
... although apart from people doing websearches I doubt any of my regular readers even know we're having this conversation ;-)
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