The Bones of Jesus?

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.