Saturday, March 03, 2007

Jesus' tomb?

There has been much international fuss over the claim made in a recent documentary by Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron (the director of "Titanic") that a tomb discovered in the 1980's in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem is that of Jesus Christ. They base their claim on the finding in this family tomb of several ossuaries, boxes in which the bones of the dead were kept. Among these ossuaries are several with written inscriptions on them in ancient Hebrew that say "Jesus son of Joseph," "Mariamne" and "Judah son of Jesus." The assumption is that these inscriptions are all genuine, having been seen and examined by several experts. Although the BBC made a movie about the tomb in the 1980's when it was first discovered, the significance of this find now seems to have been exaggerated.
Criticism of the claims of the "tomb raiders" is as follows: (i) all the names found in the tomb were extremely common in that period, so they could have been anybody, not necessarily the famous Jesus and family; (ii) as well as "Mariamne" being possibly "Mary," she could also have been the wife, cousin or aunt of any of the other men, so the lack of any clear relationships makes the claim that this is the family portrayed in the New Testament very remote; (iii) the tomb is in Jerusalem, not in Nazareth or anywhere near the domicile of Jesus' family, and since travel was very difficult in those days a family living in Nazareth was very unlikely to have had a family tomb near Jerusalem. So this may be the tomb of a Jerusalem Jewish family that contained someone named "Jesus," but so what?
Possibly because of the influence of the "Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown, the desire to find a "son" of Jesus and Mary is quite strong now. However, there is no evidence that this particular son has anything whatsoever to do with the famous Jesus of Nazareth. If it did then it would be an explosive find indeed! Because Christianity as it developed laid a great emphasis on two points: (i) belief, one had to believe and have faith that Jesus was crucified, and arose from the dead, which seems unlikely for the bones of a seemingly ordinary Jesus buried in an ordinary tomb; (ii) if Jesus indeed did have a son named Judah this would be totally inconsistent with the story so elaborately learnt by generations of Christians.
On the other hand, one could say that religions are irrational, and the belief system of Christianity doesn't need to be validated by proving that the actual Jesus acted as protrayed in the Gospels. It could all have been a made up fantasy, but as long of there are believers in the story that is all that matters. I don't subscribe to this view, because the fathers of the Church decided on the "true" interpretation of the Gospels and anyone who didn't accept their interpretation was a heretic. It was decided (by majority vote at the Council of Niceae) that Jesus was the "son of God" and that he arose on the third day, etc. Now if this was not true then the Church fathers had a lot of people killed for nothing. If the historical Jesus was not consistent with the canonical Gospels that were written between 100-400 ce, then Christianity has a lot to answer for.

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