Friday, March 02, 2007

Jesus Tomb

This past week the world was told that the tomb of Jesus was found and the “documentary” by James Cameron will be released shortly. My gut when I heard that the same guy that produced Titanic was making this was that it was just for the money. However I figured I should look into it since one Christian poll had 16% of Christians believe Jesus’ tomb was found…it really frustrates me how many people will believe whatever mainstream media tells them. So in hopes of letting someone one in the world realize how big of a scam this is I will give everyone some facts.

This tomb was first excavated in 1980 and then 3 years later it was completely debunked and ruled out as having a chance of being Jesus’ tomb. However in 1996 the BBC tried to resurrect this story (I felt like using the pun) but was shot down immediately for the same reason it was shot down originally. So here a few key points that were used by archeologists to consider this an unlikely location for Jesus’ tomb.

(1) The names in the tomb were the most common names at that time period. There are nearly 100 tombs in that region with the name Jesus and 21% of all females were named Mary.
(2) The family in the tomb was quite wealthy, but Joseph being a carpenter from a small town would not have had much money.
(3) James, the brother of Jesus, tomb was known and often visited during the first century following Christ’s death.
(4) It was known that Joseph died earlier then the rest and was buried nearly Galilee, which is not near this tomb.
(5) The tomb is no where close to where the family lived, which makes it very unlikely that you would have a multigenerational burial site for a family that wasn’t close to where they lived.
(6) The ossuary labeled Jesus is currently debated whether it says Jesus or a different name that is close to Jesus.

I’m sure there are more points, but that gives you a flavor of the problems associated with this find. So obviously since James Cameron won’t just be bringing up an old, outdated story to make a buck he must have found new evidence that supports his belief that this is actually Jesus Christ’s tomb. The new “scientific” evidence that he brings to the table is DNA analysis…what!?...seriously? How in the world could DNA analysis give any new information…unless he picked this because it sounds scientific and everyone will believe things that sound scientific…no certainly not James Cameron, I had better look into how DNA analysis magically cracked this case.

So according to Carney Matheson, the scientist that did the analysis, dust from Jesus’ ossuary and Mary’s ossuary weren’t related. I use dust because there weren’t any bones and Carney was only given “bits of matter” from those ossuaries. Then since they didn’t match Cameron went ahead and concluded that Mary and Jesus were married. Note that they never even bothered to check the DNA of any other individuals to find out if it was even possible to get a match for anyone. Perhaps I’m a little bit slow here but I struggle to see how this “evidence” in anyway addresses the original problems that debunked the tomb in the first plate. Heck even one of the original discoverers of the tomb, Amos Kloner, was quoted as saying “I don’t accept the news that it was used by Jesus or his family, the documentary filmmakers are using it to sell their film.”

I actually think this years attempt to destroy the Christian religion bothers me even more than last years. See last years, The Da Vinci Code, was a lot closer to laughable because it was obviously a fictional story. In fact the only thing that truly bothered me about it was that Dan Brown was labeling his book fiction then telling everyone it was non-fiction (if you don’t believe me check out Brown’s interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show when asked how much of the book was based on reality in terms of things that actually happened and Brown said “Absolutely all of it.”). Sadly even with such an obviously bogus story many Americans believed it was true. However this year James Cameron is selling it as straight up fact…dishonest to say the least.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw this news early this week and debated with myself for a while. If they put it cunningly, I am sure it could do more damage to some people's faith than Da Vinci Code.

I don't know if it's true or it's just me. The attack from the media has been extremely fierce recently. Look at the Oscar nominated film "Jesus camp" followed by those hostile comments on Youtube. Not to mention that last year the anti-religion book "the God delusion" was top ten on "New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller" list for about 20 weeks.

Anonymous said...

What I think is crazy about the "DNA evidence" is that they could even attempt to "prove" that any DNA they find in the tomb would be (the Christian's savior) Jesus... I mean, unless someone 2000 years ago saved a vial of Jesus' DNA for our scientists to compare it to. :)