By: Jim Taylor
Last week, film producer James Cameron announced
that he had identified a stone box that once contained the remains of Jesus.
Also, boxes for Jesus' mother, wife, brother, and son.
This kind of event
seems to happen every year around this time. Five years ago, it was the box (or
ossuary) reputed to have held the bones of James, the brother of Jesus -- later
denounced as a hoax.
Then we had Dan
Brown's conspiracy theories in The Da Vinci Code.
And
the unexpurgated violence of Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of The Christ.
All timed their
release to exploit the season of Lent, the seven weeks of penitence and
reflection preceding Easter, the holiest event of the Christian year.
It's a marketing
ploy, of course. But will it change anything?
FINDING THE "LOST TOMB"
Unfortunately,
cynicism about the timing deflects serious consideration of the message.
Cameron and
Emmy-award winning director Simcha Jacobovici produced a $3.5 million documentary, to be
broadcast today on the Discovery Channel in the
The tomb itself
was first uncovered in 1980, during construction in the
Archeologists
removed ten ossuaries inscribed with common names of that period: Yeshua bar Josef [Jesus son of Joseph], Maria [Latin for
Miriam, Mary in English], Matia [Hebrew for Matthew],
Yose [Mark's Gospel names Joses
as a brother of Jesus], and in Greek, Mariamne e mara [Mariamne, known as the
master].
Biblical scholars
such as Harvard professor François Bovon say Mariamne was the original name for Mary Magdalene.
Nine ossuaries
were stored at the Israel Antiquities Authority; the tenth disappeared.
While working on a
film about the James ossuary, Jacobovici made some
connections that professional archeologists had not.
The nine ossuaries
all bore the same patina -- a glaze or crust, formed by conditions inside the
tomb. Examination by electron microscope found a matching patina on the James
ossuary.
The bones in the
caskets were reburied in unmarked graves, according to Jewish custom. But
enough tissue fragments remained, Cameron claims, for DNA analysis at
Unrelated male and
female remains would only be placed in the same tomb if they were husband and
wife.
Which would make
more plausible the inscription on another ossuary: Yehuda
bar Yeshua [
CONFLICTING OPINIONS
Critics protest
that the names prove nothing. They were all common at the time. Joe Zais, former Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for
the Israel Antiquities Authority, estimates that 48 per cent of Jewish women
were named Mary. Jesus was the seventh most common male name.
Cameron and Jacobovici invoke statisticians. Names may be common;
combinations of names are not. A combination of six names, all connected to a
single family, tilts the odds to 600 to one.
Add the ossuary of
James and the statistical likelihood, Cameron told NBC's Today show, rises
"to the range of a couple of million to one, in favour."
Professional
reactions varied. James Tabor, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at
the
Amos Kloner, an archeologist who examined the tomb when it was
first discovered in 1980, called Cameron's claims "nonsense. impossible!"
"There is no
likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb," Kloner stated flatly. "They were a
DIVISIVE DISCOVERY
The real problem
is that if Cameron and Jacobovici are correct, the
interment of Jesus' bones contradicts the Bible.
Nothing in the
Bible states unequivocally that Jesus never married and never had children. The
Bible simply makes no mention of wife or children.
And clearly, after
his resurrection, Jesus had a recognizably physical body. If it had wounded
flesh, presumably it also had bones.
But one writer --
the author of Luke's gospel and the Acts of the Apostles -- states that Jesus
"ascended into heaven." Which implies that he left
no bones behind.
Thirty years ago,
Canadian author Charles Templeton based a novel, Act of God, on the church's
efforts to silence a discovery of Jesus' bones. Twenty years before that, Nikos
Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ imagined
Jesus escaping from the cross to live happy-ever-after with Mary Magdalene.
"Skeptics, in
general, love to poke holes into the story that so many people hold dear,"
explained Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the
University of the
Of Cameron's
documentary, Pfann said, "I don't think that
Christians are going to buy into this."
Father Peter Boutross of the Church of the Nativity in
"Not a Lenten
season goes by without some author or TV program seeking to cast doubt on the
divinity of Jesus and/or the Resurrection," said Bill Donohue, president
of the Catholic League.
Thus the battle
lines are drawn.
TWIN FOUNDATIONS
The controversy
reveals more to me about the entrenched convictions of the two sides than about
the validity of either. One side argues from science and research; the other
argues from Bible and tradition.
A faith based on
an absence of evidence -- an unbroken hymen, an unmentioned reference, an empty
tomb, missing bones -- will always be threatened by new evidence.
Personally, I
don't particularly care whether Jesus climbed a stairway to heaven or rode an
elevator. The presence or absence of his physical remains will not affect my
faith.
The indisputable
fact is that something happened to change the world. That reality doesn't
depend on miraculous healings or disappearing bodies. Its evidence is the
church itself -- flawed and fallible, but nevertheless outliving a dozen
empires.
In the end,
whether or not Cameron and Jacobovici have really
found the tomb of Jesus won't matter. The steamroller of 20 centuries of faith
will roll on regardless.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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