Several prominent scholars who were interviewed in a bitterly contested documentary that suggests that Jesus and his family members were buried in a nondescript ancient Jerusalem burial cave have now revised their conclusions, including the statistician who claimed that the odds were 600:1 in favor of the tomb being the family burial cave of Jesus of Nazareth, a new study on the fallout from the popular documentary shows.
The dramatic clarifications, compiled by epigrapher Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem in a paper titled "Cracks in the Foundation: How the Lost Tomb of Jesus story is losing its scholarly support," come two months after the screening of The Lost Tomb of Christ that attracted widespread public interest, despite the concomitant scholarly ridicule.
The film, made by Oscar-winning director James Cameron and Emmy-winning Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, prompted major criticism from both a leading Israeli archeologist involved in the original dig at the site as well as Christian leaders, who were angered over the documentary's contradictions of main tenets of Christianity.
But now, even some of the scholars who were interviewed for and appeared in the film are questioning some of its basic claims.
The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together.
Pfann's paper reported that a statement on the Discovery Channel's Web site, which previously read "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters...concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family," in keeping with Feuerverger's statement, has been altered and now reads, "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters... concludes that the probability factor is in the order of 600 to 1 that an equally 'surprising' cluster of names would arise purely by chance under given assumptions."
Another sentence on the same Web site stating that Feuerverger had concluded it was highly probable that the tomb, located in the southeastern residential Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, was the Jesus family tomb - the central point of the film - has also been changed. It now reads: "It is unlikely that an equally surprising cluster of names would have arisen by chance under purely random sampling."
Israeli archeologists have said that the similarity of the names found inscribed on the ossuaries in the cave to the members of Jesus's family was coincidental, since many of those names were commonplace in the first century CE.
The film argues that 10 ancient ossuaries - burial boxes used to store bones - that were discovered in Talpiot in 1980 contained the bones of Jesus and his family. The filmmakers attempt to explain some of the inscriptions on the ossuaries by suggesting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that the couple had a son, Judah.
One of the ossuaries bears an inscription reading "Yeshua son of Yehosef" or "Jesus son of Joseph;" a second reads "Mary;" a third is a Greek inscription apparently read by one scholar as "Mary Magdalene;" while a fourth bears the inscription, "Judah, son of Jesus." The inscriptions are in Hebrew or Aramaic, except for the one in Greek.
But Shimon Gibson, who was part of the team that excavated the tomb two and half decades ago and who appeared in the film, is quoted in Pfann's report as saying he doubted the site was the tomb of Jesus and his family.
"Personally, I'm skeptical that this is the tomb of Jesus and I made this point very clear to the filmmakers," Gibson is quoted as saying.
"We need much more evidence before we can say that the Talpiot tomb might be the family tomb of Jesus," he added.
In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film's claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.
"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. - that is, variants of 'Mary.' So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying.
The paper also notes that DNA scientist Dr. Carney Matheson, who supervised DNA testing carried out for the film from the supposed Jesus and Mary Magdalene ossuaries, and who said in the documentary that "these two individuals, if they were unrelated, would most likely be husband and wife," later said that "the only conclusions we made were that these two sets were not maternally related. To me, it sounds like absolutely nothing."
Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene - one of the filmmakers' critical arguments - issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.
Pfann has already argued that the controversial inscription does not read "Mariamne" at all.
The burial site, which has been contested from the start by scholars and church officials alike, is some distance from the Church of the Holy Sepulchrr in the Old City, where many Christians believe Jesus's body lay for three days after he was crucified.
According to the New Testament, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion, and an ossuary containing Jesus's bones - the explanations of the movie director notwithstanding - would contradict the core Christian belief that he was resurrected and then ascended to heaven. - source
Showing posts with label tomb of jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tomb of jesus. Show all posts
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Key Error In Jesus Documentary
JERUSALEM -- A scholar looking into the factual basis of a popular but widely criticized documentary that claims to have located the tomb of Jesus said Tuesday that a crucial piece of evidence filmmakers used to support their claim is a mistake.
Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar and paleographer at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said he has released a paper claiming the makers of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" were mistaken when they identified an ancient ossuary from the cave as belonging to the New Testament's Mary Magdalene.
The film's director, Simcha Jacobovici, responded that other researchers agreed with the documentary's conclusions.
Produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron, the documentary has drawn intense media coverage for its claims challenging accepted Christian dogma.
Despite widespread ridicule from scholars, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew more than 4 million viewers when it aired on the Discovery Channel on March 4. A companion book, "The Jesus Family Tomb," has rocketed to sixth place on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
The film and book suggest that a first-century ossuary found in a south Jerusalem cave in 1980 contained the remains of Jesus, contradicting the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven. Ossuaries are stone boxes used at the time to store the bones of the dead.
The filmmakers also suggest that Mary Magdalene was buried in the tomb, that she and Jesus were married, and that an ossuary labeled "Judah son of Jesus" belonged to their son.
The scholars who analyzed the Greek inscription on one of the ossuaries after its discovery read it as "Mariamene e Mara," meaning "Mary the teacher" or "Mary the master."
Before the movie was screened, Jacobovici said that particular inscription provided crucial support for his claim. The name Mariamene is rare, and in some early Christian texts it is believed to refer to Mary Magdalene.
But having analyzed the inscription, Pfann published a detailed article on his university's Web site asserting that it doesn't read "Mariamene" at all.
The inscription, Pfann said, is made up of two names inscribed by two different hands: the first, "Mariame," was inscribed in a formal Greek script, and later, when the bones of another woman were added to the box, another scribe using a different cursive script added the words "kai Mara," meaning "and Mara." Mara is a different form of the name Martha.
According to Pfann's reading, the ossuary did not house the bones of "Mary the teacher," but rather of two women, "Mary and Martha."
"In view of the above, there is no longer any reason to be tempted to link this ossuary ... to Mary Magdalene or any other person in biblical, non-biblical or church tradition," Pfann wrote.
In the interest of telling a good story, Pfann said, the documentary engaged in some "fudging" of the facts.
"James Cameron is a great guru of science fiction, and he's taking it to a new level with Simcha Jacobovici. You take a little bit of science, spin a good yarn out of it and you get another 'Terminator' or 'Life of Brian,"' said Pfann, who briefly appeared as an ossuary expert in the documentary.
In Israel on Tuesday for a screening of the film, the Toronto-based Jacobovici welcomed Pfann's criticism, saying "every inscription should be re-examined."
But Jacobovici said scholars who researched the ossuary in the past agreed with the film's reading. "Anyone who looks at it can see that the script was written by the same hand," he added.
Jacobovici has faced criticism much tougher than Pfann's academic critique. The film has been termed "archaeo-porn," and Jacobovici has been accused of "pimping the Bible."
Jacobovici attributes most of the criticism to scholars' discomfort with journalists "casting light into their ossuary monopoly."
"What we're doing is democratizing this knowledge, and this is driving some people crazy," he said.
SOURCE
Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar and paleographer at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said he has released a paper claiming the makers of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" were mistaken when they identified an ancient ossuary from the cave as belonging to the New Testament's Mary Magdalene.
The film's director, Simcha Jacobovici, responded that other researchers agreed with the documentary's conclusions.
Produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron, the documentary has drawn intense media coverage for its claims challenging accepted Christian dogma.
Despite widespread ridicule from scholars, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew more than 4 million viewers when it aired on the Discovery Channel on March 4. A companion book, "The Jesus Family Tomb," has rocketed to sixth place on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
The film and book suggest that a first-century ossuary found in a south Jerusalem cave in 1980 contained the remains of Jesus, contradicting the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven. Ossuaries are stone boxes used at the time to store the bones of the dead.
The filmmakers also suggest that Mary Magdalene was buried in the tomb, that she and Jesus were married, and that an ossuary labeled "Judah son of Jesus" belonged to their son.
The scholars who analyzed the Greek inscription on one of the ossuaries after its discovery read it as "Mariamene e Mara," meaning "Mary the teacher" or "Mary the master."
Before the movie was screened, Jacobovici said that particular inscription provided crucial support for his claim. The name Mariamene is rare, and in some early Christian texts it is believed to refer to Mary Magdalene.
But having analyzed the inscription, Pfann published a detailed article on his university's Web site asserting that it doesn't read "Mariamene" at all.
The inscription, Pfann said, is made up of two names inscribed by two different hands: the first, "Mariame," was inscribed in a formal Greek script, and later, when the bones of another woman were added to the box, another scribe using a different cursive script added the words "kai Mara," meaning "and Mara." Mara is a different form of the name Martha.
According to Pfann's reading, the ossuary did not house the bones of "Mary the teacher," but rather of two women, "Mary and Martha."
"In view of the above, there is no longer any reason to be tempted to link this ossuary ... to Mary Magdalene or any other person in biblical, non-biblical or church tradition," Pfann wrote.
In the interest of telling a good story, Pfann said, the documentary engaged in some "fudging" of the facts.
"James Cameron is a great guru of science fiction, and he's taking it to a new level with Simcha Jacobovici. You take a little bit of science, spin a good yarn out of it and you get another 'Terminator' or 'Life of Brian,"' said Pfann, who briefly appeared as an ossuary expert in the documentary.
In Israel on Tuesday for a screening of the film, the Toronto-based Jacobovici welcomed Pfann's criticism, saying "every inscription should be re-examined."
But Jacobovici said scholars who researched the ossuary in the past agreed with the film's reading. "Anyone who looks at it can see that the script was written by the same hand," he added.
Jacobovici has faced criticism much tougher than Pfann's academic critique. The film has been termed "archaeo-porn," and Jacobovici has been accused of "pimping the Bible."
Jacobovici attributes most of the criticism to scholars' discomfort with journalists "casting light into their ossuary monopoly."
"What we're doing is democratizing this knowledge, and this is driving some people crazy," he said.
SOURCE
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Resurrection and the Tomb of Jesus
Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead is arguably the most important question in the history of western civilization. It is also irrelevant and based on a misunderstanding of the process of resurrection, and should not be important at all. He both died and remained dead, and was resurrected. After the resurrection, his body remained in the tomb and was undoubtedly taken away to be buried somewhere.
Perhaps the burial place has been found and perhaps not. Certainly, an interesting tomb has been found, as was shown in the recent TV film, the Lost Tomb of Jesus.
However, the fact that Jesus left a corpse behind does not mean that there was no resurrection. That this is even an issue only points to the fact that we do not understand the nature of resurrection.
This is because we have been lied to about it for millennia by men who have sought to use the wonderful good news that Christ brought to us, to their own greedy ends.
If you read the gospels with any care, you will see that the resurrected Jesus no longer functions like a physical body. He functions like something that appears to be physical, but has new powers to appear and disappear at will, and to move about without reference to the constraints of nature. This is because the man who was seen—and he certainly was seen, I think—was no longer a physical body.
The fact that we do not understand this, and that so many of us believe that his conquest of death had something to do with his physical remains is tragic.
Something terrible happened to the Christian religion, and to western society, in the second and third centuries after the resurrection. Specifically, the pagan gods were replaced with Jesus, who was made into an instrument of political power.
This is utterly at odds with his true message, which was that the kingdom of heaven is not the domain of gods and kings at all, but the rightful inheritance of everybody and anybody. It is also within us, it is part of us, it is integral to being human, and he is no different from any of us. So of course he died. We all die. But he also demonstrated, by continuing to appear after death, that the soul does retain consciousness, and a sufficiently powerful and attentive soul can affect the living and actually be seen by them and communicate with them even after the death of the physical body. Anybody can do it. It’s not a miracle, it is an ability natural to conscious beings, or should be.
To get power, evil men set Jesus on a god’s pedestal, and imbued him with special physical qualities quite unlike those of ordinary people. He was supposedly formed out of some sort of divine substance, different from ordinary people, higher, special and unattainable. He wasn’t even conceived via sexual union between man and woman. Not only that, this most sacred of all sacraments, sexual union between a loving couple, was called ugly and profane by these profoundly sinful men. For a human being to reject sex is to reject nature and thus also God. Certainly, it is to reject Christ.
The resurrection was a special and unique event, they told us, its purpose being to draw attention to the importance of the way of worship that Jesus supposedly proclaimed—and coincidentally, to confer power onto a priesthood that managed the salvation that he promised as a sort of process involving subservience to various secular and religious political institutions.
But it’s all a lie—one cunningly fashioned out of truth, but still a lie, and probably the most profoundly evil of all lies. This is because the whole message of Jesus—the Good News—is that each person is whole and complete and has only to look within himself to find the kingdom of God.
The lie is designed to disempower the very person—the ordinary human being—whose true power Jesus sought to unleash, on behalf of this whole species reaching a new and better level of being, of becoming more compassionate, more loving and more joyous by becoming more aware of ourselves and thus also understanding of one another.
Jesus was an ordinary man, conceived in the ordinary way. There was nothing special about him at all, except that he knew himself, and, by extension, everyone. He was not soul blind, and he knew how to live in such a way to gain the help and knowledge he needed to truly understand himself and others.
Resurrection is not mysterious and separate from ordinary life. It’s as much a part of nature as breathing. Because we are soul-blind, though, we do not see it. But it is—or ought to be—a natural outcome of lives lived by creatures like us. That it is so rare here, and the path to it concealed, is testament to the fact that this is a fallen world.
But what does that mean, then? What is a fallen world?
A fallen world is one in which the purpose of conscious life either was known and has been lost or rejected or, as in our case, both. In fact, the purpose of conscious life is to grow a coherent and defined soul, that carries consciousness into energy after the physical body dies.
How do we make our eyes to see, then, if we are blind? Jesus said it: give yourself to your nature: “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” People think that this means that we should abandon our shelter and go out and live in the forest, but it does not mean to give up our humanity. Our fur was taken from us so that we would use our brains and make them grow into what they have become: a machinery for the creation of souls.
I say creation, because that’s what it is. The creation isn’t over, it’s ongoing. Every death is, potentially, an ultimately creative act. When most of us die, we have very little left of ourselves. We are not in any kind of balance and wander a bit, often not even knowing—and often not ever knowing—that we died, then ending up in another physical body again all willy-nilly, drawn by the magnetism of the physical, and just continuing on the wheel of life.
When recently the Tomb of Jesus was broadcast, I saw at once that the mausoleum pictured was that of a family with real knowledge. The reason is that the door to the tomb bears a symbolic inscription of a T-square over a circle that means “the measure of the world.” This was a common but secret medallion of royal families in Judea—that is to say, families who had brought the craft with them from Egypt. Jewish royalty was descended from Egyptian royalty. Moses was an Egyptian royal prince, and all who came of him were of the same blood, too.
Why is this significant? Because there is a way to be born other than willy-nilly. Some are born, like Jesus, as all of us were meant to be born, with intention, to parents who know in advance the task the child has come into the physical world to perform.
If you die in a state of real consciousness, what happens to you then will be your decision. If you come back, it will be with intention and, as soon as your brain is able to process the information, real knowledge of who you are, where you came from, and why you are here.
Going on and not re-entering the physical means joining one’s personal aim to what has been the aim of life from the beginning: to enter a greater consciousness, one that is founded in the life of the earth and is our contribution to the ecstasy of eternal being.
And yet we live in a world that is so turned in on itself that most of us either don’t believe that our souls exist, or, even if we say that we believe this, act as if we don’t. I have had the blessing to be fully conscious outside of my body, and I can bear at least my own small personal witness to the reality of the soul. It is not a dream and it cannot be explained away by the various forms of high-sounding poppycock that are generally used to dismiss it. Life is not mechanical. The soul is not fiction.
Our aim should be to bring intention into our lives, which is to say, to surrender ourselves just as do the flowers of the field.
But how can intention have anything to do with being given over to the whims of nature? Another man who, like Jesus, knew God was Meister Eckhart, and he expressed what it was to be as the lily in a slightly different way: “be as a clear glass through which God can shine.”
You don’t need to make a shelter for your soul, God will make it out of the winds that blow you through life. “Be as the lilies of the field” means to live life—to lie down and be crushed in the fury of the storm, but also to have joy in the sun of the day.
But, how, precisely, do we go about living like this? Does it mean to let life walk over us? When injustice comes, what is really meant by turning the other cheek? It means to accept the energy of the situation objectively as energy, without regard to the way it manifests. “Negative?” “Positive?” Not our business. Our business: accept the energy, trust grace and give our lives to God.
Life has been growing here on earth for hundreds of millions of years, and has many times evolved three-brained beings like us. We are the only ones, however, who have ended up with hands and resonating vocal chords capable of complex speech and thus communication. This means that we can respond to the challenges of nature rather than just accept them. Thus, our minds have grown. When a creature with hands is cold, he can pull down leaves to make a shelter, or cut open an animal and use the body for warmth. He can think about how to take that warmth with him, and make himself a coat. He can make a house, tools, all the rest of it, right up to the internet and beyond. And, if he can speak, above all, he can tell others.
And with the intelligence that has grown in the service of his needs, he can also begin to do what three-brained beings were meant to do, which is to live in inner harmony, to the point that we have the chance to see ourselves objectively, and therefore to affect what happens to our souls.
By three-brained, I mean that we have a reptilian or primitive brain that controls our nervous system and basic impulses, a mammalian, or mid-brain that mediates our emotional life, and a human or higher brain that reasons.
These three levels of the brain form the most energetic and evolutionary structure in the universe: a triad. The negative pole is the lowest level, because it can act only from impulse. The positive pole is the mid level, because it can mediate desires with compassion and love. The harmonizing level is the highest level, the human level, which can balance the needs of the other two and so create a greater, harmonious whole, a fourth level of being that is beyond death and immortal.
This is the energy of resurrection, the Osiris energy, the Jesus energy.
Osiris suffered fourteen cuts from his brother Set, as also Jesus traversed the fourteen stations of the cross during his passion. Normally, a life is expressed as a full octave of seven parts. The reason their lives are expressed as fourteen parts is that they were living two lives at once: the subjective life of their suffering and the objective life of their seeing. Thus the number of a life is seven, but the number of a resurrected life is fourteen.
Near the baptismal place now called the Osirion in Egypt there is an ancient philosophical machine we refer to as the Sphinx. This statue expresses the process of resurrection. It has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion and the intelligence of a man and can therefore soar aloft like an eagle.
To rise above life is to rise into the second level of being as Osiris and Jesus did. This means that we not only live our lives, but see ourselves living them, and see all around us from above—that is to say, from outside of time.
The need to do this is where the admonitions to turn the other cheek and love the enemy come from. Unless we include our enemy in our love, we cannot be objective about him, and if we do not see his truth, we also do not see our own truth, and in this way hatred clips our wings. The energy uses us instead of us using the energy.
All meditation is, in essence, about finding a way of processing energy in such a way that it feeds objective understanding and leads us down the path to inner truth.
As a species, we have been moving for thousands of years in the direction of this state. The reason that blood is considered important in human affairs is that this state is so potent that something of it literally enters the blood of those who experience it, and is even passed down to future generations. The ability to be objective and taste of resurrection is profoundly of the body at every level, including the physical. Who reaches this state gives the ability to reach it to their children. This is the origin of the symbolic eating of the body and drinking of the blood of Christ, to partake of this state. However, actual eating and drinking mean nothing. What Jesus was saying was that his bloodline was important, that his body was to be spread throughout the world after his death.
How, though? Well, he must have had children or he wouldn’t have bothered to say it. Of course, it’s all stuff and nonsense that one man, believed to be directly descended from Jesus, would have better blood than the next. In point of fact, the blood of everybody who lived at the time of Jesus—him included, through his children—now runs, effectively, in the veins of everybody in Europe and the Middle East and probably everybody in the world, and those who do not bear the blood of Christ within them bear the blood of another such person. So not only was Christ resurrected in his own life, his resurrection is in us, too.
THIS IS WHAT THE DARK SIDE DOES NOT WANT US TO REALIZE.
It’s why we are fed the lie that Christ died “for our sins” when, in truth, he lived for our souls.
Christ did not die at all, and he showed his living presence to prove it, even though his body expired and rotted away. And because we are the body and blood of Christ, he is alive in all of us right now.
This objective material I am speaking of does not die, it passes into a woman’s eggs and a man’s semen, and gives the next generation a greater ability to experience more objective being and be more harmonious.
This is why the wives were so important to these special men, inundated as they were with this richly energetic material, and also why their children were so very hidden. No objective person wants his bloodline recognized, because this will mean that his children will be exalted in this life, which is a curse. The palace is too far for comfort from the lilies of the field. It is difficult to remember who you truly are when you are surrounded by the glitter of the material world.
We apes have a love of glitter. The chimpanzee is fascinated by the twinkling bauble in your hand, and we’re no different. You couldn’t sell many new cars if they didn’t shine. The reason for this goes way back: this adaptation made it easier for our forebears to see the skin of fruit hidden among the leaves when we lived in the forest. All of these things we place around our bodies and say of them, “this is mine,” are just so much shine. The whole world of possessions is nothing more important than an old, now useless adaptation from when we had different needs. Unfortunately, because of it, we are eating the planet. But “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
This is why, when you put aside your material self and re-enter this world as a naked soul, everything turns upside down. The rich countries appear poverty stricken—vast, dark plains marked only here and there by an occasional spark. But go to the poor countries, and there you find fountains of light spewing up into the heavens. “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” This is what it means. “And the meek shall inherit the earth.” This is what it means.
But to live in the peace and comfort of the first world also means that there is an extraordinary chance to turn toward Christ, because we have the education needed to contemplate wisely, and the leisure to do so. So in those few little sparks in the prosperous lands, when you go close to them, you find the treasures of the ages.
The Romans killed Jesus of Nazareth because he was the heir to the throne of David, bearer of the blood of Moses and Osiris. In Judea at the time of Jesus there were only about three thousand Romans, and not all of them were soldiers. It was an unstable situation, and they were aware of the fact that a determined uprising could easily overpower them. They relied on their ally Herod and his family and their Greek and Jewish soldiers to keep the peace. But Herod and his family were not Jews, and certainly very far from the exalted house of David. When Jesus began to make a name for himself as a preacher, the Romans eventually captured and crucified him in order to demonstrate their power and effect his utter humiliation. The fact that he was not preaching about an earthly kingdom was entirely lost on those primitive men. Here was the heir to the throne of David talking about some sort of kingdom. That was quite enough to get him killed.
However, the fact that he was a victim of political murder was coincidental to his ministry.
No doubt Jews loyal to Herod supported the murder, and thus are also to some extent responsible. However, in the gospels the real situation was reversed so that the Romans to whom they were meant to appeal would not take offense at them. The mild and tolerant Roman governor washes his hands of the affair in the gospels. In reality, the Romans would have sent their agents to find this dangerous man, and would have themselves caused the ironic title to be nailed on his cross: king of the Jews.
The murder of Jesus broke the House of David, and also made the eventual Jewish rebellion inevitable. James and Jesus’ other brothers followed a much more traditional Jewish ministry, saying nothing of any kingdoms. His wife clarified his message as a moral and philosophical one, not a political one, and was the person who led the apostles in spreading it to the world...and, more importantly, hiding the children and giving them the chance to grow up and have children of their own. She took the blood with her, and nurtured it, and gave it to us. We drink of it because of her. We are Christ because of her.
The time when her role was erased and the equal place of women usurped in the church was the same time that the lies that the body of Jesus was special and the resurrection unique to him were spread. The effect of this was to derange the Christian household by making one of its pillars shorter than the other. The household where objective seeing is to be gained—where the measure of the world is to be taken—must be founded on two equal pillars. Otherwise, it is a crooked house and will come down.
“Two are better than one, and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped.” What this means is that harmony between the two is reconciled in the third. The third strand is love, itself a triad with three levels, physical, emotional and rational. This love eventually results in children, and in this sense it is the building block of the species. So any society in which either sex is considered in any way unequal is itself an unbalanced triad and doomed to failure. Throughout human history, one sex or the other has always dominated, in virtually every culture. The ones where this was least true have lasted the longest, and brought the most happiness to their members.
Christ has nothing to do with religion or belief. You do not need to believe in anything to be a Christian, and it was never intended that the way be imposed on anybody, or that the Good News be turned into bad news for nonbelievers. Nor, as I said before, is the idea that Jesus died for our sins true in any way at all. He died because he was the true heir to the Jewish throne. It had nothing to do with any sins anybody subsequently may or may not have committed, and nobody is born with sin already on their souls.
The whole point of recurrence is that the slate is wiped clean so that another effort may be made. If a soul’s situation becomes impossible, its memory of itself fades entirely and it is lost to consciousness. That’s the real wage of sin, and the only one. It is always a choice made in life, and for that to happen is extremely rare. The truth is that human beings are mostly innocent and mostly good. We lash out because we are frightened or we are desperate, or have been harmed in some way by a bad childhood.
That which seeks our ruin causes us to concentrate on darkness and evil, and tells us that we are powerless and that our souls are ugly. The human mind has been alive in the earth for just a few thousand years. Osiris, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Mahomet—all of these bearers have just left their blood and wisdom in us in the past few millions of a second, in the great time of the earth.
And yet, so important is that second that everything that has come before, all the billions of years that earth has been here, are one day. We are the next day.
From Whitely Strieber's Unknown Country
Perhaps the burial place has been found and perhaps not. Certainly, an interesting tomb has been found, as was shown in the recent TV film, the Lost Tomb of Jesus.
However, the fact that Jesus left a corpse behind does not mean that there was no resurrection. That this is even an issue only points to the fact that we do not understand the nature of resurrection.
This is because we have been lied to about it for millennia by men who have sought to use the wonderful good news that Christ brought to us, to their own greedy ends.
If you read the gospels with any care, you will see that the resurrected Jesus no longer functions like a physical body. He functions like something that appears to be physical, but has new powers to appear and disappear at will, and to move about without reference to the constraints of nature. This is because the man who was seen—and he certainly was seen, I think—was no longer a physical body.
The fact that we do not understand this, and that so many of us believe that his conquest of death had something to do with his physical remains is tragic.
Something terrible happened to the Christian religion, and to western society, in the second and third centuries after the resurrection. Specifically, the pagan gods were replaced with Jesus, who was made into an instrument of political power.
This is utterly at odds with his true message, which was that the kingdom of heaven is not the domain of gods and kings at all, but the rightful inheritance of everybody and anybody. It is also within us, it is part of us, it is integral to being human, and he is no different from any of us. So of course he died. We all die. But he also demonstrated, by continuing to appear after death, that the soul does retain consciousness, and a sufficiently powerful and attentive soul can affect the living and actually be seen by them and communicate with them even after the death of the physical body. Anybody can do it. It’s not a miracle, it is an ability natural to conscious beings, or should be.
To get power, evil men set Jesus on a god’s pedestal, and imbued him with special physical qualities quite unlike those of ordinary people. He was supposedly formed out of some sort of divine substance, different from ordinary people, higher, special and unattainable. He wasn’t even conceived via sexual union between man and woman. Not only that, this most sacred of all sacraments, sexual union between a loving couple, was called ugly and profane by these profoundly sinful men. For a human being to reject sex is to reject nature and thus also God. Certainly, it is to reject Christ.
The resurrection was a special and unique event, they told us, its purpose being to draw attention to the importance of the way of worship that Jesus supposedly proclaimed—and coincidentally, to confer power onto a priesthood that managed the salvation that he promised as a sort of process involving subservience to various secular and religious political institutions.
But it’s all a lie—one cunningly fashioned out of truth, but still a lie, and probably the most profoundly evil of all lies. This is because the whole message of Jesus—the Good News—is that each person is whole and complete and has only to look within himself to find the kingdom of God.
The lie is designed to disempower the very person—the ordinary human being—whose true power Jesus sought to unleash, on behalf of this whole species reaching a new and better level of being, of becoming more compassionate, more loving and more joyous by becoming more aware of ourselves and thus also understanding of one another.
Jesus was an ordinary man, conceived in the ordinary way. There was nothing special about him at all, except that he knew himself, and, by extension, everyone. He was not soul blind, and he knew how to live in such a way to gain the help and knowledge he needed to truly understand himself and others.
Resurrection is not mysterious and separate from ordinary life. It’s as much a part of nature as breathing. Because we are soul-blind, though, we do not see it. But it is—or ought to be—a natural outcome of lives lived by creatures like us. That it is so rare here, and the path to it concealed, is testament to the fact that this is a fallen world.
But what does that mean, then? What is a fallen world?
A fallen world is one in which the purpose of conscious life either was known and has been lost or rejected or, as in our case, both. In fact, the purpose of conscious life is to grow a coherent and defined soul, that carries consciousness into energy after the physical body dies.
How do we make our eyes to see, then, if we are blind? Jesus said it: give yourself to your nature: “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” People think that this means that we should abandon our shelter and go out and live in the forest, but it does not mean to give up our humanity. Our fur was taken from us so that we would use our brains and make them grow into what they have become: a machinery for the creation of souls.
I say creation, because that’s what it is. The creation isn’t over, it’s ongoing. Every death is, potentially, an ultimately creative act. When most of us die, we have very little left of ourselves. We are not in any kind of balance and wander a bit, often not even knowing—and often not ever knowing—that we died, then ending up in another physical body again all willy-nilly, drawn by the magnetism of the physical, and just continuing on the wheel of life.
When recently the Tomb of Jesus was broadcast, I saw at once that the mausoleum pictured was that of a family with real knowledge. The reason is that the door to the tomb bears a symbolic inscription of a T-square over a circle that means “the measure of the world.” This was a common but secret medallion of royal families in Judea—that is to say, families who had brought the craft with them from Egypt. Jewish royalty was descended from Egyptian royalty. Moses was an Egyptian royal prince, and all who came of him were of the same blood, too.
Why is this significant? Because there is a way to be born other than willy-nilly. Some are born, like Jesus, as all of us were meant to be born, with intention, to parents who know in advance the task the child has come into the physical world to perform.
If you die in a state of real consciousness, what happens to you then will be your decision. If you come back, it will be with intention and, as soon as your brain is able to process the information, real knowledge of who you are, where you came from, and why you are here.
Going on and not re-entering the physical means joining one’s personal aim to what has been the aim of life from the beginning: to enter a greater consciousness, one that is founded in the life of the earth and is our contribution to the ecstasy of eternal being.
And yet we live in a world that is so turned in on itself that most of us either don’t believe that our souls exist, or, even if we say that we believe this, act as if we don’t. I have had the blessing to be fully conscious outside of my body, and I can bear at least my own small personal witness to the reality of the soul. It is not a dream and it cannot be explained away by the various forms of high-sounding poppycock that are generally used to dismiss it. Life is not mechanical. The soul is not fiction.
Our aim should be to bring intention into our lives, which is to say, to surrender ourselves just as do the flowers of the field.
But how can intention have anything to do with being given over to the whims of nature? Another man who, like Jesus, knew God was Meister Eckhart, and he expressed what it was to be as the lily in a slightly different way: “be as a clear glass through which God can shine.”
You don’t need to make a shelter for your soul, God will make it out of the winds that blow you through life. “Be as the lilies of the field” means to live life—to lie down and be crushed in the fury of the storm, but also to have joy in the sun of the day.
But, how, precisely, do we go about living like this? Does it mean to let life walk over us? When injustice comes, what is really meant by turning the other cheek? It means to accept the energy of the situation objectively as energy, without regard to the way it manifests. “Negative?” “Positive?” Not our business. Our business: accept the energy, trust grace and give our lives to God.
Life has been growing here on earth for hundreds of millions of years, and has many times evolved three-brained beings like us. We are the only ones, however, who have ended up with hands and resonating vocal chords capable of complex speech and thus communication. This means that we can respond to the challenges of nature rather than just accept them. Thus, our minds have grown. When a creature with hands is cold, he can pull down leaves to make a shelter, or cut open an animal and use the body for warmth. He can think about how to take that warmth with him, and make himself a coat. He can make a house, tools, all the rest of it, right up to the internet and beyond. And, if he can speak, above all, he can tell others.
And with the intelligence that has grown in the service of his needs, he can also begin to do what three-brained beings were meant to do, which is to live in inner harmony, to the point that we have the chance to see ourselves objectively, and therefore to affect what happens to our souls.
By three-brained, I mean that we have a reptilian or primitive brain that controls our nervous system and basic impulses, a mammalian, or mid-brain that mediates our emotional life, and a human or higher brain that reasons.
These three levels of the brain form the most energetic and evolutionary structure in the universe: a triad. The negative pole is the lowest level, because it can act only from impulse. The positive pole is the mid level, because it can mediate desires with compassion and love. The harmonizing level is the highest level, the human level, which can balance the needs of the other two and so create a greater, harmonious whole, a fourth level of being that is beyond death and immortal.
This is the energy of resurrection, the Osiris energy, the Jesus energy.
Osiris suffered fourteen cuts from his brother Set, as also Jesus traversed the fourteen stations of the cross during his passion. Normally, a life is expressed as a full octave of seven parts. The reason their lives are expressed as fourteen parts is that they were living two lives at once: the subjective life of their suffering and the objective life of their seeing. Thus the number of a life is seven, but the number of a resurrected life is fourteen.
Near the baptismal place now called the Osirion in Egypt there is an ancient philosophical machine we refer to as the Sphinx. This statue expresses the process of resurrection. It has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion and the intelligence of a man and can therefore soar aloft like an eagle.
To rise above life is to rise into the second level of being as Osiris and Jesus did. This means that we not only live our lives, but see ourselves living them, and see all around us from above—that is to say, from outside of time.
The need to do this is where the admonitions to turn the other cheek and love the enemy come from. Unless we include our enemy in our love, we cannot be objective about him, and if we do not see his truth, we also do not see our own truth, and in this way hatred clips our wings. The energy uses us instead of us using the energy.
All meditation is, in essence, about finding a way of processing energy in such a way that it feeds objective understanding and leads us down the path to inner truth.
As a species, we have been moving for thousands of years in the direction of this state. The reason that blood is considered important in human affairs is that this state is so potent that something of it literally enters the blood of those who experience it, and is even passed down to future generations. The ability to be objective and taste of resurrection is profoundly of the body at every level, including the physical. Who reaches this state gives the ability to reach it to their children. This is the origin of the symbolic eating of the body and drinking of the blood of Christ, to partake of this state. However, actual eating and drinking mean nothing. What Jesus was saying was that his bloodline was important, that his body was to be spread throughout the world after his death.
How, though? Well, he must have had children or he wouldn’t have bothered to say it. Of course, it’s all stuff and nonsense that one man, believed to be directly descended from Jesus, would have better blood than the next. In point of fact, the blood of everybody who lived at the time of Jesus—him included, through his children—now runs, effectively, in the veins of everybody in Europe and the Middle East and probably everybody in the world, and those who do not bear the blood of Christ within them bear the blood of another such person. So not only was Christ resurrected in his own life, his resurrection is in us, too.
THIS IS WHAT THE DARK SIDE DOES NOT WANT US TO REALIZE.
It’s why we are fed the lie that Christ died “for our sins” when, in truth, he lived for our souls.
Christ did not die at all, and he showed his living presence to prove it, even though his body expired and rotted away. And because we are the body and blood of Christ, he is alive in all of us right now.
This objective material I am speaking of does not die, it passes into a woman’s eggs and a man’s semen, and gives the next generation a greater ability to experience more objective being and be more harmonious.
This is why the wives were so important to these special men, inundated as they were with this richly energetic material, and also why their children were so very hidden. No objective person wants his bloodline recognized, because this will mean that his children will be exalted in this life, which is a curse. The palace is too far for comfort from the lilies of the field. It is difficult to remember who you truly are when you are surrounded by the glitter of the material world.
We apes have a love of glitter. The chimpanzee is fascinated by the twinkling bauble in your hand, and we’re no different. You couldn’t sell many new cars if they didn’t shine. The reason for this goes way back: this adaptation made it easier for our forebears to see the skin of fruit hidden among the leaves when we lived in the forest. All of these things we place around our bodies and say of them, “this is mine,” are just so much shine. The whole world of possessions is nothing more important than an old, now useless adaptation from when we had different needs. Unfortunately, because of it, we are eating the planet. But “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
This is why, when you put aside your material self and re-enter this world as a naked soul, everything turns upside down. The rich countries appear poverty stricken—vast, dark plains marked only here and there by an occasional spark. But go to the poor countries, and there you find fountains of light spewing up into the heavens. “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” This is what it means. “And the meek shall inherit the earth.” This is what it means.
But to live in the peace and comfort of the first world also means that there is an extraordinary chance to turn toward Christ, because we have the education needed to contemplate wisely, and the leisure to do so. So in those few little sparks in the prosperous lands, when you go close to them, you find the treasures of the ages.
The Romans killed Jesus of Nazareth because he was the heir to the throne of David, bearer of the blood of Moses and Osiris. In Judea at the time of Jesus there were only about three thousand Romans, and not all of them were soldiers. It was an unstable situation, and they were aware of the fact that a determined uprising could easily overpower them. They relied on their ally Herod and his family and their Greek and Jewish soldiers to keep the peace. But Herod and his family were not Jews, and certainly very far from the exalted house of David. When Jesus began to make a name for himself as a preacher, the Romans eventually captured and crucified him in order to demonstrate their power and effect his utter humiliation. The fact that he was not preaching about an earthly kingdom was entirely lost on those primitive men. Here was the heir to the throne of David talking about some sort of kingdom. That was quite enough to get him killed.
However, the fact that he was a victim of political murder was coincidental to his ministry.
No doubt Jews loyal to Herod supported the murder, and thus are also to some extent responsible. However, in the gospels the real situation was reversed so that the Romans to whom they were meant to appeal would not take offense at them. The mild and tolerant Roman governor washes his hands of the affair in the gospels. In reality, the Romans would have sent their agents to find this dangerous man, and would have themselves caused the ironic title to be nailed on his cross: king of the Jews.
The murder of Jesus broke the House of David, and also made the eventual Jewish rebellion inevitable. James and Jesus’ other brothers followed a much more traditional Jewish ministry, saying nothing of any kingdoms. His wife clarified his message as a moral and philosophical one, not a political one, and was the person who led the apostles in spreading it to the world...and, more importantly, hiding the children and giving them the chance to grow up and have children of their own. She took the blood with her, and nurtured it, and gave it to us. We drink of it because of her. We are Christ because of her.
The time when her role was erased and the equal place of women usurped in the church was the same time that the lies that the body of Jesus was special and the resurrection unique to him were spread. The effect of this was to derange the Christian household by making one of its pillars shorter than the other. The household where objective seeing is to be gained—where the measure of the world is to be taken—must be founded on two equal pillars. Otherwise, it is a crooked house and will come down.
“Two are better than one, and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped.” What this means is that harmony between the two is reconciled in the third. The third strand is love, itself a triad with three levels, physical, emotional and rational. This love eventually results in children, and in this sense it is the building block of the species. So any society in which either sex is considered in any way unequal is itself an unbalanced triad and doomed to failure. Throughout human history, one sex or the other has always dominated, in virtually every culture. The ones where this was least true have lasted the longest, and brought the most happiness to their members.
Christ has nothing to do with religion or belief. You do not need to believe in anything to be a Christian, and it was never intended that the way be imposed on anybody, or that the Good News be turned into bad news for nonbelievers. Nor, as I said before, is the idea that Jesus died for our sins true in any way at all. He died because he was the true heir to the Jewish throne. It had nothing to do with any sins anybody subsequently may or may not have committed, and nobody is born with sin already on their souls.
The whole point of recurrence is that the slate is wiped clean so that another effort may be made. If a soul’s situation becomes impossible, its memory of itself fades entirely and it is lost to consciousness. That’s the real wage of sin, and the only one. It is always a choice made in life, and for that to happen is extremely rare. The truth is that human beings are mostly innocent and mostly good. We lash out because we are frightened or we are desperate, or have been harmed in some way by a bad childhood.
That which seeks our ruin causes us to concentrate on darkness and evil, and tells us that we are powerless and that our souls are ugly. The human mind has been alive in the earth for just a few thousand years. Osiris, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Mahomet—all of these bearers have just left their blood and wisdom in us in the past few millions of a second, in the great time of the earth.
And yet, so important is that second that everything that has come before, all the billions of years that earth has been here, are one day. We are the next day.
From Whitely Strieber's Unknown Country
Sunday, March 4, 2007
The Lost Tomb of Jesus
Certainly, the story of this week has been James Cameron and his Jesus bone box. Here's an almost complete summary of the story, to get you up to speed with what is sure to be an ongoing saga this year:
The flurry of publicity this week (see a Reuters slide-show) is actually a little surprising, given that the 'bone boxes' (properly known as ossuaries) were unearthed at an Israeli construction site in 1980, and there has been comment about them previously over the years (including a 1996 BBC documentary which made similar claims). The recent hype comes about because of a 90 minute documentary which will be shown on Discovery Channel this Sunday (4th March, 2007), produced by Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron, titled "The Lost Tomb of Jesus".
The ossuaries are said to bear inscriptions matching those of the immediate family of Jesus the Christ, as well as Mary Magdalene (of course suggesting the Dan Brown meme that the couple were married), and also a son of Jesus and Mary, Judah (said to be confirmed by DNA tests).
Jane Root, president of Discovery Channel, says "The evidence is compelling...the consequences are enormous." However, Amos Kloner, the Bar Ilan University professor who led the excavation in the 1980s, dismissed the claim: "They [say they] are 'discovering' things. But they haven't discovered anything. They haven't found anything. Everything had already been published. And there is no basis on which to make a story out of this or to identify this as the family of Jesus."
Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, commented that the documentary "is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with ‘The Da Vinci Code'", despite not having seen the documentary. However, James Cameron refuted claims of riding Dan Brown's coat-tails. “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 makers of the Bloodline documentary released an email update in which they said they...
...think it's a good thing that the debate continues over the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. Of course, we feel that it's much more likely that, in the climate of the time, Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their family came to France and are buried there.
Sporting their own biblical scholar, they quoted Professor Robert Eisenman (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame) as commenting about Cameron's discovery, that "it should be obvious that names of the kind found in the ' Jesus Burial Cave ' were so widespread at the time that finding a family tomb with ossuaries inscribed with them proves nothing at all."
Meanwhile, it's interesting to note the manner in which the discovery is being treated by the Christian base as an assault upon Christianity. From viewing various forums around the Intarweb, this seems to be a common feeling amongst Christians - that this is just the next attempt to discredit their religion, in a similar vein to The Da Vinci Code. This perception obviously arises out of the suggestion that Jesus was married, and that the discovery of his mortal remains argues against his ascension. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the film is a "made-for-television hoax", while Catholic sources were very skeptical of the documentary.
Beyond the James Cameron versus Christianity debate though, there is another controversy which seems to have been brewing for some time. Some have noted the allegedly fraudulent 'James Ossuary' as being a bone of contention (no pun intended) between Christians and Jews, with the Israeli Archaeological Authority (IAA) going up against Christian supporters of the alleged Biblical relic and most notably Hershel Shanks and his Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS). There is a similarity in that case with the new finds - Israeli archaeologists debunking claims of 'Christian' discoveries - although with the twist this time that many Christians will be siding with the Israelis.
But wait, a further twist: some have made a claim for the authenticity of the James Ossuary because it is rumoured to have come from the same dig as the new ossuaries, with Cameron's team identifying the same patina on their ossuaries as on the James Ossuary (see Archaeology.org's cynical coverage, which also has some excellent images of the press conference). However, just last week photos were submitted in the forgery case against antiquities dealer Oled Golan, suggesting it had been held since 1976. Ironically, though these images are supposed to validate Golan's claims for authenticity of the James Ossuary, the photos may invalidate any suggestion that the ossuary was part of the Jesus ossuary collection (although it could be claimed that it was looted before the 'official' discovery of the tomb).
Interestingly, just to muddy already murky waters, one of the scholars present at the James Cameron press conference was James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty. As the Archaeology.org coverage notes, in his book Tabor suggests that Jesus was actually the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera, "a conclusion obviously at odds with the Cameron and Jacobovici's interpretation of the cave and its find." Another, Shimon Gibson - who was a member of the team that originally excavated the tomb - confessed to being skeptical about the claim...though he did urge keeping an open mind about the possibility.
And perhaps that is the best advice. Certainly, there is reason for skepticism. But every argument deserves to be heard, as I'm sure they will over the coming weeks and months.
Archaeology.org analyses Discovery Channel's "Lost Tomb of Jesus" documentary - read it here.
The flurry of publicity this week (see a Reuters slide-show) is actually a little surprising, given that the 'bone boxes' (properly known as ossuaries) were unearthed at an Israeli construction site in 1980, and there has been comment about them previously over the years (including a 1996 BBC documentary which made similar claims). The recent hype comes about because of a 90 minute documentary which will be shown on Discovery Channel this Sunday (4th March, 2007), produced by Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron, titled "The Lost Tomb of Jesus".
The ossuaries are said to bear inscriptions matching those of the immediate family of Jesus the Christ, as well as Mary Magdalene (of course suggesting the Dan Brown meme that the couple were married), and also a son of Jesus and Mary, Judah (said to be confirmed by DNA tests).
Jane Root, president of Discovery Channel, says "The evidence is compelling...the consequences are enormous." However, Amos Kloner, the Bar Ilan University professor who led the excavation in the 1980s, dismissed the claim: "They [say they] are 'discovering' things. But they haven't discovered anything. They haven't found anything. Everything had already been published. And there is no basis on which to make a story out of this or to identify this as the family of Jesus."
Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, commented that the documentary "is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with ‘The Da Vinci Code'", despite not having seen the documentary. However, James Cameron refuted claims of riding Dan Brown's coat-tails. “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 makers of the Bloodline documentary released an email update in which they said they...
...think it's a good thing that the debate continues over the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. Of course, we feel that it's much more likely that, in the climate of the time, Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their family came to France and are buried there.
Sporting their own biblical scholar, they quoted Professor Robert Eisenman (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame) as commenting about Cameron's discovery, that "it should be obvious that names of the kind found in the ' Jesus Burial Cave ' were so widespread at the time that finding a family tomb with ossuaries inscribed with them proves nothing at all."
Meanwhile, it's interesting to note the manner in which the discovery is being treated by the Christian base as an assault upon Christianity. From viewing various forums around the Intarweb, this seems to be a common feeling amongst Christians - that this is just the next attempt to discredit their religion, in a similar vein to The Da Vinci Code. This perception obviously arises out of the suggestion that Jesus was married, and that the discovery of his mortal remains argues against his ascension. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the film is a "made-for-television hoax", while Catholic sources were very skeptical of the documentary.
Beyond the James Cameron versus Christianity debate though, there is another controversy which seems to have been brewing for some time. Some have noted the allegedly fraudulent 'James Ossuary' as being a bone of contention (no pun intended) between Christians and Jews, with the Israeli Archaeological Authority (IAA) going up against Christian supporters of the alleged Biblical relic and most notably Hershel Shanks and his Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS). There is a similarity in that case with the new finds - Israeli archaeologists debunking claims of 'Christian' discoveries - although with the twist this time that many Christians will be siding with the Israelis.
But wait, a further twist: some have made a claim for the authenticity of the James Ossuary because it is rumoured to have come from the same dig as the new ossuaries, with Cameron's team identifying the same patina on their ossuaries as on the James Ossuary (see Archaeology.org's cynical coverage, which also has some excellent images of the press conference). However, just last week photos were submitted in the forgery case against antiquities dealer Oled Golan, suggesting it had been held since 1976. Ironically, though these images are supposed to validate Golan's claims for authenticity of the James Ossuary, the photos may invalidate any suggestion that the ossuary was part of the Jesus ossuary collection (although it could be claimed that it was looted before the 'official' discovery of the tomb).
Interestingly, just to muddy already murky waters, one of the scholars present at the James Cameron press conference was James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty. As the Archaeology.org coverage notes, in his book Tabor suggests that Jesus was actually the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera, "a conclusion obviously at odds with the Cameron and Jacobovici's interpretation of the cave and its find." Another, Shimon Gibson - who was a member of the team that originally excavated the tomb - confessed to being skeptical about the claim...though he did urge keeping an open mind about the possibility.
And perhaps that is the best advice. Certainly, there is reason for skepticism. But every argument deserves to be heard, as I'm sure they will over the coming weeks and months.
Archaeology.org analyses Discovery Channel's "Lost Tomb of Jesus" documentary - read it here.
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