[Buddha-l] The Lost Tomb of Jesus

[Richard Hayes]

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 09:42 +0800, Wong Weng Fai wrote:

> OK... I'll cast the first stone... so what do folks think of the 
> "archae-porn" shown last night on Discovery, i.e. The Lost Tomb of Jesus?

Over here in the Benighted States of America one often sees automobiles
with bumper stickers. (Yes, I know, it is a barbaric practice, but that
is a matter for another thread.) A bumper sticker commonly found on cars
driven by people who want to advertise that they are Christians read "I
FOUND IT!" I assume this refers to the lost tomb of Jesus.

I quite enjoyed the documentary (and the vicious attacks on the film
maker by academics and theologians that followed). I could not help
wondering whether there would have been so much resistance if the film
had been about an boxes of bones with entirely different names on them.
Would people still be screaming about how sloppy the film-maker's
methodology was if he had shown that there is DNA evidence suggesting
that a box inscribed with the name Susie probably contains the bones of
a woman who was the wife of a guy named Fred, since Susie was not
biologically related to Fred but was found in Fred's family's tomb?

The feeding frenzy that followed the showing of the film was especially
disgusting. What seemed to be happening was 1) that academic big shots
could not stand the idea that a mere journalist might have found
something important, and 2) that Christians could not stand the idea
that a Jew might have found something of importance to say about Jesus
(who, as a rabbi, was surely married and had children) that contradicted
the often absurd Christological dogmas of some branches of orthodox
Christianity.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico