Hello Again Sirloin,
As promised, here is a more detailed response to the whole "Lost Tomb" debacle. It's basis was the longer response I gave to the "Lost Tomb" controversy on the Sunday the Discovery Channel aired Cameron and Jacobovichi's documentary. The original PDF of that Sermon is available here:
The full PDF of that response is available here while an MP3 of it
is available here Here in short, is a condensed presentation and interaction with some of the major problems with the Whole Lost Tomb theory:
In 1980 workers in Talpiot, a southwestern suburb of Jerusalem, were excavating an area to build an apartment block when the came upon a tomb. This was no big deal, there were countless tombs in the area, and you really can’t put a spade down in Israel and dig without hitting history in very quickly. So they called in the archaeologists who excavated the large tomb which contained Ten Ossuaries and the remains of up to 35 people. An Ossuary is a carved stone “bone box” used during the period of the second temple, that is up until the Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 AD. Generally, they were only used by wealthy people. You would bury someone in a winding shroud in a niche in the family tomb, and then a year later you would go back and collect their bones, which were bundled together, and sometimes you put them into one of these smaller boxes called Ossuaries. That way you could keep reusing the niches in the family tomb for new burials. These Ossuaries are so common in Israel that wealthy people actually buy them and use them for planters.
Six of the Ten Ossuaries had names on them, the tenth is missing, but the original archaeologists on the dig, Joe Zias and Amos Kloner, report it was blank The names were Yeshua bar Yehosef (Jesus Son of Joseph), Mariamenou-Mara (they are translating it as Mary known as the Master it is actually Mariam known as Martha), Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus), Matia (Matthew), Yose (a form of Joseph), and Maria (and Mary). All of the inscriptions are in Aramiac except for Mariamenou-Mara which is in Greek.
Now why when the Archaeologist saw those names didn’t they say "OH MY we’ve discovered the LOST TOMB OF JESUS!?" Was it because none of them had read the New Testament? NO. It was because they saw those names on Ossuaries
ALL THE TIME. In fact for instance, 21% of all the Jewish women in the first century were named Maria or a variant of Mariam. 3.4% of all men had the name Yeshua which is the name Joshua. That makes it more common than my name Andrew is in the USA today.
They just filed it away and moved on, it wasn’t until Simcha Jacobovici producer of documentaries like "Yummy Mummy" began to get involved that the profile got jacked up. From the start he was looking to make a connection between these Ossuaries and Jesus Christ. In effect he was doing archaeology backwards. The big problem with the cluster of six names was Mariamenou-Mara, and indirectly Yehuda bar Yeshua, neither of which are mentioned in the Bible.
But Jacobovici finally managed to find a "gospel" of sorts which mentions a Mariamne, a Gnostic gospel called the Acts of Phillip which may have been written in the 5th century but the earliest copy we have of it dates to the 14th century. In it, Mariamne is called the sister of Phillip the Apostle and sister of Martha and in this gospel she does amazing things like evangelizing foreign nations and when persecuted “became like an ark of glass full of light and fire and every one ran away.” The Acts of Phillip doesn’t say she is Mary Magdalene but one scholar says that is who she is, and that scholar is who Simcha chose to believe. The Acts of Philip also doesn’t say she married Jesus nor had children either. But since the current vogue following the Da Vinci Code says that’s what Mary Magdalene did, it follows that if Mariamne is Mary Magdalene she must have been Jesus’ wife.
So they tested mitochondrial DNA from the remaining fragments in the Yeshua and Mariamne boxes and found out that
A) they were both Jews and B) they did not have the same mother. Therefore Simcha concluded they must have been MAN AND WIFE! What they did not tell you in the book was that the same DNA lab that did the tests told them they could have been: father and daughter, paternal cousins, half brother and sister or simply two totally unrelated individuals in the same burial tomb.
But if you don’t believe the DNA Then there is the statistical evidence. It is, according to Simcha, a 600 to 1 possibility that these 6 names could occur together, so they must be the family of Jesus Christ.
There is good reason that Mark Twain commented once that there are “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” Use them right and you can prove or disprove ANYTHING. It is actually statistically far, far, less likely than 600 to 1 that in the modern day one family would consist of six people bearing the names Andrew, Joy, Margaret, Victor, Graham, and Isabel.
Based on statistics, you can show just how unlikely it is that my family actually exists. That’s it, that’s really all they have for their theory. Some common names, a DNA test that actually proves nothing you haven’t assumed already, and a far-fetched theory from a Gnostic Gospel. Oh that and some support from the media, from people who want to make money, and from a few members of the eager to disbelieve Christianity side of the scholarly community. Perhaps the worst example of this support is from James
Tabor, chair of religious studies at UNC-Charlotte, who previously wrote a book named the Jesus Dynasty arguing that Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier named Pantera. Now he has come out supporting The Lost Tomb,
which assumes that according to the inscription Jesus is the son of Joseph! In other words, he is willing to support any theory
except the one in the Biblical Gospels.
Now in the evidence against the Lost Tomb Category, I could go on all day. Let me give you just a few.
• The tomb itself was not secret it was ornamented, prominent, and would have been well known. If the Jews had know where Jesus’ family plot was they would have dragged out his ossuary every time the Apostle’s preached. The Apostles would have been the laughing stock of Jerusalem.
• If Jesus had a son name Judah, whom Simcha argues wrote Gnostic Gospels including the Gospel of Thomas which was written in Coptic Greek well over 100 years after the death of Christ (one scholar wonders “was there a fax in that ossuary, I wonder?”) why is he never mentioned, even in the
Gnostic Gospels that would have
loved to have mentioned him.
• Why is Matthew, who wasn’t related to Jesus, buried in his family tomb?
• Jesus is NEVER called “Son of Joseph” by his family members or Apostles; in fact we only have one reference in John 6:42 and that is from his enemies.
• No DNA evidence can prove any relation to the actual Jesus, we have no control sample. Also why only test the Yeshua and Mariamne DNA?
• Mary Magdalene is always called Maria in all first century literature
• The names on the Ossuaries are in three languages suggesting a multi-generational tomb of long use. Certainly there is no reason for a family that spoke Aramaic to record names in three languages in two generations.
• Why would the Jesus family tomb have been in Jerusalem when he was born in Bethlehem and His Family lived in Nazareth?
• The So-called James Ossuary has definitively been shown not to have come from this tomb contrary to Jacobovici’s theory. There is currently a fraud trial going on in Israel which has even thrown doubt on whether the inscription on the ossuary itself is authentic.
- SEAGOON
