Yellum Notnef

And nobody has ever actually seen Jesus keeping someone alive in a car accident either, but that doesn't mean he's not doing it.

avi

Hi Fenton, no one has observed Siddhartha keeping anyone alive in a landslide either, but sometimes Buddhists in China survive landslides, of power sufficient to destroy entire towns.

No one has ever seen Zarathustra save people from Earthquakes in Iran, but that doesn't mean that he is not intervening on their behalf....

Tsunamis are devastating, but, some folks survive--even that natural disaster. Should we assume that in Indonesia, it was Mohammed, who was responsible for the modest few survivors, not suffering the fate of thousands of their countrymen?

Superstitious thinking is not unusual in many parts of the world, including, apparently, right here on this forum....

avi

Failte

No one has seen Jesus pass by a car wreck and let everyone die, either. Doesn't mean he's not doing it. It works both ways, despite believer's trying very hard to ignore that.

But, I love how the articles about this immediately invoke "Jesus" because of some tenuous link to someplace mentioned somewhere in the bible -- found a first century house near the modern town of Nazareth? Must be related to Jesus! Maybe even his own house! Just imagine him playing in the street outside his family home with neighborhood children. It's a very unsubtle piece of propaganda. I've already gotten a forwarded email from a fundy friend that this is an Important Discovery to Prove Jesus!

It's a house. Other than a time period that is conducive to magical thinking, there is certainly no reason to invoke Gabriel and Jesus and Mary when discussing it. Hmph.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Falite

Good point about the "tenuous" connection.

Metropolis is a small town in Illiinois. It started in 1839, one hundred years before the Superman comic book became popular. For the past twenty years it has been known as the hometown of Superman. It is not like the major city that is described in Superman comics. It has only a population of 6,000. However, this should not stop anybody from believing that Superman is a historical character, as the writers of early Superman stories obviously exaggerated many things about him, as his legend grew.

Here is a story from last week that did not get as much publicity as the Nazareth one because it did not have a catchy headline. One can imagine it being more read with these headlines:

Woman's Body from Superman's Time Found in Metropolis or

Police say body Found in Metropolis Not Lois Lane
If the headline writer who wrote the Nazareth announcement had written the article, I'm sure they would have noted that the woman was born around 1935, a few years before Superman was spotted in Metropolis according to most official Superman sources.

[Note: There is also a small place called Metropolis in Lousiana about 1/2 way between Jackson MS and Shreveport LA and there is a ghost town, Metropolis, Nevada, which started in 1910 and ended in 1950].

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

ApostateAbe

I think a lot of people are curious about the social environment that Jesus presumably grew up in, and this archaeological discovery would provide the best clues for that.

Steven Carr

Why? There was obviously already tons of evidence for Nazareth before this discovery.

Why does finding one house make any difference?

squiz

If the word has been spelled differently by each source, doesn't that mean that there are then multiple witnesses to this word being used in association with Jesus (as opposed to if they had just copied from each other)?

aa5874

And, people are beginning to realise that there was NO city of Nazareth based on the archaeological discovery.

ApostateAbe

Towns change, and there has been no evidence until now about what life was like in the first century CE, the century of Jesus' upbringing. The Christian gospels contain too much myth of the city.

ApostateAbe

That's right, only a small hamlet, as a historiological reconstruction hypothesized.