gnosis92

I only saw the part on James ossuary, and according to the wiki, the Israel Antiquities never published in a peer-reviewed paper how they came to the conclusion it was a forgery. They also claimed that it was forged around 2000 but there is a photo dated 1976 which has the disputed phrase brother of Yeshua. Our good friend Hershal Shanks has the testimony of a geology phD who says the James ossuary cannot be concluded to be a fake based on what IIAA reported.

A Univ of Toronto statistician said if the James ossuary came from the Jesus famly tomb which can be established by patina chemical analysis, it almost certainly would establish by odds of those collection of names being buried together as being Jesus of the New Testament -- except for the part of being married and having a son. THe son of Son of God so to speak.

For the record I did not watch all three hours, and which was an initial 2 hours plus a 1 hour followup hosted by Ted Coppel.

ApostateAbe

I just saw all three hours. It was amazing. I had lots of doubt about it before, but now I think it approaches the status of a smoking gun.

lee_merrill

With or without a bullet?

Several problems:

1) Why would people at the heart of Christianity be inscribing tombs with "Son of Joseph" (the gospels all say Joseph was not the father)?

2) Or "son of Jesus"? This, if discovered, would certainly overthrow the new movement. I would even be able to think of some code that would identify the ossuary, that would not discredit the faith if someone found it, and I'm not a rocket scientist.

3) Rock tombs were for rich people, Jesus' family was notably poor, by all accounts, why would they then have a mausoleum?

4) There is a simple arithmetic error, 1 in 190 is the probability of the name of "Jesus", yet it is also 4%? This can't be.

5) They say more DNA testing should be done, to see if Mary / Jesus / Jose / and so on are related, yet they say there is probably no DNA in the untested boxes. I also wonder who might have "vacuumed out the boxes," not standard procedure in archaeology, I would imagine. "Let's clean up this site!" Erm, no.

6) How could it not be a (say) 2nd century forgery by a skeptic seeking to overturn the case for Jesus' resurrection?

These will do for starters.

Diogenes the Cynic

I found the presentation more compelling than I thought it would be. A lot of it seems to kind of rest on the hypothesis that the James Ossuary came from the same tomb (contending that only the "....brother of Yeshua" part of the JO inscription is a forgery). The patina evidence was intriguing, but not dispositive.

I'm not convinced of anything, of course, but I can't think of a reason (yet) to say it's impossible for the to have an HJ connection. It's not as easily dismissible as I had assumed.

The one thing I would still need to see be explained is why the tomb would be in Jerusalem.

I found the discussion with Ted Koppel following the documentary to be rather more interesting than the movie itself. Koppel seemed like he was in over his head a lot and kind of got owned by Jacobovici a few times. I was a little disappointed in the critiques by Dever and Reed, especially by Dever. They didn't really have much in the way factual rebuttals to the discoveries, just weak protestations about the doc making archaeology look bad and some objections to the statistics. At times, they came close to weaselling.

The panel of clergy they had on later was pretty much a waste of time -- just insubstantial whining by non-scholars. I did think it was ironic that they kept complaining about the dramatic renactments of the program when the Discovery Channel has made a cottage industry of pandering to credulous believers by producing pseudo-documentaries and dramatic reenactments of the most ridiculous Biblical bullshit (Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses).

Sauron

Who says that the people writing on the tombs were "at the heart of christianity"? Unsupported assumption on your part.

* Maybe the people writing on the stone didn't care.
* Or, maybe they represent a different school of thought within the early movement - one that didn't depend upon a divine origin.
* Or, maybe your assumption that the movement would be overthrown is like most of your other assumptions - often claimed, never proved?

Your inability to think of fairly obvious explanations only underscores how much your rarely-practiced faith cripples your analytical abilities.

And what method of transmission would you use for this hypothetical code?

Too expensive for a poor family? That's funny; wasn't Jesus laid in an expensive tomb after the crucifixion? Your own argument backfires on you: it's also an argument against the body being laid in any kind of tomb after the crucifixion. If you think it happened after the crucifixion, then why can't it happen later on?

If you think you have such a case, then make it. But waving your hands around and tossing what-ifs into the air like confetti will not suffice.

A list of straws, begging to be grasped?
Not really.

Malachi151

No, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke say otherwise, Mark doesn't relay this either way, and we all know that the "virgin birth" stuff is made up.

Assuming that the later stories are accurate. (Big assumption)

See above.

Seems odd, maybe they can recover the bones.

This is quite doubtful.

However, I totally disagree with the presentation though and don't think that this is "the tomb of Jesus".

Malachi151

I saw the whole documentary and the first half of the "critical" bit with Coppel, but didn't stay around to listen to the theologians.

Here is what I had to say about it:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/bl...try_id=1650704

I'm totally unconvinced basically, at least by their arguments.

djrafikie

I believe that Jesus existed, but I sure as hell don't believe he was the son of god. I have no problems with believing they found the guys tomb..I'm quite sure he did exist.

Diogenes the Cynic

Because Joseph was the father? There is no reason to suppose that the earliest followers of Jesus believed in that virgin birth nonsense.
How so?
You're retrojecting later Christian beliefs back into the earliest movement. It wouldn't even actually contradict the gospels since the Gospels don't say that Jesus wasn't married or didn't reproduce.
This one still needs to be explained to me. Not so much that it was expensive, but that Jesus would have been entombed at all.
But there is still nuclear DNA in the other samples, which could conceivably give better profiles. There is just a technical problem about how to extract it.
Do you have some familiarity with standard archeology procedures? I don't know who vaccuumed out the boxes. I assumed it was those who worked on the first dig.
This would be even more far-fetched than the proffered hypothesis.

ApostateAbe

Without the bullet. Here are my speculations to the problems.

Since the family owned the tomb, presumably, the family would be the people who decide the inscriptions. The doctrine that Jesus was conceived by God is not found in the earliest representation of Christianity, the gospel of Mark.

That would not discredit Christianity. The narrator did assert that the son of Jesus needed to be kept secret from the Romans, who feared a Christian dynasty. But the death of the young son would mean that the secret no longer needed to be kept.
Jesus' family was poor, but poor people have ways of making cash, and Jesus found that way. *cough* cult leader *cough*

I don't know. Perhaps the 1 in 190 figure was the ratio of people named Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph).

I imagine they are vacuumed out to be presentable in museums. They are not normally put under a microscope.

Because he never told anyone about it. If it were truly an elaborate hoax, he likely would have gone through the trouble of telling the Christians about it, who would have denounced it and "corrected" it.