Malachi151

I'm doing a presentation on the "Lost Tomb of Jesus", the show from the Discovery Channel about the supposed finding of the tomb of the Jesus Christ family.

Anyway, my focus isn't going to be on the actual claims themselves, I'm just going to present that stuff and move on, but I want to focus more on the reception of the claims.

Specifically I want to focus on how the claims were presented in the MSM, how they were opposed by traditional Christians, and how they were received by atheists and skeptics of Christianity.

I'm most interested in this last bit, how American non-Christians received the claims.

I know that in this very forum several "anti-Christians" I think were sympathetic to the claims, and I'm looking for perhaps statements in MSM articles or on major blogs by non-Christians who supported the claims of the show.

FYI, I was a critic of the claims from the outset and think its all just a bunch of sensationalists nonsense used to sell books, but the presentation is simply about how the claims were received and portrayed by various groups and by the MSM.

If anyone knows of some relevant martial I would appreciate it.

Thanks

Toto

You are talking about the Talpiot Tomb (The Lost Tomb usually refers to the people who think that Jesus traveled to India/Tibet/Japan and died there.)

I started a non-committal thread here. It might not have been clear, but I am rather skeptical of the whole enterprise, which seems guided by commercialism and a misguided attempt to find a coherent Jesus figure behind the myth.

There is another thread here from a year ago. The comments are not quite as negative in that thread.

But I don't recall any support for Tabor's theories, even among his fellow secularist academics.

Minimalist

Joseph E. Zias was the Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1972 to 1997. He held that post when Talpiot was uncovered in 1980.

Here is his take on the recent conference in Jerusalem about this fiasco. You may find it interesting.

http://www.joezias.com/talpiot.htm

Solitary Man

You might want to google and do research on the Talpiot Tomb Conference and look up on ANE-2, xtalk-2, and Biblical-Studies (all Yahoo lists), as well as various bloggers when the show was presented.

Malachi151

Yeah, its just that its difficult retracing all of the material and comments that were made at the time. I do recall that at the time there were a good number of non-Christians in the blogs and on message boards who were quite excited by the idea and were supportive of it. I'm not necessarily talking about scholars here, indeed I'm not talking about scholars, just the general reception of the claims by the non-Christian American public. That's something that's rather hard to nail down, especially since so little of the perspectives of the non-Christian public were recorded in the official MSM. I think blogs will be the best bet to review the opinions of such folks, so if anyone knows of any blogs off hand that were in support of the claims when they came out that would be helpful.

Thanks

Solitary Man

James Tabor's blog was the only one I know of, but he's disqualified. Tyler Williams did the best job on keeping it all updated:

Before the Airing (2/26)
Before the Airing 03/01
During and After the Release (03/05)

If I were you, I would look especially at the third link, as those are the most comprehensive.

Malachi151

Well, I gave my presentation today at SkeptiCamp. It was about a 25 minute presentation, and it went well.

Basically I first went over the claims, then went over the basic refutation of those claims, though I didn't go into detail. Then I basically discussed the reception of the story in the MSM, and how the backing of the Discovery Channel setup a situation that allowed it to be payed out as "science vs. faith", but that in fact the Jesus Tomb claims were highly flawed, which allowed the "defender of the faith" to score easy points.

I used it as an example to illustrate that just because there is a supernatural claim (resurrection) that is being addressed by a naturalistic explanation (Jesus tomb) that doesn't always mean that the naturalistic explanation should be embraced, however, atheists and skeptics often have a tendency to jump on the naturalistic explanation as true sometimes without proper objectivity just because it seems to refute a commonly held supernatural belief.

In this case, neither the traditional supernatural belief nor the new naturalistic claim are credible.

Minimalist

Both claims suffer from the same problem. There is not a shred of evidence that the "tomb" was ever occupied.

angelo

I watched the documentary and read the book and found it fascinating. Reminded me of the movie with Antonio Banderas ''The Body'' which was released a fair few years ago.
But the consesus seems to be that the claims are far fetched. Also it has to be remembered that most crucified people were either buried in a common grave or left on the cross to be devoured by the jackals and other wildlife. In most instances there was precious little left to be buried. I also doubt the existence of a historical Jesus in the first place.

lpetrich

I did not follow that controversy very much, because it did not interest me very much.

But most of the atheist bloggers who had commented about it were skeptical about it.