 |
| Descent from the Cross, 14th Century, from the Church of Saint Marina, in Kalopanagiotis, Cyprus. Joseph of Arimathea is standing in the center, holding the Body of Christ. Read more on Wikipedia > |
I had begun noting a few points of disagreement (I’ve footnoted them for those that are interested[1]), but after reading some alternate viewpoints outside the book, I took a step back and considered what the more interesting story was:
If you you can delicately upset popular convictions - not topple them, mind you, just tip them a bit - then you have the perfect recipe for outrage and publicity: “I’m not really destroying your mythology, just enhancing your understanding - you can still keep your myths and confront the evidence like I did.”
All you need is a premise and a little mystery, like an assassination and missing bullet, or enormous ancient structures built without modern machinery, or a hairy biped and a blurry photo.
If you read this, you’ll have enough info to settle your own mind: The Talpiot Tomb on Wikipedia >
[2014-03-27]
c0
[1]
Now reading (very slowly) The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity, by James D Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici. The “resurrection tomb” is the primary focus but one of two that figure in the book. They are identified as the Garden Tomb (aka the “Jesus Tomb”, which was partially destroyed by construction) and the Patio Tomb (aka “Resurrection Tomb” which is intact). The Garden Tomb contained a number of ossuaries (bone boxes) bearing the names of a man named Jesus and his family, including the inscription “Jesus son of Joseph.” Tabor and Jacobovici suggest the Garden Tomb holds Jesus’ family and the Patio Tomb belongs to Joseph of Arimathea and his family).
(A short background: All four biblical gospels tell us a man named Joseph of Arimathea got permission from Roman prefect Pontius Pilate to bury Jesus before the Sabbath, which began at sundown the same day he was crucified. Joseph of Arimathea is assumed to have been wealthy and influential (he could get in to see Pilate and buy fine linens to wrap the body). Joseph and Nicodemus and the disciples worked quickly so Jesus was prepared with spices and interred before sunset.
1. Level-setting: There’s no doctrinal reason I know of that, it it were learned Jesus had a family, Christianity would suffer irreparably. But even atheist biblical scholars (like former evangelical Bart Ehrman) see no evidence that Jesus had a wife and family of his own.
2. Most of the names of interest were common in Jerusalem at that time (there is even another unrelated ossuary inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph"). There have been ~2000 tombs excavated in Jerusalem dating roughly 1 BC-1 AD, but there is no way to know if is a representative corpus of data (ie, are those 2,000 tombs a fair representation of the social class Jesus and his family occupied?).
In my bible reading just last night (end of Mark 15 and beginning of Mark 16), there were 3 Marys mentioned within a few verses, all different and unrelated, and none of them Mary the mother of Jesus.
 |
| The Talpiot Tomb, aka Jesus Tomb and Garden Tomb. This is picture is from Wikipedia Commons, which reproduced it from Discovery.com here. Use of this image is Fair Use. It is being used for critical commentary, discussion, scholarship, or research. See this article > |
4. And if Tabor’s and Jacobovici’s assertion that 1st Century Christians believed in a “spiritual resurrection” and not a bodily one (making the Resurrection and physical remains compatible), there’d be no reason at all to invent accounts of the empty tomb.
5. Even Tabor and Jacobovici admit that cataloging and guarding the Garden Tomb after it was discovered were badly managed (to put it mildly) and important information was irretrievably lost. (At one point children were playing soccer with skulls and bones and an Orthodox resident went house to house collecting them and gave them to Israeli archeologists, though no one knows what happened to them after that).
6. The book is accessible and reads like a mystery, but so far there is far more speculation than fact. (Think Erik Von Daniken meets The Ten Commandments.) Tabor and Jacobovici just seems to desperately want the Patio Tomb to belong to Joseph of Arimathea.
This tendency is no more evident than when they speculate that the James Ossuary (unrelated to the Garden or Patio tombs) will prove to be genuine, but it was shown after The Jesus Discovery was published to be (at least) a partial forgery (James Ossuary on Wikipedia >).
That’s one of the risks of speculating with historical evidence: subsequent scholarship may cast your conclusions in a very different light.
7. If, after the last chapter, this all comes down to names and symbols inscribed on ossuaries, there really is no story at all:
“Peter Lampe, professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Heidelberg and working in archaeology, pointed out that in the 120s/130s C.E. in the port town of Maoza at the southern end of the Dead Sea one Jewish household comprised the following names: Jesus, Simon, Mariame, Jacobus and Judah (Papyri Babatha 17 from 128 C.E.; 25-26 and 34 from 131 C.E.). These people had nothing to do with the New Testament or the Talpiyot tomb. ‘According to the rationale of the filmmakers, these people should not have existed.’ Source >
[2014-03-24]
c0
No comments:
Post a Comment