Jesus Christ! There could not be a bigger announcement

in our times than that someone had found the body. Jesus' body that is. So much of western culture is rooted in the presumptions of the Resurrection and its implications, that the corpus would challenge those beliefs at their core. I read today that the Discovery Channel will be airing a Sunday night television show premised in just that way. The show asserts that limestone ossiaries from the First Century AD are highly likely to be those of Jesus and his family. The ossiaries came from a tomb in Jerusalem and are certainly some family's remains. If I understand the facts not in dispute, there were ten ossiaries found about twenty years ago, catalogued, and stored at a University archeological repository since. The tomb they were in had, at some point between interment and discovery, been vandalized though details aren't currently known. Of the ten stone ossiaries, six are inscribed with names. Several of the names are congruent with names mentioned in the New Testament. One is of a woman name Marianmene. The television show asserts that this is likely the Mary otherwise known as the Magdalene; again reasons aren't quite clear. Critics note that all the names on the boxes are extremely common in the thousands of First Century burials in Jerusalem. The show's producers have done a statistical analysis of the likely convergance of all the names in one place and time. One ossiary noted did not come from the University repository but from an antique dealer. If I recall, it is inscribed with the name," James, brother of Jesus". The statistical analysis apparently includes this ossiary, and a chemically based case is made for it being originally part of the group found in the tomb. Whether the case is compelling is, again, not clear. There is also an assertion that DNA testing of the bones in the "Jesus" ossiary and those in the "Mary" ossiary do not have the DNA of relatives and therefore could have been husband and wife. Or mother-in-law and son-in-law one presumes.

I have deeply Catholic roots even though I do not consider myself a Catholic at this point in my life. One of those roots includes a heavy dose of analyitical thinking training. As a consequence I find myself wondering seriously about the interpolations possible between the time Christ lived and the time the Gospels were written. I also find myself extremely skeptical of 'pseudo scientific' approaches to issues like this. Used to be that an assertion about such issues would be laid before peers in a reviewed journal before it was put on television. To our loss, I think that the level of critical thinking among watchers of this show will be low enough that it will reach Creationists proportions. And so our culture will continue to be beset by the noise of dunderheads competing for the intellectual high ground. When all is said and done, I worry that that noise has the power to drown out the truly important discussions which need to take place---whether about the fate of Jesus or the fate we ourselves are headed toward. davidrites