Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

FEILER FASTER EXCLUSIVE: Report From Jerusalem on Jesus Hoax
Monday, February 26, 2007

My phone has been ringing off the hook today with media calls about the James Cameron "Lost Tomb of Jesus" docu-hoax. As a service to readers of Feiler Faster, I telephoned my longtime archaeologist companion Avner Goren, who lives in the neighborhood in question, knows the archaeologist who first discovered the cave, and has been down this road before.

The headlines:

1. Caves like the ones where the ossuaries were discovered are commonplace in the area and were very familiar features of this neighborhood in the 1st century B.C.E. and 1st century C.E. Avner made the fascinating point that bodies used to be buried in groups but with the introduction of individualism from Greece, they started burying people in single boxes and labeling them. Basically, the way it would work is that the bodies would be buried for a year, the family would come back and collect the bones and put them in an ossuary (a stone box). Then they would take the box out once a year and have a memorial service, as Jews still do today with candle lighting.

2. A family from Nazareth would not be buried in Jerusalem. Jewish custom holds that a body should be buried within 24 hours. I recently heard of a family that hired a private plane to get a body from Cleveland to Jerusalem in time. It would have been impossible to get a body from Nazareth, in the Galilee to Jerusalem in this time period. Also, there's no way for a family to tend a grave this far away. So the idea of a multi-generational family tomb for Jesus in Jerusalem makes no sense. Even the archaeologist who discovered the tomb, Amos Kloner, has dismissed the show as "nonsense."

Kloner, who said he was interviewed for the new film but has not seen it, said the names found on the ossuaries were common, and the fact that such apparently resonant names had been found together was of no significance. He added that “Jesus son of Joseph” inscriptions had been found on several other ossuaries over the years. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb,” Kloner said. “They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”

3. The names on the ossuaries are very common. As Avner pointed out, 21 percent of names of women are Mary; Joseph and Jesus (Joshua) are among the top four male names. The presence of these names in a tomb would not have been rare. We have no evidence that this is a family tomb; it could have been a communal tomb, or an extended family tomb. The DNA evidence that Jesus was not connected to the Mary buried in the tomb does not prove anything, other than they are not related. There is no evidence the female body belonged to someone who was "married" to anyone else in the tomb. There is no evidence she was the the mother of anyone else in the tomb. And we can be sure they checked that! So the claim that Jesus fathered a son with the "Mary" in the tomb is bogus.

Avner is a contemporary of Amos Kloner and has known him for decades. "It takes courage to say that the names on these ossuaries were very common," Avner said. As for the filmmakers: "There is something cheap about playing on the emotions of people."

And therein is the truth of this tale: For two centuries now we have seen a tap dance between science and the Bible. Whatever the scientific breakthrough of the moment becomes the battlefield of the war -- archaeology, Darwin, physics, now DNA. What's said about this story to me is that there are many archaeologists out there who strive to find the truth. This exploitation of science is hardly new -- in fact a story like this pops up every few years or so -- but it's tawdry nonetheless.

The bottom line for me: There is more truth in Dan Brown's fiction than in James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovichi's fact.

Labels: Biblical Archaeology

Posted by B Feiler at 2:40 PM
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