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

The Titanic Code: James Cameron Becomes Mel Gibson
Monday, February 26, 2007

My in-box filled this weekend with happy-talk about the new James Cameron announcement, expected on Monday, that's he's solved the mystery of Jesus. Before I pour cold water on it, let's review what he's expected to preview. As TIME puts it:

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you 'The Titanic' is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he's sinking is Christianity.

In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

No, it's not a re-make of "The Da Vinci Codes'. It's supposed to be true.

As another report, takes up the tale:

The story starts in 1980 in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, with the discovery of a 2,000 year old cave containing ten coffins. Six of the ten coffins were carved with inscriptions reading the names: Jesua son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Matthew, Jofa (Joseph, identified as Jesus’ brother), Judah son of Jesua (Jesus’ son - the filmmakers claim).
The findings in the cave, including the decipherment of the inscriptions, were first revealed about ten years ago by internationally renowned Israeli archeologist Professor Amos Kloner.
Since their discovery, the caskets were kept in the Israeli Antiquities Authority archive in Beit Shemesh, but now two have been sent to New York for their first public exhibition.
Although the cave was discovered nearly 30 years ago and the casket inscriptions decoded ten years ago, the filmmakers are the first to establish that the cave was in fact the burial site of Jesus and his family.

First, let's go back eight months ago to last summer when Cameron announced that he had "solved" the riddle of the Exodus, and proclaimed, in similar grand fashion, a television show that moved the traditional dating of the Exodus from around 1250 BCE to 1500 BCE based on an outmoded theory that a volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean had "caused" the Exodus. So to be clear: Then he was interested in proving the Exodus and now he's interested in disproving the Gospels. That's hard work for anyone in six months time!

Now he's picking up the similar underappreciated work of another archaeologist who has an entirely speculative theory about Jesus belonging to a dynasty far grander than the storyline in the text about his father being a carpenter. The raw facts of the story are problematic: These names were extremely common at the time, and finding them in a burial chamber is not emblematic of anything. And now comes DNA? I haven't seen the purported DNA evidence, but what's the original source? And finally, the heart of their claim is that the ossuary of Jesus was actually stolen, it's "The Lost Tomb," but as others have mentioned, it's listed as having "no inscription."

To say that this whole gesture is a money-making proposition is neither interesting nor surprising. What is surprising to me, at least, is that for most of the last century these types of grand announcements were quite common. There was a golden triangle among religious institutions, biblical scholars, and the press. The churches (and sometimes synagogues) would pay for the research; the scholars would make bold, unsupportable proclamations; and the press would report them credulously. The headline of this story to me is that the churches have been taken out of the equations and replaced with whom ... Hollywood! Mel Gibson may have met his wildest dreams: He's turned everyone in Hollywood into his or her own church.

Update: Their appearance on THE TODAY SHOW was completely unpersuasive. Not an archaeologist in site, just a journalist and a filmmaker, as they both admitted, "pimping the Bible," as one archaeologist commented. Their best case: "Nothing we discovered disproves the initial hypothesis." This is very shady and setting the bar very low: When making a claim like this, the goal is not, "We've found nothing to disprove our outrageous claim," but "We can prove it to a scientific level of certainty." At least Dan Brown had the nerve to call his story fiction.

Labels: Biblical Archaeology

Posted by B Feiler at 7:11 AM
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1 Comments:

Anonymous said...: I wonder how long before Cameron has Jimmy Carter's book in movie form. Since regard for fact is not an issue for either, research time would be minimal. Who knows, perhaps they could have the next Indiana Jones.; February 26, 2007 4:10:00 PM EST