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

Two Jesus Hoaxes? The View From Kentucky
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

I'm waking up in Louisville this morning, only to find that the Jesus Hoax controversy has followed me here. A reader sent me a tip, linking me to a piece in the Lexington Herald about Ben Witherington. Witherington denounces the new docu-hoax as the silliness it is; the piece also has a great quote from an archaeologist at the Israel Museum who says: The chances that the film's contentions are true "are more than remote. They are closer to fantasy."

Money quote: Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at the evangelical theology school in Wilmore, said Cameron's contentions were false and amounted to a publicity stunt "full of holes, conjectures and problems."

But as the piece goes on to note, Witherington himself has his own problems with hoaxes. He co-authored with my friend and colleague Herschel Shanks a book about what they claimed was an ossuary of the brother of James. That turned out to be a forgery.

In 2003, Witherington and co-author Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, wrote in The Brother of Jesus that they believed an ossuary bearing the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," was authentic.

A few months after The Brother of Jesus was published, Israel's Antiquities Authority decided that the ossuary was a fake. It charged the ossuary's owner, Oded Golan, with fraud and illegally selling archaeological artifacts outside of Israel. His trial continues, 21/2 years after it began.

Witherington said that he and Shanks stand by their conclusion that the ossuary is authentic and are not likely to change their minds, regardless of the trial's outcome.

And the ultimate kicker: Witherington and Jacobovici used to work together! In fact, Jacobovici directed the film on the James ossuary. The tangled web gets even darker. Here's a section from Witherington's blog post about all this yesterday:

First of all, I have worked with Simcha. He is a practicing Jew, indeed he is an orthodox Jew so far as I can tell. He was the producer of the Discovery Channel special on the James ossuary which I was involved with. He is a good film maker, and he knows a good sensational story when he sees one. This is such a story. Unfortunately it is a story full of holes, conjectures, and problems. It will make good TV and involves a bad critical reading of history. Basically this is old news with a new interpretation. We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980.

For what it's worth, Jacobovici told me yesterday he was an Orthodox Jew. That was when he was barely speaking with me, before we were interviewed together on CBS. Afterwards he stormed out of the studio. To watch the interview, click here.

Labels: Biblical Archaeology

Posted by B Feiler at 7:44 AM
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2 Comments:

Geo said...: As an atheist, I find all this blather about the Jesus hoax entertaining. I wouldn't expect a Christian or Jew to accept Cameron's findings any more than they can accept that the Earth isn't 6000 years old or that natural selection is how the homo sapien arrived to observe this Cosmos. Any rational person who emphasizes the rational synapses of his brain over his intuitional fears has to come to the conclusion that god is no more proven or real than Santa Claus. But, of course there could have been a Jesus. There was a Joseph Smith wasn't there? There were Bill Wilson and Bob whatisname, AA's founders, another institution whose meetings are beginning to sound like a religion. I wonder when Xtians and Jews (and Moslems for that matter) will shed their evolutionary mental chains which bind and blind them and arise into the rational universe?; February 28, 2007 8:34:00 AM EST
Anonymous said...: The latest dispatch (3/7/07) from Witherington, from his meditation on "Bitterness":

"It would be easy for me to get bitter about the nonsense propagated in the Jesus tomb theory. To become bitter that the other side of the story has not adequately been told. That there is an unfairness in all of this, especially since I spent years of my life dealing with the James ossuary and the remarkable implications of that, which is still a genuine relic from the family of Jesus."

From his own words, it's even more obvious now that the ONLY dog that BW had in this Jesus Tomb fight was the one that he hoped would free his James ossuary from its association with the ossuaries from the "Family Tomb."

He succeeded in part. Most people agree that his J-o was not one of the ten, but he only dragged his credibility down further since he was forced to rely on the word of Oded Golan to establish a sort-of provenance for his ossuary and almost every mention of the J-o in the press was surrounded by variations on the words "forged" or "fake."

RE: "...the other side of the story has not been adequately told"

I have to agree with him here. Even though there were archaeologists, scientists and even Biblical scholars aplenty to refute the claims of the JFT-crowd, Witherington just had to jump in bearing the ridiculous baggage of his own ossuary claims. The case against the JFT would have been even much more adequate without his input. He was an unneeded distraction.

RE: "I spent years of my life dealing with the James ossuary and the remarkable implications of that, which is still a genuine relic from the family of Jesus."

"Still?!"; March 7, 2007 8:36:00 PM EST