James Cameron, director of Terminator, Aliens, and Titanic knows something about resurrection. The endings of his movies are famous for dragging out the deaths of their villains (or heroes), attempting to wratchet up suspense by having a skeletal android emerge from a fire; an alien somehow survive the vacuum and absolute zero of space to threaten Sigourney Weaver; and Leonardo DiCaprio survives much longer than the roughly forty-five seconds he would have in the near-freezing North Atlantic waters (after survivng the sinking of a huge ocean liner) to slip romantically beneath the waves. This struggle against death - usually by evil, which seems more persistent and stronger than good - is a theme of his movies. It should come as no surprise, then, that Cameron is making a movie about an ossuary found in Israel a quarter-century ago and claiming it is the burial container of Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, that Jesus.
Is it possible? Of course it is! Indeed, such a find would be among the most important in archaeological history. It would force a fundamental re-thinking of Christianity and Islam which also holds to a less important, but still miraculous view of the resurrection of Jesus. It would force a fundamental reassessment of two-thousand years of western history. It would be earth-shattering beyond belief, as important as the discovery of intelligent life outside our solar system.
I have not seen the film, obviously, and I do not believe Cameron holds any animus towards Christianity. I refuse to believe there are sinister motives behind this project, and I think it would be interesting to view all the evidence - or at least the evidence Cameron presents in the film. If nothing else, if true, that stupid add that has run in The Nation for years claiming that Josephus of Alexandria invented the story of Jesus would end, because there would be proof from archaeology that he, indeed, existed and was not "fictional".
I think skepticism is in order, and not just because faith-based archaeologists are calling the whole thing in to question. For one thing, in the AP story by Marshall Thompson here (if the link doesn't work, let me know; you can find it at Yahoo!News, I am sure. I would, however, like to correct the link if possible, but it's one of those wierd long string of letters and numbers), I do not believe that history, archaeology, and theology should be used in the same breath as the Greek Orthodox archaeologist who defends The Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the site of Jesus burial. Quite simply - we don't know where Jesus was buried. This is like pointing to a stump and saying "This is where George Washington cut down that cherry tree."
Other comments, however, by other archaeologists, do raise important points. First, Jesus is a Hellenization of "Yeshua" (Joshua), a fairly common name. Mary, likewise, is the Greek form of "Miriam" (my daughter's name, BTW), also fairly common. The tomb containing the ossuaries was a fairly typical one for mildly prosperous Jerusalem-based merchants. So, not only didn't Jesus rise from the dead, he somehow moved his whole carpentry business (and his suddenly-discovered family, one assumes) from Nazareth to Jerusalem. He also was not a politico-religious figure at all, but apparently died naturally, and was laid to rest with his entire family. The Gospels are fiction, the concoction of strange minds bent on, what? Creating a religion out of whole-cloth?
The fact that this story dove-tails with (a) The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Jesus comes down from the cross, lives a long life with his wives and children, only to encounter a con-artist named Saul who is trying to become famous on the back of Jesus name and reputation; and (b) The DaVinci Code which was done much better by Robert Anton Wilson, who called it The Illuminatus Trilogy should also give one pause. These are modern conceits - that Jesus was married, that Mary Magdalene was his wife, etc., etc. Had any of these things even been remotely the case, there would be some ancient source, canonical or not (and the number of surviving non-canonical Gospels is large, and they make for very interesting reading; none of them mention Jesus having a wife and children) would have at least hinted at them. They do not. Even Josephus, the supposed "inventor" of Jesus' divinity, etc., mentions none of this in his chronicle (the anti-Semitic conceit that later Christian scholars added the parts about Jesus to Josephus' account of the Jewish Wars does not hold water).
These are important considerations. None of them, however, are as important as this. The tomb and ossuaries were discovered in 1980. While one can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the information was withheld out of a sense of fear for the reaction of the faithful, we are entering, again, into DaVinci Code-conspiracy mongering, all arguments from silence. Could not a more plausible explanation be that they were not reported as the tomb of Jesus and his family because there was enough evidence showing that they belonged to someone else?
Again, I have not seen the documentary, and I certainly pass no judgements upon Cameron, his producers, or anyone else involved in the process. We need to remember that skepticism is a scientific virtue, even in matters of faith.
Virtual Tin Cup
