Thursday, March 01, 2007

Jesus's Tomb?

One thing that has created a bit of a stir in the last few days is the claim by a documentary film maker (his credits include Titanic) that he's found the tomb and ossuaries of Jesus and his immediate family (Allah be pleased with them).

Of course, the media's busy trying to sell the story it wants to see. Or finds more sexy. Namely how this challenged the basis of Christianity as we know it today, complete with a Da Vinci Code'ish reference to Mary Magdalene as His Missis, so to speak. See the story here, for example. And, to be fair to the Press, most everybody else has been doing the same--as you can see in the discussion on the "On Faith" site that The Washington Post and Newsweek run. [Featured guests there include everyone from the Bishop Desmond Tutu, to the MPV's co-founder, Pamela Taylor.] You'll see the whole gamut of opinions, from the agnostic, to the a-theist to the religious--and all the way to a person with the moniker "Jihadist", who claims that this just proves his point...

... But does it?

If you listen closely the producer (or was it the director) said, in at least one interview, that "If Jesus can rise from one tomb, he can rise from the other." [Or, as someone in that discussion above said, if Joseph of Aramathea can pay for tomb in one place, he could have paid for it in another place. And if I may say so, when you look more closely, what this story--for what it is worth, there've been multitudes like this over the centuries--does take on is:

  • The Catholic insistence that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is inarguably the site of the tomb Jesus rose from, and
  • The Muslim belief that Jesus never made it to a tomb and was raised bodilly without being crucified.
Postscript (3/2/07): The cross-post of this entry on the Eteraz.org site has more of a discussion going, if you care to listen in, or join in.

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