I know there’s already a thread about this but now that the documentary has been broadcast, I think we should have a new thread to discuss the show itself. I watched all three hours, including the discussion with Ted Koppel after the film.
I found the presentation to be more compelling than I expected, but there’s no smoking gun yet. . A lot of the statistical arguement rests on the hypothesis that the James ossuary originally came from the same tomb (and I believe the Israeli Antiquities Authority is only claiming that the “brother of Yeshua” part of the inscription is forged, which would still leave the possibility that we could have a bone box matching the described dimensions of the one missing from the Talpiot tomb, with a similar patina, bearing the inscription, “Yaacov [James] bar Yoseph.” IF it could be demonstrated that the James Ossuary came from the Talpiot tombe, that drives the statistics way up. I found the 'Maraimne" material fairly interesting as well, although it must be said that all they proved was that she wasn’t related maternally to 'Yeshua."
I still need to see an explanation for why a poor Galilean family would have an expensive family tomb in Jerusalem, but that’s not insurmountable, I suppose (conceivably, some members of the community in Jerusalem presided over by James after the crucifixion could have bought a tomb for Jesus’ family). I would also need to see an explanation for how Jesus got off the cross and into any tomb at all.
There are still some dots which need to be connected, and this is far from a slam dunk, but as I was watching, I kept trying to think of reasons to dismiss the whole thing out of hand or find something which would blow the whole hypothesis out of the water until I realized I was being ad hoc and resistant just to be resistant. SO FAR, while they still have a ways to go to prove their hypothesis, I can’t say that it’s impossible for them to be correct.
I was particularly eager to see the Koppel segment after the film, when I expected to hear scholars blowing holes in the theory. Bill Dever (a very respected archaelogist), in particular, was someone I expected to dismantle
the entire hypothesis, but I was disappointed in the relative weakness of both his and Reed’s protestations. Dever was worried that they were making arcaheologists look like “anti-Biblical” crackpots (a concern I actually share), but neither him or reed really offered much in the way of substantive rebuttal to the evidence.
Koppel seemed like he was in over his head. I got the sense he didn’t know much about either archaeology or the scholarship on Christian origins and he kind of got pwn3d a lot by the director, Jacobovici.
The panel of clergy near the end was pretty much a waste of time. We know the hypothesis would contradict Christian doctrine. So what? What does that have to do with the validity of the evidence?
All in all, the whole think wasn’t as cringe inducing as I had assumed it would be. It did make me examine some of my own assumptions, so that’s something.
I watched only portions of the documentary (putting children to bed is often a repetitive task), and skipped most of the late panel discussion. However, I was interested in what Dever had to say. I agree his arguments against the theory were weak, but I attributed this to the desire to “dumb-down” the discussion for a general audience (one of the reasons I gave up on the panel).
For me, there were a lot of pieces here, but not enough to put the puzzle together without assuming a number of different hypotheses. The DNA evidence from the Mariamne ossuary–that the woman interred there was not related to any of the men–was something I hadn’t known before, and for me the most interesting. On the other hand, the statistical analysis of names was, for me, pure speculation based on a ton of ad hoc assumptions.
I agree it could not be dismissed immediately, which did surprise me because much of the more spectacular claims I hear from Biblical archaeology falls in the “John’s baptismal cave” nonsense. I hope they rerun it so I can Tivo (the Tivo was occupied last night with my wife’s usual Sunday lineup).
I thought they pretty conclusively showed that it DID come from the same tomb (due to the trace elements found on the patina of the ossuary and those found in the tomb). In addition, at least according to the show, the only part that was thought to be an actual forgery (and they were unsure) was the ‘and brother of Yeshua’ part…the ‘Yaacov bar Yoseph’ seemed to be authentic. Which, as one of the pro-tomb guys said was pretty compelling in and of itself.
You are right though…this peice drove it from something like 600 to 1 in favor of this being the tomb to something like 30,000 to 1 in favor (IIRC).
I didn’t catch the thing you described at the end unfortunately. By the time the show was over it was 1am here and I had to get up fairly early. I’ll have to see if that part is on again, or maybe if its online somewhere.
I’m in agreement with you…it seemed pretty compelling to me. Still some questions, and I would love to see some good rebuttal, showing why the main stream expert community is so ho hum about this…and skeptical.
James Tabor is saying on his blog today that he’s preparing a formal paper on the tomb for peer review. I believe some similar reports are being prepared for the statitics, the DNA evidence and the patina evidence. The peer review of these reports are going to be where the rubber hits the road. Tabor and Jacobovici both seem to want it. It should be noted that none of these claims would be getting examined at all if Jacobovici hadn’t reopened this tomb. It’s at least an interesting hypothesis which deserves more examination that it recieved in 1980.
As for how the Jesus family could afford a tomb…well, IIRC Mary Magdalene was from a fairly wealthy family IIRC (this could be myth though…I’m going on memory). Also, after his death I would imagine that enough people were believers to get something like what we saw constructed. Finally, wasn’t Jesus’s family supposed to be a rather old family? And fairly well connected, at least at one time (especially on Jesus’s mothers side)…so maybe a family tomb was handed down from when the family was better off.
I saw the last couple hours of the show last night, fortunately I left the tube on and woke up to the Lost Tomb about an hour into it.
I agree with everyone here so far, that it was intriguing and brow raising.
I was suprised that they welded the tomb shut at the end of the show, before they could really examine the tomb.
Couple questions though;
Why didn’t they do DNA of the supposed Christ debris?
Back in the day, what was the procedure for placing the decayed remains in an ossuary?
And, why didn’t we see any actual bones in the boxes?
They did, but they were only able to examine mitochondrial DNA (which only gives a maternal profile). Supposedly there is nuclear DNA in the bone fragments which would give a more complete profile, but it’s very hard to extract a sample.
The burial process took place in two stages. The first involved preparing the body in linens and spices and what not, then putting it on a stone slab inside a tomb. A year or two later, after the meat was rotted away, they collected the bones and put them in stone boxes (called ossuaries) for permanent storage.
My understanding was that the boxes had all been vaccuumed out by the excavation in 1980. Where those fragments are now, I don’t know.
I thought it was an interesting hypothesis that had some merit and should be explored further by scientists who know what they’re doing.
I don’t care for Jacobovici’s sloppy scientistic methods, his Olympic-level assumption-jumping or his defensive arrogance on the panel, BUT he shone a light that definitely is worthy of further investigation, and that’s the point of this feature. He opened up the panel by saying that he views this not as the final word, but the beginning of the study that should be done on the matter. I wish he had let his archeologist partner do the bulk of the debate as I found his responses more measured that Jacobovici’s remarks.
I wanted a lot more meat from the rebuttal scientists. Rather than putting the focus on the several “Big Ifs” that the director’s hypothesis relied on, they seemed a little petty and spiteful over the filmmaker’s roughshod process.
The religious woman’s complaint that the feature dramatized his hypothesis and lent it gravity was pointless. EVERY show on the Discovery or History or whatever channel uses these “reenactments” to illustrate a point. It was unfair to call out the director as if he was doing anything different than what is standard operating procedure for these types of shows.
IIRC, according to the show they were removed from the boxes and reburied. I think this has to do with some of the more conservative religious folks in Israel…at least that was the impression I got.
I wonder if, when they reburied the bones, they kept track of what was put where…or if they just put them all together in a common grave.
I also only caught the first hour…I hope to catch a re-run. But two questions:
Why did they not test the “Jesus” DNA vs. Mary (the mother) DNA?
Any reason the remains are not available? I understand the Isreali antiquities authority still has them catalogued elsewhere…would be interesting if the “Jesus” remains bore evidence of crucifixion (damage to the feet, ankles, hands, wrists) etc.
They couldn’t recover any remains from the “Maria” box. All the boxes were cleaned out by the first excavation team and eventually reburied for religious reasons. They wre lucky to get the samples they did find
According to the notes from 1980. The bones were in an “advanced state of disintigration,” meaning they were mostly just powder. I don’t think a forensic examination for causes of death would be possible anymore.
I thought it was pretty cool that there is another tomb down there thats pretty much untouched. I wonder if there are plans to ever excavate that one. Its pretty close to the ‘Jesus’ tomb…only 20 meters. Perhaps the sites are related, or even connected.
How much time did Dever or the others have to review the presentation before the interview? If I was a serious expert on a topic, I would not want to simply dismiss it without serious examination out of concern that if I missed some point, I would have to see it show up in conspiracy sites for the rest of my life.
I have now seen a claim that the statistician on the team had made the associated names highly improbable as coincidence and a claim from another mathematician (not interviewed) that the numbers were all over the place. I will be interested to see what some serious peer review of the numbers actually show.
I don’t know how much time they had to prepare but my impression was that they did not come in totally cold and one of them made reference to having read the book. Dever was circumspect about addressing specifics but Reed said he was confident that peer review would destroy the hypothesis (which allowed Jacobovicvi to score a point about the inconsistency of preaching against assuming conclusions and then assuming that a hypothesis will not stand up to review).
I admit to getting a little lost on some of the statistical discussion but the hypothesis is contingent on a couple of assumptions which would change the numbers. 1.) that the James ossuary is from the Talpiot tomb and 2.) that “Mariamne” is not really just “Maria.”
I think Tabor makes an interesting point, though, that even if the odds are 50-50, that’s still significant enough to warrant serious examination.
I watched those tests, and several other tests looked pretty damn close. There is no real doubt that the “and brother of Jesus” part is a forgery. The film downplayed this. The entire incription could be bogus. From Wiki" ,* Israeli Minister of Culture, mandated the work of a scientific commission to study the suspicious finds. IAA begun a heavy investigation about the affair. As for the James Ossuary, epigraphers of IAA concluded that the inscription was modern. Chalk type of the ossuary did match with the type of chalk in various other ancient ossuaries. However, Yuval Goren and Avner Ayalon of GSI identified three different coatings in the ossuary, the last of which was artificial and covered only the inscription. Letters had been cut through the patina and covered with artificial coating. Different parts of the text in different styles had been copied from a catalog of Jewish ossuaries and possible carved by the aid of scanning software. Ossuary was authentic - albeit unusual in shape - but the inscription was a fake.
As for the Jehoash Inscription, the commission concluded that various mistakes in the spelling and the mixture of different alphabets indicated that this was a modern forgery. The stone was typical to western Cyprus and areas further west. Patina over the chiseled letters was different from that of the back of the stone and could easily be wiped off the stone by hand."There, see here :
", who worked with Jacobovici on a Discovery Channel documentary on the James Ossuary, denies this connection on two grounds:
* "The James ossuary, according to the report of the antiquities dealer that Oded Golan got the ossuary from, said that the ossuary came from Silwan, not Talpiot, and had dirt in it that matched up with the soil in that particular spot in Jerusalem."
* "Furthermore, Eusebius reports that the tomb marker for James' burial was close to where James was martyred near the temple mount, indeed near the famous tombs in the Kidron Valley such as the so-called tomb of Absalom. Talpiot is nowhere near this locale."[22]
Another consideration is that the measurements of the James Ossuary do not match the measurements listed for the tenth ossuary, which is no longer stored with the rest of the collection. The James Ossuary is listed as being approximately 50 centimeters long by 30 centimeters wide on one end, and 25.5 centimeters on the other end [28]. The tenth ossuary in the Talpiot collection is listed as 60 centimeters long by 26 centimeters by 30 centimeters[29]. Furthermore, Amos Kloner has stated that the tenth ossuary had no inscription. And Joe Zias, former curator of the Rockerfeller Museum who received and catalogued the ossuaries, has also refuted this claim on his personal site. [30]"*
From that same page *"Criticism
When interviewed about the upcoming documentary, Amos Kloner, who oversaw the original archaeological dig of this tomb in 1980 said:
"It makes a great story for a TV film, but it's completely impossible. It's nonsense."[23]
Newsweek reports that the archaeologist who personally numbered the ossuaries dismissed any potential connection:
"Simcha has no credibility whatsoever," says Joe Zias, who was the curator for anthropology and archeology at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem from 1972 to 1997 and personally numbered the Talpiot ossuaries. "He's pimping off the Bible... He got this guy Cameron, who made 'Titanic' or something like that—what does this guy know about archeology? I am an archaeologist, but if I were to write a book about brain surgery, you would say, 'Who is this guy?' People want signs and wonders. Projects like these make a mockery of the archaeological profession."[24]
Stephen Pfann, president of Jerusalem’s University of the Holy Land and an expert in Semitic languages, who was interviewed in the documentary, also said the film’s hypothesis holds little weight:
"How possible is it?" Pfann said. "On a scale of one through 10 - 10 being completely possible - it's probably a one, maybe a one and a half."[25]
Pfann also thinks the inscription read as “Jesus” has been misread and suggests that the name “Hanun” might be a more accurate rendering.[26]
The Washington Post reports that William G. Dever (mentioned above as excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years) offered the following:
"I've known about these ossuaries for many years and so have many other archaeologists, and none of us thought it was much of a story, because these are rather common Jewish names from that period. It's a publicity stunt, and it will make these guys very rich, and it will upset millions of innocent people because they don't know enough to separate fact from fiction." [12]
Asbury Theological Seminary’s Ben Witherington III (who has also been aware of the tomb since 1980) points out some other circumstantial problems with linking this tomb to Christ.[22]
* "So far as we can tell, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus ‘son of Joseph’. It was outsiders who mistakenly called him that."
* "The ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem, and his adult home was Nazareth. The family was still in Nazareth after he [Joseph] was apparently dead and gone. Why in the world would he be buried (alone at this point) in Jerusalem?"
* "One of the ossuaries has the name Jude son of Jesus. We have no historical evidence of such a son of Jesus, indeed we have no historical evidence he was ever married."
* "The Mary ossuaries (there are two) do not mention anyone from Migdal. It simply has the name Mary-- and that's about the most common of all ancient Jewish female names."
* "We have names like Matthew on another ossuary, which don't match up with the list of [Jesus's] brothers' names.""
And here is what I say "They made scads of assumptions for those calculations. Most of which are based entirely on suppositions. Here’s what I posed earlier "But here’s the problem. There is no evidence whatsoever that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus. None. A couple of wild hypothesis and a popular fiction book is it. So assuming that the second Mary is Jesus’s wife is a HUGE stretch.
Nor does the evidence from the tomb say that the Matthew is the brother of that Yeshua, or that the Jospeh is the father or any relation at all. It does give the name of Jesus son of Joseph, and a Judah son of Jesus, but the tomb does not in any way indicate that the Joseph in the tomb is the father referred to or that THAT Jesus is the father of the Judah thus interred. Sure, we can guess a familial relationship as they are all in the same tomb. Nor is Matthew one of the known names of a brother of Jesus, in fact, Jesus’s brothers are named “James and Joses and Judas and Simon” and thus, it is very unlikely there was another brother named Matthew.
So, the computation is bogus. He blithely makes the assumption there is an unknown Brother named Matthew, and the Jesus was married to Mary. So,when he throws those bogus assumptions into the math, of course the numbers look good. Now, he does eliminate Matthew in a later compuation (“not “explicatively” mentioned in the Gospels” ) , but still there is no reason to assume the “other Mary” is Mary Magdalene. Nor is there anything, anywhere, even in myth for a Judah son of Jesus.
So really, the only evidence is that it’s a Jesus son of Joseph- related in some way to a Mary."
The DNA testing was completely meaningless. All it showed was that the DNA found in the ossuary labled “Mary” (which they blithely assume is Mary Magdalane, without a shred of evidence) was NOT related to the DNA from the ossuary labeled “Jesus son of Joseph” NOT related. And even that’s weak as the sample was poor. They then go on to state that anyone in the tomb who is not related by blood is likelrelated by marriage- which is a reasonable assumption. But then they blithely assume that thereby that Mary was Married to that Jesus. And, that assumption is completely bogus. (She could have been married to any other male in the tomb or perhaps even another male who was not buried in that tomb).
For some reason they did not show a test amoung all the ossuarys to see if anyone was related to anyone. This is very disturbing. Knowing how that Film-maker works, I have no doubt he did order those tests. The fact he did not show the results on film can only be they do not support his theory."
By the time the show was over it was 1am here and I had to get up fairly early. I’ll have to see if that part is on again, or maybe if its online somewhere.