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The lost tomb Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! The key point here, though, is that Jesus died no later than 33 AD, and quite possibly as early as 21 AD. So when were the relics laid in the Jesus family Tomb? The inscriptions are from the Herodian Period. The use of limestone ossuaries and the varied script styles are characteristic of that time.
Well Herod died in 4 BC, not many years after the birth of Jesus, according to Matthew, a later and less reliable gospel than Mark, because it had allowed more time for excuses and mythology to have been invented. The inscriptions are in Aramaic except for the inscriptions for Mary Maria and Matthew Matia which are in Hebrew, and the form of Mary is Latinized or Hellenized, suggesting, if anything, that she, at least, was sympathic to the occupying forces of Rome.
The use of Greek suggests this woman was influenced by western culture. She was Hellenized. It illustrates that the very name Mary began as an honoured title, the female equivalent of Lord Mar , and the preponderance of the Marys in the gospel stories suggests that the title Mara has been mistaken for the name Mary. The Mariamne in the Acts of Philip, is the sister of Martha of Bethany because she is paired with her as she is in John After Mariamne is mentioned: And Mariamne his sister—it was she that made ready the bread and salt at the breaking of bread, but Martha was she that ministered to the multitudes and laboured much—seeing it, went to Jesus… She is not Mary Magdalene nor the companion of Jesus.
Luke calls Mary the sister of Martha, Mariam, though a variant has Maria, and Mariam is another form of Mariamne. Possibly all of the names were simply alternatives for each other because no one cared much how they were spelt.
We begin to see the accumulation of speculations needed for these pseudo histories just like the Da Vinci Code, and the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
They make interesting reading, or viewing in this case, but no one should imagine that speculation piled on top of speculation is what history is about. It is fantasy. Curiously, the Israel Antiquities Authority agreed to send the two ossuaries to New York, but it claims they did not contain human remains, so how could they have been tested?
If they were depending on using DNA cloning methods to magnify the DNA present in minute amounts on the bottom of the boxes, then there is another problem—the ossuaries rarely had only one skeleton in them. Amos Kloner lists 35 skeletons in the tomb and 17 in the 10 ossuary boxes. Unless the contents of the boxes are known, the DNA scaped and multiplied from them is useless. If the film makers had access to the other boxes, then why did they not test the residual DNA in them? Was the other Mary the mother of Jesus?
Was Judah the grandson of this Mary. Anyway, the conclusion the film makes is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene must have been married to be in the same tomb. Or, as one reporter put it: The documentary asserts that tests on samples from two of the coffins show Jesus and Mary Magdalene were likely to have been buried in them and were a couple.
DNA can only be used for comparison. Unless the film makers had the DNA of Mary Magdalene and Jesus to begin with, or at least some close relatives, they could not possibly have made any such conlusion. Nor does anything stop either Jesus or this Mary from not being of the family blood, or of having different mothers. Or Jesus could have been the adopted son of Joseph, wealthy men without natural born sons often adopting sons in those days to provide security for the family and a successor for the family business in the days when there were no welfare checks.
Mary might have married anyone else in the family, even Joseph, after his earlier wife died. John tells us this lad was the beloved disciple, presumed to have been John himself, not Judas, so here we have a pile of unfounded speculations again heaped one on the other and amounting to… precisely nothing!
Another test was done to compare patina taken from the Jesus Family Tomb and the James ossuary, already shown to have been a forgery, but a forgery inscribed on a a genuinely old ossuary. The conclusion: The samples were consistent with each other.
We are meant to conclude from this and the fact that there was enough room in the Jesus Family Tomb for another ossurary that the James ossuary was genuine and was taken from the same tomb, so James, the brother of Jesus was originally laid in the same tomb.
The patina proves little indeed, and the claim that the two samples are consistent tells you nothing. Consistent with what? Limestone of the same age from the same district in the same climatic conditions will have aged in a consistent way, so the patina would be expected to be consistent. It says nothing about the relationship of the boxes except that they were of a similar age and from a similar place, and no one doubts it.
It does not mean they were from the same place, and anything so tentative could not possibly overthrow the careful tests that showed the James box was forged. Probability A big deal is placed on the statistical anaysis of the concatenation of the names that occur in the tomb being the same as those prominent in the gospels. He concludes the odds are over to 1 that the Jesus Family Tomb is that of the gospel family.
Mention anything mathematical and many people will credit it with a preciseness that they ought not to without examination. Like any syllogism, mathematics is only as good as its assumptions, and so it is here. Nor is it clear what this statistician is actually calculating. He seems to be working from names mentioned in tombs, and so seems to be calculating what the chances are of two tombs having the same set of names of people laid in them. That might be quite rare indeed, but it is not what we want to know, and even that might be not so rare when allowance is made for the fact that tombs often contain a quantity of ossuaries.
This one had ten but we do not know what the names were on the others. Allowing that other tombs had additional ossuaries, the chances get less remote that among them might be these six names.
Also dubious is that none of these people had a birthplace attached to their name, as Mary Magdalene is assumed to have had on the basis of her coming from Magdala—an unjustified Christian assumption, incidentally. If these people were not native Jerusalemites, they would have had their birthplace inscribed too, and, indeed, would have been unlikely to have been buried in Jerusalem at all, but in the place they were born in or lived in.
A lexicon of Jewish names taken from ancient sources including ossuaries shows the names in the Jesus Family Tomb were among the most common of the time and place. There could have been thousands of poor families with these names who could not afford a tomb, and we are led to believe from the gospels that Jesus was a poor man not a rich one.
So the evidence, however precise, to one might sound, is less than convincing. Least convincing of all, because it is not at all convincing, is that one of the Marys is actually Mary Magdalene. It does not say it is, and therefore it is not. Cameron told reporters the chances of finding the combination of names was like finding a grave marked Ringo next to others marked John, Paul and George.
James Tabor, a respected historian—until now—thinks the two are the same because they are both unique names! It is utter nonsense, and shows it is all too easy for a viewer to be carried along with the enthusiasm of the picture maker, or book writer, and to be easily persuaded of something that is just not so.
Feuerverger seems to get his odds partly by taking Mariamene e Mara as a very rare coincidence: The extraordinariness of the Mariamene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name. So, instead of giving a chance of one in three, like any of the other Marys, he gives it much larger odds against based on further dubious assumptions. He took it that the experts in biblical archaeology would have given him reasonable assumptions.
The aforementioned James Tabor tries to argue that this tomb evidence is as good as the gospel evidence. He wants to refute the notion that Jesus was wealthy, that the tomb implies. It would be true if we had two pieces of evidence that were indisputably about the Christian Jesus, but we only have the gospel evidence that is indisputably about the Christian Jesus.
This tomb is not indisputable, and that is why people are disputing it. Tabor effectively assumes the tomb is of the same man, then equates the value of the evidence, another absurd way of proceeding. Essenes Tabor defends his view by arguing that a messianic movement could afford an expensive tomb for its leader, and there seems no reason to quibble with the idea, but this tomb is not a tomb owned by a movement, but purports to be a family tomb.
The notion that Jesus was buried by the Essenes as a noble man who died for his belief and his country is quite possible, but would require a new set of assumptions, and a proper examination of the tomb to establish that it was an Essene tomb. If it was, the danger is that a lot of priceless evidence has been destroyed, but it seems the clues would be clearer.
Well, if these arguments are to be accepted, and they should, there is no good evidence that Jesus had a family in this cuddly snese. In the earliest gospel, no father Joseph is mentioned, and Mary is pretty skimpily described. The mention of a family we get is that the family rejected Jesus!
This is in the earliest gospel, not the ones that have been elaborated by fantasy. The whole of the notion of the Holy family really depends on the utterly unrealistic and contradictory tales of the nativity in Matthew and Luke.
Christians are fond of these stories but there are few proper scholars who will not reject them as Hellenistic romances added to Mark many years later to pander to the gentile converts to the new religion. Frankly, the most reliable evidence is that Jesus had no family that he knew, or that knew him.
He had brothers and sisters because he was a member of a brotherhood, and the fraternity of it might have extended to the use of the term father and mother to senior members, just as the later church did, almost certainly based on the original practice of the Essenes.
The original excavator of the tomb in was Professor Amos Kloner, and he was the one who decided the tomb was of a well-off Jerusalem family of the time of Herod the Great in the first century BC. Apparently he stands by his conclusion, and as it is based on less assumptions and direct data, it is a better conclusion than this farrago.
Kloner is blunt about it: The documentary filmmakers are using it to sell their film. He is a professional Christian and is complaining about the facts offered by the authors, Charles Pellegrino and Simcha Jacobivici, a pair of ancient history sensationalists out to make money. They spoke Aramaic. We have absolutely no historical evidence to suggest Mary Magdalene would have been called by a Greek name before AD She grew up in a Jewish fishing village called Migdal, not a Greek city at all… you cannot use later Gnostic documents filled with wild fictional accounts, indeed fairy tales, about talking animals yes we have that in the Acts of Philip and like.
How does he know all the early Christians in Jerusalem spoke only Aramaic, and had no Greek? Since this country had been in the Greek sphere of influence for over three centuries, it seems most unlikely. If they did speak only Aramaic, it was a deliberate choice, not because they had no Greek. As for Mary Magdalene growing up in a Jewish fishing village called Migdal, this is pure invention. Witherington wants to discredit a Gnostic book with a talking animal in it, so is the Bible discredited too?
It has talking serpents and asses. My point is simply to show Christian experts are no more honest than the Discovery Channel sensationalists, something that Christians will not accept. Yes they did, which is why they were angry and did not think Jesus had any right to teach them. He was probably viewed as a mamzer, as Dr Bruce Chilton has argued—an illegitimate child. And this is precisely what James Tabor argues in his Jesus Dynasty book, claiming he was the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera… Jesus was not the physical descendent of Joseph, was known not to be by his hometown folks.
The uncharitable suggested he was illegitimate but Mary claimed his conception was a miracle. It is special pleading to say this conclusion is uncharitable because Mary claimed it was a miracle. In those days, Greeks thought it possible for human women to be impregnated by gods, and it was used as an excuse in that culture, but no traditional Jewish culture was likely to accept it.
The Christians who wrote the gospels were not traditional Jews.
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