Jesus’ burial site found - film claims

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2shelbys said:
What they consider their best piece of evidence, the supposed statistical improbability of finding a similar grouping of names (ignoring the devastating fact that Yeshua is not one of them, which trashes their whole claim immediately) in one tomb of the period is not even something that can be reliably calculated unless you know the one key piece of information necessary for such a calculation: exactly how numerically common were those names at that time in history. Unless they have an accurate census of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the surrounding area from the period their statistics are nothing more than an unfounded guess. Every serious scholar directly connected to the site has stated at one time or another that this claim is nonsense and many of them are Jewish and therefore have no ulterior motive to protect Christianity. It is just another pathetic attempt to damage Christianity and it would be laughable if there were no Christians un-informed enough to think it may be true.
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According to an article I read online this morning by the Discovery Channel, Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of statistics and mathmatics at the University of Toronto, conducted a study addressing the probabilities that “will soon be published in a leading statistical journal.”

dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/02/25/tomb_arc.html?category=archaeology&guid=20070225073000
 
Faith1960 said:
True. Conversely, claiming it isn’t His tomb doesn’t make it so, either. Using logic such as questioning why a family as poor as Jesus’s would have been buried there, a burial place that was for middle class people, or why they’d be buried so far from where they lived, proves nothing, since people do all sorts of strange things that defy logic. If this isn’t the Jesus’s burial site I would think it will be easy enough for scientists to disprove the claims through testing of the cave or ossuaries. Maybe they’re going to wait until after the airing of the documentary to get started.
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Questions like ‘If Jesus’ family was poor, why are they buried in a tomb like this? If this is the NT Jesus, why are they buried far away from where we’d expect?’ and other questions are entirely valid, and do serve to offer reasonable criticism, especially in the field of history and archeology. And how can scientists ‘disprove the claims through testing of the cave or ossuaries’? What if they came back with results that the Jesus and supposed Mary Magdalene of the cave may have not shared the same mother, but did share the same father? That would have made any supposed relationship incestual. But people do all sorts of strange things that defy logic. And if the ‘Son of Jesus’ in the tomb isn’t Mary’s? That doesn’t necessarily disprove Jesus and Mary being an item.
From all I heard last night, it’s more like 1/2,000,000.
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It supposedly reaches into the millions if they add in other things, like ‘The James ossuary was stolen from this spot’. Which already has evidence running against it, such that the film producer’s response has been ‘Well, we know that an FBI expert witness concluded that the ossuary was photographed in the 1970s, and since the dig only uncovered this site in the 1980s, it would be impossible for James’ ossuary to be included.’ The response? ‘Well, maybe it was a photo that was taken in the 1980s, but they were using material from the 1970s.’
 
its an amazing story, I think that you can’t bet hard facts, down through the years we have been feed a load of lies!. Why does the christian faith cover up things. Let the facts come out. enough with the christian lies. after all men wrote the bible like i’m writing this reply it could be made up or it could be true. HARD FACTS I will believe any day over any bible basher
 
Nullasalus said:
Questions like ‘If Jesus’ family was poor, why are they buried in a tomb like this? If this is the NT Jesus, why are they buried far away from where we’d expect?’ and other questions are entirely valid, and do serve to offer reasonable criticism, especially in the field of history and archeology. And how can scientists ‘disprove the claims through testing of the cave or ossuaries’? What if they came back with results that the Jesus and supposed Mary Magdalene of the cave may have not shared the same mother, but did share the same father? That would have made any supposed relationship incestual. But people do all sorts of strange things that defy logic. And if the ‘Son of Jesus’ in the tomb isn’t Mary’s? That doesn’t necessarily disprove Jesus and Mary being an item.
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Asking those questions help piece the puzzle together but it doesn’t prove anything conclusively, which will be necessary for this to all die down. People are going to be arguing this with increasing intensity in the days ahead, leading up to the airing of the documentary. I suspect that after it’s aired there will be more people than ever who will be considering the possibility that the claims in this documentary may be true. As I said earlier, I doubt James Cameron would attach himself to a project that could be easily proven false, which is why I hope I’m wrong and that scientific methods will be employed soon to put an end to their claims. Time will tell, I guess.
 
Faith1960 said:
Using logic such as questioning why a family as poor as Jesus’s would have been buried there, a burial place that was for middle class people, or why they’d be buried so far from where they lived, proves nothing, since people do all sorts of strange things that defy logic.
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This proves that non-believers can be subject to blind faith. They (falsely) accuse believers of blind faith yet they are the ones using blind faith 🙂
 
Why does the church lie to us about so many things? very strange way going on?
 
Digger71 said:
That makes it incredibly likely that this family of 2 Marys, one Joseph and a Jesus is the family of the Bible.
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Yes, that’s what they were saying and I think it may have been one of the most compelling arguments to sway James Cameron. Now, I’m a cradle Catholic who’d been away from the Church for many years, returning last year. I love my Church and am glad to be back. It’s my hope that the claims these filmmakers are making can be easily proven false through science, but they’re insisting that their information comes from reputable scientists and they’re only relaying what they’ve been told. It seems to me that if their claims can be easily refuted, (though I doubt they’d go this far in making the film if they can) it won’t be long before scientists do more testing and prove that it’s a hoax or their “experts” were in error.
 
but what if there is no error, what then? the whole teaching of faith is wrong
 
2shelbys said:
Actually, everyone dismisses it because every serious scholar directly connected to the site dismisses it and always has. Many of those scholars are Jewish and therefore have no ulterior motive of protecting Christianity. What we are dismissing is not any kind of evidence but the unfounded claims of two film makers. More than one scholar has stated that the name Yeshua does not appear on any of the ossuaries. That devastating fact aside, their whole claim is based on the supposed mathmatical improbability of finding a particular grouping of names in one tomb. The main problem here is that they do not have the two pieces of information vital to making such a calculation: the total number of residents of Jerusalem and the surrounding area and the total number of people bearing the names in question. Without this information their claim is nothing more than fantasy. I am always amazed at the blind faith necessary to support an atheist position in the face of undeniable evidence that is acknowledged by every competent scholar that has reviewed the claim.
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This is right on…there is an ossuary in Ft. Lauderdale that is part of an “Early Christianity” exhibit that reads, ‘Jesus Son of Joseph’, so what does that tell you. It was common.
 
reason said:
My last post is relevant because everyone else here is dismissing the evidence out of hand without even considering it. They offer no factual counterarguments outside of the NT itself (and it’s just child’s play to shoot holes in that).
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I think then, you have perhaps, not actually read this entire thread. I posted a number of objections based on inconsistencies with the evidence that has been produced thus far and not referencing the Bible except in so far as it is necessary since this discovery claims to have found people described primarily in the Bible. In other words, you can’t prove that you have found the Family of Jesus unless you can link them to the people described in the Bible. In other words, it is perfectly acceptable for me to use the Bible to say that the Joseph described in there was a carpenter and if the Joseph in this tomb could be shown not to be a carpenter, then it is legetimate to say, that it can’t be the Joseph of the Bible.

In other words, you could, hypothetically find a dozen tombs with a Jesus, Mary and Joseph buried in them, but unless you can match up specific details of the tombs with the figures in the Bible, you haven’t proven that they are the figures from the Bible.
That this archeological site was found in the early 80’s and dismissed back then means nothing. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but those days were before the Bible scholarship of the previous few hundred years became more widely known and accessible, before much of what we know now from the dead sea scrolls, etc.
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Not just dismissed back then, but has been consistently ignored by the majority of scholars specializing in the area. Quite remarkable when you consider that it would be thd greatest discovery in the field if one could prove a link between this tomb and the family of Jesus!
regarding string theory
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No, it’s not accepted on faith. It’s a theory. An avenue open for thought and exploration. Science does not work on the basis of faith, but rather on that of curiosity and the drive to understand. We progress by testing our various theories until they are disproved.
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Science relies on a theory until a better one comes along, not necessarily that the older theory was disproven. For example, the modified Ptolemaic model of the solar system was actually more accurate than Copernicus’s model, but many astronomers accepted it even before Kepler modified it with his “laws” of planetary motion.

Ultimately a scientific theory is tested by its predictive value. If a new theory predicts nothing that old theories do not do already, then there is little reason to accept the new theory unless the new theory is simpler than the old theory (for example, elliptical orbits around the sun versus circular orbits around the Earth with many epicycles).

At the moment String Theory is pretty, but it has yet to make a single verifiable prediction. Without making those verifiable predictions, it remains a curiosity, though a compelling one.
Religion is the opposite of that. It refuses to test itself. Instead, any newly perceived problem is rationalized to fit the existing theology. If it was up to most of the world’s religions, including Christianity, we would still be living in the world of 2000 years ago.
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Actually, there is considerable development of doctrine in Religion, the difference is that in religion we start with the most fundamental level and develop from there, in Science we are still looking for the fundamental level.

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Bill
 
your by-passing the answer, what if it is true? dont tell me its not with no proof, i have no proof i’m just asking the question what if its true? is our religion false?
 
Hi, bullfrog1979. Most of us aren’t too concerned that errors won’t be found. Even CNN mentioned that a majority of scholars & archeologists in Jerusalem are completely skeptical of this. The IAA was initially very concerned about vandalism, which would explain the poor translations of the names on the ossuary.

BTW, what specific lies of the Catholic Church are you referring to?
 
bullfrog1979 said:
but what if there is no error, what then? the whole teaching of faith is wrong
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That’s why I’m hoping that these claims can be easily proven wrong. There will always be people whose faith will never waver but unless science can refute these claims with certainty, I think this discovery is going to put a serious dent in many people’s beliefs. Take The DVC, many people became nervous believing Dan Brown’s claims even though he stated at the beginning of the book that it was a work of fiction. Experts came out in droves to point out all the errors, churches held seminars and all was well once again. If that can’t be done in this case, the documentary will cause serious problems for many people.
 
you know i think i have joined the wrong forum, you guys have very strong faith, and nothing be it true or not will prove you wrong. its sad the narrow mindness. we don’t know and have no proof of a god or jesus, we need facts like this program to show us how it really was. I would believe hard facts rather than stories
 
Did anyone see this discussed on Larry King Live last night? Donohue & Dr. Mohler did a decent job trying to refute it. The tone of the show was pretty biased towards this being true. They mentioned there are a plethora of scholars who are skeptical, they just didn’t give any of them a chance to speak. Only James Tabor…

Larry asked Dr. Mohler (I think he is the head of the Southern Baptist Conv.) 2 or 3 times why he just can’t be open-minded. It was about all he said to him. When was the last time the media asked a prominent Moslem or Jewish person why they can’t just be open-minded that their religion is a farce?!
 
artist3189 said:
This is right on…there is an ossuary in Ft. Lauderdale that is part of an “Early Christianity” exhibit that reads, ‘Jesus Son of Joseph’, so what does that tell you. It was common.
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It’s not the names that are uncommon, it’s the statistical probabilities that all those names would be found together in a family burial tomb. According to what the filmmakers were told by their statisticians, the chances of that happening are about 1 in 2,000,000. I don’t remember what the numbers were with regards to the DNA evidence in the OJ Simpson trial but the numbers were at least that high with his DNA matching the blood found at the crime scene, and people were astounded that the jury didn’t find him guilty. Now we have numbers that supposedly prove that this is likely where Jesus was buried and people scoff. Again, scientific testing needs to be done that will hopefully disprove all these claims.
 
Digger71 said:
That makes it incredibly likely that this family of 2 Marys, one Joseph and a Jesus is the family of the Bible.
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Actually it is the family of the DaVinci Code :). The Bible never makes the second Mary the wife of Jesus. Even the Gnostic texts which claim a special relationship between Mary Magdeline and Jesus don’t state they are married.

Remember, the genetic information only showed that the Jesus and the second Mary did not share the same mother. considering the number of men in the tomb, it seems to me to be a great leap to assume that the second Mary must have been the husband of the the Jesus. I would say, that to make the claim plausable, the following needs to be shown.
  1. The first Mary needs to be shown not to be genetically related to either the other Mary or the Joseph.
  2. The first Mary needs to be shown, at the least, to share mitochondral DNA with the Jesus.
  3. The second Mary needs to be shown to share mitocondrial DNA with the Judah, son of Jesus.
Once those genetic relationships have been established, you at least have a reasonable basis for the extraordinary claims that have been made. You still, in my mind, haven’t proven the case, but at least it no longer seems like an excercise in chance names lining up. In any case, to make the claim stronger, they then would need to start finding stronger links between the Biblical figures and the tomb besides the names. Evidence that the Joseph had spent his life doing manual labor; that Jesus had been crucified, etc. Also one need to explain how Joseph, a carpenter living and dying in Nazareth would come to be buried in Jerusalem.

Do all that, and then, I might start taking this “discovery” seriously. Until then, its just another sensational documentary taking advantage of the Easter Season.

–
Bill
 
Does anyone know of a good source for refutation of these claims? Have any prominent Catholic apologists addressed this upcoming documentary? :confused:
 
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