Honestly, that’s along the line of Richard Dawkins saying he’s 99% sure God doesn’t exist, and then someone referring to his statement as ‘Richard Dawkins having doubts about his atheism.’
I was very disappointed when I watched the interviews last night. I was hoping that the Church’s side would be prepared to refute these claims with well respected experts in the field.
I thought Donohue and Mohler did more to discredit the Christian side than anything or anyone else, thus far. They sounded rather unconvincing, not to mention defensive and nervous. I got the the impression that even they were somewhat fearful of what this all might mean for our faith. Add to that Donohue’s obnoxious ranting and angry shouting which detracted from his credibility.
No, we don’t know those things but analysis of blood type (analyzed way back in 1981) is a key point when people share information about the Miracle at Lanciano. Jesus’ blood type or DNA strand is unimportant there so it shouldn’t be that important now.
From what I heard last night on TV (sorry I forget who said it, now), he made it very clear that scientists now put no stock into it being THE burial cloth. Besides biased sites that seem to be in abundance, do you know of any unbiased sites I could read which show otherwise?
Actually, how do you know that some of us aren’t qualified?
Actually with respect you are wrong. Archeologists and other scientists who wish to make claims about linking science to the Bible, need to work with Biblical scholars so they know they are interpreting what the Bible says correctly.
Again, how do you know. Some of us on CA actually have an indepth interest in science and even may do some amateur science of our own or work closely with scientists. For all I know, some of the apologists here might actually be scientists!
If this info had shown up in a journal, I would be far more willing to take it seriously, but really, like cold fusion a decade ago, claims of great break throughs that start in the popular media are more often than not shown to be false.
So far, James Cameron has never claimed it is Jesus’ DNA nor is he saying the DNA proved anything but that two of the people don’t have the same mother. Have you watched these interviews? If so, which ones?
That’s what I heard too, until last night.
What if all those things are shown in the documentary or in the next several years? What will that mean for the Church? Would she then make some revisions about teaching or…what, exactly?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.
- The first Mary needs to be shown not to be genetically related to either the other Mary or the Joseph.
- The first Mary needs to be shown, at the least, to share mitochondral DNA with the Jesus.
- 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.
Bill
That’s a pretty big if. I think the better question is, what will we do if the documentary (and even subsequent followups) do not take those steps, or do so and come up with conflicting information? At what point are the claims of Cameron and crew considered either ‘extremely unlikely’ or ‘proven false’?
I will deal with if and only if all those things are shown. If they are though, then the Discovery Channel’s website on the show is seriously holding info back. The only genetic evidence presented there was that the genetic material collected from two ossuaries came from people who did not share the same mother.
I hope they’re wise enough to not divulge everything on their website or else there’d be no reason for anyone to watch the program.
Which again seriously undermines the argument that the people behind this documentary are serious scholars. If they are more interested in the getting good ratings that getting the information out into the open, it undermines their credibility. If a scholar is announcing work only to get money, well, it does give him (or her) something of a reason to be less than 100% honest in one’s findings.
It’s not some great conspiracy, a lot of shows about Jesus are on around the christian festivals, just as budget shows around the time of the budget, programs about terrorism around September 11th, etc, etc, etc.I haven’t read all the posts, so this might have been noted already but isn’t it uncanny how this tripe hit the media at the start of Lent? I don’t think it was by accident. The good thing is that I gave up watching secular media except local news for Lent, so my exposure to this garbage is minimal.
1a. Only a sample is needed, not a census, to know the distribution of names, and even if the sample misses some combinations, there are statistical techniques to measure hidden populations. They seem relatively reliable (with the caveat that I stopped doing deep statistics 15 years ago).