"Jesus Family Tomb" ID Refuted

I found an interesting article about the so-called "Jesus Family Tomb" and James Cameron's documentary about it over at the Jerusalem Post site. Apparently, in addition to the widely noted criticism of scholars and theological concerns voiced by Christian groups, some of the experts involved in the documentary are calling some of the claims in the film into question:

Several prominent scholars who were interviewed in a bitterly contested documentary that suggests that Jesus and his family members were buried in a nondescript ancient Jerusalem burial cave have now revised their conclusions, including the statistician who claimed that the odds were 600:1 in favor of the tomb being the family burial cave of Jesus of Nazareth...
The dramatic clarifications, compiled by epigrapher Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem in a paper titled "Cracks in the Foundation: How the Lost Tomb of Jesus story is losing its scholarly support," come two months after the screening of The Lost Tomb of Christ that attracted widespread public interest, despite the concomitant scholarly ridicule.

...

Some of the scholars who were interviewed for and appeared in the film are questioning some of its basic claims.

The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together... Israeli archeologists have said that the similarity of the names found inscribed on the ossuaries in the cave to the members of Jesus's family was coincidental, since many of those names were commonplace in the first century CE... Shimon Gibson, who was part of the team that excavated the tomb two and half decades ago and who appeared in the film, is quoted in Pfann's report as saying he doubted the site was the tomb of Jesus and his family.

...

In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film's claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.

"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. - that is, variants of 'Mary.' So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying

...

Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene - one of the filmmakers' critical arguments - issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.

Read the full story HERE.

I can't say that I'm at all surprised by this turn of events. Just sad that the refutations likely won't get the same publicity as the misinformation spread by Cameron's documentary. But such is life, I suppose...

They Don't Make Pope's Like They Used To...

And yes, I know thats not necessarily a bad thing! But the current Pope is definitely not as hip as his predecessor.

From The Sunday Mail (via Expecting Rain):

Last week, the Pope disclosed in a new book that in 1997 he was opposed to Bob Dylan appearing at a youth event with the late Pope John Paul because he considered the pop star the wrong kind of "prophet".

At that concert in central Italy, Dylan sang Knockin' on Heaven's Door, his 1960s anti-war classic A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and Forever Young.

I suppose the obvious cheap shot would be mentioning that Bob is Jewish and that Pope Benedict XVI is a former member of the Hitler Youth, but I'm not nearly petty enough to bring that up...

This Should Be a Suprise, but Its Not...

Yudel points out this article in which David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Fatih-Based and Community Initiatives, spills the beans on Republican-style Religion:

My wife Kim and I were together with a group of friends and acquaintances. Someone mentioned that I used to work at the White House in the faith-based office.

A woman piped up and said, "Really? Wow, I was on the peer-review panel for the first Compassion Capital Fund." I asked her about how she liked it and she said it was fun. She talked about how the government employees gave them grant review instructions – look at everything objectively against a discreet list of requirements and score accordingly. "

But," she said with a giggle, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero."

At first I laughed. A funny joke. Not so much. She was proud and giggling and didn't get that there was a problem with that.

I asked if she knew of others who'd done the same.

"Oh sure, a lot of us did." She must have seen my surprise, "Was there a problem with that?"

I think this pretty much speaks for itself...