I have your bones right here

The headlines in today’s newspaper reads “Revelation or good TV?” Below a picture of two large stone boxes is this blurb:

“Limestone ossuaries founding a 2,000-year old tomb in Jerusalem may have held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, left and Mary Magdalene, right. That’s what filmmakers and researchers claimed Monday when they displayed their discoveries to the media in New York.”

Film makers? You bet…the filmmaker in this case is the same man who directed the movie Titanic – James Cameron.

Later in the article it has this to say:

“The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron and scheduled to air March 4 on the Discovery Channels, argues 10 small caskets, called ossuaries, discovered in 1980 in a Jerusalem suburb may have held the bones of Jesus and his family.”

Sound like a Hollywood stunt? It is. Sound like the plot from a Hollywood movie? It was – Google “The Body” a movie made in 2001 with Antonio Banderas. The article is the plot of the movie. Sound too incredible to be true?

It is. That’s exactly what, according to the rest of the article, buried on page 7 of the same paper, the archeology community thought in 1996 when this same garbage was spouted. Read on and this is what you will see in the same article:

“In 1996, when the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a short documentary on the same subject, archaeologists challenged the claims. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archeological standards.”

The article goes on to say that the ossuraries do not contain any bones. They were reburied, it claims, when the tomb was discovered.

So lets take a good hard look at what the article claims is definitive proof that the tomb contained the bones of Jesus (which have been conveniently removed). The article says this:

“One of the caskets even bears the title, “Judah, son of Jesus” hinting that Jesus may have had a son, according to the film.” Let’s look at one of the experts they have called upon.

A Toronto filmmaker – yes FILMMAKER – named Simcha Jacobovici says another of the Ossuaries has the name “Mariamene”

At this point, based on the FILMMAKERS assumption that ‘Mariamene’ is the name of Mary of Magdalene, they go on to have someone calculate the odds:

“But the filmmakers had statisticians calculate the likelihood that any other family in first-century Jerusalem would have had that cluster of names.”

So, despite the fact that the archeological community already rejected the claims that the “bones of Jesus” (again, conveniently absent) were found in a tomb in Jerusalem –

Despite that, we have the authoritative word of two FILMMAKERS that all of Christianity has been wrong for the last 2,000 years. But wait, there is more.

The article ends with this blurb:

“But Jacobovici [remember this man is a FILMMAKER] said DNA evidence can nonetheless be collected from the boxes. He said DNA analysis has so far proved that Jesus and Mariamene, the putative Mary Magadalene, were not siblings and therefore could have been husband and wife.”

“Putative?” I had to look up the word and my friends, I have two masters degrees. Lets consider the dictionary definition:

Putative – “generally considered or deemed such; reputed.”

Ok, here is where I am going to get a bit un-nun like. For putative it seems to me a better phrase might be “wild-assed guess” So we have the authoritative word of, not the archeological community, which has already rejected the films claims once, but rather the assumptions of none other than HOLLYWOOD. As far as DNA evidence saying that the two people in the ossuaries are not related and could have been married? Well DNA evidence can also prove that my DOG and I are not related and I can be married to him if I am STUPID enough to do it.

Far be it from me to dispute the authoritative claims of filmmakers based on wild assumptions and cooked numbers that Christ did not raise from the dead. However,

My grandfather would have had this to say about that. He would have grabbed his crotch and said…

I HAVE YOUR BONES RIGHT HERE.