I woke up this morning to the Today Show telling me that they found the tomb of Jesus, his wife and son. Wow. I waited for the historian or archaeologist who made this discovery and found out it was James Cameron, the movie director who made Titanic. This "new" discovery has been around since 1980, and never was thought to amount to anything until Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici got their hands on it.
Here's my take on it: Suppose I'm looking for a guy by the name of John. I know he died a few decades ago, but I can't find his body. I know him to be a poor, unmarried man from Baltimore with no children. In my search I happen to find a family tomb in Washington D.C. where there's a casket with John's first name (I can barely make it out, but I think it's "John") and also the first name of his father. Then I find in the tomb another casket with his mother's first name on it as well as a casket with the name of one of his siblings. But then I find a couple other caskets with names on them that aren't is relatives (one of them might be that of his wife), and then I find a casket with his son's name on it. I further determine that this tomb is the tomb of a rich family, not a poor one, like the John I'm looking for. It would not be a difficult conclusion to reach to say that I have the wrong John. I'm not even sure the casket says John, and what I can tell about him is very different from the John I'm looking for.
Now it's possible that I have completely misunderstood John. He was posing as a poor, unmarried man from Baltimore with no kids. In fact, he had a whole secret identity. Yet without any evidence of that secret life, it's a really stupid conclusion to draw.
The fact is perfectly obvious, from the data that we have about this tomb of "Jesus," that this is a different Jesus from the Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels is from Galilee, not Jerusalem. He and his family were also poor. There's no conceivable way a poor family could afford a wealthy family tomb just south of Jerusalem (and if they had come into money, they would have bought one in Galilee). Furthermore, he is presented as being unmarried with no kids throughout his whole life. The "Jesus" (if that is what the scribble on the ossuary says) of the Talpiot tomb was a wealthy man from Jerusalem who was married with a kid and had other relatives we don't know to be those of Jesus of Nazareth. The tomb contains the body of a man who is a different man than the Jesus of the Gospels.
Now perhaps the Gospels got Jesus all wrong, and he was in fact a wealthy man from Jerusalem with a wife and kid, but without any evidence to suggest that, it's a pretty dumb conclusion to draw from what we've found in that Talpiot tomb. And if the Gospels got all that wrong about him, why would we trust the names of his relatives as stated in the Gospels anyway?
That's my thought on the matter. Anyway, Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar whom I respect, has this to say about it: Ben Witherington's blog.
