It was not a great week for religion in the media. First there was the story on CNN about the evangelical pastor in the Midwest who has attracted a huge following with his sermons about how believers can have a better sex life with Jesus--read it here. Then came the story about thousands of Roman Catholic believers making the pilgrimage to a little town in Texas see the image of the Virgin Mary as revealed in a pizza pan. (Judge for yourself here. But both of these were overshadowed by the claim made a documentary producer that he had discovered the bones of Jesus in a tomb in Jerusalem. A show based on this is scheduled to be shown this weekend (check local listings for the Discovery Channel -or not!).
At first it seemed a bit like the kind of thing that you would read on the cover of the National Enquirer while waiting in the check-out in the grocery store. But as time went on, more and more media outlets picked up the story, and soon I as getting more questions about it than any other topic, as I traveled around the Diocese.

The claim is, of course, that if these really were the bones of Jesus then Christianity would be rendered a fraud, since the central claim of our faith is Jesus' resurrection and ascension.

My guess is that we have nothing more to worry about than a producer who is capitalizing on the DaVinci Code hysteria of a year ago. Good archeology-no, a great way to make a lot of money-yes! I've asked our Canon for Communications to assemble some more links and information for you below. I am not an expert on the claims, but from the little I know, there are already serious problems. Why would Jesus be buried in a high-class tomb in Jerusalem? Why would the label on his ossuary box call him Jesus of Jerusalem instead of Jesus of Nazareth? What of the fact that Jesus and Mary (Miriam) are two of the most common names of the time? And what of the claim by the film makers that they have recovered Jesus' DNA? Scientifically unlikely, but also, as one scholar pointed out, what does that do, link him genetically to God?

It appears that we may be dealing with a hoax, and if not that, at least a badly conceived effort at "yellow journalism."

There have always been challenges to the Christian faith. More recently, a whole cottage industry of books and TV shows has sprung up based on conspiracy theories, historical arguments "ex silencio" (i.e. speculations based on what the evidence does not say, instead of what it does), and self-serving attempts to twist even reliable sources to support personal agendas. A good example of the latter is the misuse made of documents like the Dead Sea scrolls or the "Gnostic Gospels" to rewrite the history of early Christianity. (For those interested, I would recommend, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way , by Philip Jenkins).

This is not the latest attempt to discredit Christianity, so don't believe everything the media uses to sell newspapers, nor be disheartened by superstition and sensationalism which passes for belief. Instead, let's give folks some real Good News to talk about!

A Final Thought . . .

Darrel Bock has written up a critique of the "Coffin of Jesus" discovery being promoted by James Cameron, the director of the film Titanic. You may read it in its entirety here .

Darrell L. Bock is a New Testament scholar and research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, TX. (Bock wrote Breaking the Da Vinci Code). Bock, who served as a consultant on the most recent project, and who has actually seen the film, has ten different points where he raises objections to the claims being made:

Today we have the battle of the hype: the Oscars versus the release of the family tomb of Jesus story. The tomb is an old story now being recycled in an effort to make far more of it than the evidence really requires. The key claims depend on numerous assumptions, cherry-picked evidence, if you wish.

First, there is a suggestion that this is a family tomb of Jesus, when Jesus was in Jerusalem as a pilgrim, not a Jerusalem resident. How did his family have the time in the aftermath of his death to buy the tomb space, while also pulling off a stealing of the body and continue to preach that Jesus was raised BODILY, not merely spiritually?

The bodily part of this resurrection is key because in Judaism when there was a belief in resurrection it was a belief in a bodily resurrection a redemption that redeemed the full scope of what God had created. Here are the details:

The earliest Christianity came out of a Judaism that believed in a physical resurrection, which is why a claim about only needing a spiritual resurrection does not fit with historic Christianity

Second, we have to believe that in a family tomb, some who were not in the family are included, that is, Matthew. How do we explain his bone box being there? There is no record of a Matthew being a part of the family of Jesus.

Third, we have to accept that as the mourning family scrambled to steal the body from Joseph of Arimathea's tomb (where several knew the body was originally placed) and yet they preached an empty tomb and resurrection when they actually knew that Jesus was not raised, doing so at the risk of their own lives as Jesus' half brother's death (James) in AD 62 shows.

Fourth, there is the name Mariamne, a variation of Maria, one of the most common of names of the time.
Here are the details on names provided to me by Prof Richard Bauckham of St. Andrews:
"Out of a total number of 2625 males, these are the figures for the ten most popular male names among Palestinian Jews. The first figure is the total number of occurrences (from this number, with 2625 as the total for all names, you could calculate percentages), while the second is the number of occurrences specifically on ossuraries.

1 Simon/Simeon 243 59
2 Joseph 218 45
3 Eleazar 166 29
4 Judah 164 44
5 John/Yohanan 122 25
6 Jesus 99 22
7 Hananiah 82 18
8 Jonathan 71 14
9 Matthew 62 17
10 Manaen/Menahem 42 4

For women, we have a total of 328 occurrences (women's names are much less often recorded than men's), and figures for the 4 most popular names are thus:

Mary/Mariamne 70 42
Salome 58 41
Shelamzion 24 19
Martha 20 17

You can see at once that all the names you're interested were extremely popular. 21% of Jewish women were called Mariamne (Mary). The chances of the people in the ossuaries being the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of the New Testament must be very small indeed."

Fifth, there is the DNA showing that Mariamne and Jesus DNA residue do not match. Now with how many women in Judea would Jesus' DNA not match? Even women named Mary/Mariamne? This proves nothing. That a match would take place is a one in several thousand likelihood.

Sixth, to get Mariamne to match Mary Magdalene and not a host of any other Mary's, one has to appeal to an apocryphal Acts in a fourth century manuscript. Without that, there is not even a possibility of a connection. In other words, we do not know Mary/Mariamne is Mary Magdalene, a very key point that has to be true for this claim to work.

Seventh, if one pays close attention to the special when it airs over the weekend, one will see that when the subject of the connection is raised with the most well known of these experts, they all say the connection is NOT credible because the names are so common.

Eighth, the remark about "Mara." Here are the words of Prof. Bauckham, "'Mara' in this context does not mean Master. It is an abbreviated form of Martha, probably the ossuary contained two women called Mary and Martha (Mariamne and Mara)."

Ninth, there are claims about an ossuary of Peter, even though there is a rich tradition that he died in Rome that has to be wrong for that claim to work.

Finally, there are the statistics. To get to the high numbers, all the assumptions made above about the identifications have to be put into the numbers pot, including Matthew, a name simply called "consistent with the family." How? Where is the evidence for this?

So what we have is a special, making a claim about an old finding, cherry-picking the evidence to hype it as more compelling than it actually is. It ALL has to fit in place to work. The statistics for that, given just what I have raised above, would be fun to calculate.

You may read additional information at the following blogs:

• Deirdre Good , Professor of New Testament, General Theological Seminary
• Here is a collection of blog commentaries from Tyler F. Williams , Chair of the Religion & Theology Department and professor of Old Testament at Taylor University College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
• Jerusalem Post article regarding Bar-Ilan University Prof. Amos Kloner , the Jerusalem District archeologist who officially oversaw the work at the tomb.