Joe Zias, is an outstanding Israeli biblical
anthropologist and scholar who heads up that department at Hebrew
University has been investigating the ongoing "discovery" that attempts
to debunk Christianity. He has graciously provided the attached summary
of his "24 hours per day" work over the past several weeks. He has just
posted this report on his web site at www.joezias.com.
|
Viewers Guide to Understanding the Talpiot Tomb 'documentary' to be
aired on the Discovery Channel
by Joe Zias
Scene from the movie Lost Tomb of Jesus |
THE 'MISSING OSSUARY': The film makers try to fool the public into
believing that as ten ossuaries were discovered in the tomb and only
nine were published by Kloner that the tenth ossuary was the
controversial James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus ossuary which was
declared to be a forgery by a panel of experts. The attempt to deceive
the public can be clearly seen here in terms of an 'agenda'. Two members
of the /BAR Crowd/ who appear prominently in the film had earlier
declared that the ossuary had originally come from a robbed tomb which
_they_ had cleared a few years ago in Silwan and not purchased by the
collector decades earlier as he claimed. They clearly had attempted to
draw media attention to their robbed tomb in Silwan and when the media
attention flagged they now suddenly claim that they were mistaken and
the ossuary no longer comes from Silwan but from the Talpiot 'Jesus
Family tomb excavated in 1980 by the Israel Antiquities Authority! Well,
last week ago a small problem suddenly arose when Oded Golan the owner
of the ossuary in question, who is on trial for forging objects,
produced a photograph of the ossuary with a time stamp 1976, four years
before the Talpiot tomb was accidentally discovered! Moreover, they
maintained that the missing ossuary, their James son of Joseph brother
of Jesus ossuary was of the same identical dimensions as the 'missing
ossuary from Jesus Family tomb at Talpiot. Sounds convincing until an
enterprising skeptic here in Jerusalem checked the dimensions of the two
'identical' ossuaries and found that the Talpiot plain white "missing
ossuary is approximately 20% longer than the James brother of Jesus
ossuary ! So much for 'identical'.
THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER: The truth of the matter is that the missing
ossuary was never missing, never stolen from the IAA, nor stolen from
the Talpiot tomb. Plain ossuaries which bore no inscription, nor any
ornaments were automatically placed in an inner courtyard in the
Rockefeller Museum during my tenure at curator (1972-1997). Due to a
lack of storage space this was standard operating procedure, the ossuary
was given a registration number, measured and simply stored in the inner
courtyard with perhaps an additional 50-100 plain ossuaries. This was
personally explained to Tabor by me so as to avoid any problems of a
conspiracy theory in which the plain ossuary would figure.
Unfortunately, it did not fit their agenda so they artificially created
a story in which a plain white ossuary, suddenly morphed into a ossuary
with two rosettes on the front, traces of red paint, bearing the
inscription on the back 'James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.
CONCLUSION: All of this can be neatly summed up in the following
opinion piece (edited) by a SC biblical scholar (Byron. McCane) who
wrote in today's paper, what I believe pretty much speaks for all of us
involved, enraged and fed up with the current wave of pseudo science
posing as biblical scholarship, foisted upon the public, by our colleagues.
"The publicity for the Discovery Channel documentary "The
Lost Tomb of Jesus" has a disturbingly familiar ring. First came the
James Ossuary; then The DaVinci Code, next the John the Baptist cave,
and now "the lost tomb of Jesus. The two archaeologists involved in "The
Lost Tomb of Jesus," for example, already have a _well-known track
record for sensationalism_. These programs go for_ the quick buck_.
Everything is crafted to generate interest, to make sales. The
disturbing trend in recent documentaries toward profit-driven
sensationalism, however, is an insult to all concerned, and especially
to those of us who are scholars of these subjects. And that is why it
is scholars who should bring this train of sensationalism to a stop."
/Slight correction/-/ make that one archaeologist and one biblical
scholar.
|
Today:
Printer
friendly version
