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We Must Be Getting Close To Easter |
You could set your watch by it; or in this case, your calendar. You know Easter is getting close because secular attacks on the historical reality of the resurrection of Christ start heating up in the weeks prior to Christianity’s greatest holiday.
In consistent if not predictable form, the media are falling all over themselves to report and over-report what is really a tired, old story – the discovery of Jewish burial boxes containing names that include Yeshua, or Jesus. “They have found the bones of Jesus,” is just one wild claim you may have heard debated at the water cooler.
You could set your watch by it; or in this case, your calendar. You know Easter is getting close because secular attacks on the historical reality of the resurrection of Christ start heating up in the weeks prior to Christianity’s greatest holiday.
In consistent if not predictable form, the media are falling all over themselves to report and over-report what is really a tired, old story – the discovery of Jewish burial boxes containing names that include Yeshua, or Jesus. “They have found the bones of Jesus,” is just one wild claim you may have heard debated at the water cooler.
Stories like this delight the scoffers with “proof” that the Gospel narrative concerning Christ is inaccurate. They also concern the faithful who scramble to answer yet another attack on the Gospel.
Alas, this whole affair is just the latest in the long-running media attack on the historical Jesus, which – we thought – had culminated in that book of lies, “The Da Vinci Code.” But no; the caricatures of Christ continue. Please, lose no sleep over the Talpiot “discoveries” for the following reasons, and these are the facts:
1) Nothing is new here: scholars have known about the ossuaries ever since March of 1980. The general public learned of them when the BBC filmed a documentary on them in 1996. James Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty, made a big fuss over the Talpiot tombs more recently, and now James Cameron (“The Titanic”) and Simcha Jacobovici have climbed aboard the sensationalist bandwagon as well.
2) All the names – Yeshua, Joseph, Maria, Mariamene, Matia, Judah, and Jose are extremely frequent Jewish names for that time and place, and thus most scholars consider this merely coincidental, as they did from the start. One-quarter of Jewish women at that time, for example, were named Maria.
3) There is no reason whatever to equate “Mary Magdalene” with “Mariamene,”as Jacobovici claims.
4) So what if her DNA is different from that of “Yeshua”? That particular “Mariamme” (as it is usually spelled today) could indeed have been the wife of that particular “Yeshua.”
5) What in the world is the “Jesus Family” doing, having a burial plot in Jerusalem, of all places, the very city that crucified Jesus? Galilee was their home. In Galilee they could have had such a family plot, not Judea. Besides all of which, church tradition – and Eusebius – are unanimous in reporting that Mary died in Ephesus, where the apostle John, faithful to his commission from Jesus on the cross, had accompanied Mary.
6) If this were Jesus’ family burial, what is Matthew doing there – if indeed “Matia” is thus to be translated?
7) How come there is no tradition whatever – Christian, Jewish, or secular -- that any part of the Holy Family was buried at Jerusalem?
8) Please note the extreme bias of the director and narrator, Simcha Jacobovici. The man is an Indiana-Jones-wannabe, who over sensationalizes anything he touches. You may have caught him on his TV special regarding The Exodus, in which he revealed his anti-Bible bias. As for James Cameron, he also has a well documented anti-Christian bias, and this bias nowhere reveals itself more clearly than in his work for the upcoming television special on the so called coffin of Christ. No, the “Coffin of Christ” has not been found. Nor will it be. The Gospel account stands just as surely as it has for over two millennia: Christ was crucified, buried in a borrowed tomb, resurrected on the third day, and ascended to heaven after appearing to no less than 500 eye witnesses at one time.
We will celebrate that resurrection on Easter Sunday, as we do every Lord’s Day at Graceway.
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