Jesus documentary

[FlaSoxxJim]

Take everything in the Bible with a grain of salt. .

 

Unless it's Sodom and Gomorrah stuff from the OT. That you have to take with a pillar of salt.

[Soxy]

Unless it's Sodom and Gomorrah stuff from the OT. That you have to take with a pillar of salt.

He'll be here all week folks! Don't forget to tip the waitresses and try the veal!

[southsider2k5]

Unless it's Sodom and Gomorrah stuff from the OT. That you have to take with a pillar of salt.

 

Ow

[FlaSoxxJim]

He'll be here all week folks! Don't forget to tip the waitresses and try the veal!

 

 

Ow

 

Yeah, I know that hurt a Lot. Or at least a Lot's wife.

 

So tell me, how long did Cain hate his brother?? That's right folks, as long as he was Abel.

 

Stick with the classics and you're OK.

Edited March 1, 2007 by FlaSoxxJim

[Soxy]

I'm too lazy to start a new thread, so here's this. Does religion make you more aggressive?

Yes.

No.

A couple of interesting papers. Thought I'd pass along to you all.

[southsider2k5]

Yeah, I know that hurt a Lot. Or at least a Lot's wife.

 

So tell me, how long did Cain hate his brother?? That's right folks, as long as he was Abel.

 

Stick with the classics and you're OK.

 

Now that's just sad...

[longshot7]

Wanted to add an addendum to my earlier post without editing it. I didn't mean to infer that people who do believe in the resurrection have no common sense. I meant that to skeptics, evidence is not necessary to disprove the resurrection as it should seem obvious to them already. Just like to Christians, the truth of the resurrection would also be obvious to someone who has faith.

 

And don't get me started on the Old Testament, jokesters. Who was Cain's wife?

Edited March 1, 2007 by longshot7

[Soxbadger]

Atleast Paul Maier understands that Jesus's name was not really Jesus Christ.

 

I dont know how many times Ive had to get in that argument in my life. Not many Jews were walking around with Greek names.

[FlaSoxxJim]

And don't get me started on the Old Testament, jokesters. Who was Cain's wife?

 

The old Clarence Darrow/Carl Sagan stumper!

 

If William Jennings Bryan was as up on his OT as he should have been, he would have noted that cain, Abel, and Seth were merely the first generation of children born to Adam and Eve. Without listing them by name, genesis clearly states that Adam and Eve had lots of children both male and female after that first set of named kids. Cain's wife was obviously one of his sisters, if we are to adhere tothe Christian tenet that all people are descended from the first man and woman.

 

And the days of Adam after he had fathered Seth were eight hundred years. And he fathered sons and daughters.

 

--Genesis 5:4

 

800+ years and Eve was still pushing them out. That's some longevity.

[longshot7]

The old Clarence Darrow/Carl Sagan stumper!

 

If William Jennings Bryan was as up on his OT as he should have been, he would have noted that cain, Abel, and Seth were merely the first generation of children born to Adam and Eve. Without listing them by name, genesis clearly states that Adam and Eve had lots of children both male and female after that first set of named kids. Cain's wife was obviously one of his sisters, if we are to adhere tothe Christian tenet that all people are descended from the first man and woman.

800+ years and Eve was still pushing them out. That's some longevity.

 

Yes, but I think the larger point this hints at is that the story is clearly creation mythology, not literal truth. In a sense, who cares who Cain's wife was when the point of the story probably something else. Both sides (believers and not) are guilty of focusing so hard on extraneous details that they miss the message being delivered.

[CanOfCorn]

800+ years and Eve was still pushing them out. That's some longevity.

 

There was an old lady who lived right outside of Eden...she had so many children, her uterus fell out!

 

OOOOHHHH!!!

 

 

Yeah, not the same.

[bmags]

koppel doing a great job on the discussion. i

[HuskyCaucasian]

koppel doing a great job on the discussion. i

Yea he is.

 

On a side note: I found this article and I think it does a very good job at picking this case apart piece by piece.

[BobDylan]

I agree that a fully human Jesus, fully engaged in all domestic aspects of human life is not something that should shake the foundations of the faith. But I think you are missing the real point for the by-the-book faithful. If Jesus rose from the dead and 30 days later ascended bodily into heaven, how could his bones possibly be in an ossuary in a tomb in Jerusalem?

 

The same way he floated into heaven. Nobody knows how!

[LowerCaseRepublican]

800+ years and Eve was still pushing them out. That's some longevity.

Jeez, it's not a clown car!

 

That docu-drama was so craptastic yesterday -- such a non-event that it was so hilarious to me that it produced so much faux outrage on both sides of the aisle. I watched it and at every turn was laughing with a friend of mine at how crappy their research/assertions were + also the chasms in logic on all sides.

 

But you know who did steal all the rest of the bones from the assuaries so they couldn't get DNA? Opus Dei and the albino villain who wants to preserve the bloodline of Christ from the population. Someone get Tom Hanks on this now!

[Soxbadger]

Well the part that really got me was when they kept going to the stats guy in Toronto.

 

I dont care how many crackpot formulas you can come up with, statistical formulas can not prove anything but chances. I can say that 50% of the people on this board are from Illinois, but that does not mean if I pick 2 posters randomly that I will have to get one from Illinois. In fact I could pick 100 posters and never get one from Illinois.

 

Just like I could flip a penny and have it land tails 100 times in a row. It shouldnt happen statistically but it does.

 

I liked the Dark Ages on History channel better.

[RockRaines]

Christianity will continue to play down findings like these as a hoax, or "fake" because they feel like any such truths would undo the entire thread of religion all together.

 

Fact is, people always need something to believe in and follow with faith and hope, and most of these types of things will not affect religion at all.

Edited March 5, 2007 by RockRaines

[longshot7]

watched the majority of the doc (the Koppel thing is on the Tivo for later) - and pretty much most of my fears were true. The assumptions the filmmakers made were inexcusable - you can't assume that there was a Matthew in Maria's family tree because the Bible says that there is. You can't assume Joseph (Jesus' father) and Maria were both decendants of David because the Bible says so. Newsflash: The Bible is NOT a reliable text, especially in assertions about Jesus' lineage. 1st century, and other ancient texts, should only be trusted if corroborating sources can be found. I found the argument about Jose, Jesus' supposed brother to be compelling, but I'm not sure if it's enough for a skeptic to believe. Maybe this tomb will end up being the Shroud of Turin for non-believers.

[SoxFan562004]

Jeez, it's not a clown car!

Easily one of my favorite punchlines, makes me laugh everytime someone mentions something about a woman having many kids

[BobDylan]

Christianity will continue to play down findings like these as a hoax, or "fake" because they feel like any such truths would undo the entire thread of religion all together.

 

Fact is, people always need something to believe in and follow with faith and hope, and most of these types of things will not affect religion at all.

 

"If there is no God, everything is permitted." - Dostoevsky

[FlaSoxxJim]

"If there is no God, everything is permitted." - Dostoevsky

 

I quite like Dostoevsky but he's full of it in this instance.

[Heads22]

I quite like Dostoevsky but he's full of it in this instance.

 

C&P's a good read, if not a tad strange.

[southsider2k5]

A new update...

 

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...rticle/ShowFull

 

 

Jesus tomb film scholars backtrack

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

 

Several prominent scholars who were interviewed in a bitterly contested documentary that suggests that Jesus and his family members were buried in a nondescript ancient Jerusalem burial cave have now revised their conclusions, including the statistician who claimed that the odds were 600:1 in favor of the tomb being the family burial cave of Jesus of Nazareth, a new study on the fallout from the popular documentary shows.

 

The dramatic clarifications, compiled by epigrapher Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem in a paper titled "Cracks in the Foundation: How the Lost Tomb of Jesus story is losing its scholarly support," come two months after the screening of The Lost Tomb of Christ that attracted widespread public interest, despite the concomitant scholarly ridicule.

 

The film, made by Oscar-winning director James Cameron and Emmy-winning Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, prompted major criticism from both a leading Israeli archeologist involved in the original dig at the site as well as Christian leaders, who were angered over the documentary's contradictions of main tenets of Christianity.

 

But now, even some of the scholars who were interviewed for and appeared in the film are questioning some of its basic claims.

 

The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together.

 

Pfann's paper reported that a statement on the Discovery Channel's Web site, which previously read "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters...concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family," in keeping with Feuerverger's statement, has been altered and now reads, "a statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters... concludes that the probability factor is in the order of 600 to 1 that an equally 'surprising' cluster of names would arise purely by chance under given assumptions."

 

Another sentence on the same Web site stating that Feuerverger had concluded it was highly probable that the tomb, located in the southeastern residential Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, was the Jesus family tomb - the central point of the film - has also been changed. It now reads: "It is unlikely that an equally surprising cluster of names would have arisen by chance under purely random sampling."

 

Israeli archeologists have said that the similarity of the names found inscribed on the ossuaries in the cave to the members of Jesus's family was coincidental, since many of those names were commonplace in the first century CE.

 

The film argues that 10 ancient ossuaries - burial boxes used to store bones - that were discovered in Talpiot in 1980 contained the bones of Jesus and his family. The filmmakers attempt to explain some of the inscriptions on the ossuaries by suggesting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that the couple had a son, Judah.

 

One of the ossuaries bears an inscription reading "Yeshua son of Yehosef" or "Jesus son of Joseph;" a second reads "Mary;" a third is a Greek inscription apparently read by one scholar as "Mary Magdalene;" while a fourth bears the inscription, "Judah, son of Jesus." The inscriptions are in Hebrew or Aramaic, except for the one in Greek.

 

But Shimon Gibson, who was part of the team that excavated the tomb two and half decades ago and who appeared in the film, is quoted in Pfann's report as saying he doubted the site was the tomb of Jesus and his family.

 

"Personally, I'm skeptical that this is the tomb of Jesus and I made this point very clear to the filmmakers," Gibson is quoted as saying.

 

"We need much more evidence before we can say that the Talpiot tomb might be the family tomb of Jesus," he added.

 

In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film's claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.

 

"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. - that is, variants of 'Mary.' So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying.

 

The paper also notes that DNA scientist Dr. Carney Matheson, who supervised DNA testing carried out for the film from the supposed Jesus and Mary Magdalene ossuaries, and who said in the documentary that "these two individuals, if they were unrelated, would most likely be husband and wife," later said that "the only conclusions we made were that these two sets were not maternally related. To me, it sounds like absolutely nothing."

 

Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene - one of the filmmakers' critical arguments - issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.

 

Pfann has already argued that the controversial inscription does not read "Mariamne" at all.

 

The burial site, which has been contested from the start by scholars and church officials alike, is some distance from the Church of the Holy Sepulchrr in the Old City, where many Christians believe Jesus's body lay for three days after he was crucified.

 

According to the New Testament, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion, and an ossuary containing Jesus's bones - the explanations of the movie director notwithstanding - would contradict the core Christian belief that he was resurrected and then ascended to heaven.