News item:
Bones of Jesus found, Canadian documentary claims
Monday, February 26, 2007Titanic director James Cameron and Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici say they aren’t trying to undermine Christianity in their new documentary that claims the remains of Jesus, his wife, Mary Magdalene, and their child have been found.
Oscar-winner Cameron and Gemini-winner Jacobovici unveiled two limestone boxes they believe once contained the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene during a news conference Monday at the New York Public Library.
“It’s very far from the case,” said Cameron. “What this does is celebrate the real-life existence of … this man, who, 2,000 years ago, had a vision and communicated it to people.”
The claim that the bones of Jesus have been found could challenge the Christian belief that Jesus died and was resurrected three days later.
As MND observed last week, filmmaker (and “King of the World”) James Cameron has funded a project to resurrect the purported tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
Academy Award winning film director and special effects wizard Cameron gained great wealth with the success of his 1997 film “Titanic” – still the world’s all-time box office hit with almost 2/3 of a billion dollars in gross movie sales.
After the unveiling of the Tomb, Ted Olsen, the former Solicitor General for the United States approached Cameron for an exclusive interview in Christianity Today:
Olsen: What’s your response to the criticism that no actual New Testament scholar supports your thesis?
Cameron: Okay. We’re done here. Don’t call me ever again.
Olsen: In the tie-in book, you say that “some of the most respected experts in biblical history and archaeology have contributed to this investigation.” Could you name one who actually supports the argument that this is “the greatest archaeological story ever”? Just one? Hello? Mr. Cameron?
Despite Mr. Cameron’s unveiling, it is not clear if the supposed-bones of Jesus showed any signs of crucifixion or other trauma. Such evidence – even coming from the lap of a special effects expert with personal wealth to rival the GDP of nations - could be ruffling.
As a nominal Catholic, I cannot count all the times I have encountered people who founded their faith in a “literal interpretation” of the Bible. I have always thought that anyone who trusts this notion has trusted ash for a plank.
I was trained by the brothers, you see. The Christian Brothers were founded by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle. I am not so sure Monsieur de La Salle would have approved of the education I received in his name. Nor even St. Peter – for whom my grade school was named. (aside for trained ears: “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”)
I have already said that my own faith as a Catholic “does not require the historical existence of Jesus as described in the New Testament.”
I have even posited a view of the Bible that is almost entirely metaphorical.
But I can also accept on faith that God exists and that a man named Jesus died on the cross for a reason and was subsequently resurrected.
But whether Jesus was resurrected in the flesh is not important to my belief system. It is not the specifics of biblical tales that form the foundation of my Christian belief in His Resurrection. Instead, both my beliefs and my reasoning are founded in and described by thematic human narratives – including the life, death and resurrection of Christ.
Science and epistemology are friends of mine, and I am not remotely swayed by the sudden fashion of aetheism inspired by Richard Dawkins and The Daily Show.
Over a decade ago, in his book “The Physics of Immortality”, Tulane professor Frank J. Tiper offered a mathematically demonstrable proof for the existence of God in his Omega Point Theory.
Oxford professor David Deutsch, author of “The Fabric of Reality”, confirmed Tipler’s theory in chapter 14 of his seminal book.
As Deutsch pointed out, Tipler’s OPT only requires that the universe be a “three-sphere” – something that an ever-expanding universe will not provide. (I have posited a solution to the open universe problem with my own bicameral universe model.)
I could even speculate that the reason the three-sphere model has been an affront to atheists and monotheists alike is that it represents the crux of God’s connection to our anthropic experience.
(Before the discovery of the “Big Bang”, theologians insisted that the universe had a definite beginning in time.) “This worried philosophers such as the German thinker Immanuel Kant. If the universe had indeed been created, why had there been an infinite wait before the creation? On the other hand, if the universe had existed forever, why hadn’t everything that was going to happen already happened, meaning that history was over? In particular, why hadn’t the universe reached thermal equilibrium, with everything at the same temperature?
“Kant called this problem an ‘antimony of pure reason,’ because it seemed to be a logical contradiction; it didn’t have a resolution. But it was a contradiction only within the context of the Newtonian mathematical model, in which time was an infinite line, independent of what was happening in the universe. However … in 1915 a completely new mathematical model was put forward by Einstein: the general theory of relativity.”
-From Stephen W. Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell.
Before the development of the Big Bang theory, religion came under attack for positing a “beginning” to the universe.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was lightâ€ÂÂ
-Genesis 1:3
Two hundred years ago, critics of religion said that a “beginning” to the universe was required only IF God Existed. So, they surmised, without evidence of God, there was then no evidence to support a “beginning”. Ergo, the “open” universe model in which there was no beginning and no end became the default position amongst ideological atheists. They dismissed the whole matter for two centuries or more as an “antimony of pure reason”.
Unfortunately for default-atheists, when scientists began to understand cosmic inflation, they began to see evidence that the universe really did have a “beginning” in the Big Bang.
In 1951, Pope Pius XII acknowledged that the Big Bang theory was in line with Moses’ description of Creation in Genesis.
The Big Bang, as it turns out, is entirely consistent with both Theology and Science.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
and the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that is was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
God, then, is simultaneously the First Creator and the First Observer.
Nowadays, trendy academics are very touchy about the three-sphere model, and would prefer to speculate on iterative models of the universe. Such cheats are common among scientists whose career goals require sniveling on behalf of high priests and other plum-givers.
Despite it all – in the event that the universe in the end does “close” to a three-sphere – Tipler’s model will reign triumphant.
In his article, The Omega Point Theory and Christianity Tipler defends the Trinitarian model and uses it to describe an essentially Christological view of our universe. He even suggested that the next step in PROVING a core aspect of Christianity is to test the Shroud of Turin for DNA samples.
If said samples match those from Mr. Cameron’s Tomb, then we might have a winner.
But whether Tipler’s theory or Cameron’s theories are correct or not, it still does not upset my case that Jesus did indeed suffer and die for the sins of mankind – and that his historical existence is immaterial to the impact of the ideas he delivered to us.
Oh. And what do I think the resurrection of Jesus really means? It’s a message: Jesus – like all men – was born, he lived, and then he died.
But Jesus was different in this way: he lay dead for three days, and on the third day He rose again to tell us of it.
In my opinion all of us are destined to rise again on the third day – just as Jesus did. The third day, of course, is a metaphor for the afterlife.
“The Lost Tomb of Jesus” will be aired on The Discovery Channel on March 4.
