The Jesus Family

Tel Aviv in the spring

Let us be hip (not always true in my case) and on top of things and respond to fresh and recent news. Here are two articles I found from ankerberg.com in regard to the Jesus Family. I will provide the link and comment on portions of the articles.

First from Ben Witherington:

http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/historical-Jesus/the-Jesus-family-tomb/the-Jesus-family-tomb-witherington-response.htm

Witherington states:

James Cameron the movie director who made the enormously successful film “Titanic”, on the night after the Oscars, will give an Oscar winning performance at a news conference along with Simcha Jacobovici who have now produced a Discovery Channel special on the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, ossuary, bones, and that of his mother, brothers, wife, and his child Jude as well!

First of all, I have worked with Simcha. He is a practicing Jew, indeed he is an orthodox Jew so far as I can tell. He was the producer of the Discovery Channel special on the James ossuary which I was involved with. He is a good film maker, and he knows a good sensational story when he sees one. This is such a story. Unfortunately it is a story full of holes, conjectures, and problems. It will make good TV and involves a bad critical reading of history.

Interestingly Witherington knows one of the producers of the film.

He continues:

1) The statistical analysis is of course only as good as the numbers that were provided to the statistician. He couldn’t run numbers he did not have. And when you try to run numbers on a combination name such as ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease the statistical sample dramatically. In fact, in the case of ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease it to a statistically insignificant number! Furthermore, so far as we can tell, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus ‘son of Joseph’. It was outsiders who mistakenly called him that! Would the family members such as James who remained in Jerusalem really put that name on Jesus’ tomb when they knew otherwise? This is highly improbable.

Witherington notes that the names found on the ossuaries were common ones as he writes: The chances of the people in the ossuaries being the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of the New Testament must be very small indeed.

Back to Witherington:

2) there is no independent DNA control sample to compare to what was garnered from the bones in this tomb. By this I mean that the most the DNA evidence can show is that several of these folks are inter-related. Big deal. We would need an independent control sample from some member of Jesus' family to confirm that these were members of Jesus' family. We do not have that at all.

Yes, without actual known living descendents of Joseph and Mary living today, DNA evidence cannot demonstrate that this is the family of the Biblical Jesus Christ.

Witherington writes:

3) Several of these ossuaries have very popular and familiar early Jewish names. As the statistics above show, the names Joseph and Joshua (Jesus) were two of the most common names in all of early Judaism. So was Mary. Indeed both Jesus’ mother and her sister were named Mary. This is the ancient equivalent of finding adjacent tombs with the names Smith and Jones. No big deal.

Even if the popular names Jesus, Joseph and Mary match the Biblical family, if any of the other ossuary names do not match the probability of this family being that of Jesus Christ decreases significantly. These popular names matched the Biblical family, but if some names found in the ossuary do not match such as is the case with Matthew and Jude (the son and not half-brother of Jesus), then we likely have a different family despite any similar names.

Witherington continues:

4) The historical problems with all this are too numerous to list here: A) the ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem, and his adult home was Nazareth. The family was still in Nazareth after he was apparently dead and gone. Why in the world would be buried (alone at this point) in Jerusalem? It’s unlikely. B) One of the ossuaries has the name Jude son of Jesus. We have no historical evidence of such a son of Jesus, indeed we have no historical evidence he was ever married; C) the Mary ossuaries (there are two) do not mention anyone from Migdal. It simply has the name Mary-- and that's about the most common of all ancient Jewish female names. D) we have names like Matthew on another ossuary, which don't match up with the list of brothers' names. E) By all ancient accounts, the tomb of Jesus was empty-- even the Jewish and Roman authorities acknowledged this. Now it takes a year for the flesh to desiccate, and then you put the man's bones in an ossuary. But Jesus' body was long gone from Joseph of Arimathea's tomb well before then. Are we really to believe it was moved to another tomb, decayed, and then was put in an ossuary? Its not likely. F) Implicitly you must accuse James, Peter and John (mentioned in Gal. 1-2-- in our earliest NT document from 49 A.D.) of fraud and coverup. Are we really to believe that they knew Jesus didn't rise bodily from the dead but perpetrated a fraudulent religion, for which they and others were prepared to die? Did they really hide the body of Jesus in another tomb? We need to remember that the James in question is Jesus' brother, who certainly would have known about a family tomb. This frankly is impossible for me to believe.

It is unlikely the family of the Biblical Jesus would be buried so far away from home as they were not wealthy from what the Biblical text indicated. We have no serious evidence within the Christian community that Christ was married or had a son and therefore to assume that Christ was related to these folks in the ossuaries is pure speculation. It is hard to believe that Jesus' half-brothers James and Jude would proclaim and write about the gospel while facing intense persecution and likely an eventual terrible death for something they knew was a lie. Yes, persons in history have likely fought for what they knew were lies but I have a difficult time finding the benefits for James, Jude and others to live an average life faced with persecution for what they knew was a false religion. If they were becoming wealthy and getting multiple wives/sex out of a false religion perhaps I can understand bad motives. I can understand the idea of those who are preaching what they know is false fighting militarily for their movement. However, it would not make sense for people who know they are not telling the truth to lay down their lives as non-resistant martyrs, as was the case of many followers of Jesus Christ.

My final comments from Witherington:

And one more thing to add---Eusebius the father of church history (4th century) tells us that there had been since NT times a tomb of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, which was near the Temple mount and had an honoric stele next to it, and that it was a pilgrimage spot for many Christians. It was apparently a single tomb, with no other Holy family members mentioned nor any other ossuaries in that place. The locality and singularity of this tradition rules out a family tomb in Talpiot. Christians would not have been making pilgrimage to the tomb if they believed Jesus' bones were in it-- that would have contradicted and violated their faith, but the bones of holy James were another matter. They were consider sacred relics.

Second from Darrell Bock:

http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/historical-Jesus/the-Jesus-family-tomb/the-Jesus-family-tomb-bock-response.htm
Bock states:

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 by the tomb space, while also pulling off a stealing of the body and continue to preach that Jesus was raised BODILY, not merely spiritually.

A good point, and why would they preach that Jesus was bodily raised? Are not first century Christians known for being persecuted, rather than for being richly rewarded in a worldly sense for proclaiming Jesus?

Bock continues:

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 this? Does this inflate the statistical numbers in the show to include such “evidence?”

On Larry King, Monday, the filmmakers discussed the statistical evidence in their favour, but the numbers are less favourable when people such as Matthew and Jude that are included in the ossuaries are shown to not be part of Biblical Jesus family.

For the critic may I state that I do not have blind faith and hold to the Christian faith because I believe that God has guided me through mainly Biblical evidence and philosophical reason. If evidence was to show that Christianity was perhaps false I would reconsider my views, but archeologists and scholars of religion alike seem to dispute the findings of the film, and therefore it is not a serious challenge to my faith/philosophical theology.

Cheers,

Russ;)