by Elsewhere 58 Replies latest jw friends
what kind of stink would be going on if they were doing a show on mohammed instead of jesus?
I am guessing it would depend on the show. And, in case you weren't aware, Muslims believe it is important to accept and respect Jesus (alayhi salaam) as a prophet. We just don't believe that he died for humanity's sins, because we are all responsible for our own sins and God is quite capable of forgiving us without a sacrifice.
~Merry
hey merry, i hope you know i meant no disrespect.
That's why I smiled...and I hope you know I think it was a perfectly valid question!
~Merry
The film makers were on the Today Show this morning. They kept saying they are only documenting, not making any claims.
Also they said they asked a statistician to calculate the odds of having an entire group of coffins with those names & not have it be the family in the Bible: one in 2 million. This calculation considered the fact that their names were common too.
It will be interesting to see the documentary in its entirety to see if it's credible.
Of course this will just bolster dubs who say Jesus didn't get resurrected back into his old body. Other Xians who think this is a challenge to their faith will probably just say it isn't the holy family. Personally I don't think this is going to shake the foundations of anything--people generally choose what to believe based on their wishes, not facts.
(sorry--trying to figure out how to format paragraphs in my new browser)
The film makers were on the Today Show this morning. They kept saying they are only documenting, not making any claims.
Their Exodus Decoded had a steady stream of claims, special pleading built upon conjecture and conjecture built upon error. I would say that the "claims" were the very glue keeping the whole thing together. They "documented" a Mycenaean tombstone that has absolutely no connection at all with the biblical exodus; it was the "claim" (pulled out of thin air) that Israelites must have escaped to Crete that made the connection. They documented the killer lake Nyos in Cameroon, Africa, which had a deadly limnic eruption and carbon dioxide leak in the 1980s, but again that has nothing to do with the exodus; it is the "claim" that a similar mechanism was involved in the Tenth Plague that made this relevant, never mind the fact that the Nile is a running river, not a lake, and never mind the fact that it lacks all the geological features that made the Nyos lake lethal. They documented the Serabit el-Khadim turquoise mine in Sinai, but this only has relevance through the "claim" that Israelites were the slaves used for labor there. Too bad that the site dates several hundreds of years before Jacobovici's date for the exodus. And which date is that? Jacobovici lumps together events separated from each by decades if not centuries (the Hyksos expulsion, the eruption of Santorini, the Ahmose stele), fills in the gaps with conjecture, and then five minutes later takes the conjecture as established facts on which he builds further conjectures.
They've already claimed that this tomb is indeed the Jesus family tomb. Looks like we are in store for more of the same from Jacobovici.
Some people will do anything to push their latest schlock movie
S
Yep, just ask Algore.
Here is a review of the documentary by a compentent scholar:
http://drjimwest.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/christopher-rollston-on-the-talpiot-tomb/
Note especially how he describes the statistics being founded on underlying assumptions. This displays exactly the same kind of faults that I mentioned above concerning Jacobivici's Exodus Decoded.
This may be a short lived controversy. It was just revealed that they have found an inscription under the lid of the crypt that contains the word "Oldsmobile".
Here is another excellent critique of the "statistics" used in the program:
http://ntgateway.com/weblog/2007/03/statistical-case-for-identity-of-jesus.html
I like this point in particular:
At the risk of labouring the point, let me attempt to explain my concerns by using the analogy of which the film-makers are so fond, the Beatles analogy. This analogy works by saying that if in 2,000 years a tomb was discovered in Liverpool that featured the names John, Paul and George, we would not immediately conclude that we had found the tomb of the Beatles. But if we also found so distinctive a name as Ringo, then we would be interested. Jacobovici claims that the "Ringo" in this tomb is Mariamene, whom he interprets as Mary Magdalene and as Jesus's wife, which is problematic (see Mariamne and the "Jesus Family Tomb" and below). What we actually have is the equivalent of a tomb with the names John, Paul, George, Martin, Alan and Ziggy. We might well say, "Perhaps the 'Martin' is George Martin, and so this is a match!" or "Perhaps John Lennon had a son called Ziggy we have not previously heard about" but this would be special pleading and we would rightly reject such claims. A cluster of names is only impressive when it is a cluster that is uncontaminated by non-matches and contradictory evidence.
Note also a new blog posting by Richard Bauckham which makes some very good points:
http://www.christilling.de/blog/2007/03/guest-post-by-richard-bauckham.html
