howdy,
just wanted to add my two cents as when i heard this news today a few of the following thoughts came to mind...probably others have already covered these but i didn't see the other threads started on this topic..
my first thought was that in the very early days of the Christian sect both the Roman civil authorities and the Jewish establishment would have had very strong incentives and desires to squash the blossoming of the Christians. Almost nothing would have served that purpose better than to easily overthrow the central galvanizing tenet of the new faith, namely the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus; and that most easily would have been done by producing the body or bones of Jesus for the world to see.
Thus, when the resurrection claim first circulated, if the tomb of Jesus were known, then the Romans and/or the Jews would have exposed the teaching by producing these ossuaries.
It is easy to say..well the problem is that it wasn't known...and after all that is essentially what the Gospels tell us right (I will come back to that part in a moment).
Ah! but here is the rub and the second part of my thought.
The thing is that SOMEONE placed these bones into the ossuary and placed the ossuary into the tomb. (I could be wrong but I think the process is to let the remains dissesicate (sp?) and then to later take the bones and place them into the ossuary.)
Now let's assume that these ossuaries or an any ossuary did contain the remains of Jesus for the sake of discussion. If that were so then we are left with only two possibilites.
1) either the person(s) who took care of the remains didn't know that they were Jesus' (which seems pretty unlikely)
or
2) they did know that these were the remains of Jesus.
So since it seems unlikely that the person(s) taking care of these arrangements would not have known who they belonged to, we should assume that they knew that they belonged to Jesus. Thus this again leads us to two possibilities:
1) either they were a BELIEVER (aka follower of Jesus)
or
2) they were not a believer
So then let's analyze this issue a bit.
If the person(s) was a believer or follower of Christ they would have known that the central tenet of their faith, the resurrection, was false. And that seems really crazy to say that they were a believer because either they knowingly helped perpetuate the lie fof the resurrection or they somehow disconnected the fact and their knowledge with their belief. (ummm sounds familiar...) either way, it doesn't seem like they would hae any long-term incentive to maintain the secret regarding jesus' tomb..word would have eventually got out and the anti-Chrisitan forces would have had their bodily proof against the resurrection.
on the other hand, if the person were not a believer in the first place....what incentive would they have had to maintain the secret for any duration...and thus the secret would have gotten out it seems..
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So there are some givens and assumptions in the above (a few questions begged), but overall it seems highly unlikely that if there were actual remains of Jesus that whoever did take care of them would have been able to keep that a secret, generation to generation. It seems almost evident that at some point the secret would have gotten out and I don't mean in the year 2007 A.D. :-)
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The problem that the Jews, and to some extent the Romans, had was that there were no remains to be found. The bible says that the Jewish leadership had their own guards (who were guarding the tomb of Jesus immediately after his death) and that they bribed them into fabricating a story that while they were asleep, Christ's followers came and removed the body (and presumably hid it for all eternity). (See: Matthew 27:62-66, 28:11-15)
Interestingly, Isaac Asimov says that this story in the bible has to be complete hogwash for the simple reason no one can claim both to be asleep (unconscious) and simultaneously claim to give testimony that they can both positively identify a person or persons and state what it is they did!
It's a good point.
Think about it. The guards have to say that they were completely asleep. For if they were awake or awakened at any time during the theft, they have no excuse for not doing their duty and preventing it. On the other hand, if they were completely asleep, there is no way they could positively claim to know who it was that removed the body and when it was that the body was removed the body.
[Certainly, if i had someone on the stand who stated that while they were sleeping in their room, their roommate came into their room and stole $50 bucks out of their wallet, it would be pretty easy to demonstrate how such testimony would be a factual impossibility. [the testimony that is not necessarily the act itself.]]
Asimov's point is that it is just moronic to say that the Jews would have even suggested that the guards provide such ridiculous testimony and thus the Bible's account that they did so is self-evidently false. And indeed when properly understood, it does seem pretty silly to expect that anyone would have believed such testimony or that such an "explanation" would have become popular "among the Jews down to this day."
I don't know what the explanation is for this strange bit of reasoning in Matthew which Asimov has so deftly exposed.
Maybe, at the time the gospel was written, the idea that it was Christ's disciples who stole and concealed his body was popular among the Jews and it was used as negative propaganda to thwart the Christians. When the gospel was written, the writer "elaborated" and created an "origin" for this idea but messed up in not realizing how illogical and factually impossible his explanation was. It certainly is one to puzzle over.
But in any case, the Gospel account of this "theft story," despite its rational-logical flaws, does seem to reveal one truth, namely that the Jews didn't know where the body of Jesus was.
And this brings us back again to the issue of a tomb/ossuary of Jesus. If the Jews didn't know then either his disciples knew or a non-believer handled the remains without knowledge of whose they were (and we can only surmise was evidently also illiterate or blind since Mr. Cameron and fellows' claims rest mostly upon the "inscriptions' of the names of the osuaries occupants). This latter case, again seems very unlikely. And thus again we have the problem of how to explain disciples who would follow Jesus or associate as Christians despite knowing the truth about the bones.
Which brings us finally to the final possibility, the one which is accepted by Christians...and which even the bible text suggests that the Jews & Romans, those persons with a high incentive to expose a resurrection tale, could not produce any remains of Jesus ---because there were none to be produced. Hence the resurrection.
-Eduardo
PS: It is often said that JWs don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. JWs believe that the actual body was likely dematerialized and that Jesus was resurrected as a spirit, and that until his final ascension to Heaven (the spiritual plane) he materialized a body in some instances a replica of his old one, crucification wounds and all, and in other cases one which was not as recognizable (that latter part is disputable.)
PPS: I think it still has to be seen whether these ossuaries will not turn out to be completely bogus like the "James ossisuary" that was highly touted recently.
