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Thursday, March 08, 2007

On the so-called Jesus tomb and not pissing off the goyim
Posted by Jill | 9:19 PM
One of the things I've been wanting to read but haven't had time to is the Gnostic gospels. As someone born into a marginally Jewish family, I'm predisposed against buying into the notion that Joshua of Nazareth was the literal son of God in any sense other than that we ALL are "sons and daughters of God" -- if you believe in the Judeo-Christian Great White Alpha Male in the sky model of deity. But I've often wondered what would happen if somehow the resurrection that is the core of Christianity could somehow be disproved.

The new documentary about the ossuaries that were discovered in 1980 probably doesn't answer the question, and the fact that it's James Cameron who made it, along with Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli Jew, doesn't exactly make one inclined to think there's anything to it. The increasingly lunatic Rabbi Marc Gelman seems to think Jews have no business digging into this stuff; that this is some kind of shandeh far di goyim and even if it's true -- ESPECIALLY if it's true, for a Jew to debunk Christianity would provoke a shitstorm:

The first thing that made me feel creepy about the program was the sight of an Orthodox Jew (the filmmaker, Simcha Jacobovici) supposedly discovering a tomb containing the bones of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their alleged family. Before I go on, let me first say that I do not believe that it is the place of anyone to make other people feel foolish about following their faith. If this was indeed the tomb of Jesus, then not only is the Christian Testament false but, worse, Christianity is a cruel deception, à la “The Da Vinci Code,” foisted on the world by Jesus' panicky followers to help market a faith led by a dead messiah. I don't think that is how Christianity was born, and I don't think interfaith relations are improved when a Jewish filmmaker implies such a thing. At least Dan Brown is not Jewish, and at least he thinly disguised his anti-Christian screed as a novel. For a Jew to produce a documentary film that supposedly disproves both Jesus' celibacy and his resurrection is bad ecumenical business. I feel the same way about Jews defending Nazis who want to march through Jewish neighborhoods. Perhaps somebody should do it, but Jews should not be defending the rights of the killers of Jews. There has been so much blood and suffering, so much venom and so much hatred in past Jewish-Christian relations. How are we helped in our efforts to heal our wounds and the wounds of our world by trying to refute the foundations of the other's faith?


The problem with Gellman's argument, and perhaps his support for the Iraq war makes it more understandable, is that it assumes we have an obligation to allow others to persist in delusion, particularly if said people have a history of mass killings of those who don't believe what they do. But similarly, this brings up the question of whether we are obligated to allow those who still believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that George W. Bush is a good, honest, Christian man who would never lie to us to continue to do so. At what point is one obligated to accept empirical truth?

I admit to being twisted enough to want Jacobovici and Cameron to be right and for ossuaries to actually be those of the so-called Holy Family. For one thing, it would bring a historical dimension to a story that is now only known through various versions and translations, and would make for fascinating study. But it would also be interesting to watch how Christians would respond to this test of their faith.

It isn't that Christianity would be completely debunked, though much of it would be. It would, however, mean that some acceptance of the Bible as allegorical and symbolic rather than literal would be required for the faith to be something other than mass delusion. And frankly, the idea of a historical Jesus with the kind of impact on the world that he has had, a Jesus whose words could be studied and followed without the need for divinity, is far more interesting than blind belief in a story that for many of us is just not plausible.

Lynn has some thoughts on the matter:

Long before the DaVinci code, my reading had convinced me that Jesus and Mary of Magdala would have had to be married. Jesus was a nice Jewish boy and a rabbi, and as a Jewish boy with a Jewish mother he would have been under enormous pressure to be married. The whole concept of celibacy among priests did not become a rule until the early fourth century CE; previous to that time the first pope, St. Peter, is known to have been a married man and subsequent popes and bishops were married, many with children. This became a problem as the early church began amassing property since children become heirs and inherited the priestly property. It was only after the early fourth century that church writers began to expound on the horrors of women and their sexuality.

There is no evidence of any celibate Jewish priests during the time of Jesus. Christian writers like to quote Jesus's words as indicating a preference for celibacy when he said, "there are those who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." But earlier translations reveal this quote to actually be "some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 19.12 This is a good example that shows how retranslating the bible has twisted all of the original meaning out of the story in order. The eunuch statement follows a strict teaching about the sanctity of marriage and equates divorce to adultery, after which the followers of Jesus say "then it is better never to marry." Jesus then makes the statement that some are born eunuchs and some become eunuchs by their own hand.

[snip]

One of the more interesting points of the film was the likelihood that Mary of Magdala may have become a respected priestess of Jesus's teachings after his death, a concept that rehabilitates Mary's reputation from the whore of the bible to a woman with spiritual power. Long before the DaVinci Code the Nag Hammadi scrolls included a Gospel of Mary, indicating that she was in fact one of the apostles with her own story to tell. If this is true, it is a major turnabout in the entire Christian epic that forces a question of the story as a whole.


Granted, I don't have a dog in this particular hunt, and the notion of "faith" -- believing something with absolutely no evidence of its truth -- is alien to me, and that may be why I find even the possibility of concrete facts about these people so exciting. But it seems to me that a charismatic leader with the ability to impart a message of hope and peace can be as holy, if not more so, than one to whom people ascribe divinity.

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