http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/11/25/jesus.box.ap/
The James ossuary box (casket) is said to be legit again. These “experts” don’t know what inscriptions are real and what are fake. The other caskets said to be of Jesus, Maria (Mary?), Mariamne (Magdalene?), a person named Matia (Matthew) and a Judah, were “lost in the system” conveniently for 27 years, discovered in 1980. Plenty of time to do some forgeries, bring caskets together that might have actually been buried separately, discard the other four caskets found with the six in question, etc. Most suspect to me, but wouldn’t it be cool…. Well, it almost would be cool if they didn’t deny the resurrection. For me, the shroud of Turin “proves” the resurrection since science still has not been able to duplicate that “fraud”, unable to imprint any glowing luminous image on a piece of cloth despite numerous tries.
Katia
I think you can blame the media, not the experts. This issue has been fraught with politics from the beginning, and the media simply chooses a random expert (or whichever squawks the loudest) without doing any back ground- what is said is accepted at face value. The problem with the ossuary is that the Israeli authorities will pretty much deny the legitimacy of anything that can be related to Jesus (ESPECIALLY if it’s a ‘diplomatic problem’ with Christians), and this one had the stain of Golan, a known forger. In the end, though, it did prove to be a real antiquity (mostly), and may be the missing Talipayot ossuary.
The real issue is that archaeology is one of the brkest, most unappreciated academic pursuits- so despite public interest, items like this CAN and do end up in cold storage due to lack of cash.
I found the official site for for the Jesus tomb:
http://www.jesusfamilytomb.com
someone ought to do a dna sample on the shroud of turin and cross it with the dna sample from the jesus ossuary.
Good thinking Mike, however, there are rumors that the famous shroud in Turin may not even be the actual shroud which had been wrapped around Jesus body. We should verify the autenticity of the item first…how? I don’t know. But there must be some possible scientific tests that could be carried out. I’d love to find out. I wonder if the Pope would object… What do you think?
Absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. This forensic antimetabole is never more applicable than as to Egyptology where it is a well-known fact that negative events and defeats, such as plagues and the Exodus, are not necessarily going to be recorded in durative archaeological records (stone work) or other national archive. The Egyptians as well as most other ancient near-eastern semitic tribes did not have a culture of polico-historians like the Romans had Herodotus or Thucydides. Would we know of the details of the events of Thermopylae strictly from Persian records? No, it is primarily from Herodotus but do scholars take such pains to disprove him? Only recently has the Biblically-referenced city of Pi-Ramesse been discovered. And it shows evidence of having been devastated by plagues and subsequently abandoned, even to the note of National Geographic.
Most ancient scholars have a clear modus operandum of disproving all books of the Bible at nearly all costs unless the evidence is incontrovertable. I am so glad we have a few honest souls willing to expose this state of affairs.